On the surface, it feels like you should be able to get all kinds of things done to your house, now that all we do is stay home. In reality, nothing is happening. Finding time to clean our floors seems impossible, let alone do all the home improvement projects my brain can dream up. So it is a VERY BIG THING that we somehow scraped together lunch breaks and half days and minutes here and there to get a big project done.
It’s way scaled back from my original plan, but we’ll call this Phase One. It’s a big improvement from what was there, super pretty and definitely functional. But I might put a hold on any other big projects for a while. It turns out doing these things in a pandemic with two small children is not easy.
We’ll get into the details, but first, a before and after!
It feels so much better. Like I can breathe when I look at it. Like I want to do laundry.
The first thing we did was paint the walls. For some reason, every closet in our house is textured. (It was easier. That’s why. It was easier for the builders). Besides making the walls rough and sharp, it makes them look dirty and they’re impossible to clean. Eventually I’d like to paint them all with a glossier pant to make them look and feel better as well as making them more functional (there I go again with the projects). We also got rid of another one of those awful shelves we hate (two closets left!). But once we did that, it sat. For months.
We didn’t even take the tape of the machines. Yes, we’ve lived here for four years now. We were getting around to it..
The annoying part of this project was that in order to work on this “room” we needed to move the washer and dryer. Which alone isn’t easy (okay it was super hard), and then we couldn’t do laundry. We have a lot of laundry. Never stopping laundry. I should be doing laundry right now actually.
The project wasn’t without hiccups, by the way.
First there was the leak. Then there was the next leak. Well, less like leak, and more like the water turned on when we didn’t want it to, and started spraying everywhere. On the floor, on the freshly painted walls, even up to the ceiling. So that was fun. So much fun we did it again a few months later. We thought we’d learned. We hadn’t.
Another hiccup? Did you see those cool new labels we put on the machines? Tom bought them for me three years ago. Back when we first thought up this makeover which also involved tiling a backsplash on the walls (phase two maybe?).
There’s just one problem with the labels. Our washing machine is on the left, and our dryer is on the right.
How could I possibly make this mistake? Well besides the whole brain fog I’ve had for the last six months, and how tired I was after working on that room all day, there was one small detail I had forgotten. When Tom moved the machines, he moved the dryer first, and moved it down the hall, to the left. Then he pulled the washer out and to the right, just in front of where the dryer usually sits. And that was enough for me to mix them up. I never actually looked at the machines, I just put the wash label on the machine to my left, and the dry label on the machine to my right.
Whatever. It’s still better than it was before.
