"I am amazed, like ahhhhh....MAZED!!!! at how much cool DIY stuff you guys do. It's AWESOME ALREADY. So, do you feel like you have a complete "vision" in your head of how you want things to end up? Or do you adjust your vision a lot as you go along?"
If you'll recall our last Reader Question was basically, "How do you keep from crying all the time?" so I think this is a significant improvement. Big round of applause for the Green Mountain Cottage Team.
We have a vision.
It is frequently reality checked.
Our vision is for a cottage style home that looks cute but lives how we live. Things need to be pretty but durable. We want the house to be energy efficient. The best way to tell what we're up to is to see what I'm pinning on the Green Mountain Cottage Pinterest Board.
Sometimes the thing that we want the most for our house is not the thing that works the best for us so we have to adjust. Like how we started out with this rug:
It was delicious, soft, wool....and impossible to vacuum.
So then I bought this rug:
Cream, wool carpet with three pets in a construction zone? OK that wasn't the best idea.
Now we have a busy carpet made out of recycled plastic. Moments before I took this picture Sugar threw up on it three times (#realtalk) and as you can see it cleans up really well.
Bonus: It is SO SO soft. It's the Campania Pewter area rug from The Home Depot.
Things don't always go as planned even when we think we have a clear plan. Let's take the kitchen for example....the kitchen plan has evolved so much. When we purchased the house we thought all the back wall needed was a new sheet of siding. Oops. Nope. It needed a whole new everything...from the window to the wall.
Even as we start simple projects what looks like, "We're going to paint this wall," turns into, "Oooohhhhh nooooo they painted over wallpaper."
Our most recent swerve in the plan came from the bathroom remodel. This time it might be a good swerve.
We started out with:
And then that devolved into this:
And further to this. Luxurious.
The other day I was lamenting to my mom that this was going to be another six month project. We were planning on re-tiling the whole thing with slate, installing a pedestal sink which would mean replacing the dry wall, sawing out the tub and putting in a clawfoot tub and replacing the entire subfloor because it's rotten. You don't want the floor under the toilet to be rotten.
The first time we flushed the toilet in the house we realized why the subfloor was rotten. The toilet was like a fountain. It dumped water out of all sides. "Water." Yeah, let's go with water.
BUT THEN I HAD A THOUGHT:
The shower upstairs is ugly. The tile is fuzzy and atrocious. The tub has a dent in it. I don't know how you get a dent in your tub and I don't know what possesses someone to pick out fuzzy tile but either way it's going.
But the downstairs shower is pristine white tile and a perfect tub. (Due largely in part to the fact that it doesn't work at all....it just dribbles water ineffectually down the side.) It seems a pity to rip all that out....
SO the new plan....until something derails that....is to leave the shower, fix the subfloor, tile, replace the toilet, steal the vanity from upstairs and paint. That might have a chance of getting done by Easter!
Later on we can put the slate and clawfoot upstairs...since that bathroom needs an overhaul too.
Yeah.....that's gonna be some work.
When you don't have a huge budget and you are DIYing you have to have a flexible plan or else you're going to give up. We've learned to roll with the punches....and yeah, sometimes they feel like punches...but some days when the light is right and I've had enough coffee I can walk through and see what it'll be like when it's done. I'll know that I had a hand in every piece of the house.
And then we'll probably move.
JK JK.
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