When my children were little and I worked from home, I had tons of time to do home renovation projects. My husband would go to work, and he would arrive home to a different home.
Once, in the middle of a tile grouting project, I received a phone call from the school. My daughter was sick. I picked her up with forest green grout all over my arms and hands. I know enough to be dangerous when it comes to home improvement, and I get ideas and want to do them RIGHT now. This means my husband goes to work, and he returns home to find a new floor in the kitchen or our bedroom completely redone.
And that is just when he was gone for a normal 8 to 5 workday.
Right now, my husband is working in West Virginia. He left last Monday, and he hasn’t heard an exact date that he will return. Imagine the damage home improvement projects I can do! We had hoped he would be home by now, but he is there for another week. I say this despite no one telling him that he will be returning home in a week. The company actually hasn’t said WHEN he would return home. I, however, am saying he will be home in a week. It is the power of positive thought. Plus, if he isn’t home in a week, I will seriously be trying to figure out how to get THERE! After all, there are benefits to working online — I can work from anywhere. And the kids won’t have anything going on (other than Justin who is taking a class at our local community college the first week in August).
Anyway, back to the fact that I have a drill. When my husband goes away and leaves me at home, I get ideas of what I can do. And there are LOTS of projects that need to be done.
Here are just a few:
1. Put office back together
2. Finish Justin’s bedroom floor
3. Figure out what to do in the kitchen where the old fridge was located
4. Stain back deck
5. Finish cabinet project
6. Help girls paint their bedroom (they are actually doing it, I just have to supervise)
7. Help Justin paint his bedroom and fix the holes he made in his wall
8. Shampoo living room rug
9. Fix the one tile on the kitchen counter that keeps falling off
10. Clean out the garage
11. Paint my bedroom
12. Finish the trim in hallway
There are other things on my to-do list, but these are the things that I want to do.
The big things that I really want to do are my office and the kitchen. These two rooms are related. Back in March when hubby went to West Virginia in the first place, I got a bee in my bonnet and rearranged my kitchen. While I was doing this, I used mostly things that were already in the house. So I raided other rooms. When I was trying different configurations, I took apart my desk in my office. That was in March, and I have not had a desk in my office since March.
When you don’t have a desk in your office, it doesn’t really function as an office. It very easily turns into a room you might see in one of those organization shows. Pay no attention to the mess behind the curtain. OK, so it isn’t really up to the organization show standards, but if I didn’t stop it NOW it could have been a contender. After all, the office is only 8×8, and it had a LOT of stuff inside it. For that matter, it still has a lot of stuff inside it, but it is all office stuff. Well except for the vacuum cleaner (had to vacuum up the saw dust) and the power drill.
I should also note that in the picture of that office, you will notice the far wall looks kind of strange. The top two-thirds of the wall is a bulletin board. The bottom one-third is one-of-a-kind wainscoting that looks kind of strange in the picture. I love wooden crates, and the wainscoting is two old wooden crates that have been dismantled. Some of the wood still has faded writing on it. When I want to make my office look fancier, I cover that far wall with deep red curtains that complete cover it.
So, I have tackled putting my office back together. And it is almost there. But now I have stuff in my living room that I need to figure out where to go.
And there is a change in the office. Before, my office desk was a one-person desk, which was perfect because it is MY office, and I am only one person. This was before I had a laptop.
Now, my office is mostly a place where I store stuff. I have also taken over a corner in my living room. There I have the textbooks I am currently using and a laser printer plus some pens.
The office is a place where my desktop computer is and where the internet and wireless hub is located. We actually have two working desktop computers, and I wanted to place them both in the office. But my old desktop didn’t really allow for a lot of room for two desktops. So I needed a new desktop surface, and I have known this for about a year or so. This was one reason I was willing to dismantle my office last March.
This week, I was at a second-hand store, and I saw the perfect desktop. It was actually a drop-down table. It was meant to be mounted on to a wall. It would be flat against the wall when you weren’t using it, and when you needed it, it would fold up and the legs would fold out. But it was a table, so it was much deeper than what I needed for my desk. This meant it was perfect for my new desktop.
Why? Because I could cut it to the right depth, and I could use the extra depth for my keyboard tray. And it worked. I reused the keyboard drawer slide-out thingy that I already had, which is good because that thing was like $20 when I bought it new. I measured and used the circular saw and my battery-operated drill, and I had a new desktop. But then I needed to drill holes in my new desktop for the computer cords, and I couldn’t find the big paddle-bit. I finally did find one, but it was smaller than I needed. I made it work.
Those last four words scare my husband. It is the difference between DIY and professional work. Weird things happen when DIY people decide “I’ll make it work.” Someday someone might look at the holes I drilled for my power cords and wonder who let the demented beaver do this work, but my cords fit and when my computers are in place, you can’t see them.
I still need to put up my corkboard tiles on the wall behind my desk, but the little sticky things that came with them really don’t work that well. So the office is partially done with a good outlook that it might actually be finished this weekend. I also have to figure out to do with all of the stuff that is now sitting right outside the office.
Things from the office that I now need to find a place for other than sitting in my living room right outside the office door.
And despite not having the office done, I did tackle another project. I was at my local home improvement store pricing cabinets to put in that place where the old fridge was that the new fridge won’t fit, and I was on my way out of the store. I hadn’t actually purchased anything. I hadn’t planned on purchasing anything. I was just there for planning purposes. I learned that an unfinished base cabinet is about $111. A finished base cabinet is about $160, which I think is cheap enough that I would buy it over the unfinished version. That doesn’t include countertops, but I have the countertop that was there before the old fridge was there, plus I have the tile that I could do instead, so I wasn’t worried.
While there, I also priced carpet. Justin needs an area rug in his room. He has needed an area rug in his room for a very LONG time, but area rugs are expensive. And he is a 10-year-old boy. And I just didn’t want to spend $300 plus on a rug that I would put in his room when I knew it probably would be ruined.
Anyway, on my way out of the store I noticed a cart by the shopping carts. It was a carpet remnant. It was 8×12, and it was marked down to $39.02. I knew that the cheap area rugs that are 5×8 go for around $30 at stores like Walmart. The rug was a dark gray color. I thought for about two seconds and bought it.
What I didn’t think about was how I was going to get it home. I had driven the truck “just in case” I found a cabinet bargain. So Amanda and I carried the carpet out to the truck, and we put it in the back and strapped it in. The carpet was on a tube, and it was 12-feet long. The truck bed is shorter than the standard 8-foot bed. This meant that above the truck’s cab was a good length of carpet sticking up. One lady noticed, and she asked me, “Did you know your truck has an erection?” Then I had to explain to Amanda, my 13-year-old daughter, what an erection was….
Anyway, we brought the carpet home, and it fit in Justin’s room very nicely. The carpet was a rectangle, and Justin’s room must be about 13×12, but two feet of that 12 is closet and doorway, so the carpet fit in his floor space with about a half-foot of space around the edges. In other words, it was the perfect area rug size for his room for less than $40. The dark gray looks great in his room.
The next thing I plan to do is also already started and not finished. I had bought a wood-cabinet a few months ago with plans to paint it and make it a peninsula in my kitchen. That was before we bought the new fridge. It was also before hubby said he didn’t want me to use it in the kitchen. But hubby is away. I plan to finish painting the cabinet and putting the doors and hardware back on and then, I am not quite sure what I will do with it. I am still going to try it in the kitchen, but I’m not sure it will work like I planned now that we have the new fridge in the new location.
So out of my list of projects the only one I have finished is the rug in Justin’s room. By Monday, I hope to finish my office and the cabinet and have a good start on cleaning out the garage. The garage won’t be too bad. It is mostly just moving everything out so I can sweep and then putting things away neatly. The things I have to move out are pretty easy to move — the cabinet that I need to paint will be the hardest — like the riding lawn mower and the grill and the log splitter. Most are on wheels, which helps.
