In my recent attempts at home improvement, I have discovered the wonders of spackle and the power that lies in a tube of caulk loaded in a caulking gun. Those items can mask a lot of Do It Yourself (DIY) fails like that base board corner cut that wasn’t quite right or that old drafty window in need of sealing. Just fill it all in with spackle and caulk. No one but an exceptionally trained eye will know the difference in the end.
(Insert me smugly blowing smoke off of the tip of the caulking gun)
Spackle and caulk are like the Band-Aids of home improvement to me. They’re quick coverups for minor “boo boos” and icky, inexperiened cuts. They’re a staple in my closet like flour and sugar in a pantry.
I bought a small house last summer, and I’ve complained about it a lot. As a buyer, a lot was “hidden” or conveniently excluded from disclosures and overlooked during inspections. It wasn’t the first house I’ve purchased in my lifetime, so I’ve been through this process before. But I’m not an expert at buying houses. Some problems are easy to spot, but there are others I just don’t know to look for. Plus, buying a house in California versus buying a house in the Midwest is very different. I’ve learned a lot (the hard way) with the purchase of this house.
In a nutshell, my house had big issues, and it wasn’t until I started scrubbing away the grime (and dry heaving occasionally) that these issues began to surface. Not one single appliance was in “good working order” like I was told. The dryer almost caught on fire the first time it was turned on. The kitchen cabinets were full of mold. They’d just placed loose boards in the cabinets to make them look clean. Underneath was rotted and decayed. Unusable. Unsalvageable.
The house was not ready for human habitation for almost two months. What was thought to be a really dirty house in need of mostly cosmetic updates turned into a severely neglected house full of shoddy DIY repairs requiring extensive and expensive corrections… and there were critters (insert more dry heaving).
I had my work cut out for me. I could do a lot of the cleanup on my own. I mowed through the overgrown yard, picked up bags upon bags of trash, YouTubed my way through tiling the bathroom, yanked up the old carpet and installed wood plank flooring. My family came over and had a “painting party” to cover the brown walls with crisp white paint. Dad patiently helped with the leaky roof, garage door, electrical issues, etc.
After some elbow grease, I was able to move in and complete the other projects little by little.
I replaced a simple light fixture with a pull chain and knew enough to know the hot pink duct tape the previous owners substituted for electrical tape wasn’t ideal. I felt proud as I matched the black wires with the black wires, the white with the white, secured the ground, and wrapped it with a fresh roll of black electrical tape. The room filled with light when I turned the power back on and pulled the string.
I’m getting the hang of this, I thought to myself.
Those little projects have been the hardest for me, though. Why? Because I think they’re little projects I can do myself. They’re not those obvious challenges that require the professionals like add-ons or structural repairs. But the little projects take so much longer by myself because I don’t know what I’m doing. I have had to learn as I go.
Let’s get real. Friends call me “handy” because my dad has taught me a lot about fixing things and patiently talked me through repairs via FaceTime. What they don’t know is that I screw up a lot before I get things right around the house. I forgot to turn off the water before I tried to replace the fill valve in the toilet (went through a lot of towels to clean that mess up).
I have avoided my laundry room for many months now. Of all the rooms in the house, this one was the one I didn’t want to tackle. There were pipes everywhere and ugly nails poking out. The concrete floor was painted at one point (years ago I would guess), and the dark red paint coming out from underneath the latest coat of peeling paint made the floor look like someone had recently bled out. No one had cleaned behind the water heater or furnace in at least a decade. By the time I’d finished most of the other projects around the inside of the house, I couldn’t avoid addressing the yucky laundry room.
It needed a good cleaning, paint, and flooring at a minimum. Some baseboards and trim would also help.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve tackled the laundry room.
And here’s my takeaway from that project: Sometimes I need to be accepting of help, even if the project seems manageable on my own on the surface.
I struggle with feeling guilty for inconveniencing anyone. I don’t want to be a bother. I want to have it together and be able to handle my own problems. I will inconvenience myself to avoid causing a hassle to another person nine times out of ten.
Some good friends kindly offered to help me put flooring in the laundry room recently. They offered out of the goodness of their hearts. They even met me at Home Depot to find the right kind of flooring and brought another friend to the installation in case we needed another set of wiser eyes.
I was overwhelmed with their kindness. Honestly, I was a little embarrassed to have other people see that disgusting laundry room.
This isn’t how I live, I wanted to say. Please don’t judge me by the state of this room. This whole place is a work in progress.
As usual, a simple flooring installation revealed another issue, a plumbing one to be precise. That’s the nature of this house. No project goes as smoothly as it should. Thankfully, that repair could be fixed by the wiser eyes assisting me. If I’d been doing this by myself, I would not have known what to do (and I’d have been without water until I could get someone there to help me).
My friends had the tools and knowledge to get me through a home update, and now my laundry room is well on its way to looking like a clean freak resides in the house.
(The timing was great, too. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, hanging out with people in person is discouraged for the time being due to COVID-19. It was good that we did it when we did.)
I’m a fixer upper just like my house. I’ll always need updates and repairs. Growth never goes as smoothly as I planned. But like the house, the end results look a lot more polished with the right tools. I can do some things right the first time by being more calculated and receptive to sound guidance like “measure twice, cut once” and wise words like these. And best of all, the best tools and resources are often found in the willing and kind people around me who don’t think helping others is an inconvenience.