You ever make promises you have absolutely no intention of keeping? Like, in the moment, you make it because you realize it really is the best course of action, but immediately after the words leave your mouth, you go back to your old habits?
That’s me when it comes to renovations. My mind is always whirling. I’ve always got another design idea. And straight up, I make promises about not talking about renovations that I know I’m never going to keep. Thankfully, my husband gets me and he realizes that as I’m almost painfully honest in all other areas of my life, this is just my blind spot. As long as I keep the talk of renovations to a minimum, he’s okay with it. As he likes to remind me, “One project at a time. You’re on a project that hasn’t even made the list yet.”
And so, that is where I find myself today: once again thinking about renovations and on the cusp of talking about them. There are just two things stopping me: one is that he just had a tooth filled and he’s in a little pain and the second reason is that I just promised him we would take a break for upwards of a year once we finished our current project. I actually intend to keep that promise but if I start talking about a new idea, it’s going to feel an awful lot like I’m welching. Instead, I just want to share my creative problem solving. Thankfully for both of us, I have this blog and I can share my thoughts here. Then, I keep my promise – at least to my husband – while I let my mind wander.
So, my new ideas center around building additional storage for Darryl’s books and a first-floor recycling center. Now, off the bat, you’re asking yourself, “who builds a first-floor recycling center?” and I’m telling you now, it’s us. We’re yuppie homesteaders, remember?
But here’s the deal with our house: it’s a relatively modestly sized house at 2,700 square feet and four bedrooms. But it lives small. Now part of why it lives small is that the builder/owner I think desired it that way. Rooms were cut up into awkwardly sized pieces. Before we started our renovations, there was a sliding glass door flanked by two kitchen peninsulas. The impact of that was to cut off the kitchen from the sliding glass door area and the sliding glass door area from the dining room. Thus, that space felt like three small awkward areas. I’ve also already complained about the dog-legged livingroom with a closet right in the middle of one of the only usable walls. So, our foyer just happens to be another place where they wasted space.
Currently, the foyer is an 11 X 10 room that has a closet on one side of the front door and a set of open stairs on the other side. Beyond both the closet and the stairwell there are three-foot openings leading to either the great room or the awkward-shaped livingroom. Beyond that is the flat wall that’s coming down to open up the space to the dining room. But candidly, the space is way too big for its function. Essentially, just like the space between the two peninsulas and the sliding glass door, it’s not usable. Unless… .
You see where I’m going? If I converted that open stairway to a partially open stair and closed in the upper portion of the stairs, I’d create a recycling center closet on the first floor and bookcases going up the wall on the second floor. Essentially, I’d be turning currently unused space into usable space.
And to boot? We get a first-floor recycling center, which we desperately need. Currently, recycling is supposed to go into a small basket by the basement stairs to be taken down and sorted whenever it gets full. The reality? The little basket gets full and things start piling up around it until one of us breaks down and takes the recycling downstairs or we find out company’s coming over and we both scramble to clean it up. Since we’ve been in the middle of a pandemic, waiting out the other person to take care of the recycling has become a little bit of a battle of wills. Conversely, when we had recycling on the first floor, the whole process went much better. But I took that closet out to make my livingroom more usable. Now, I have to replace it.
My husband prides himself on reducing our garbage to less than a small grocery bag of garbage per week and we actually do pretty well. We compost our spoiled food, recycle paper, plastic, glass, cardboard, and metal. Anything that can be donated gets donated. Plus, we try not to use some of the trappings of a disposable life. Not only do we not use paper plates, but I also use cloth napkins, and our storage containers are always reusable glass containers. What’s left? My occasional potato chip bag – yep, I’m owning it! – and the other accoutrements of groceries such as food wrappers. That gets bundled down to a tiny bag per week and if we ever go over that, my husband is disappointed in us.
So, the recycling center is actually a very functional thing for us. We really need that space to make sure that we don’t pile recyclables by the basement door and to make it easier to live the way we live. My solution? It works perfectly. Now normally, after I’ve thought about a potential solution for a few days, I tend to change my mind. I’ve had this thought for a few days and I haven’t changed my mind on this one. Plus, the building of the recycling center may actually save us money or at the very least be budget neutral. You see, the only reason why I thought about using that space is because we have to rip out the stairs and replace them anyway to bring them up to code. But now, instead of spending money on a very long bannister, I’ll have just a short one. And since they have to do some drywall work anyway with this project to also make more headroom on the stairs, there will only be incremental cost to closing in this part of the wall.
All in all, I’m pretty pleased with myself tonight… even if I did break a promise. As I’ve already noted, I wasn’t actually ever going to keep it anyway.
That’s me when it comes to renovations. My mind is always whirling. I’ve always got another design idea. And straight up, I make promises about not talking about renovations that I know I’m never going to keep. Thankfully, my husband gets me and he realizes that as I’m almost painfully honest in all other areas of my life, this is just my blind spot. As long as I keep the talk of renovations to a minimum, he’s okay with it. As he likes to remind me, “One project at a time. You’re on a project that hasn’t even made the list yet.”
And so, that is where I find myself today: once again thinking about renovations and on the cusp of talking about them. There are just two things stopping me: one is that he just had a tooth filled and he’s in a little pain and the second reason is that I just promised him we would take a break for upwards of a year once we finished our current project. I actually intend to keep that promise but if I start talking about a new idea, it’s going to feel an awful lot like I’m welching. Instead, I just want to share my creative problem solving. Thankfully for both of us, I have this blog and I can share my thoughts here. Then, I keep my promise – at least to my husband – while I let my mind wander.
So, my new ideas center around building additional storage for Darryl’s books and a first-floor recycling center. Now, off the bat, you’re asking yourself, “who builds a first-floor recycling center?” and I’m telling you now, it’s us. We’re yuppie homesteaders, remember?
But here’s the deal with our house: it’s a relatively modestly sized house at 2,700 square feet and four bedrooms. But it lives small. Now part of why it lives small is that the builder/owner I think desired it that way. Rooms were cut up into awkwardly sized pieces. Before we started our renovations, there was a sliding glass door flanked by two kitchen peninsulas. The impact of that was to cut off the kitchen from the sliding glass door area and the sliding glass door area from the dining room. Thus, that space felt like three small awkward areas. I’ve also already complained about the dog-legged livingroom with a closet right in the middle of one of the only usable walls. So, our foyer just happens to be another place where they wasted space.
Currently, the foyer is an 11 X 10 room that has a closet on one side of the front door and a set of open stairs on the other side. Beyond both the closet and the stairwell there are three-foot openings leading to either the great room or the awkward-shaped livingroom. Beyond that is the flat wall that’s coming down to open up the space to the dining room. But candidly, the space is way too big for its function. Essentially, just like the space between the two peninsulas and the sliding glass door, it’s not usable. Unless… .
You see where I’m going? If I converted that open stairway to a partially open stair and closed in the upper portion of the stairs, I’d create a recycling center closet on the first floor and bookcases going up the wall on the second floor. Essentially, I’d be turning currently unused space into usable space.
And to boot? We get a first-floor recycling center, which we desperately need. Currently, recycling is supposed to go into a small basket by the basement stairs to be taken down and sorted whenever it gets full. The reality? The little basket gets full and things start piling up around it until one of us breaks down and takes the recycling downstairs or we find out company’s coming over and we both scramble to clean it up. Since we’ve been in the middle of a pandemic, waiting out the other person to take care of the recycling has become a little bit of a battle of wills. Conversely, when we had recycling on the first floor, the whole process went much better. But I took that closet out to make my livingroom more usable. Now, I have to replace it.
My husband prides himself on reducing our garbage to less than a small grocery bag of garbage per week and we actually do pretty well. We compost our spoiled food, recycle paper, plastic, glass, cardboard, and metal. Anything that can be donated gets donated. Plus, we try not to use some of the trappings of a disposable life. Not only do we not use paper plates, but I also use cloth napkins, and our storage containers are always reusable glass containers. What’s left? My occasional potato chip bag – yep, I’m owning it! – and the other accoutrements of groceries such as food wrappers. That gets bundled down to a tiny bag per week and if we ever go over that, my husband is disappointed in us.
So, the recycling center is actually a very functional thing for us. We really need that space to make sure that we don’t pile recyclables by the basement door and to make it easier to live the way we live. My solution? It works perfectly. Now normally, after I’ve thought about a potential solution for a few days, I tend to change my mind. I’ve had this thought for a few days and I haven’t changed my mind on this one. Plus, the building of the recycling center may actually save us money or at the very least be budget neutral. You see, the only reason why I thought about using that space is because we have to rip out the stairs and replace them anyway to bring them up to code. But now, instead of spending money on a very long bannister, I’ll have just a short one. And since they have to do some drywall work anyway with this project to also make more headroom on the stairs, there will only be incremental cost to closing in this part of the wall.
All in all, I’m pretty pleased with myself tonight… even if I did break a promise. As I’ve already noted, I wasn’t actually ever going to keep it anyway.
The Yuppie Homesteader 