by Queen Bee on 05/10/2013
I bought a house 16 years ago that was in tip top condition. And then I never lifted a finger to maintain anything and it sort of fell apart a little. I was afraid to make any changes or upgrades, and was intimidated by working on anything on the house.
A month ago I woke up with a huge crisis in my life and I was suddenly thrown head on into supervising a construction project on an apartment that I was building. My boyfriend had been overseeing the project for me, but one day he was suddenly unable to work on the project and I had to supervise it by myself. It was very scary.
Week by week I learned about construction and plumbing and painting. Cabinets, air conditions and tile. I ordered materials and picked out the designs for everything. I transformed a shell of a building with no walls into a cute two story apartment that starting today is almost finished. My last step is to pass final inspection on Monday.
At first I was scared to death. My whole life I hated going to Home Depot or Lowes. But suddenly I have grown to love going to the stores and looking at all the materials. I’ve even been fantasizing about building my own fence at home. I feel like I am a super handy-woman.
As soon as I install carpet, I will post some pictures of my finished apartment! I am so proud of myself!
by Queen Bee on 03/21/2013
In my last blog post, I whined about the process of moving that I am currently going through and about how no one has really helped me. Well, not much has changed since I wrote about that, although my friend Francisco did come one day to move some furniture and my sister in law came a couple of hours to help me sand the walls and put up painters tape. I’m really grateful to the two of them for taking some time out of their schedule.
I got really tired of depending on other people to help me, especially people who promised that they would help me or even offered to help me, and I decided to jump in and help myself. I have to be out of the house by next weekend (yikes!) and I still need to paint, install new carpet and clear all of my belongings out of the garage. I can do it!
I asked around to see if there were any professional painters who could help, but believe it or not it took more time to call around only to be told that everyone was busy. So, I decided that I would start painting myself. I began painting the popcorn ceiling with a roller and after discovering how horribly time consuming it is, I took it upon myself to rent a paint sprayer from Home Depot to spray the roof. It was hard but fun! Luckily the man at Home Depot gave me tons of advice and I also found great videos on youtube to help me. Here I am painting:
The ceiling painting was time consuming and I dodged a few problems along the way! I found that I can still see a small border around where I had originally painted and then after I spray painted, I rolled paint again to try to cover it up. It’s still there and my renter will just have to live with the slight mismatch in shade. Then, I tried to do a couple of touchups after the spray painting and a huge piece of popcorn ceiling came crashing down. I tried to repair it the best that I could and I’m going to just hope that no one pays much attention to the ceiling!
Today I started to sand down the doors and some of the walls that had been painted with old oil based paint. I discovered that sanding is pretty hard, but lo and behold I traveled on over to Home Depot and rented a hand sander. It definitely made the work easier, but it’s still a dusty and time consuming job. Home Depot to the rescue!
Overall the work pretty much sucks, but I am happy to say that I am doing it alone. At least I can say that once in my life that I painted my own house! But, I definitely will always just hire a professional painter in the future because this is not something that I ever want to do again. Meanwhile, I called off for the next couple of days and I feel really proud of myself for what I am accomplishing! Oh, and did I mention that today I woke up with a horrible cold, aching body, and raging headache, but I still worked my ass off? I can do this!
