SO I have an unfair advantage over most DIY designer types in that my husband is a contractor. SCORE!
Yeah but in all fairness he wasn't a contractor when we got married. Infact, when we got married he was in the oilfield like so many people around here. Wasting his life away on fat paychecks and mucho machismo in the workplace. I kinda miss those paychecks but I'm completely to blame so I don't chirp too loudly.
You see we started working around the house. I had visions of what I wanted to see happening. I wanted to see walls moved. Closets turned into entrances, spare bedrooms turned into media rooms and all kinds of junk that would just appear out of no where. So he obliged me with the first little job we had on the docket "The Door" that previously did not exist and would need to exist to seperate the upstairs from the downstairs spaces.
Part of our renovation plan was to have renters in our basement to off-set the mortgage/costs of renovating and it was a brilliant plan except for the entrance. The back door came directly in past the kitchen and it was very awkward.
Super awkward.
Also the backdoor was kinda creepy. It was a 60 year old wood door with an old wood screen door attached. It banged when it shut and it had a wicked haunted house creek.
So I went to the re-store and I picked up a modern metal door with a full glass insert for 60.00. 60? What? Yep. 60! Don't get too excited we had to replace the seal gasget around the window and that cost us 90.00. Yep. 90.00! So the whole door was more like 150 but it was still a pretty good steal. My first in a long standing naive notion that I can pay what I can afford and still live the high life. I'm never letting go of that.
So my super confident I can do anything hubby and I hung that outside door and then we put in a french door downstairs (to let in the light) and we put in a hollow core door at the top of the stairs. I got the french door at a box store on sale because it was a bit dirty. Yep. I painted it black. Like I care if it's dirty. We re-used the door from downstairs that we took off to put the french door on, FREE!, and we did all the work ourselves.
200 in tools later we were swinging hammers and paint brushes. My husband had the bug by then. He loved installing the doors and he loved casing them. He read some books and hit the wood hard. Turns out he is a bit gifted when it comes to finishing carpentry. He's alllllll about level, plumb and super tight. He will spend hours trying to make it perfect and I will spend hours mocking him and pulling out my 'eyeball level'.
So, he quit his job, looked up some guy in the paper and found a job working as an apprentice for a finishing carpenter. He really loves it. He loves building furniture, he loves working on interesting design and he's super (slow) meticulous about everything he does. It is a perfect fit and he ended up going through all his schooling and such. Just a regular kind of fairy tale where I meet my prince and he transforms into an awesome more super cool prince after I kiss him. NICE.
Since that first project we've started picking up speed. We have built deacons benches, mantles, ledge tables, closets and built-in furniture. Some of these things are way above what the average DIY guy can do. It really hasn't stopped me though. I just get really super itchy just thinking about a project. I want to go go go!! My lovely hubby is the same. He comes home from work and he's all looking around and getting excited for what the reveal picture will end up looking like. SIGH It's LOVE. All a girl with a big imagination needs is a partner in crime with a fininky need to build stuff.
One of the other perks of this particular advantage is that I can salvage job site materials. You would not believe what the average job site just tosses out. Wood, tile, flooring, landscaping materials and insulation. All picked up from the dumpster and turned into useful parts of our renovation. I can't tell you how many times I've had to decline a toilet. No Sir, we already have one sitting in our backyard. No more please! I have a harder time resisting the other random bits that come my way. I made a huge flagstone patio on the side of my front deck (with a pathway and garden sculpture) all out of throw away materials from some stone veneer job. They had to take this rock and shave inches off to make it level and the slabs left over were useless for the job. They couldn't really get enough to make materials happen for another job either. My house is much much smaller and the left-overs were more than enough to make a sexy stone patio. FREE! I love free stuff. I just love it.
Another super perk is the tools. Apparently my husband is a bit of of a tool-o-holic much like he is a raffle maniac. No I mean it. Big macho man, super huge raffle maniac. He would buy tickets in any kind of raffle ever. I'm not kidding. We have lots and lots of tools and he's always up for more. So, in a sense, we have more tools than the average DIY crazy people although I'm sure if you are just getting into this your tool collection will start to grow too.
He has opened my eyes to fun stuff like chalk lines and the Red Bar but he's also got some pretty handy and pretty pricey tools in his collection. Take the laser level. I laughed at him when he came home giddy like a tween who just got a fake txt from her poster boy crush. Sadly the thing has come in really handy. Really really handy. I don't know if it has paid for itself at home but it certainly has at his work. It's cut hours off his work week and that money=time thing is certainly true when you are paid by the job not the time it takes to do it.
So I guess this was all in an effort to maintain full-disclosure. What we do it not magic and there is no team of experts fluffing pillows or pulling all nighters to get the big WOW in the morning photo session. It's just us. Sometimes we sleep in a camping style situation for months while we put everything together on my 'found it on the curb-side' budget and his 'working on the weekends' timeline.
Sometimes I let the kids help with the painting and sometimes we order in because it means we can work for an extra 2 hours. All this to say I know I scored when I landed my hubby and it gives us a distinct advantage to have a live in finishing carpenter. Maybe don't try all of this at home? Or maybe you should just so you know if you will love it or not. We love it.
L O V E it = )
For Fun here is a picture of the hubby at work and some iphone shots of the house combined with some of the realtors shots from the house.
This is finished as far as we planned to take it. Looks pretty good to us especially from the before shots.
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