patience...
7:27 PM
When you decide to remodel as you go, patience is a necessity. Well, patience and the ability to look into the future. When I picked the flooring for our house I knew it would look SO HIDEOUS with our existing cabinetry and woodwork - but I tried to see the big picture. I also knew when I bought the $10 pendant lights from Lowe's that they were stupid and ugly but that SOME DAY I would get exactly what I wanted, I just needed place holders to last until I got those. And so it was with nearly every single thing in our main living area.
If you plan to remodel piece by piece you definitely need to have a big picture mentality. You also need to choose things with staying power and not necessarily the most popular or trendy fad of the hour. A lot of people assume you can't "gut" a house unless you do it all at once. I am living proof that you can.
While living in unfinished "chaos" is definitely the biggest draw back, there are some definite up sides to the 'do it slowly' method.
- You get a feel for the space. I always say that you don't know what you want until you've lived and moved in a space. For me that was TOTALLY true. We ended up moving our fridge to a much better location and I love it! I don't think if we had made all the changes immediately when we moved in that I would have known that I hated where the fridge was and that it would bug me forever.
- You're not under the gun to "just pick something" because it needs to get done. You have time to really think about what you want - to bring it home, to live with it, to make sure you REALLY like it.
- For me, there were things I knew I wanted to spend a little more money on and make it look really nice and hopefully last forever. When you remodel everything at once you have to cut some corners and shave the price on some things (well, most of us "regular" people do anyway). Doing it slowly means that you can save up for what you really want most.
I would say the general exception to the 'do it slowly' rule would be people who have refinanced their home and have taken a chunk of money out to do a remodel. If you've lived in the home for a while, I feel like you pretty much know what you want.
Slowly I started to add things - like actual bar stools and a real table and chairs but I would say we lived with our house pretty much like this for just around 2 years.
In these photos we have ripped out the tile (ok WE didn't rip out the tile, we paid 6 very sturdy Polynesian guys to do it), painted the walls, ceilings, baseboards and laid the wood floor. This was by far our biggest expense of any of the remodeling we did. As I remember, the 15 gallons of paint cost around $700. The flooring was $3300 and the sturdy Polynesians were $600. We (husband and father-in-law) installed our own flooring and we (mostly me, curtsy) painted the entire house ourselves. Anything you can do yourself will save you a ton of money. I have more information on the whole DIY/hire it out conundrum coming later!
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