New Year’s Day is always so fresh, so hopeful, so inspiring. It offers a new start with no mistakes in it yet. Seven days into the new year and I already ditched my long weekend run and the house is a mess.
The good news is that tomorrow can be just as new, just as fresh, just as inspiring, and just as blemish free as midnight New Year’s day when we watched all the fireworks go off, blew those funny little whistles, and yelled “Happy New Year!”
Tomorrow is a fresh start. Pull that funny whistle out if you need to and yell, “Happy New Day!”
P.S. In my defense, I was fighting a cold all weekend and we started remodeling our bedroom.
The key to buying a fixer upper home is having vision–to see beyond the boxed in front porch and the kitchen and bathroom that got “Modernized” in the 1950’s (WHY OH WHY couldn’t they have left the clawfoot tub?) To wonder what kind of wood the trim is under umpteen layers of paint. To see that the awkward, gangly girl can become a beauty with a little love and care.
Saturday Brenton spend the day tearing our house down to the original wood siding and opening the front porch up. I drove up to the house after being on a shopping trip and I felt her smile at me. She seemed to say, “I met the right guy and he’s helping me shine again.”
That night I stood out on the newly open front porch and listened to the rain falling. I imagined watching the sunrise while sitting in a wicker chair and drinking a cup of coffee.
Vision is seeing sunrises through the pile of construction garbage.
When you live in a 97 year old fixer-upper house, any holiday, birthday, anniversary, opportunity to give/get a gift is an opportunity to update the house just a bit more. The most recent holiday/gift opportunity was Valentines Day. What did I get for Valentines day? New tile and a high efficiency toilet in the bathroom, and matching kitchen countertops.
Bathroom Before:
The floor was plywood painted over with Kilz primer. Before we bought, Brenton and I actually had to fix a hole in the floor (from frozen pipes last winter) and paint the plywood. Before that there had been carpet that the previous owner tore out. The toilet was ancient. The bolts holding the tank on were rusted to the point that if I bumped the toilet tank, the water would splash out onto the floor. The cold water coming in the house from causes lots of condensation on the tank and dripping down onto the floor.
After: newly installed high efficiency toilet (uses 1.28 gal per flush), $88 home depot. Peel and stick laminate tile, bought by the previous owner, but never installed. The new flooring is SO much easier to sweep and mop, not to mention how much better the bathroom looks and feels.
Kitchen Before:
These pictures were taken as we moved in. On one side, the countertops were practically new (probablly installed with the new dishwasher). On the other side of the kitchen the countertops were a mishmash of wooden things. One cabinet had a scary butcher block. Scary because no matter how much I scrubbed it, gross stuff kept coming out. On the other side of the stove, a drawer set had a poorly fit plywood frame built around it as a just-for-now measure.
Kitchen After:
In a moment of brilliance, we decided to see if we could find a match to the practically new countertop already in the kitchen. One trip to Home Depot revealed that the pattern was Mystic Dawn and Home Depot always had it in stock! In the process of all this, we found that the cabinets aren’t actually attached to the wall or floor. Doing what any good woman would do, I re-arranged my kitchen. The drawers got moved to the left side of the stove and the stove was pushed off center on the wall. This gives me 18 inches of counter on the left side and 38 inches on the right. The board in the foreground of the picture is a bookshelf that, when finished, will become a home for my cookbooks and some kitchen toys for Wiggles.
You can also just barely see on the right top corner of the after picture, there is a new cabinet on the wall (found in the garage).
Price breakdown: 6 ft countertop, $68 home depot
1 wall end piece: $20
2 end finishing kits: $11
Happy Wife thrilled with a completely practical gift: Priceless!
