February House Tour!

This post is about a week late. I had a bunch of issues uploading this file to youtube! I thought it was related to storage on my computer since my startup disc was almost full. I keep all of my photos on an external hard drive. When I went to delete some excess photos that were duplicates of what I had on my hard drive my computer froze and I ended up accidentally wiping all the photos from my hard drive. And I mean…. ALL THE PHOTOS. I’m trying to have that restored right now. I went to get my laptop looked at too and found out the whole reason I was having trouble updating was related to not having updated to the latest operating system. Doh! Fingers crossed I can still recover all the photos. It would be pretty sad to lose all the progress shots and before pictures of this crazy house, not to mention all the personal photos. Luckily, just a couple weeks ago I did create a new House Tour page which you can find in the main menu, which will show you all sorts of before pictures. Hopefully I can get my photos back and add even more before shots to that page. In the mean time I’ve switched to a cloud based storage system and will be backing that up to an external hard drive as well. Oh technology! Oh what an idiot I am…

Anywho, let’s chat about this house of mine. As those of you who’ve been paying closer attention know, this blog is about a year behind real time. Turns out when you’re DIY renovating an entire house primarily alone, you have very little time to blog about it. Which is why a lot of that is happening now! Luckily, I still managed to document most of everything I did and I found this great gem on my computer to share with you today. It’s a February House Tour! From 2018!

Let me tell you, I do not miss last year. I am horrified by last year. I cannot believe last year was just a year ago. My eyes hurt from this video and not just because you’re about to see some of Shaky McShakester’s worst camera work. My eyes hurt because this house was a complete and utter mess just a year ago. Things are better now, don’t worry too much after watching this.

Before you click play though, I really must apologize for three things. First, the horrendous camera work you’re about to see. I clearly should run an earthquake simulator and not a blog. Secondly, when I filmed this, I was in the midst of getting over a bad cold, so excuse the out of breath and sniffly sounds. I could only breathe out of my mouth at the time! Finally, I filmed this as a real life tour. Which meant I didn’t clean up the table or move the vacuum cleaner. This is what the house really looked like on a given day in February 2018.

But overall, despite how utterly insane this video is, I love looking back at this and seeing how far the house has come. This video is a little snapshot in time of how things were in some of the hardest days of renovation. And the best part? I survived!

For those of you who stopped watching because you got camera sick or just hate the sound of my voice, I took some stills from the video to share as well. Some of them are a little blurry, so forgive that, but I think you’ll enjoy the content this way too! I also put together a new “House Tour” page up in the header menu so you can check out how things looked when I bought the house as well!

The house was a disaster in so many ways. Mostly there was just random stuff, unopened and left around waiting for me to “move in” to my house I’d been living in for six months. Oh yeah… did I mention this is the better looking part of the six months of living here? Before this it was even worse!

The Entry and Living Room were probably the best looking spaces in all of Berrybrier last year. First, we had a sofa kindly donated from our first cousins once removed, Mary and Ted. I’d picked up the hall tree on Craigslist shortly after moving in and it created a nice place to stick a coat, though I have since come to dislike it as it always looks super messy and isn’t all that functional. TBD, but things are likely to change up there soon. My fiddle leaf fig tree was trying to kill itself when this video was shot, but don’t worry, I’ve since coaxed it back to life.

Since the kitchen renovation was on pause while I finished up the bathroom, the refrigerator got to live in the living room. Yes, this was an interesting look for sure. But it certainly made snacking easy! Before my sister, Bronwyn, moved in to the house in January bringing her two pink lounge chairs, there was absolutely no living room furniture other than the wood arm chair in the foreground and a camping cot with a sheet thrown over it to the right of the fridge! It was truly and unpleasant place to sit or live. Really, just quite the opposite of what you want your living room to be. On the bright side my German sentence writing magnets were organized by parts of sentence.

The Dining Room was tasked with serving as kitchen, pantry, storage unit, and dining area all at once. It did none of those things well as often happens when multi-tasking! I did all of my cooking in a single toaster oven. The real oven was just used for storage since there wasn’t a 220 outlet in this room to plug it in!

I used my bookshelves and my pantry cabinet to store all my food. The only thing we used in the kitchen was the sink!

And the kitchen itself was not great. Pre-floor refinishing it served as a storage and tool room with no real function or organization system Have you noticed the theme of casual chaos throughout this house yet?

I also filmed my backyard through the kitchen window. You’re welcome. It actually looks better here then it does now. Oh that’s so not good! This is the year of the back yard though, so don’t fear, I have big plans to transform this space soon!

My master bedroom was… not masterful, that’s for sure. My $25 Craigslist bed my parent’s picked up enroute to visiting was holding up okay and I’d thrown my old nightstands next to it, but this wasn’t ideal for anything. But did it work? Yes!

Of course, the other side of my room was used primarily for storage. Those boxes contain (almost exclusively) my library of books. Do I have too many books? No! I love them all and I’m not giving any of them up. Don’t even suggest it!

My Master Bathroom was, at this stage, probably equally as bad as my kitchen. It was tiny. And gross. And an extreme of both of those things. Pretty much everything in here needed to go!

Upstairs, things were looking much better! Bronwyn’s front bedroom had been patched, primed, and painted and looked lovely in it’s new shade of blue. She’d put together an IKEA Hemnes bed and was using a pretty, old chair as a nightstand while finishing up the rest of her room and waiting for the rest of her belongings to arrive.

The back, formerly blue bedroom had been painted the same taupe as the stairwell, and sat pretty empty other than a few storage boxes covered with an old sheet!

So there we go, a snapshot of one year ago. Who’s glad it’s 2019? ME!!!!! Has anyone else lived through a major renovation like the one that was going on at Berrybrier last year? Could you ever tolerate this living situation for six months? What about eight months? Does anyone else need a paperbag to breathe into right now? I think my heart is palpitating just remembering this! And if you’ve ever had a complete and huge technology fail, feel free to tell my your horror story so we can commiserate!