A Vow for After the Renovation
… Even before we decide, though, I am making a vow to myself: I will not shortchange the un-renovated parts of the house post-Phase 1, while we wait for Phase 2, like I have for the last five and a half years.
There’s a lot we’ve been tolerating about how we’ve decorated our house since we moved in. We knew we’d be making big changes eventually so, while I wanted to like anything we spent money on, I coasted on “oh, well, we’ll level up after the renovation” for far too long - and on too many silly things.
Our Weekday Default
The other week, I mentioned that having a “default” routine helps me avoid burnout. We often have to make small tweaks to that routine - and sometimes, like next week when Jon will be out of town and I’ll have to stay in the office late at least a few nights, big ones - but it means we’re not starting from scratch with the logistics every time we plan our steps for the day ahead.
So let’s look at the morning and evening defaults through the week:
Drawing Up Whole-House Plans
Let’s just pick up where we left off, shall we! Or, actually, let’s back up just a bit:
The one thing all five of the design/build firms we talked to about our renovation goals agreed on was that, with our savings plus the amount of money we were willing to borrow, we couldn’t afford to do everything we wanted. Maybe that sum would have worked pre-pandemic, they each said sadly, but costs haven’t come down since mid-2020’s meteoric rise.
Our kitchen is falling apart, though, and there are a few other pieces we really can’t wait to do to improve our home. So the firm we hired - which will henceforth be known as The Firm - suggested...
Finding our Design/Build Firm
10 months ago, I wrote the first post on this blog that mentioned our upcoming renovation. We’d been saving up for five years at that point and had a decent idea of how much money we could borrow to supplement our cash to finance the work, but we hadn’t actually talked budgets with anyone yet.
Not for lack of trying, mind you - I’d reached out to a few design/build firms to get a sense of how much what we wanted to do would cost so we could have a savings goal, but none would give me an estimate without hiring them to draw up preliminary plans. So we decided on our own and, when we reached it last spring, I started vetting firms.
Dining Tables for our Post-Reno Dining Room
Just before we moved from our apartment into this house, we bought a very stylish Crate and Barrel Parsons dining table with black steel legs and a glass top from a friend ready for something new. It is, it turns out, not a great table when you have young kids; while the top is easy to wipe clean, every spill seeps and every crumb dives into gap between the top of the frame and the glass.
I can’t wait to pass it on to its next owner.