Stanley 90's reno / Create / Enjoy

Stanley 90's reno

Showing posts with label Stanley 90's reno. Show all posts

3.14.2018

#Stanley90sReno Apartment Therapy tour and before/after!

I am so so happy to share our the before/after--and point you to our home tour on Apartment Therapy!!

I worked with Arthur from AT for our townhouse tour waaaaay, way back, and he was excited to hear about our next home which included way more DIY fixer upper projects, and of course is more of my current style. We shot it last September and it was just published on AT!

Plus, I thought I'd put together a before/after now that I have some pro photos throughout the house. Just remember... we did this in about 8 months, very low budget, almost all DIY, lots of creativity (and stress). Phew!!

After photos by Arthur Garcia-Clemente for Apartment Therapy

3.08.2018

Budget kitchen reno before/after, cost, and DIYs

I shared last week how we budget for DIY projects... I guess budgets are on my mind a lot right now!! I realized I never shared a complete post about our kitchen reno, so I finally got my act together and added up ALL the expenses of our kitchen project at the Stanley 90's Reno.

We painted the cabinets instead of replacing them which saved a ton of money, but you'd be shocked at what the whole project actually cost us!!

Okay, I'll spill the beans--add up everything and it's well under $2,000. Nuts!!

Photo by Arthur Garcia-Clemente for Apartment Therapy

3.01.2018

3 ways we budget for reno projects

Got a question from a listener recently about how to budget for a remodel project. Ashley and I both answer it briefly in an upcoming Q&A episode of the Your Home Story podcast, but I realized I have a lot more to add and wanted to go in-depth here on the blog, with a few examples from the Stanley 90's Reno and honestly, several other houses we didn't buy.

This is beefy post! Lots of elements to the budget question and I share some real talk on process and dollars.

The question is:

Q: I’m wondering about how you go about making your budget for a remodel. I know there are a lot of ‘what ifs’ in this question... but for example benefit vs. value/equity gained, how you’ve chosen to allocate money, pitfalls and surprise expenses, and how you come up with a realistic budget in advance?

I think this is a great question. It's really more like 4-5 questions...

How to make a budget
Cost/benefit analysis for how much to spend on a home project so you don't over-improve a home and can profit if/when you sell it
What to spend the most money on
How to budget for surprise expenses/how to set a realistic budget

Ashley's perspective on this is different than mine, since she's lived in her home for 5 years and is slowly renovating. Her home is 3,800 SF and in a neighborhood of other large, nice homes, so potentially over-improving is less of an issue for her than it was for us in our last home, which was a bit more than a standard starter home but still nothing big or fancy. Ashley's projects tend to have a bigger budget, and be done over more time, than ours at the Stanley 90's Reno which we accidentally flipped.

Okay, so for my answer to this question, broken down:

Making a budget. Yes! So important. I love spreadsheets. I'll share more in my tips below because I've done it different ways... so ready on for 3 ways we budget for reno projects.
Cost/benefit: I'm not sure what the listener's goals are, but in our last house and in our next house, we want to do projects and make the home worth more than it was when we bought it. We don't know where we want to live for the next 10-15 years, so we're looking for a 2-5 year house we can be secure in. So we did a few things when shopping for our last home... we found it worked well to set sights a little higher and be willing to spend a little more than we wanted, but still get a good deal. We found a 4-bedroom slightly above our price range and offered $10k less, and it worked. The house appraised for $20k more than we paid right away. Also, a very similar home across the street that was in cleaner, but not fancier, condition, had just sold for $30k more than we paid. Look at other recent home sales in your area. If you don't think you could get back enough of your $40k kitchen reno, you might need to scale it back.
What to spend on: You hear different tips about when to splurge and when to save. I've heard splurge on cabinet hardware, for example, but in our last home I was dirt-cheap with that in the kitchen and it still looked great and was appropriate for the basic home we were in. I say listen to your house on this one and don't put a fancy marble floor and designer freestanding bathtub in a small starter home in a plain neighborhood, for example. As for what makes the most difference, I think it's paint (neutral colors), flooring (I like a consistent look and only 1-2 main types of flooring in a space, but even some of the cheaper laminates look great... the big expense is the installation), and light fixtures (but you can definitely do well with $50 ones from Amazon!!). So... for me, always on a tight budget, I'd say spend the most money on the BIG things that make a difference, but you can still be budget-conscious within those.
Surprise expenses. This is a tough one. If you're using the spreadsheet method (see more below), I recommend adding 8-15% contingency. Plan to set that extra aside and don't spend it unless you have to! And if you don't need it, well, maybe treat yourself to something nice at the end of the project, or put it toward another one.

Now, I do want to go more into the first part of the question... how we budget!!

3 ways we budget for reno projects

I'm a very budget-conscious person in everything I do, so reigning in spending comes naturally to me--but I also love designing and creating new spaces in my homes so definitely spend money on items that are important to me. We did very well financially on our last home, due to factors including the market but also my anxiety about spending too much money. I don't recommend anxiety as a way to keep your projects within budget!

Instead, here are three ways we kept things in check and still got the results we wanted.

1. Budget for each item individually.

I don't often have a total budget in mind for a room like a bathroom makeover, but I think a lot about the biggest ticket item. For our master bathroom, for example, I realized I would need to spend about $1,000 for the vanity pretty much bare minimum. I thought about a few designs that might get a little lower than that, but ended up being able to get exactly what we wanted with a coupon for a little extra discount. (See total budget for this room here.)

12.27.2017

Best projects we did in 2017!

I often see recaps with a few awesome room redos or home upgrades people did in a year, but am totally intimidated to make something similar for us! We bought the Stanley 90's reno in October of 2016 and we did most of the big-impact projects in 2017 (once the walls were patched, paint was done, and flooring had arrived and we installed it). We touched every inch of that house, most of it in 2017. But I'll try to just hit the highlights!

Here goes. BEST projects I did in 2017!

Best Home Renovation Projects in 2017

January

Our bed! A Cragislist find and some painting skills learned from other projects led to this elegant four-poster.

12.08.2017

Our simple holiday decor and my FAVORITE Christmas home item!

Last year at Christmastime our house was lacking flooring, art, furniture... oh, and our furnace was broken for most of that month. We did have a tree, but beyond that it wasn't very Christmassy! I really looked forward to when I could decorate our new home for Christmas, but that time never fully came because of the change of plans and move.

But I couldn't be totally robbed of it. I pulled out a very few of our Christmas decorations, my absolute favorites, and enjoyed them for several weeks before we moved!! I wanted to share my top few items with you, and the ONE holiday decor piece I am most excited about--and is so easy to bring with us in our temporary living situation, too!

Here's our family room with my few fave pieces in it. Just adding a red plaid throw, fair isle stockings, and an old-fashioned wooden nutracker made me so happy.

12.06.2017

Why our first offer fell through

Real estate talk. Buying, fixing up, and selling the Stanley 90's Reno in about a year's time was a huge lesson for us in hard work, drywall repair, and real estate risk. We didn't intend to sell it so quickly; we thought we'd be there several years at least (read more about why we sold here) and weren't thinking about immediate profit. But, we were able to sell it to our advantage because:

We bought it for way under appraised value because it was in such bad cosmetic shape!
The market improved.
We did a ton of cosmetic upgrades! It showed well.

We had a ton of initial interest and received 4 offers the first weekend it was on the market, 3 of them over the asking price. We accepted a very strong one and the buyer moved forward with inspections, etc. But that offer fell through, and rather than hide in shame, I thought I'd share why!

Our buyer was interested in our home as an investment property, not to live in herself. She had a huge down payment, about 75% of her offered price, and even wanted to buy a bunch of our furniture!

She had inspections done on the home. A few minor things, like a loose faucet and sticky windows, came up. We installed the faucet so we could fix that (oops). The windows are stick, yes... they are the original 90's aluminum ones that we didn't think it was worth it to replace in this type of home.

But, three BIG issues came up, too.

The roof. The inspector said it was past its useful life. We knew the roof was old when we bought the house, but our inspection a year prior had said it had 3-5 years left. We did find a couple issues and we had them patched, but weren't ready to replace the roof yet. But here's where we went wrong:

Well, I think our painters power-washed the moss off... I've heard multiple places that power-washing takes years off a roof. Not sure if that's always true, but it was for us. The inspector said the grit of the roof was gone and specs of it were in the gutters.
We should have asked the previous seller for a roof certification. Sometimes banks will require this when a roof is on the older side, and a roof certifier comes out and can sometimes "certify" that the roof has 3-5 years of life left. Then he may cover it if the roof fails before then. Our agent didn't advise us about this when we bought, and I really wish we'd known to ask about it then.

Water in the crawlspace. It's a pretty flat yard and has a standard crawlspace, which we've been in before (see these terrifying photos), but apparently something went wrong with the vents or the drain, maybe rodents, some dirt was covering a drain, some insulation was pulled down, there were signs of water in the crawlspace. This kind of thing is pretty standard around here, but I guess didn't come up in our inspection a year ago. I dunno. We got a quote for these repairs, about $3k. Not that bad and totally fixable by a drainage contractor.
THE BIG ONE. Remember the awful DIY paint job the house had when we bought it? Well. Sounds like the previous owners also tried a DIY or super budget contractor job of re-siding the house a few years ago, as well. The siding is good Hardie Plank stuff, but was installed improperly.

They used huge nails instead of tiny finish nails hidden under the overlapping pieces.
The overlap of each piece is not consistent so some are at different angles.
They didn't stagger the ends of each piece so there are a couple places where the joins (caulked) form a channel for water to run down.
The windows aren't flashed property and the siding sticks out beyond the window trim in some places.
With all of these issues, the contractor we talked to doubted that they used the right kind of moisture barrier, so the house could be rotting under the siding.

You can't just fix those siding issues. When you remove it (up to $2k fees for disposal, by the way) it crumbles. You have to do all new. The quote we got from this very affordable contractor that works with our realtor was $13,000 to replace the siding. Plus $2,300 to paint it (again! We just had it painted!).

So. That was some bad news. And--the inspection report we got a year ago DID NOT address this siding issue.

So, we were quite sobered by the results of our buyer's inspection report. We got our realtor's favorite contractor our right away to give us some bids on repairs for the big items.

But before we could even go back to our buyer and offer a credit or to do some of the work, she decided it was too much to handle and walked away.

Luckily, we hadn't started packing yet! We debated doing the repairs and going back on the market in the spring, but I will be very pregnant then and we were so ready to move on at that point. We put the house back on the market, disclosing the issues and being up front with other agents about why the house was back on the market after a sale fail. We also raised the price $5k, since we'd received multiple offers at that price and knew we'd need a little extra cushion to credit a future buyer.

So, after the first weekend back on the market, we received another offer. Full price, first-time homebuyers aware of the issues.

We moved forward with them and while we didn't see their inspection report, we understand the same issues came up. They asked for some repairs: HVAC servicing and fix some ducts in the crawlspace, repair the roof again (not replace, for some reason--sounds like it's time to me to replace it!), and re-side the whole house.

We didn't want to lose them, but I also didn't want to credit more than $10k! Or do the work before they moved in. It's winter; not a great time to re-side and paint a house. And I don't want to deal with it. But, of course they want the sale to go through, too. They were willing to accept a credit rather than ask us to do the work. We ended up negotiating a $14k credit off the listing price. More than I was hoping, but we still ended up comfortably in the end.

We closed yesterday. We hope the buyers love their new home!!!!!

Thought I'd end on a positive note. Here's our "after" tour again!

11.07.2017

90's fixer upper reno before and after listing photos!

First, a real estate update. The first offer we accepted fell through, but we had so much interest and offers over asking that we raised the price $5k. That'll give us more room to negotiate on repairs for the next buyer. We did the whole open house/coordinating house showing thing again and accepted another offer on Sunday. Phew. (Read the whole story of why we're selling here.)

It's now been several solid weeks of living in the house in its cleanest, tidiest, most finished state ever!! I posted the after tour here and did an Instagram Live the other day of an even more thorough tour.

I wanted to go back and compare the listing photos of the Stanley 90's reno when we bought it (yikes) to now, the ones that got it so much attention and kudos from buyers!

10.26.2017

Hang removable wallpaper horizontally! Walls Need Love geometric print laundry room update

Our laundry room was one of the last rooms to get paint and flooring... and it felt so good when it did. We also installed white shaker cabinets above the machines for storage, in place of the cheap-o shelf that was there. (Here's the post.) It was MUCH better but still so plain! And nowhere to hang art, really.

So, removable wallpaper to the rescue again. (See how we used it in the powder room above a chair rail.) I found the perfect geometric print to accent, but not overpower, our tiny laundry room, and installed it so quickly for a fun accent wall!

Backsplash Look Horizontal Removable Wallpaper Tutorial

10.20.2017

The end of the #Stanley90sreno

Well, I have another announcement. Last week I shared our baby news and earlier this week I shared the video "after" tour of our 90's fixer upper! But I have some more big news for you today.

We're selling the Stanley 90's Reno. This was not our original intent. We did NOT mean to renovate and then flip this house when we bought it a year ago. We figured it'd be a 5-year house, maybe more, just needed to see what happens with Jason's career and our family.

Listing photo of the exterior!

(See all the listing photos and before/after here.)

But in June, right as we were saying, "MAN, it will be great to be done with projects soon and live in a finished house!," we had dinner with my parents who told us a neighbor in their historic downtown neighborhood was cleaning out his family home to sell. I walked by that home in my childhood and had been in there once, and knew the family and their kids about my age. Nice people, beautiful 1930's Tudor home, fabulous neighborhood--1.5 blocks from my parents.

We felt a spark. We were talking about starting our family back then and how fabulous would it be to be so close to my parents?! It's farther from work, but we'd loved living there for a month when we first started projects over at our current home and the neighborhood over there is SO much better. We might be able to really establish roots and stay there a long time! Something we'd never had plans for or a concept of before with our first two homes, which felt a little temporary.

The next weekend, we went into the toy store this family owns and chatted with the homeowner. We set up a time to tour the house and were so excited!

The house was fabulous. Very traditional layout (no knocking down walls in this one), but lots of quality original details like coved ceilings in the living and dining, original wood trim (the previous owners stripped the [probably lead-based] paint and restored it), original oak floors, built-ins in the charming breakfast nook off the kitchen in a turret.

For the past several months we've been communicating with the owner, who has to get 30 years of family memories out of the house before selling. He hasn't been in a hurry and had two other couples interested (all neighborhood word of mouth). Also, as the market picked up this summer, the Redfin and Zillow estimates for the market value of the home went up more than $100k and while those aren't always realistic, that kind of change isn't completely meaningless--we weren't sure if we'd be able to afford it.

Long story. I want to tell you more about it later if it works out. We've been in limbo about this house since June but the daydreaming made us realize, we want to live in that neighborhood regardless. We want to be that close to my parents, in an older home in a walkable, connected neighborhood. Homes don't go for sale there very often, but we wanted to be ready.

Keeping our fingers tightly crossed that the Tudor home would work out, without an agreement with the seller, we decided to list our home while the leaves are still on the trees and the weather's still nice. It went on the market last week, we had an open house over the weekend, and we had lots of showings. Also, it turns out the market has not slowed down after the summer as we feared, and our home's value has actually gone up a little! (I was worried about not getting it on the market before school started.)

We accepted an offer and if all goes well, will close and move in about 5 weeks. We sold with Redfin (I liked how they only take 1-2% listing fee, plus do great photos and video walkthrough standard and put your listing at the top of their searches). (Funny story, almost 10 years later they asked for a quote from me on fixer uppers... you can read it here.)

We're still trying to work things out with the Tudor homeowner, but if he does choose us and we're able to buy his home, it won't be ready till at least February. So we'll be living with my parents again (we did that last fall when working on our fixer upper). If it doesn't work out, we'll be house-hunting in that very desirable neighborhood, so fingers crossed for that, too.

We're in limbo and can't wait to figure out what's next for us--but here's to the next thing and hoping it's fabulous!

Thank you for following along as we've updated the Stanley 90's Reno and thanks for your support in all of our life changes! Subscribe by email (sidebar on the right below my book image) to get updates as I share them!

10.17.2017

The video "after" tour of our 90's fixer upper is here!

One year ago Sunday....... we got the keys to our mess of a house and got to work. But first, we recorded this "before" video tour. Well, this past Saturday, our house was looking its best and is DONE, so we recorded the AFTER!!

10.10.2017

Laminate stair flooring--finally done!

Possibly the biggest embarrassment of the Stanley 90's reno... we installed 1,574 SF of laminate flooring ourselves in a matter of weekends, but it took us almost a year of living here to finish the stair flooring!!

9.19.2017

Useful or beautiful: what to put in our basically-finished fixer upper home

Now that the Stanley 90's reno is mostly "finished," I've been focusing on feeling happy, settled, and calm here. We've had a few free weekends now that summer is winding down and I've had time to sort and get rid of some things like old fabric and sewing supplies, do some yard work, and cook for fun!

It is a weird and new feeling to live in a home that's almost done--yes, we did that in our townhouse... but we are still recovering emotionally from the 10 months of intense fixer upper projects and internal pressure to get things done around here that it's strange to have that free feeling in this home in particular.

So, I've been thinking about what I should do here now that the bones are done, but we have yet to finish decorating every little spot and almost all of our books are still packed in grocery bags on shelves in the garage. 😳

I found this William Morris quote years ago, I'm pretty sure when reading Gretchen Rubin's Happier at Home. (I highly recommend it and her first in the series, The Happiness Project, if you haven't already read it. You can buy them for a few bucks online including shipping and they are fast, fun, inspiring reads.) Gretchen has some of the same issues I do--a longing for "simplicity" and the urge to get rid of everything, but also sentimental attachment to certain objects and appreciation and happiness for things that I engage with regularly.

I've read the minimalist books and seen the Netflix documentary, but I've never been motivated to get rid of SO much of my stuff, everything that doesn't spark joy. When we decorated this house we were intentional about what we put in each room, which means a lot of our rooms are clean but a little bare, and there's still not much on the walls yet. Unfortunately some of our stuff is still in the garage........ like lots of artwork and of course, books... and the office is still a mess. So we still have opportunities to be really intentional about what we put in our home.

William Morris is probably most known as a textile designer in the Victorian era in England. The quote? Well, it solves all my dilemmas about what to keep and what to toss, not based on bare minimum I need or only things that make me feel joy when I pick them up.

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

9.05.2017

Exterior cleanup and "landscaping" at the Stanley 90's Reno

Until I shared our exterior painting update last week, I'd shared almost no photos of the exterior of our fixer upper cause everything about it was so depressing. The paint colors, the abandoned garden in one corner, the damaged fence, the thistles and scrubby, muddy patches of grass here and there among the moss... a yard was one of the main things we wanted when we bought this house, but ours was not quite usable and enjoyable to be in for quite a while!

So, with a little over $100 of materials and really not that many hours of work, we've got it looking MUCH better and we're almost proud of it and want to be out in it!

8.31.2017

Reveal, budget, and sources: $1,482 master bathroom reno

I checked back on my calendar--we began demo in our master bath on May 12. We finished it last week. That's 15 weeks exactly. For a good amount of that time the room was almost completely demoed so we didn't have a toilet or sinks, and all our stuff was in boxes on the floor of our bedroom! This was probably our biggest, most intensive room redo at the Stanley 90's Reno and it took... 6-15x longer than most of our other big projects!! But it's done and we are so grateful!

In contrast, we did the powder room and guest bathroom in about 5 days total (see video here!). But in this bathroom, we removed a wall (only wall in the house we ended up taking out, and it was a bigger job than we thought) and redid plumbing and electrical. The drywall was ripped up behind the vanity area for weeks and weeks! Those changes made this way more than the surface-level project we're used to at this fixer upper!

It also took a long time for us to pick the design, and the first vanity arrived cracked and getting the second one delivered by the moving company was a huge mess so that whole process took about 2 months. To catch you up on what the heck else we've been doing on this room:

I shared our two really different design inspirations
Demo progress, including demoing the wall (harder than it sounded)
Major progress: tile and lighting

Oh, and you can see all of the bathroom in its glory in the before pictures here. Gasp.

8.29.2017

Exterior painting update at the #Stanley90sreno

Because of all the work we had to do in the interior of our fixer upper home, getting to the outside work has been a little on the back burner. But, we had an opportunity to get the painting done for a great price earlier this summer and took it.

I haven't shared hardly any photos of the exterior of our home because it was so ugly when we bought it!! But I'm sharing them here, with the painting and minor landscape updates we've done to dramatically improve its curb appeal (and make us happy when we drive up to it each day!).

I shared some inspirations and paint color combinations here, and puzzled over how to make our totally 90's garage-with-house-attached home look classy but still appropriate for its architecture which we're not really changing.

8.15.2017

Removable wallpaper in the downstairs powder room - and Walls Need Love removable wallpaper tutorial! & DISCOUNT!

I am so excited to be sharing this tutorial with you finally and I know some of you have been wondering about it!

Aaaaages ago, I picked out a fun wallpaper pattern for our powder room which we totally made over but had yet to really dress up/decorate. It took me a while to get it up and get the chair rail installed around it, but it's up now and it's so perfect!

The even more perfect thing is I used removable wallpaper (sent to me by Walls Need Love) which was super easy to install and can be removed and even reused! So read on for the tutorial and how you can get 25% off your order!

You can read here about our $391 bathroom reno for this bathroom--that included tile, Kohler pedestal sink, brass faucet and light fixture, and new toilet. But it was so plain when it was done. I loooove the white paint we used throughout the house (Benjamin Moore OC-151) but this bathroom is in a hole with no natural light and four blank walls, and there was nothing to pop against it or stand out. I tried putting art over the toilet but it looked dumb next to the round mirror, not symmetrical and just not balanced. So I picked out a bright removable wallpaper and did a chair rail to separate the lower and upper halves of the wall--and it looks great!

7.27.2017

Our house has window screens now, you know, like a normal HOUSE! Replacing all our window screens

As you may remember from the before pictures at the #Stanley90sreno, this place was a complete mess inside and out, from carpet to drywall to doorknobs, and it won't surprise you that almost all of the window screens were missing, broken, or torn.

We've been knee deep in reno projects since we moved in in October, so replacing the screens has not been on the priority list for most of that time. But, when I got a tour of the Orchard Supply Hardware that opened up in Portland's Central Eastside, I learned that they can re-screen old window screen frames of any kind, and can make new custom screens for our windows! It actually gave me a moment of anxiety for a second because it reminded me I had no idea where to get replacement screens for old windows, like as if I was forgetting I had just learned I could get them at OSH... so I quickly calmed down and made a note to measure all our windows and come back to order new screens!

We were missing ALL of the screens on the ground floor of our house plus one upstairs, and two were broken upstairs. Now that it's summer, we open up the windows and doors wide when it cools off in the evenings, so we had plenty of bugs flying around inside without screens. (So silly that it took me this long, but... I've had a little too much going on.)

Not to mention, we lived with old, dirty aluminum windows and a terrible paint job on the outside of the house for months and months plus no screens, and having dirty, nonfunctional, fixer upper-ness all around you really messes with your mood, and feng shui of the house! Replacing the screens has made the rooms and windows look so much more complete and civilized!

7.18.2017

Why we didn't chose the IKEA Domsjo/Havsen sink for our farm sink kitchen update

I have celebrated with several friends lately who've just bought new homes and two of them are planning kitchen updates. Painting cabinets, updating lighting, and doing new DIY-install countertops like we did! And when you replace countertops, you also start to think about the sink. I've been talking about our affordable, DIY-install farmhouse style apron-front sink a lot lately and wanted to share with all of you why we chose the one we did--instead of the popular IKEA Domsjo sink!

I wanted an apron-front sink back before we bought our townhouse in 2012, and while we got to pick out the finishes and fixtures, back then the only farm sinks on the market were more than $1,000. When we bought our current 90's fixer upper, I was excited we'd be able to reuse the cabinets but replace the sink and counters. Even then, 4+ years later, it seemed like almost every sink on my dream kitchens pinboard was a farm sink. However, now there are more options for farm sinks!

A very popular one is the IKEA Domsjo sink, which comes in 37" wide or 24" wide and is very affordable. (UPDATE: IKEA's farm sink is now called the Havsen and it comes in three sizes.) It's real ceramic, standard countertop depth (so you don't need to fit any counter behind it), and there are a TON of tutorials and blog posts online about how to install it yourself in existing, non-IKEA cabinets.

So, what's not to love? At $313 for the big one or $185 for the small, our budget could accommodate it, and since we were doing our own new countertops it was great that it went all the way back to the wall. However, a few things slowed me down.

Why we didn't chose the IKEA Domsjo/Havsen farm sink

First... right after we had our offer accepted on this house we visited a friend who had just done a very similar kitchen reno. They had installed the double basin IKEA Domsjo sink. She complained that it had been a huge nightmare to install, and it was super heavy. Then--get this--a couple weeks later she texted me that they were putting a cast iron pot in the bottom of the sink and it CRACKED. (!!) She wasn't sure what to do, since it had been so hard to get in there, but it wasn't really fixable! (I found out later that IKEA exchanged it for a new one. But still.)

Also, probably the biggest issue for us... the large IKEA sink fits IKEA cabinets, and other 36" sink cabinets. But ours was only 33". That meant we could use the smaller version, but lose sink space and have to deal with the faux drawer panel on the existing cabinet. I don't know that 36" is a super standard cabinet width, so I think IKEA was really hoping you'd just give up and buy all their cabinets to go with their super affordable sink.

And, while not an issue in the end, the Domsjo has one hole for the faucet and is meant to use a single handle style. I've heard of people drilling extra holes for a bridge-style faucet, but drilling ceramic does not sound good to me!

Finally... now that I have a wide, single-basin sink, I have to say... it's fabulous and I never want to go back to double-basin!! You can fit so many more, larger things in without worrying about tipping things. If I could design the perfect sink, it would be wide (33" or 36", whichever) and only one basin! The divided design of the 36" IKEA Domsjo is not perfect.

So, what were we to do?? Other farm-style sinks are still very expensive compared to standard drop-in or undermount ones. And they are harder to find. The big box stores don't have a lot of options. A lot of farm sinks don't have a back piece at all so they only work as undermounted, which would be harder for us to install well with our DIY-cut countertops.

7.11.2017

$206 laundry room update and cabinets!

I achieved a goal this month that I've had for yeeeeears!! Adding adequate, appropriate laundry room storage (and by "laundry room," I mean laundry closet/hallway) was a goal of mine in our townhouse and I've never had it in laundry facilities in any of our rentals, either. I've dreamed of a couple of cabinets with shelves and doors, clean and white, to hide the detergent and lightbulbs, and finally we did it--for only $206!!

The space above a washer and dryer is often pretty empty, maybe with just a wimpy shelf. I know laundry rooms don't have to be glamorous, just functional--but one shelf is not functional. Our townhouse and our early 90's builder basic fixer upper home came with one shelf. What the heck!

I dreamed of filling the space with clean white cabinets for storing detergent and other utility room items. I searched the Habitat for Humanity Restore many times back when I was working on our townhouse, with measurements, looking for some old cabinets I could paint and hang. I never found any, but I also never felt super confident installing them myself. Well, throwing yourself into a massive fixer upper project with very little budget can change that!

7.05.2017

Choosing exterior paint colors for the #Stanley90sreno!

I am SO excited that we're planning to paint our 90's fixer upper home already! We had planned to put it off till next summer but found a connection to a very affordable painter and are making it happen in less than 2 weeks! That means I have to choose a color in a hurry, which has been hard.

I started out not having any idea what I wanted. I just created a pinboard for exteriors and outdoor decor and it's all over the place.

Honestly, I love white as an exterior paint color as well as an interior, and picking white would make it easy. But, Jason won't let me paint anything else white for a while... :P... and I think a nice soft color could be nice, too. I actually also love dark navy or charcoal, but there's a house on our street that's painted a dark grey with white trim and it looks off to me. I think something about the bland early 90's style of our neighborhood doesn't lend itself to modern dramatic tones.

So, I'm thinking about other colors I like. I've found a few combinations I think could work well. I like a sagey, beigey, warm, pale grey like this, plus the black door.

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)

© Create / Enjoy • Theme by Maira G.