The best-laid plans

So, this house is teaching us valuable life lessons too. I think our first lesson from the house is how plans change with time. Maybe the lesson should have been "don't make plans for the house until you actually have the house". Perhaps it was all the waiting involved in getting the house that lead us to fool ourselves into hammering out all the details before we ever got the key, but we've only had the house a couple of weeks and our thoughts have quickly changed.

Here were some of our initial intentions:
-Take down all the wallpaper
-Repaint everything
-Pull up all the carpet
-Tile the bathrooms
-Carpet the bedrooms
-Hardwood the living room/dining room
-New vanities & shower/bath fixtures
-New toilets
-Granite countertops
-Double oven
-New fireplace hearth
-Put in a dock

Oh boy. What were we thinking. Good thing we started with the wallpaper... Here's what we ran into:


See that? That's wallpaper, on wallpaper... Sometimes up to 4 layers!
And yet we persevered... (and accepted helping hands!)


Until we discovered that the bottom wallpaper was peeling the sheetrock off with it. Apparently there's some step you're supposed to do when you hang wallpaper to prepare the wall, and skipping this step leads to what we have. Lots of damage to the drywall...

So I'll admit it. After giving it our best in the kitchen, laundry room and dining room, we gave up. We got some estimates, and hired a team to take down the wallpaper, re-mud the walls, and paint. They're awesome. They have turned this place around so fast! And honestly, they're doing way better than we would have. I mean, they're painting the ceiling and the trim, and carefully respackling and sanding to make it all perfect, even inside closets. Hah! Closets?? Ceilings?? I'm sure that by the time I got to working on the upstairs I'd be rethinking letting the wallpaper just stay up! So, we've gratefully moved on to other things, but it was the start of re-thinking everything (as well as budget!)

Here are our new intentions:
-Thank Progressive Painting Inc for taking down the wallpaper and painting
-Thank Carolina Carpet Co for pulling up all the carpet upstairs; recarpeting the bedrooms and laying linoleum in the upstairs bathrooms
-Lay our lock + fold Armstrong flooring (in a nice dark cherry) in the living room, dining room, and downstairs half bath
-Repaint the vanities, clean the shower/bath fixtures
-New toilets
-Clean up the old formica countertop
-Single oven
-Clean up the old fireplace hearth
-Just put chairs at the water's edge.

And we're pleased as punch with the changes! There will be time enough for remodeling down the road. We're so grateful for what we have, and that's an important thing to remember when you get into big projects like this. It's so easy to lose sight of reason when you get into stores or look at "idea catalogs"... or watch HGTV... But we truly are learning to keep things within moderation, be humble in our decisions and above all be grateful. Like my brother Dan reminds me, we're keeping "an attitude of gratitude"! We have so much love between us, and a safe place to sleep - that really is just so much to be thankful for!