Twelve days to Christmas – wahoo! We gave ourselves a Christmas deadline a month ago: as of Christmas Eve we could put the apartment on the market that minute. Welcome, Ugly Baby buyer! Joy to the world! Feliz Navidad! Wash your hands, please. Mince pie? We’re not selling quite yet – certainly not while I’m [...]
367 days? They came and went. Going by that metric, today is Day 432 but you’ll notice they’ve disappeared from my header. The basis of the operation was always: enjoy first, everything else second. Turns out that we love it here, and we plan to stay awhile. But that’s crap! I demand daily drama, further [...]
This was our apartment laundry room on Day 1. A boring, ugly little corner we knew we were lucky to have. Many apartments – if they have in-suite laundry – have it tucked in a tiny closet. At 25 square feet this one almost had room to wander. Storage space, with laundry, right next to [...]
I’ve never given numbers before – because what’s the point? Maybe I had to buy 3 new paint brushes and you didn’t. Maybe my stupid Canadian Home Depot charges more than your American one. Maybe you already have brass nipples. Renovation choices are completely subjective – splurging for this or that where it suits our [...]
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Sally asks, Sally gets. For ages she’s asked for a detailed show-and-tell about our kitchen cabinets – which I think we reinvented for about $100. Procrastination ends here. Here’s how we moved our kitchen cabinets: When we had our home inspection, the only thing I knew well enough to check was whether the cabinets were real wood. [...]
Continuing from “What I’d tell myself a year ago” – the most crucial thing I’d change next time… get rid of more stuff before moving – and better organize what’s left. Putting stuff in storage - a master stroke; utter genius. Last summer, after a major stuff-cull, Paolo & I were shoving things into whatever vessel [...]
It didn’t take long into the demolition – oh, about 20 minutes, before we got stuck. And this was actually stupid. Remember this little chap? You’ve never been properly introduced. This thing was a mirror, a medicine cabinet and a light. And they say multi-tasking is a modern preoccupation. The entire beast was attached in one [...]
I blame HGTV. What can two people reasonably expect to accomplish in 12 hours? DIY, as we’re shown it, has no hassle. Sometimes only one implied crisis – to get you back after the commercial. A glossy fallacy that meant I often went to bed disappointed – “We’re not getting anywhere” – as I mentioned [...]
Mega sadness: watching the “total spent” figure in our budget creep up and up. Is there a “continued delusion” function I’m missing in Excel? Presuming a magical replenishment unlikely – we had to think whether tile refinishing really did make most sense. I really, really wanted it to. Stephanie, Claire, Kelly, Liz, Karrie & Shiny-Dishwasher Sally [...]
We’d avoided the bathroom for long enough – and its shiny, “woodland-wonder-goes-to-the-bowling-alley” charm was growing thin. As the last major project in the renovation, the bathroom seemed far less daunting than the kitchen. Wallpaper? No problem. I knew exactly how to turn those walls into clean, fresh surfaces. Vanity and sink? Not such a big [...]
"An ugly baby is a very nasty object and the prettiest is frightful when undressed". -- Queen Victoria
“There are but two ways of dealing with a room which is fundamentally ugly: one is to accept it, and the other is courageously to correct its ugliness”. -- Edith Wharton, The Decoration of Houses (1897)
“[T]o create a beautiful home,
you need a bit of ugly”. -- Deborah Needleman, The Perfectly Imperfect Home
"The uglier the wallpaper, the harder it is to remove.... Ugly wallpaper just sticks better. It's a fact" -- Julie Sussman, Dare to Repair
