D.I.Y Did I Do This?!

The Big F.A.T. Truth About Home Remodeling

When my husband & I bought our house 12 years ago, we knew that we were going to work hard to bring this old, dated farmhouse new life. We couldn’t do it all at once, but we were going to concentrate on things room by room.
Let me paint you a picture:

The living room had 7… SEVEN… layers of wallpaper covering the walls & was underscored with hunter green carpeting that flowed through to dining room. In that dining room was a bronze chandelier & a red brick fireplace. (Don’t forget that dark green carpeting.)

Each of bedrooms sported their own unique color palette that was just not our style. Let’s work our eyes from floor to ceiling in the master bedroom, for example.

Imagine… dropping a cinnamon stick on my bedroom floor in 2013 would mean that it would disappear forever. It would have been perfectly camouflaged on my medium brown carpeting. The previous owners were so proud of their walls, & I nodded & smiled as they explained how she painstakingly painted 2 of the bedroom walls orange with gold sponging & the other 2 were gold with orange sponge painting. Still with me? Brown carpet, orange & gold walls. That takes us up to the ceiling where the room’s perimeter was decorated with an Asian-style black wallpaper border.

My husband & I, however, could see the potential. We went through the house the first few years & did things ourselves. We couldn’t afford a lot so we focused pretty much on removing wallpaper & painting.

If you have wallpaper that needs taken down, I am now an official expert. You have to have to spend at least 47.5 hours struggling to remove wallpaper to be dubbed an expert in this field, & I’ve earned that designation twice over. So, coming from an official wallpaper-taker-downer, I have some Do’s & Don’ts for you:

– DON’T spend a lot of money on the chemicals that you spray on the walls. They stink, are pretty expensive & just don’t work well.

– Fabric softener was another recommendation. DON’T use that either. The blue fabric softener mixes nicely with the yellow glue of the wallpaper only to create a buggery substance on your walls that’s just as green as it is slippery. I owe a lot of gouges in my walls to that technique.

– DO get yourself a commercial-grade scraper. Metal – not plastic.

– DO get a wall-scorer which makes tiny holes in the wallpaper.

– DO get a spray bottle. Fill it with the hot water & put it in the microwave to make it close to boiling (without melting your spray bottle)

– Score a section, douse it with hot water. Score another section & douse that with water. Go back to the first section & start scraping.

I just saved you a lot of money, a lot of experimentation & possibly your marriage. You’re welcome.
That’s what we did. We worked ourselves from room to room doing what we could do ourselves on a very skimpy budget.

Remember: things can be done fast, good or cheap. You can only get 2 out of those 3 things. After several years, we saved enough that we no longer had to go the cheap route & focused on finding people who could do the work better & faster… but not cheaper.

As we matured more in our careers, we saved even more money for bigger projects to be tackled by professionals who could get it done better & faster.

When you’re looking for a home, you need to take 3 things into consideration when it comes to DIY (Do It Yourself) home improvements. You need to consider your F.A.T.
F: Finances
A: Ability
T: Time

Your Finances

Some things to consider:

– Can you live with just some new paint & changing the hardware in the kitchen?

– Are you looking to make this your long-term dream home or are you looking for a 2-3 year thing & more of a flip situation? (Basically, are you doing the repairs with your own style & preferences in mind OOOOOoooorrrr are you doing it strictly with resale as the goal?)

– Definitely budget in a 10-20% buffer for surprises.

This is obvious, but one thing that newer home-owners don’t consider is that your finances improve over time. You may not have the money NOW, but as you mature in your professional life, your budget will grow as well.

So, if this house has the ONE THING you can’t change (location, location, location) & it’s a house you can see yourself in for quite some time – forget instant gratification. Take the imperfect house as it is, live with the dated kitchen or red bedroom carpeting for a bit & put money into it as you can. It took us 12 years, but our personal home has more than doubled in value over that time. These things don’t happen overnight.

Your Ability

Be honest with yourself – I KNOW where I’m at. I was trying to make a planter last year out of a file cabinet after seeing some woman do it on TikTok & almost destroyed my husband’s screwdriver using it as a drill. Lesson learned. If it’s more complicated than changing a lightbulb – it’s just not my forte.

Here’s how to determine your ability. I’m going to ask you one question, & your response is going to give us a good indication of where you’re at with your DIY ability.

If someone asks you for a Phillips head screwdriver, how would you respond?:

A. Size #2 or #3?
B. Is that the cross or the minus sign one?
C. There’s different kinds of screwdrivers?

If you answered C: You’re with me. We need to get someone else involved. This is just not our thing.

If you answered B: Okay, proceed with caution. Maybe do some YouTube’ing to make sure you’re not going to screw this up.

If you answered A: Find yourself someone who answered C, & you can probably make some money doing some handyman jobs at their place.

I probably should have given one of my clients this quiz. He purchased a house a few years ago & told me at closing that he planned on making it more of an open concept. I pressed for some more details, & he was going to remove the wall between the kitchen & living room.

As you & I both know, construction isn’t my wheelhouse. However, having seen the house, I was pretty sure that the wall he was referring to was a load bearing wall. (If you don’t know what a ‘load bearing wall’ is, you’re definitely a C, by the way.) He was confident that it would be fine – he knew what he was doing.

We’re talking about removing walls here, people. That is for people who are very much an A+ person kind of job.

The next time I spoke to his wife, she said that they had to get someone to the house shortly after he started the project. He took out the wall, it WAS load bearing & now their roof was quickly inching towards their living room floor.

When doing DIY projects, you first have to consider your F.A.T. Evaluate your Finances first then your Ability.
Lastly though is considering your Time.

Your Time

Time is often the most underestimated resource in home improvement projects.
Consider:

• Your Schedule: Do you have consistent blocks of time to dedicate, or will it be piecemeal? Projects often take longer when done in short bursts.

• Disruption: Will the project interfere with daily life (I’ve gone without a kitchen for 3 months, & I’m currently 3 weeks without a laundry room – IT’S NO FUN! TRUST ME!) You have to plan for temporary setups or alternate arrangements. My washer & dryer are currently hooked up on my side porch. It’s not classy, but it’s temporary!

• Seasonal Timing: Outdoor projects may be weather-dependent. Indoor projects might be better suited for slower seasons in your personal or work life.

• Project Duration: How long will the project realistically take? A weekend paint job is very different from a month-long kitchen remodel.
When we purchased our house, there wasn’t any sidewalk from the driveway to the front door. I looked at some pictures & thought that pavers would be the prefect fit! We just needed to buy some, put them in the yard where I wanted them. An afternoon job, right?

Let me remind you… I’m a C on the DIY ability quiz. My husband is more of an A. He informed me that we needed to dig up the path, lay gravel, level things out… blah blah blah. Needless to say, what I thought was going to be an afternoon project with no needed tools turned into a several day long project that required a lot more supplies.

Katina Hunter
Team Lead for the Katina Hunter Team with Coldwell Banker
724-888-9020
Katina.Hunter@PittsburghMoves.com