Part Two: Foresight

This is part two of a two part series. To read part one. please catch up here. 

Years passed. The Small Table was still outside on the patio. By this time, his wood was stripped on the most exposed side. The once shiny, polished finish had turned black in areas. Dust and pollen accumulated on top. The Small Table was losing hope. He had waited through many changing seasons, and still, nobody came for him. 

One day, Foresight entered this house. Foresight surveyed the area. Foresight looked inside the pantry. Foresight looked in the refrigerator. Foresight looked in the freezer. There would be a time and place for dealing with these areas. By chance, Foresight opened the blinds to the patio door and stumbled upon The Small Table. 

Foresight asked The Follower if The Small Table was being used. The Follower did not use him. There was no need to ask The Fool as that is why The Small Table was rejected in the first place. Foresight cleaned, wiped, disassembled, and transported The Small Table away.

The Small Table was elated. He was so happy to be found. He was so glad to be rescued from the patio. He was ready for his makeover.

Foresight had a vision of the beauty which could be revealed from The Small Table. There would be a new coat of paint. Choosing the color would be slightly trickier. Foresight debated white. Gray. Navy. Even a bright shade of teal was considered. But in the end, Foresight made the decision to leave the top natural and stain it. The legs would be painted white to create an elegant, modern look. 

It's so nice to have a covered workspace in the garage, even with two cars inside...😊

Of course, the actual transformation process is never easy. The Small Table had to endure a generous layer of sanding to remove all the damage and ensure an even coat of new stain and paint. On went a generous coat of stain as well as three layers of poly to protect the surface. The Small Table would be protected and taken care of. 

The first coat of primer never looks like much, but you have to trust the process.

Each of the legs was meticulously primed and painted white with a satin finish. You would never have guessed what The Small Table had been through from seeing it now. 

The Small Table hopes to be able to listen to children laughing. The sounds of voices in conversation. He wants to be colored on, be painted on. He wants to be the surface to rest bowls of freshly cooked meals. He wants to soak in the smells of various cuisines. He wants to support the pages of a book or the paper in a notebook as someone studies, completes homework, or writes for fun. Yes, he wants to be used and worn over time in these ways. Yes, he wants his surface to be occasionally scratched or marked. 

These ways, however destructive they can be, are much better than being left outside to the mercy of the weather. These ways, however destructive they can be, are much better than suffocating under a pile of things. These ways, however destructive they can be, are much better than being rejected. 

Because these are the ways in which love and purpose happen. And Foresight was able to see it. 

Paper Blinds

16 years ago when my family moved into our new house (which is still my dad's current house,) we had the builders install window blinds for us. However, before the blinds arrived, we asked them to cover up the windows so we'd have some privacy without people looking in as they walked past. They put up these paper blinds on all the windows until the blinds were delivered and installed.

After the real blinds were put up, we saved every single paper blind and shoved them all in a cabinet in the laundry room. My mother's mentality was, "You never know when they'll come in handy again." Yes, mother.

They sat in the laundry room cabinet for years, and years, and years, and years, and years. And it's a slight miracle nobody threw them out. I don't think anyone ever even opened the cabinet actually.

Fast forward about 14 years when my husband and I bought our house. It had its fair share of problems. The blinds were actually very minor in comparison to the other issues we encountered. They were mismatched between the rooms - 2 inch faux wood here, vinyl mini blinds there - as well as some that had been damaged and chewed up. The ones in working condition were yellowed with age and dated-looking.

The blinds in our bedroom were the ones which had been damaged and chewed up. Rather than leave them in their current half-functioning state, we took the blinds down altogether, retrieved the 14 year old paper blinds tucked away so neatly in storage from my dad's house, and taped them to our windows. (Yes, I remembered they were still there.)

As you can see in the background,
our paper blinds being put to use once again.

Blinds were one of the projects that constantly got shoved on the back burner because there was always something else needing work. I occasionally looked to see if anything was on sale, but the prices only seemed to be increasing. Also, with the paper blinds up, it was very easy not to notice them as a problem and just to see them as the real blinds in our house. Aesthetically, it was not the best, but when you've seen something day after day, it becomes your normal, and you accept it.

Recently, I stumbled across some blinds on sale and curiosity actually led me to go online and search the website for our sizes. I found some that would work for a few of our rooms and went ahead and bought them. We were able to get them installed in our bedroom and swap out the paper blinds.

Bye bye paper!

It's actually quite nice to be able to sit at my desk and write this blog while having a slight view of our backyard outside. Before, the light was able to filter in through the paper, but it was still opaque enough not to see through. Now, I can steal glimpses at yellowing grass.

I can just imagine my mother's voice saying to me, "See, you found a use for the paper blinds! Aren't you glad we kept them all these years?" Yes, mother. 

I am glad we kept them, and I am glad we got a good two and a half years of use out of them. What I wouldn't remind her of is that home improvement stores actually sell those paper blinds...and they're not super cheap either! 

If we had the money and budget to buy blinds two and a half years ago, I wouldn't be here telling this story of how we reused old folded paper. So I guess the story credit would have to go to our frugalness.

Real blinds are still better. 

The Last will be First and the First will be Last

The ones hired in the morning agreed to work for one denarius. The ones hired in the afternoon who worked fewer hours were still paid one denarius. There's nothing unfair about this because each individual agreed to what was arranged. Although still just as important, my title is inferring something just a bit different to Jesus's parable in Matthew.

We bought our house with three full bathrooms ranging in size from small to medium to large. The only one considered updated at the time was the small bathroom. Seven months after closing, we embarked on our first full-on DIY bathroom renovation and worked on the medium bathroom. It took us about three weeks working late nights and weekends along with our day jobs. After completing this project, this bathroom now became the nicest one in the house.

Obviously, we were still using our master bathroom. The original toilet seven years older than us and a super skinny shower door were nothing compared to the convenience of having an attached en suite.

Three and a half months ago, we made the decision to do our last and largest renovation project on the inside of our house - not completely DIY. We said goodbye to our 80's bathroom which is now remembered solely by these pictures alone:

Vanity Before

Take 2: Goodbye nasty cabinets that previous
homeowners did not take care of keeping clean

Shower: Goodbye 18 inch shower door that's
almost too skinny for a 24-inch-waisted person
to walk through straight-on

Bathtub: A very inefficiently small oval tub in a large space

And then came the fun but physically stressful part: Demolition. Last we left off, everything was boxed up and placed at the curb outside in a limited exhibition. Here's what the inside looked like.

Look at that him go with that 20 pound tool. That was no joke. 

Even just blogging about this and seeing the in-progress pictures is already making me tired again. We were thankful to have been able to move to a spare bedroom in our house and use the other bathrooms to completely clear the space so it didn't really feel like we were living through a renovation. We also had the luxury of a door to the back patio from our bedroom which the contractors used, so they stayed out of the main living area of the rest of our house so I could teach and live somewhat normally. However, I won't downplay the amount of cleaning we had to do in our bedroom and bathroom after the contractors finally finished walking in and out of our room and bathroom. There was a lot of vacuuming and a lot of mopping.

In the end, our bathroom, which ended up last to be renovated and took the most patience (in waiting for contractors to come and finish their parts) and money, is now the nicest space to bathe in our house.

New vanity with double the storage as before and a much more refreshing color scheme.

New tub - takes up just as much space as the last one, but double the bathing space
with a much more spa-like appearance and style.

We borrowed about half of the space which used to be that giant cabinet
and enlarged the shower. Frameless glass makes the shower open to the
rest of the bathroom and gives it a clean, sleek design. The door is
the proper width and built to today's code.

We haven't finished the shelves to the left of the shower yet (as you can see from the empty space in the last picture), but we're not in a rush. And having tapped out of the project halfway through due to other priorities....I'm definitely giving my husband a break on that one.

We also don't have mirrors yet because we haven't found ones that are the right size which we like. If you have any ideas, please let us know where to shop! We've scrounged Homegoods, Ross, At Home, and Kirklands.

I've also mentioned to Jonathan several times that I will not be attempting anymore large-scale DIY renovation projects around the house after this one. Not sure if it's the pregnancy stealing my energy and motivation away, or if my first-house-energy is truly drained. Either way, we will definitely be taking it easy for a LONG time in terms of house projects. However, we will not be taking it easy in terms of life for the next 18 years.....

Flat File

A few weeks ago, or maybe just one, I can't remember, I converted some built-in-bookshelves to be a flat file for my music. Before, it was just regular bookshelves with the books vertically placed next to each other. I grew up doing this, however, it is quite bad for your books. Over time, unless you have a very good bookend, (which I do not,) the books will slowly begin to slip downward. The unfortunate part about this is that the process is quite slow, so over time, the books don't fall, but they'll actually take on a warped shape to accommodate for the slipping.

Before: regular bookshelves, music books stored upright. Hello, guitar!

Having been pressured immensely by a fellow music teacher and friend, I finally decided to take some action to get a flat file. However, purchasing a flat file that has aesthetic value and can function as a piece of furniture is not cheap. They run at least a couple hundred dollars to start. I had no intentions of spending that much money simply to store the music, so we decided to go a different route. (Having moved the piano in with seating for parents, the room itself also has very little space to add an additional piece of furniture so I wanted to try and use the existing space as best as possible to not cramp the space.)

We did some research and looked at the shelf clips on our built-in. Now our house is over 30 years old. These shelf clips that were used are not your normal little pins that you push into holes and pull out. These shelf pins were one of a kind, specialized clips with their own tracks.

This here is a Knape & Vogt 256 shelf clip. If not purchased carefully, they can
run you up to $1 a piece. We purchased carefully and did not spend that much per unit. 

Our much cheaper solution was to add shelves to the existing built-in unit so that the bookshelves would stay on the left side and my flat file for music would be added on the right side. If you reference the first image above, you'll see that the three shelves for books on the left have ample wiggle room between each to shift closer and add in a fourth shelf. That's precisely what we did. We moved one of the shelves from the right side to the left to create a fourth shelf for books. Then, we created four more shelves ourselves out of wood to add skinnier shelves on the right for my books to lie flat.

Work in progress: fourth shelf added to the left for books. Stacks of music
lying on their side waiting to be sorted into in-progress shelving units on the right.

The total cost for my flat file conversion ended up being about $25. Of the total materials needed - shelf clips, wood shelves, wood stain, and a clear coat - we only actually had to buy one quart of wood stain and a pack of shelf clips. In the garage, we already had leftover wood pieces from previous projects for the shelving and a can of clear coat also from a previous project.

The finished shelf with bookshelves on the left and a flat file on the right.

Much to the chagrin of my music teacher friend, I did not purchase a flat file, which my bank account much appreciates. Now, for the first time in 15+ years, my music books can lie flat and rest comfortably on their shelves with no fear of a warped cover. I am constantly reminded that my music library will grow and I will need more space, and that statement is most likely true. In that event, I will slowly remove the books from the left and slowly infiltrate that side as needed using the same process we did. Perhaps this whole built-in unit will be a flat file for my music some day. But we are not there yet. :)

HGTV In Real Life: Kitchen Facelift

We thought the kitchen was going to be one of the first projects we would tackle and renovate as homeowners, and we got halfway done....but we ended up waiting over a year. It started out as an aesthetic problem, and we were able to compromise on the aesthetics of the kitchen to put it off and save money. However, when the dishwasher wasn't secured any longer to the underside of our crumbling wood-bits-smashed-together-and-covered-in-plastic counters, it was no longer an issue of aesthetics. Every time we wanted to put dishes in the dishwasher, it would tip forward and make my heart skip a beat.

One of my favorite parts of renovating has been that I can truly make it my own. I'm not overly particular about aesthetics to begin with, but when it comes to the biggest purchase and investment (probably) of my life, coupled with the fact that we bought an older house knowing it needed some renovating, I'm going to be picky. And having seen the results of our kitchen facelift, I am confident that no house we saw with renovated kitchens had one that came close to being my dream kitchen.

Before:



After round 1 of facelift:





During phase 2 of the facelift:





And finally, I present, my dream kitchen:





So...I wish I could say nothing was ever on our counters, but that would be a lie. So this is what our counters actually look like:

We're pretty clean...at least in the kitchen :)

I was in awe for a while after we finished our kitchen. Having lived with the outdated materials for so long, I got used to it. And then, I watched the contractors install pretty much every detail, so it wasn't a big reveal for me. To be honest at first, I wasn't sure if I liked it. Jonathan and I took FOREVER to pick our backsplash (like....almost a year if not more. Yes, we had been looking at backsplash for a LONG time) because I couldn't decide whether it was worth it to splurge on a fancy shmancy design or just to keep it simple and low-budget. In the end, we went simple and low-budget, and I'm more than pleased with how it turned out. I learned that visualizing an end product with just one representative piece is really difficult. Super props to interior designers who can figure this all out in their head instantly.

If you're curious on the materials we used, I've made a list below of every item we bought for the kitchen. I didn't include any of the appliances. All the current prices listed on the links are higher than what we paid for them.

Kitchen Sink - Kraus

Kitchen Faucet - Kohler

Backsplash Tile

Quartz Countertops

Cabinet Hardware

Range Hood Vent

Cabinet Paint: SW Pro Classic Satin Pure White 7005

Wall Paint: SW Marshmallow 7001

Jonathan and I don't splurge on fancy meals or new clothes on ourselves very often if ever, but we do spend the time and money to have a nice house, not only for ourselves, but to share it with others. One thing I've enjoyed most about having our home is being able to open it up to others and have them come over for dinner, host friends who are in town for the weekend, and to share our lives with others. We hope you can enjoy our house as much as we do :)