Let’s be honest: sometimes we bloggers write posts for you the reader, and sometimes we write posts for ourselves.  More often than not the post serves both audiences.  This might not be one of those posts.  Fair warning: this post might only be helpful to me.

We’ve lived in our new house for long enough that we should probably stop calling it the new house.  Four months is a good amount of time to get settled, but still feel like you have a crapton of work left to do.  That’s how I feel.  Our to-do list of things we want to change seems to keep getting longer and our everyday to-do list doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon either.  And then there’s the kids.  I should probably pay attention to them every once in a while.  Nevermind the fact that unfortunately I don’t have a limitless bank account.  This makes the home improvement process feel extremely slow.  The pace of our home improvement movement (that was bad, but not bad enough to edit it out, sorry) has been stressful.  We feel at home in the new second house but it isn’t our personal style at all which is frustrating.  The stress of wanting it done yesterday kept me up on Saturday night until 2AM.  The Red Sox win may or may not have also contributed to my insomnia.  

Did I paint the living room the right color?

How long will it take me to paint all the trim in the house?

When can we rip up the horrible carpet?

Will I have to look at that hideous wallpaper forever?

And on and on.

In an effort to keep my brain free of DIY mind clutter I need to dump some thoughts here, I hope you don’t mind.

I ordered this rug in green that I’ve coveted for years.  I waited long enough for Land of Nod to send me a 15% off coupon.  It should come at some point this week just in time for my grandmother’s 90th birthday party at our house on Sunday.

Even though my downstairs bathroom currently looks like this:

 

I’d love for it to eventually look a lot like this:

We have some wall-to-wall carpet in our family room that originally we thought we’d keep.  It turns out that the previous owners had a cat and the dander is firmly planted in the carpet, which is not ideal for our family of allergies.  We are planning to pull up the carpet and put down laminate for the short time.  Long term we’d like the whole downstairs to be hardwood.  For now, I’m thinking something like this:

While I love this wood there is plenty of wood in my house I’d love to get rid of like this:

and this:

The best part  you’ll have to imagine for yourself.  All of our outside doors are steel, but are painted to look like…knotty pine.  I assume to match the fake wood trim and the knotty pine cabinets.  It’s awful.  The worst part is that I didn’t even notice for the first few weeks I lived there, now it’s all I see.  Not-y cool.

Thanks for indulging me in my little brain dump.  Since I started writing this post my DIY anxiety has been reduced so it did help one of us.

Ugly house photos credit C. Fuss