Tag: diy

  • Just Some Paint (Unedited)

    Just Some Paint (Unedited)

    The livingroom painting project is done!

    Well… like 80% done, as I still have to paint the ceiling, but that’s for next weekend, and that’s easy.

    So… We’re done!

    It took a little time, as I did start this whole project right before the kid went away to camp. I did that to kill time, and also try to teach her a life skill; how to paint a wall. I mean, at some point she will live someplace that she’ll want to make her own, and though painting isn’t a difficult skill to learn, I would like her to have in her head that this is something she can do.

    Anyway… digressing here…

    The point is that we took our time, but the wife and I painted the livingroom. Not only that, we cleaned everything out. Really got into all the nooks and crannies of the apartment and cleaned. And then the wife had an idea to sand and paint out TV stand, which turned out great. (She has a little more to go on it, but it looks great. Might share a picture of it when it’s done.) But the best part of all of this is that at the end of Sunday night, we were tired, but not exhausted, and we had the self-satisfied feeling of accomplishing something important.

    The last time we painted the livingroom was right before the kid was born. I guess it was called the “Nesting Phase,” but either way, it was fun to get the apartment ready for the kid. Even the wife’s sister came in town to help us get the whole place ready. It’s a fun memory.

    This time around, it felt like we were putting the last few years behind us. There are still ghosts of Covid around our home. This we hung on the walls, or furniture we tried to repurposed to make working from home functional, or home school at least viable. Books came off the shelves and were cleaned, and a new sense of order and comfort began to take root. It was renewing our commitment to make this little Harlem apartment our home for the next decade or more.

    It was just a little paint. Just a little time. Some sweat and listening to my wife’s playlists.

  • DIY Home Remolding Videos

    I used to watch HGTV for all the remolding shows. I will stress the word “used to” because after a few weeks, I noticed that all the shows were the same in their structure, and they didn’t show you how to improve anything in your home. Such as every HGTV show had the same reality tv plot wherein half way through the show, the hosts discovered some huge “whatever” that would cost way more money to fix, and then they had to call the client and get their reaction, and decide what to do next. But no matter what the issue was, it all worked out, and Joanna put a huge “LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE” sign up on the wall. Oh, and they only thing I learned about fixing my home was to hire a good contractor.

    All of this has now lead me to watching YouTube videos. At first, I was looking for clips that would help me patch a hole in the wall, or install trim, or build a built-in. But, the Algorithm caught on to me, and started pushing all these renovation videos on me. Like, “we bought a school building in the country and turned into our dream house” type videos. Or “I bought a row house in Boston, and am fixing it up with my girlfriend and our dog.”

    I won’t lie, late at night, these videos suck me in. Not so much the people, or their story, or how they did it all (though I wish they would go into more of those details), but I get sucked into their home renovation ideas, and I try to figure out if that would work in my apartment. See, I have a mudroom area, and a place for a built-in buffet/bookshelf but I can’t figure out how to make it work…

    As I have watched more and more of these renovation videos, I have started to notice, especially the ones that are a long series, that they all kind’a do the same thing. They all have a time-lapse video of their demo, or a time-lapse of the contractors doing something, with a jangly guitar underscoring it. Or, they do this confessional thing where the “admit” that they might have bit off more than they can chew, and the whole project might fail.

    But it never does.

    They always figure out a solution, or they pay more money to the contractor who figures out a solution. Yeah, it’s all rather cliché.

    Or to put it another way…

    Once, you know, I’d like to see someone just throw in the towel; They can’t do it, it’s just too expensive, or they settle. Sure, that wouldn’t be a very interesting video, but it sure would be a cautionary tale for all of those middle-aged guys out there, that have no experience at home improvement, but think they can do it because they watched a video at 1am.

  • Painting Our Bedroom

    This past weekend was THE weekend for us to get our big Summer task accomplished; Painting our Bedroom.

    This has been a slow project of remodeling our bedroom, and making a space that we are both happy to be in. See, our bedroom has had to function as an office as well, and to accomplish this, we got ourselves a Murphy-bed a little over three years ago. And though I was against this type of bed, I have to admit that my hesitations were unfounded. We do live in a tiny New York City apartment, and every inch has to be functional and not wasted. But the rest of the room has been a hodge-podge of Ikea furniture that used to be in the livingroom, or in the kid’s room. Outside of the bed, everything else in our room is second hand news.

    Two years ago, we did a complete re-do on the kid’s bedroom. She was growing out of little kid stuff, and was knocking hard at being a tween, so we wanted to give her a room that felt more appropriate to who she is. When we finished up the kid’s space, the wife and I said that our room was next.

    Two years later, after much, and I mean MUCH, debate – we have landed on what we want, can afford, and most importantly, fit into our space.

    To start this whole process, we had to start with the walls. Well, I started with the walls by patching holes, sanding, and getting everything ready. When I patch the holes in our walls (these are the anchor holes for shelves, hooks, and pictures) it is a walk down the history of the wife and I in the apartment. All the different arrangements we have tried before the kid and after. I can also say that with over fifteen years of patching holes, I am getting pretty good at it.

    Then this weekend, we painted. The ceiling got a nice hue of primer white, while the walls got a good treatment of this aqua/blue color that has made the bedroom have this strange New England beach house feel. The furniture will be white with natural wood for the doors, drawers, and handles. I still need to finish painting the rest of the dark wood trim white, but it’s not a big room and I can knock that out in another weekend.

    When it was all completed, besides feeling exhausted and aching in weird parts of my body, there was a satisfaction in accomplishing a task that will help us relax. Sometimes, it feels like we are still coming out of Covid. What I mean by that is that we are still hanging on to some of our “bunker mentality” which is manifesting in the fact that we haven’t allowed us to have a room, a space, that is for us. Covid made us try to make the kid’s life as normal as possible, and be comfortable. She came first, and everything else, especially if it was for us, could be put off.

    It’s taken us awhile to say that the kid’s okay, we did our job very well, and that we shouldn’t feel guilty if we want to do something nice for ourselves. Like painting the walls in our bedroom.