Five Home Mistakes We Made (We Learned The Hard Way): a house log
I was lying in bed thinking about what random lessons we have learned in over nearly seven years of homeownership and Hands-on, and I realized it might make a good post. Shoulda woulda coulda – ya know? Here is what I came up with (which is by no means all-inclusive, but hopefully will assist someone else out there who is simply learning as they go like we are apt to do). Who is ready for number one? Ok, since I cannot in fact hear you folks (but clearly you are all screaming “we are!”), I will continue.
1. It is not consistently best to blindly follow one sentence pointers in home improvement magazines without knowing if they’ll work for your system/house. For example, we read somewhere that shoving a piece of insulation up your not-in-use chimney was a strong way to save energy since you will not be losing heat or cool air through the chimney. So we did it, simply shoved in some insulation (warning: if you are eating or afraid of bugs, do not read this pointer).
A few weeks later after a lot of rain while John was away on a business trip I was walking into the kitchen, past the fireplace without my contacts in. And I saw what could best be described as a bunch of white pieces of rice on the floor. So I knelt down to look a little closer and they were… maggots. Crawling out of the fireplace.
Likely fifty or more of them. Thankfully I am not too squeamish (although I did take a moment to resent John for missing this debacle entirely by being gone on business) so I used a paper towel to gather them all up and fling them outside. Then I shined a light up the chimney only to realize that somehow the chimney cap must have leaked and the moist insulation was the ideal place for a fly to lay her eggs, which had hatched and were now in their larvae stage.
How did I know they were flies? Because apparently I missed a few of them and a few days later flies were all over the house. Thankfully I could solve the problem by removing that nasty piece of insulation, resolving to get the chimney cap looked at (we later resealed it with some silicone caulk) and reminding myself that perhaps every one-sentence pointer in a magazine is not a blanket this-is-certainly-best-for-your-house rule.
2. Do not decorate around a stump. Simply pay to get it ground instead of sinking money into trying to make it look like a fairly planter. Although I am sure some folks could totally pull it off, we could not. We thought we could, so we attempted to make a little octagonal planting bed with some wood on top of the stump but it consistently looked like a tree stump in the corner of our driveway with a weird wood planting bed on it. So when we later chose to get our pebble driveway paved for our backyard wedding, we jumped at the chance to at last get that stump ground once and for all so we could reclaim that corner of the driveway and no longer look at our mutton-dressed-as-lamb stump.
Note: here is where I’d put a picture of the hideous octagonal planter that we built on top of our giant 3′ wide stump, but the thing was so ugly we never snapped a picture. But you can see the tree that we had to remove (it was dead when we picked up the house) which left the stump in the background of this picture of the sunroom:
I think this is likely a wider concept, in fact. For example, if you have an ugly obstacle (gross wallpaper you have not gotten around to removing), do not try to pick art, drapes, and accessories in that color palette to try to make the ugly thing work if you do not even like said ugly thing. If at all possible, simply save up money (or wait to have some spare time) and remove it if you can. Then you can spend money and energy towards creating a room/feature that you enjoy instead of spending money and sweat to try to disguise something that makes you twitch whenever you see it.
3. Plant things a safe distance from your house’s foundation. Some things we dug in at first were borderline too close, so we learned that even though planting a dwarf tree four feet from the house feels oddly far, from the street it looks simply fine and it is much better for the foundation (and the tree itself since it gets more sun and rain than it would if it was half-tucked under the eave of the house).
4. Spackle and drywall mud need to be smooth before you prime or paint. Primer and paint in fact will enhance any irregularities, so they will not hide any sins at all. And once those things are painted if they are not smooth, you can no longer simply easily sand them to make them smooth (paint is truly hard to sand and get the same smooth look as caulk or putty or drywall mud before the paint is applied).
So when in doubt, we like to spackle and sand and spackle and sand – at least two rounds simply to make sure we fill everything in that needs to be flush and sand everything down that needs to be smooth. The instinct is to hurry up and get done as swiftly as possible, so you truly have to fight yourself to make sure you sand things well so they are pleasant and smooth (in the end it’ll save you plenty of time since going back and trying to fix things after they are painted over is a royal pain in the behind).
5. Your first idea is not consistently your best idea. Take our first house’s kitchen for example. For a while we were planning to simply get new cabinets and put them in the same configuration as the old ones. But after a while of thinking and rethinking and brainstorming we came up with removing the door to the old dining room, making that a third bedroom (it already had a closet), moving the dining area off of another kitchen doorway in our extra-long-never-used living room, and making a fully functional and much more striking u-shaped kitchen instead of the old i-shaped counter that used to be there (we gained at least three times the storage and counter surface along with making our house more valuable since we brought in a bedroom).
Similarly, in our current house we initially hoped to add an island to the kitchen. And then we considered a banquet.
It took us a while to get to the peninsula idea, which we certainly think was the right way to go.
So try not to rush into anything major without truly thinking and rethinking everything. We find that living in a house for a while to get a feel for it can give you major layout-change and floor-plan ideas that you never could have come up with if you renovated off the bat.
And there you have it. Five things we learned the hard way. Well, I guess the last one was not something we learned the hard way because we rethought things sufficient to narrowly miss creating a similarly small and cramped kitchen in our first house and a room with an oddly placed island or banquette in our current house. But it is still certainly a lesson we learned along the way. What have you folks learned the hard way? Share and share alike.
Update – Wanna know where we got something in our house or what paint colors we used? Simply click on this button:
