We moved into our new house a little more than six months ago, and I feel like we’ve made a ton of progress (which obviously helps with my DIY goal.) I feel like all of my posts for the blog could be and probably are the same, but that’s because I’m really focused on getting the house somewhat right before I am able to focus on other things (also known as EVERY OTHER THING.)
So far, I’ve completed the following projects:
- Remove wallpaper and paint the basement (which let me unpack some of our books, the ultimate goal in my life.)
- Paint living room and half of hallway. (This took kind of a while because of the furniture moving required and also the navy blue paint…)
- Paint dining room. Lesson here is to consider the amount of paint you’ll need for a room or you’ll end up having to get more with hardly any wall left to go.
- Remove wallpaper from the entry and most of the kitchen.
- Here’s a new DIY tip I learned on this project: Sometimes when your steam cleaner breaks and you have no idea how you’re going to take down the wallpaper otherwise, just pull it and it comes off in sheets in about five minutes. But then you have a gluey mess left behind. So you have to spray it constantly with water and dawn dish soap and scrape it off by hand with a putty knife. See below: left side is no paste and right is still gross.
- My office wallpaper is gone.
- Broderick’s room has wallpaper down, paint and just needs new curtains and art.
- My closet is now a glorious place that keeps my clothes organized and is pink and pretty.
We’ve also had the following problems come up:
- Replace French doors that didn’t close with sliding glass doors that really aren’t that clean, yet somehow birds still fly into them.
- Replace oven.
- Fix leaky window well: this is on our list for Memorial Day weekend
- Fix leaky bathroom: also a surprise that our bathroom fixtures are leaking down into the storage room. The only benefit of the leaky window well was that we discovered this because we were checking on the other leak.
- LIGHTBULBS. Good grief, we have lightbulbs burning out all of the time.
- Electrical panel and other misc. electrical things: Lesson here: get a home warranty plan.
- The backyard, which desperately needed grass seed.
When I was typing up this list, it didn’t seem like a lot but it’s been a lot of work and all things that make a huge difference for us. It will hopefully eventually get to the point where we can stop for a while, which means you might get to read posts about something other than DIY from me…
defining30 