Everyone’s doing DIY projects while they’re stuck at home, staring at the ugly trim in the living room, or the messy closet floor. I’ve been knitting and crocheting dish rags and blankets and I just started knitting what will hopefully turn out to be my first sweater. At the same time, we’ve got a contractor (just one) coming to our house most days to work on several projects we’ve been meaning to throw money at for years.
- Turning the twins’ room into two rooms. They’ve been wanting more personalized spaces and more privacy for a while. This year, for their birthday (in February) we told them we’d set aside time and money to make that happen. COVID made it rather difficult, but we found a guy who was willing to do it all on his own, and he’s doing a great job. We’re waiting on custom door delivery and a permit inspection and we’re basically done with this one.
- Building an office in the back yard. This one has also been on the docket since before the pandemic. In this case, the project got fast-tracked because my partner is now working from home full-time and indefinitely. Even after the disease is under control, he hopes to still work from home multiple days per week. We’ve managed to finish out a nice Tuff shed well enough that he can work there instead of our bedroom. Which is also an improvement for me, because his bedroom office situation made cleaning the bedroom rather difficult for me. The new space does still need trim and enough contents to make it less echo-prone though.
- Getting rid of the mold in the master bed/bath. Obviously, this has been a real problem for as long as it has been happening. The base of the shower leaked into the wall between the master bath and master bedroom and caused substantial damage. We need to replace the drywall, trim, carpet, and who knows what else. Plus, we’d like to do a full bathroom remodel so we can replace the base of the shower with something less likely to crack, and then fit the rest of the bathroom to match. This is the next big thing on the list. We just need to get the twins moved back into their spaces before we move out of ours.
The contractor has been fully responsible for the twins’ room construction, while my partner and I did most of the work on converting the shed, except for electrical. We’re thinking of calling it “the Shab”, as a nod to Andy Weir’s The Martian. Mark Watney calls the martian habitat “the Hab”, but ours is a shed. So it’s a Shab.
We haven’t done anything about the mold yet. We live in Colorado, where the air is super dry, so as long as we keep the shower from further contributing to the moisture in that wall, it should be pretty dormant. We did fill the cracks with silicone for now, but I’m really looking forward to getting rid of the unsightly mess. It’s next on the list.
We’ve lived in this house for almost 8 years at this point. It’s a post-war shoebox of a house. As you might expect, many things have cracked and suffered over the years. I’m just glad we’re finally getting around to fixing some of the worst of it.
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