The 8 Month Difference…: a house log

After yesterdays first house vs. current house comparison, this comment from Jess certainly got our wheels turning: “I think its an unfair comparison to put 8 months of work at the current place up against 4 + years at the old. You should have compared current photos from this house to what your old house looked like 8 months after you moved in there!!” Well, that is likely not quite fair either, since we have certainly learned a ton in the last five years of homeownership (and also spend a lot more time doing house stuff these days since this Hands-on diary of ours is our job)… but we are game! It is Friday. But oh boy is this walk down memory lane going to amuse you. Simply picture us quietly cringing over here as we bare all.

See, eight months into owning our first house, we still did not even know how to properly paint trim (I painted all of it in the whole house with flat paint only to learn it should be semi-gloss and then had to redo it all – and yes, it was torture). But the beauty of this post is that it is a good reminder that houses take time. And sometimes they look crazy. Which is likely why some of the fully unfinished rooms in this house do not make us want to cry as much as they did in our first house (back when we thought homes were supposed to be done the week after you moved in). Now we know better. So simply for lively, here is how our first house looked around eight months in (which was only about eight months before we began this ol’ journal to track the progress of our big kitchen renovation for friends & family members). Oh and you can scroll back to yesterday’s post if you want to peep the final first house pics (or compare this roundup to our current house’s eight-months-in progress). Simply did not want to bog this post down with 50 more pics and crash the site like I did yesterday. Oops.

Front Yard, First House (8 Months In):

Our front yard was kind of simply a forest when we moved in. But in eight months I did manage to clip all the trees that fully blocked the view of the house from the curb so neighbors could sneak a peek (yes, there truly was a house back there). Project Tree Trimming was one of those let us-surprise-John-when-he-comes-home-from-work projects that I did with a lawn chair and a branch cutter. And yes, the mister was shocked to in fact see the front porch from the street.

Front Porch, First House (8 Months In):

This was a few weeks after I clipped up the branches. I took a saw to the fully slatted wood screen door and cut a big “window” in it simply to break things up. Then I painted it yellow and hung an embarrassingly lame twig and faux lemon wreath from Target. Oh yeah and that thing hanging next to the door was left by the previous owner. It was a wood plaque that looked like a cutting board with a pineapple and the word “Welcome” painted on it. Quite country cottage-y. But I enjoyed that thing for a good year.

Living Room, First House (8 Months In):

Oy. That is truly all I can say. The sofa was a hand me down from a family member. The iconic college dorm coffee table was an Ikea find. Everything is way too small and way too far apart. There is a square of faux-stone linoleum in front of the door. It is all sorts of horrible. Living with this room for a few years taught us that creating two zones in the long-ish space (a dining area and a living area along with a console by the entryway) filled the space in a more functional and not-crazy-sparse way.

Kitchen, First House (8 Months In):

We were fairly active in the kitchen within eight months of moving in. We got all new appliances (Frigidaire from Lowe’s, which we carried over into our big remodel about eight months later) and painted the cabinets (Brown Bag by Glidden), replaced the hardware (with low-cost Ikea stuff) and painted the faux brick backplash (Wishes by Glidden). It still looked like a hot mess in there, but it was our mess. Come on, you know you like those awkward serving spoons hanging from the metal range hood that is not in fact over the stove.

Dining Room (Future Bedroom/Nursery), First House (8 Months In):

We had plenty of lively with this room, even though it was not quite functional (a room that barely accommodates four people does not a dining space make). We in fact built that table ourselves (using a thrift store pedestal base and a giant piece of wood screwed in from below and then painted glossy black). I also spray primed and painted the old chandelier white (it used to be brass) and replaced the long pointy fire-shaped bulbs with modern round ones. But my go-to little adventure in there was painting the area over the chair rail with tiffany-box blue paint, and then using chalk to draw subtle leafy branches on the wall. Crazy yes, but plenty of lively (I even used a spray fixative from the craft store to keep it from rubbing off). More on that project here.

Our Bedroom, First House (8 Months In):

Yikes, this room was baaad. Much like the living room everything looked truly sparse. And yes, that is a printer/fax machine hiding on the floor in the corner. Freelance copywriter from home = in fact faxing things fairly regularly. But there is no excuse for having it on the floor in the bedroom. And the too small art and too low bed with nothing else going on to fill things in around them kind of kills me. Thank goodness for living and learning.

Oh yeah, this bathroom phase is like looking back at photos of a truly bad haircut in ninth grade. I thought painting the trim black around the window could look truly cool and Domino-ish… but no. Not happening. So I painted it white again and took out the swag (which was in fact a pashmina that I still wear to this day – and giggle when I remember its past life). Ah, much better.

Guest Room, First House (8 Months In):

So… eight months in meant we painted the room but that is it. Still no bed for guests. We were saving our pennies and focusing on other areas, but we eventually got a full sized bed as a hand-me-down a few months later. Hooray for sleepovers.

Den, First House (8 Months In):

Bad news bears. Seriously, everything from the white bedsheet that I in fact stapled to the underside of the desk in the corner to the crooked-looking painted paneling but unpainted brick makes me cringe. About a month later we painted the two brick walls the same color as the two paneled ones and it began to move towards the room that we know and enjoy (but it still took a while to work up the energy to tackle those beams).

Laundry Nook, First House (8 Months In):

This is a terrible shot of the space that would someday become the laundry nook because it is aimed at the floor, but I was terribly proud of the peel & stick vinyl tile that I laid down over grody old yellow sheet linoleum (that consistently looked dirty no matter how hard I scrubbed). Of course about a year later we’d remove those bifold doors to open the laundry area up (and to avoid door wars between the bifolds and the door to the sunroom) and add wood flooring throughout the whole hall, half bath, den, and kitchen. Oh but you might notice that I put little glass knobs on the bifolds to make them more palatable until those later phases. It is the little things.

Half Bathroom, First House (8 Months In):

We knew that giant boxy sink vanity needed to be switched out for a smaller pedestal sink to make the compact room feel a lot less crowded, but eight months in we were fairly scared to take that on (a little googling revealed that we had to cut into drywall to find studs to secure the back of the sink basin) so we put it off a few months longer. But we did paint the walls the same tiffany box blue that we had in the dining room (with flat paint, which was a bad call, btw- now I consistently use semi-gloss in bathrooms & kitchens) and replaced the toilet (it was avocado green when we moved in). And I replaced the knobs and the grungy old fabric on the window shutters (but later took out them entirely because natural light was much needed).

Sunroom, First House (8 Months In):

We in fact did a fair amount of work in eight months in here. We got that wicker daybed as a hand-me-down and then got a hand-me-down twin mattress for it (and used regular old twin sheets from Target to cover the mattress and make that odd little skirt in the front). We also used a low-cost-o lack table from Ikea to create the scrabble table (we simply topped it with a larger tabletop that came with the thrift store pedestal that we used to make the dining table). We also stained the concrete floors a color called “tuscan gold” – which I later grew to hate because it was a bit too orange-y in direct sunlight (so we painted it a glossy chocolate color to tie it into the hardwood flooring throughout the house).

Patio, First House (8 Months In):

This patio was labeled as “needs replacing” during our inspection, so we knew it was on its last leg but thought we could live with it for a little while. But when my mom visited a few weeks before our backyard wedding and said she feared for guests’ safety (and pictured them all breaking their ankles on it) we chose to spend some of our saved-up “house fixing fund” to pay a pro to redo the whole thing over the course of three days (since it was simply a few weeks before the wedding and we feared a giant half-wrapped up disaster if we took it on ourselves). Knowing simply how hard laying a patio is from doing the one at our current house, we are still quite glad we hired that one out so we could plan the rest of our wedding without that monkey on our back.

Back Yard, First House (8 Months In):

During our walk-through I glanced through the window in the old dated dining room and saw this. And I nearly lost my breath. I remember thinking “all this could be ours?” – I simply thought having all this space would be excellent (the deep woods beyond the planted part was also part of the acreage). At first we enjoyed the park-like setup above (and kept it fairly much exactly like this for the wedding (you can see how we set things up here), but eventually we grew tired of weeding the long pea gravel path and pruning the bushes and trying to use the compact patches of segmented grass for incredibly mature things like extreme frisbee and chasing the dog, so we eventually craigslisted the gravel & bushes (folks dug them all up and hauled them for us in exchange for them being free) and we laid down some grass seed for a pleasant flat grassy yard in front of those deep woods. And Burger thanked us repeatedly for the trouble.

So there you have it. The state of our first house around eight months in. Thank goodness for the whole learn as you go, trial and error thing. It might not be the quickest way to a complete makeover, but I am telling you – there is something to it. Eventually you get there. Heck, it is still the exact method that we use today (we simply know a bit more about what we like and what type of paint should be used on trim and in bathrooms). So rejoice if your house is only a shadow of what you long for it to be. That stuff takes years, at least it does for us. So simply keep trying things and learning about what floats your boat and eventually you will get there. Oh and do not forget to enjoy the ride.