For the past five years, my house has been in a constant stage of renovation. We started with orange carpets, red countertops, and a giant brick island in the middle of the kitchen that prevented you from being able to open the fridge more than 45 degrees. Now, there's beautiful shiplap, no island, and an entire kitchen furnished by IKEA. We ditched the red, orange, and brown and traded it for beautiful creams and granite.
So, with all of that being said, I am not scared of the home-renovation world. When we were installing the new cabinets, all of our food was put in boxes on the opposite side of the room for WEEKS. When we were getting a new sink...you guessed it- bathtub dishes! Although I'm extremely used to the home-renovation world, I was never really a part of it. I didn't help put our house together all that much. I mean, sure, I painted a few walls here and there, but nothing extremely significant.
This weekend, I was blessed to start a journey with a dear friend of mine and get to work on renovating her home. Normal college students on Friday nights usually party and drink, but if you had asked us what we stayed awake until 1:30 am doing, we would tell you that we were still peeling wallpaper. And I say this because if you've never peeled wallpaper before, it's not an easy task. I could have sworn that the person who installed it had super-glued it to the wall. Never the less, we got most of it off on Friday night and things sped up once we got real scrapers instead of using butter knives.
On Saturday night, we were so amused by all of the freed up walls that we decided it was time to sand all of them and prime them. Have you ever used an electronic sander before? If not, it's advised (in hindsight) that you should be wearing goggles and a mask to keep the dust out of all the important zones.
I had never used one before until this weekend, but I thought "how hard could it be?" Well, the process was not that hard actually, to my surprise! The most difficult part of the entire thing was the soreness of your muscles the day afterward - which was not expected on either of our parts.
This weekend, we didn't act like "normal" college students but instead took on the role of the new Chip and Joanna Gaines. And it was much more satisfying. There is something amazing about being able to take such a dreary space and flip it on its head. We only tackled two rooms- the front room and the bathroom, but they look absolutely amazing. After learning how to use an electronic sander, I felt extremely powerful, and I thought "hey, why don't we teach girls how to use power tools?" But that question is for an entirely different article. I'd rather live a day in the life of Chip and Joanna Gaines than a weekend in the shoes of a typical college student.
