A little over a month ago I started to look around our house to see if there were any minor home improvement projects that a friend of ours could do for us.
I should never have started to look. I should have just kept my head down and gone on not noticing all the flaws in our home. Because the progression has gone like this:
We don't like our countertops -- they're out-dated and yucky. So let's get new countertops! Time to research all the different surfaces, suppliers and possibilities. And time to agonize over color choices.
Well, if we're going to get new countertops, we should probably change our kitchen floor, because the tile there was also out-dated. Time to research home equity loans!
And if we're going to change our kitchen floor, we might as well change the flooring in the front rooms as well, since the wood there is showing a lot of wear, and has significant gaps between the planks. Plus it would be too hard to match the color. Time to research all the possible surfaces, widths, types and installation deals. And time to agonize over color choices for the floor.
And as long as we're changing the floors, we might as well re-paint the kitchen -- and right away -- before the countertops get installed. Time to agonize over color choices for the walls.
So, we got the floors done.... but the job left a HUGE mess throughout the house. Even though we had painstakingly moved all the furniture downstairs into one room and covered it all with plastic -- and made plastic sheets separating the kitchen from the rest of the house, still, apparently, chipping up tile is an extremely messy deal and the dirt and dust get EVERYWHERE. Thankfully some of the Wray family came over to help clean that night and we started to get re-settled. (Although I know I will be finding dusty boxes in the pantry for months to come, and even our upstairs closets will never be rid of all the dust)
But... at this point my mother had entered the scene (with her 6 buckets, 45 rags, 7 spray bottles, 2 mops, 14 face masks, 47 pairs of sterile gloves, and a partridge in a pear tree).... and this event spurred a whole new set of ideas.
Such as....
Instead of putting the dining room table back in our kitchen eating area, why don't we put it in our front room? And then we could put the couch from the front room in the old kitchen... which can now be called a "keeping room" (whatever THAT is)
And since we're rearranging furniture and purposes of rooms, we'll need to switch the light fixtures. And we'll need to re-paint the new dining room. Time to agonize over color choices for THOSE walls.
And since we moved some of the furniture into the kitchen, the paint color I thought I had chosen for that room no longer works. So time to agonize over color choices for the kitchen walls AGAIN.
Mom also had the brilliant idea of adding a bar in the kitchen where the kids could sit and eat breakfast... so now, we need to build a bar. Time to go to Lowe's and figure out how to do that. And back to the paint store again to get paint for it! (We should have bought stock in Sherwin Williams last month before all this began!)
And then, as Mom pointed out, since we have a new more "open" floor plan, we should re-arrange the furniture in the living room --- the one room downstairs that we had not yet touched this month -- to make it all "flow better."
And, now we'll need new light fixtures above the bar, new dining room furniture for storage, and we need to switch out our dining room table and chairs for one that Mom has. But all that stuff will remain on the "To Do" list for next month.
In the meantime, though, as we await our new countertops and try to get things back into the spots they need to be in, we have to sit back and chuckle. What started as a very harmless question, has exploded into something far more time-consuming and expensive than we ever would have imagined! Instead of relaxing and enoying our last month of summer, we've been going a little nuts; for a decision-making-challenged goofball like me, this has been WAY too stressful. I really never should have picked up my head to look around our house!
And, oh yeah, we're trying to find a minivan to buy, too.
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