Home Improvement

I love our house.

Hubby and I have been in our twenty-year-old house for three years now. We’ve worked hard to make it a home, and we’ve succeeded. Every day, I look around our home and think about how content I am to be living here at this point in my life.

Never mind the fact that our house has plummeted in value since we purchased it at the height of the housing boom…we’re here now and we’re here for the foreseeable future. So we’re taking this opportunity to take our basic house and make it something more…along the way taking an opportunity to build up our DIY skills. (They make it look so easy on TV!)

This house has had very few, if any, upgrades done to it since the day it was built. When we moved in, it looked like the only improvements were ceiling fans in the bedrooms, fresh interior paint and new carpet.

Since taking ownership of this house, we’ve made some improvements here and there, and have learned some valuable lessons along the way. The number one lesson being that they might make it look so easy on TV…but it is generally not so.

We’ve painted all of the rooms in the house and replaced the original light fixtures in the hallway, foyer and both bathrooms with more modern fixtures. That is about the extent of the “easy” projects. 

From that point on, all the plans that I had that seemed so simple just turned out to be darned near impossible.

I thought that we should pull the plain mirror off the bathroom wall and purchase a beautiful mirrored medicine cabinet for our master bath, along with putting in a beautiful metal and alabaster light fixture. Turns out that to sink the medicine cabinet into the wall, we’d have to pull permits and hire someone to do it, since the cabinet would go into an exterior wall and thus cause issues with supporting the structure of the house. So we just hung the cabinet on the wall, and Hubby had to build a box to bring the light out from the wall so that it would hang over the cabinet as it should.

I thought that the closet doors to my closet were big and bulky. Why would anyone want sliders when bifolds are so much prettier and functional? Turns out that my closet door opening isn’t a standard size for accommodating bifolds. I can order custom doors, or rip out the framing around my closet opening and rebuild it to accommodate the standard doors that are available at home improvement centers. I just hung up a curtain and called it a day.

I thought that we should replace the light over the sink in the kitchen. Turns out that once Hubby pulled out the old light fixture, he discovered that the light box wasn’t secure…it was actually wiggling on its support that wasn’t fastened to the joists correctly. So he had to tear into the ceiling and fix the support, and then repair and retexture that section of the ceiling. 

I thought that we should get an alarm on the house. Turns out that during installation, the technician drilled through a wire that caused our outside patio light to stop working. Two years later, Hubby looks into fixing the patio light and has to rip part of an interior wall and ceiling out to solve the problem.

I thought that it was amazing that our house had survived almost twenty years without an overhead light fixture in the living room. The open plan allowed the room to “borrow” light from the kitchen, dining room and hallway/foyer, but the room itself was still cave-like. So I bought a ceiling fan with a light and Hubby went about installing it. Turns out Hubby had to rip back into the recently repaired dining room ceiling to install a junction box to run power to the fan. He has yet to match the popcorn pattern on the ceiling.

I thought that the wall paper in the hall bath was ugly. Surely pink and purple floral wallpaper was never really in style, right? It would seem so simple to pull the wall paper down to remodel the room. Turns out that the wallpaper was original to the house and the builders didn’t prime the walls before pasting the paper up. Thus, when we pulled the paper down, the drywall came with it. We had to pull down the wall itself to get rid of the wall paper! And when it came time to tile the floor, it seemed to be not so perfectly level. And pulling out the old countertop did some damage to the remaining wall. And I thought that we could keep the old vanity, paint it and reuse it with the new countertop that I bought for the remodel. Except that the sink wasn’t positioned in such a way that the vanity would work so we wound up buying a new one anyway. And my grand plans for crown molding seem to have hit a snag thanks to non plumb ceilings. (Thankfully Home Depot is offering a class on installing molding tomorrow…we’ll be there!) I think that there may have also been issues in putting up the wainscoting that caused Hubby to declare that the room wasn’t perfectly squared.

I thought that a nice black and silver plaque to display our house number might look nice in front of the garage. The house numbers that are original to the house are on the eaves of the house and are now hidden by Italian Cypress Trees that were planted in front of them. Turns out that our house is made of some sort of fake stucco that is stuck to Styrofoam (yes, apparently I live in a Styrofoam house, but I can get away with that as there are no hurricanes here to blow the house away!) and now we have to devise some sort of elaborate plans to get the numbers to stick to the house, since anchors won’t anchor to the vast nothingness that is behind the fake stucco that makes up our house.

You think that we would learn a very important lesson from all of these experiences. Sadly, we keep trudging along. 

This weekend is the beginning of the master bath renovation. We’ll be pulling out the vanity and countertop (watch out, walls!) and painting in preparation for tile and a new vanity and countertop. We have already established that we will have to make a couple of minor alterations to the new vanity to accommodate the existing plumbing. Hopefully that will be the worst of the renovation.

This summer…new kitchen, foyer and dining room floors, along with removal both patterns of popcorn on the dining room ceiling. Shortly thereafter, new countertops in the kitchen. And after that, we’ll reface the kitchen cabinets ourselves. 

We’re just setting ourselves up for new challenges. But we won’t accept failure. 

We’re going to be living in this house for awhile yet…and I want to get all of these projects done with plenty of time for us to enjoy the results. This is, after all, our home.