Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Holy home improvement!

In a typical "Christina-Salway-Too-Little-Money-Too-Many-Projects" fashion, I'm taking on some big offenders up at the farmhouse this Spring. We've got lofty goals, a fair amount of progress already, and a surprisingly small budget in order to accomplish everything on my list.

Here's what I'm aiming for: (Don't laugh!)

-Wallpaper the stairwells from ground floor to second floor, and second floor to attic: The good news: I think I've already found the paper for this-- on Craig's List bien sûr-- so that helps my ailing budget considerably... The bad news: Wallpapering 4 diagonal walls. I can't imagine this will be easy. Having no experience with wallpapering is not going to make it easier. 

-Wallpaper the downstairs guest bathroom: This should really be low on my list because eventually I'm hoping to totally renovate this bathroom and quite possibly chop it off the house altogether; but I've come to terms with the timeline on that-- and it's looking more like 2026 than 2016... So with that in mind, spending $150.00 to wallpaper it for a decade doesn't exactly feel like throwing good money after bad, if you know what I mean...

In case you can't tell-- the walls in the photo are made
of spray-foam insulation, NOT a lovely butter color paint,
applied in traditional tudor style... 

-Ok. This is the big one. I think we're finally makin' moves to finish the attic: This is not a project of skill as much as it is a project of devotion. My plan is to install horizontal bead-board throughout the entire room, build a wall to divide the sleeping space from the storage space, and then install a railing around the stairwell so Jules, the dog, and any inebriated friends of ours don't fall down the hole unwittingly. It's kind of a bummer about the storage space/ sleeping space division, because the whole attic is really lovely as a whole, but let's be serious. 25% of the reason city people have country houses is the storage space. If we didn't have this attic for hiding our "old baby clothes/insane amount of mismatched frames/random pieces of wood/bonkers collection of windows and doors", we'd be lost. Or we'd have to rebuild the barn. 

And no. I don't want to talk about the barns right now. 

As though I don't have enough on my plate, I was recently informed that my utterly-collapsed hay-filled haunted barns are "starting to smell like hay". Which I'm neither thrilled about, nor poised to do anything about. Unless someone else has $7,000 they want to use to bury my barns.... Any takers???

I hate this chimney. Sorry this is such a terrible photo,
but literally, I hate this chimney so much, I don't have
any photographs of it. I'm avoiding it. We're estranged.
I've also resigned myself to hiring out the demolition of the rogue chimney that remains in one of the guest bedrooms. It's this ridiculous eyesore, but also creates a colossal amount of dust and detritus, and after talking about it for a year, I asked a local dude to hack it apart for me on the cheap. I just didn't have it in me when there are SO MANY other big fish to fry... (There are so many fish to fry around here, it feels like a freakin' chip shop.) You must realize that this was a major concession for me to make-- I'm SO tight fisted about paying other people to do work I know I can do, so letting this manual labor go was a significant psychological break-through/ failure on my part. You say potato, I say PO-tah-TOE. 

Anyway........

By removing the chimney from the guest bedroom, we also have to remove the chimney from the attic, because the guest room chimney was supporting the weight of the attic chimney. The positive spin on this last little project is that now both chimneys are out, I can finish furnishing the guest room how I want it rather than how it fits around that f-ing chimney; and when we start paneling the attic, we don't have to work around a chimney we wish didn't exist... 

So that's where things stand today. Lots to tackle this weekend, lots of decisions still to be made, and then SO much more to tackle. 

I'm already tired. 

2 comments:

  1. Your decoration is really nice. Everyone has a dream to decorate their home in beautiful ways. Please keep sharing your blog, it helps in getting innovative idea.

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