Our house is approaching the end of it’s ninth year. We bought it new.

I’m not entirely sure why we went with a house when we did. I know we wanted more room. I know we wanted offices that weren’t bedrooms, and I know that it was seemingly impossible to get a house with dens/offices/libraries/whatnot without ending up with 4 bedrooms and generally something huge. We did not need this size house.

My point?
Well, in all this time, we’ve barely done anything to the house. One room is painted. One. Out of far too many. Well, unless you count the little closet housing the commode. Then it’s two. Two rooms. Nine years.
Why?
It never seemed there was a perfect storm of having the time, the money, and the “knowing what we wanted to do” in order to do anything. In the beginning it was probably the money and “no idea what we want” problems. Later it was the time and “no idea what we want” problems. I’m sure we could have figured out what we wanted, if we’d had the money and time at the same time. Maybe.

Which brings us to today.
I’m about to finally leave school. Like for real. I’ll finally have time. I can make money. And I *think* we’re starting to get an idea of what we want to do. At least partly. There’s a lot of stuff we want to make (we’re kinda DIY, perhaps another sticking point in the past), and we finally know how to make things, and have tools and a place for making.

And so, we are going to start ReMaking our house. Probably just in time to sell it. And the way I see it, this will be rather heavily design-related. We’ll be building closet storage systems, workable office/studio spaces, and do something with our horribly laid out living room. We’ll be finally picking paint colors, and possibly actually -*gasp*- painting. We’ll be building built-ins, freestanding units, and hopefully some really, really, REALLY cool stuff.

We’re just finding our style. We’re learning how to make our ideas reality. We’re figuring the number of … mistakes… will be huge. We’re ok with that. Mostly. I’m hoping we make all our mistakes with inexpensive materials or in such a way that we’re not destroying beautiful materials.

We’re planning on some green. Some sustainable. Some ideas that can carry over into other projects/houses/people.

But first we’re starting with the little things. The really, ugly, irritating, little things.

Our house may be only 9 years old, but the development was starting to be built nearly 15 years ago.
Know what that means?
Mid 90s.
Fug hardware.
ayup!

I am not a huge fan of golden shiny brass. I don’t mean cool steampunk brass, I mean mid 90s builder-grade brass. It’s everywhere. E V E R Y W H E R E.
Now, I can’t see spending all the time and money it’d take to change every doorknob and hinge in the house. That’s just silly. And did I mention it’s kinda a big house? Yeah.
But also, the doorknobs and hinges don’t bother me all that much. Overall they just blend into the landscape, and aren’t terrible. On lights and cabinets, however, it’s driving me batty.
We’ve started slowly changing the lights. Some were right away when we moved in for ceiling fans and the like… but some we’re just getting to.

But today’s project is replacing all the little brass bits of ugly on my kitchen cabinets. Fun, you say? I say HA! I have 64 knobs to replace. Oh well. Is well worth it, yes indeedy.

Before:

After:

el yay!