Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Pick a Project.... Do it Yourself to the Finish


My hubby and I are working on remodeling our farmhouse. We purchased it about 8 yrs ago and love it... location, home, property, room for a garden..... The only thing not so great is that it needed a lot of updating!

We began our process as soon as we moved in tackling most of the projects ourselves.
We've put a deck on the back, resided the barns with metal to make them last, remodeled the 2 upstairs bedrooms, turned the one large bath/utility room aside the kitchen with lots of wasted space into a small bath/utility and a decent size master bath, started a garden, remodeled the back storage room into a movie room and added countless updates like lighting and fixtures. The only things we hired out we didn't feel like we could handle ourselves... the roof, furnace & air, and taking down a wall between the kitchen and dining room.

We are currently replacing windows from who knows when and getting ready to put in a woodstove... yes, ourselves. We want to get this done before winter because our gas bills will be outrageous otherwise.

We've learned we can take on just about any project ourselves (although hubby says he's never doing drywall work again) so long as we do the research first. It's so rewarding too when you're done to look at it all and say, "I did that!"

We have been bad about starting a project, but not completing it before we start the next. One thing I've begun doing is reminding hubby of one of those projects at a time and that is the next one of focus until it gets done. For example... we needed to put a mirror up in the bath, but the next big project was ready for the undertaking.... before we started the "big" project, the small one needed completed. We had all the supplies for both, but the mirror kept getting put off and we'd had the supplies for it much longer... besides, I wanted my mirror! Hubby likes the new system so much he mentioned a few weeks ago to keep the project ideas coming.

We've managed to get a few things finished that had been waiting much too long and hubby feels like he's accomplished something when one of them gets done. This equates to a win/win!

There are some projects that are his, some that are mine, some that we do together, and some that our 3 yr old even get involved in... actually, we often end up doing them together to an extent even if we just visit while the work is being done.

Somehow the elbow grease of doing it ourselves makes it all the more feel like home and it's great to finally be finishing some of those loose ends to projects that should have been long ago finished.


Once we get all the loose ends finished from previous projects, and as we start new ones in between, our new rule is not to start another project until the previous is complete.

1 comment:

Stacey said...

What a gorgeous home!

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