I’m no stranger to big crazy home renovations, but I have to say – my patience is wearing thin on this one. We began this leg of the #NeverEndingReno on Thanksgiving day, so we’re about 10 weeks in, and I admit – we’re both pretty cranky at this point.
The challenge of doing something like this in a tiny house is that all the stuff you’ve taken out of the room you’re working on has to go somewhere, and with limited space it’s probably going to impact your whole house.
Uh, yeah….CRAZYTOWN.
There is always a “low point” in a big project, when your enthusiasm is wearing thin, the house looks like Beirut after the bombings and you’re not quite at the tipping point of putting everything back together. You’re tired of living in dust coated chaos, you can’t find anything and you’ve given serious thought to just burning the house down and starting over. WE ARE SO THERE.
Sanity? Sanity?? We have a runner….
We got the sink and faucet installed over the weekend and this simple, routine project took 2+ days and about 80 trips to the store. The nipples on the new faucet were not long enough to reach through the butcher block, the cartridges were in backwards, and the new sink is bigger and deeper than the old one, which made it difficult to put the clips on -AND we had to rework the whole plumbing situation underneath.
It’s safe to say we’re ready to have it DONE.
I don’t think any other renovation impacts your day to day life as much as a kitchen, but we discovered a few things you can do to make the process slightly less painful:
- PRE-MAKE MEALS – Make and freeze as many meals as possible before you begin. When you don’t have counters, you will appreciate being able pop something homemade in the microwave. If you don’t have a lot of space, see if a friend will let you sublet their basement freezer for a couple of months.
- TAKE THE EASY WAY OUT – If you don’t have enough freezer meals to get you through the entire reno (we didn’t), you can cook up a big batch of chicken breasts, turkey sausage or other meat once a week or so to keep on hand for easy meals – quesadillas, tacos, Naan bread pizza and the like. Frozen tortellini and assorted sauces are a life savor too.
- PAPER GOODS ARE YOUR FRIEND – stock up on paper plates and cups. The fewer dishes you have to do the better.
- THE NEUTRAL ZONE – Keep a “construction free” zone. I kept our living room clean and debris free as long as possible (though it has since gone out the window), and I made sure to make our bed and straighten up the bedroom every single day. When your entire house is madness, it’s really important to shut the door and retreat into a calm clean space at night.
- WORK YOUR STRENGTHS – While I am capable of doing basic plumbing and electrical, the DRG is faster and better at it. He hates painting, patching and finish work, so I was in charge of that.
- CLEAN UP – Return your tools to a designated area every night during a long reno. You’re not going to want to completely put them away, but we found it helpful to designate an area for tools we are still using (my dining room window seat) and another area for paint, spackle, poly and brushes (the floor next to my buffet). In spite of the general disarray, we can easily locate tools when we pick the project up the next day.
- HIRE OUT – We hired someone to tile the floor… sacrilegious on a DIY blog, I know. This was a very, very tough decision for me, since my default position is to DIY everything. But – the DRG has never tiled a floor and the only one I’ve done is my tiny bathroom. I get this is not a terribly difficult project, but our kitchen floor is not level and we’re going from an 8″ tile to a 12″ tile. If we tackled this ourselves, I’m fairly certain it would take a month to do it correctly around our jobs and businesses. To save money we did all the demo ourselves and we’re picking up the materials for the contractor so he can jump right in when he arrives this week.
- WALK AWAY – sometimes you just have to walk away. When patience is wearing thin, take a break. As much as you want to power through and get it done, taking a night off will keep you from losing your marbles and turn on each other.
- BOOZE AND CHOCOLATE – Stock up…..seriously.
