What actually happened was obviously, quite different (besides the part where we went away on vacation after the renovation and came home to our house painted a stunning navy blue by Jordan's parents- who I'm forever grateful for!)
Instead of a crew doing all the #demoday work Jordan and I spent the entire summer we moved in tearing the basement to the studs and rebuilding it as an apartment. When I say Jordan and I, I mostly mean Jordan. I had very good intentions at first but eventually I was begging to mow the lawn in 40 degree heat instead of being forced to pull one more nail out of the studs. It was a hell of a summer that ended with Jordan, his brother, and I insulating the entire basement over two nights in the Fall with fiberglass falling into our eyeballs. What.a.dream.
We eventually did get the basement finished and our reward was a pre-planned trip to Europe. When we came back from Europe we still had a heck of a lot of painting and cleaning to do but we were almost there. (Side bar: during this whole renovation Jordan worked his ass off going to work all day and slaving away all night. He basically pushed himself to the limit ripping up floor tiles, getting on the roof and putting his body in danger the whole time. In the last couple of days he bent over to pick up a pencil and pulled his back and we still laugh about that to this day.)
This extremely long-winded story is to say that by the time we had finished turning our basement into a legal apartment and moved our friends in as our very first tenants we had little to no interest (or cash) left to work on our part of the house. I put things on our beige walls, sighed over our chipped and stained laminate counter tops and wiped grime from our back-splash free kitchen. But it was ours.
Fast forward two years and we've been working really hard bit by bit to make our part of the house ours. We've painted our walls grey (with an absolutely gorgeous navy blue statement wall in our living room, which I love), we've change our counter top out for butchers block, subway tiled the back-splash and repainted, framed and changed the hardware on the cabinets. Our house is finally living up to the fixer upper finish, not just the before!
Now that the frame of the house is living up to my dreams, I'm still working on getting the contents of the house up to snuff. That includes some furniture that I'm planning on axing (your days are numbered, boys), a dresser that is getting a new coat of paint, and some of the things we originally put on our beige walls that went right back up when they were painted grey.
Exhibit A: our chalkboard
This chalkboard was a hand-me down that I decorated the first night in our house. For some reason it was very important to me that I get that done and hung immediately. And it served us well. At minimum it gave people a chuckle occasionally. But it's time in our life was over. I had my eyes set on some shelves and since we had some leftover wood from making our headboard I was able to sway Jordan into building them with me!
We obviously had to have a never ending conversation about the height, placement and width of the boards. At the end of it we still couldn't come to an agreement so we decided to do what any millennial would do: take it to instagram!
Jordan's preference was option 1 and my preference was option 2. I don't want to brag or anything, but my choice won. (Okay I'm bragging, I have impeccable taste).
Now, if you want to know how not to go about building shelves, you can ask experts Jordan and I. We spent our entire Christmas break going to every Home Depot, Home Hardware, Rona, Lowes, and everything in-between trying to match up these dang pieces. Our shelves included four pieces: a foot, a pipe, a topper and a bracket. We originally bought everything to fit a 1 inch pipe because that was the only size where we could get six sets of all four pieces. Well, we got the pieces home and realized they weren't long enough for our wood! (Measure first people, don't estimate, and also don't measure, lose the measurement, and say "it's okay, we can eyeball it").
We scoured the hardware stores for longer pipes and it took us six stores but we finally found what we were looking for. We finally got them up on December 31st and congratulated ourselves on being the most productive people of 2018.
So the moral of the story is: life is not like a 40 minute HGTV show, you'll probably never move into a home that looks exactly how you want it to be from fixtures to furniture and you sure as hell won't be able to make it exactly what you want without a little time and patience.
Our home still has a long way to go, but it's getting there. Until then I'll just be over here dreaming up the next headache I'll be badgering Jordan into!
From the desk of:
Taylor Brown
Demo Day Diva
