scrub it

Hey friends, didja miss me? I’m interrupting your regularly-scheduled Friday to say I’m back in the world of the internet!

As I type, I am sitting in my new home, using the internet and sipping coffee. (Fresh coffee – freshly roasted, freshly ground. Not the bottled stuff I’ve been forced to drink for several weeks.)

Yep, closing finally happened. On July 25, my husband and I became homeowners again. It’s both exciting and exhausting. I love our new place, but it needs a lot of work. From the kitchen cabinets covered with more grease than anyone should ever use in the kitchen (please people, put down the shortening and grab the olive oil!) to the all-pink bathroom in the basement (ceiling included. Because being inside a Pepto-Bismol bottle was their big dream?)

So we’ve vacuumed and Swiffered and scrubbed away things I’d rather not identify. I’ve been reminded, while cutting shelf liner, that I cannot cut straight. I think I need to revisit kindergarten. Finally, a couple days ago, I got to the fun part of homeownership. What might be the fun part, you ask?

Paint. I didn’t buy a two-pound paint swatch deck to use as a hand weight! I’ve been training for this, the picking of colors. And when the previous owners of your house didn’t realize salmon should refer only to a fish and not a room color, you know you’ve got to be ready with the right colors. (Quick tip: If you ever have to paint a whole house, I highly recommend investing in a paint swatch deck. I got mine at Lowe’s for around $40. If it saves you from two gallons of “I didn’t realize that color practically glows in the dark” then it’s paid for itself. Not to mention, you won’t have to dig around for “that one shade, where’d it go? Kinda like that one but not.”)

So that’s how my life has been for the last week and a half – sleeping on an air mattress in the family room, squirting Green Works at everything I see, and, finally, rolling fabulous paint colors onto tired, patched-up walls begging for new life. New life is here, friends. I can’t wait to make you into the fabulous home you’re dying to be.

(Hey, speaking of fabulous color, it appears my purple chucks made an impression at last year’s writers’ conference. Amanda Luedeke’s talking about my shoes on Chip MacGregor’s blog. Check it out.)

life updates cleaning, homeownership, homes, houses, paint, painting, real estate Comments