Disaster Confessional: The “I Can’t Believe It’s Been Years” Edition

It’s been a while since we did a disaster confessional on the blog.  Granted, that’s probably because we’ve had the opportunity to confess plenty of disasters in the normal course of our projects, from mistakes made in discharge dying to plumbing to the horribly embarrassing state of disarray in a hallway closet.  But we like these confessionals because they’re an opportunity to talk about some of the disasters in our homes without needing to do the work to fix them right away in hopes that it is comforting to all of you that our lives are a mess.

In the past, we’ve confessed our messy habits, our terrifying stairs, our projects that fell apart, and much more.  Today, we’re making truly embarrassing confessions: the things in our houses that it is utterly unbelievable that we haven’t dealt with yet.

Most homeowners probably have these things, the projects or small issues that they intended to deal with and then never did until it is years later and you can’t believe you’ve been living this way for so long.  However, most homeowners probably don’t put those things on the internet…

Naomi: “I have dingy old beige doors in the most visible parts of my house”

We’ve been slowly fixing up the main parts of our house, from the dining room to now even paying attention to livening up the hallway.  What I ignore/carefully crop out of a lot of my images are the terrible old exterior doors that are still covered in the previous homeowners paint colors.

They’re terrible: dinged, dingy, and dull.  And they’re in the most visible places, too: the middle of the living room, the space between the dining room and kitchen, and right at the end of the hall that you can see whenever you walk around the house.

The weird gray-beige is probably my least favorite color in the world, and is the color that the entire interior of the house used to be painted.  We’ve slowly removed it from every other inch of the house, but somehow it remains here.

Why?  I’ve always meant to paint them, but I keep putting it off because it doesn’t seem like a good use of time.  These doors will be replaced as soon as we do our next renovation, when I plan to swap them out for nice wooden ones, so it never seems worth it to invest scarce time into a temporary need.  But I’ve still been living with, hating, and cropping them out of photos for five years.  There must be a better way!

Sage: “I have a room in my house painted like a watermelon with the musings of a teenager scrawled all over the walls”

If you’ve been reading awhile, you know that I have one room in my house — my “craft room” — that has yet to be painted. It’s understandable that it’s never reached the top of the to-do list because it is the least-used room in our house (I store craft supplies there and it’s a second guest room, but we don’t use it a ton), but it is also the room with the most absurd existing color palette. You better believe that when I saw it in the listing photos, I thought it was one of the first things I’d change:

And yet, somehow here it is, 3.5 years later:

Yes, the walls are lime green and hot pink. As if that weren’t bad enough, the seller let her teenage granddaughter write all over them.

I know it’s hard to read what it actually says, but if you can remember back to the kinds of silly notes you wrote your friends when you were a teen then you get the gist. Here’s a close up for you of just a small sampling:

It’s one of those things that I’ve gotten used to, but whenever someone comes over to the house for the first time and asks for a tour, when I get into the craft room I am reminded of just how ridiculous the whole thing is given how much work we’ve done on the rest of the house.

Like Naomi, a big part of the delay is that this setup was always planned to be somewhat temporary. We didn’t buy a four bedroom house for two people; our plan has always been that eventually we’d change the use of this room when we started a family, and I figured it made sense to wait on doing too much work on it until I knew what we’d use it for. I still stick by that (as recently as a few months ago, I thought this room might become our master bedroom — read all about that change in thinking), but in the meantime we’ve got quite a strange space on our hands.

It’s funny how as you renovate a house, the things that seemed like the least of your concerns at the outset start to stick out like a sore thumb the more you work on everything else. It’s good to keep that sense of perspective — these things only seem so out of place now because everything else has changed for the better. Still, sharing these pictures with our adoring audience is good motivation to get to work. If you have spaces like this in your home, please let us know so that we feel less alone — please and thank you!