39 Comments

The pink tile bathroom defender has logged on

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May 4, 2022Liked by Scott Hines

Death, taxes, yardwork, home projects.

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May 4, 2022Liked by Scott Hines

We have 3/4 of our kitchen wallpapered. It's been 2 months. Never wallpaper.

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May 4, 2022Liked by Scott Hines

Having recently just bought a house (it took us 6 months of searching and 8 rejected offers), if I have to look at a listing ever again it’ll be too soon.

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founding
May 4, 2022Liked by Scott Hines

Man you're not joking. We moved in February and picked this house because it "didn't need anything." Famous last words.

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May 4, 2022Liked by Scott Hines

We sold our house in 2019 to move to DC, and now we are at the point where we're looking to buy again (in Maryland or Virginia, not in DC, because we're not made of money), so the Zillow/Redfin thing is happening in earnest. Sometimes I have a small shock of panic strike me when I realize that I'm not looking at these places aspirationally anymore -- this is something we are actually going to do, for real, in the near-ish future. So all of the "well, I wouldn't have done that" thoughts are followed by "so we'd have to do something different instead, right away," and the prospect of actual work looming on the horizon changes our minds very easily.

And of course, anyone saying anything bad about YOUR house is an absolute monster. When they say don't read the prospective buyer comments, they mean it.

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May 4, 2022Liked by Scott Hines

Currently, I've been doing the math about what age is too late to uproot your children and move them to a different house, neighborhood, and school, and then realizing that we have a very short window to decide if we are going to buy a perfect house somewhere else or start adding on to the existing one. Quite a fun practice!

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May 4, 2022Liked by Scott Hines

We had a bathroom demo/remodel all planned out in late 2019 with demo slated in April 2020 - we all know what happened then.

We were finally able to get the bathroom finished this past August. Nothing says fun like working from home (at the dining room table) with contractors going up and down stairs carrying plywood and bathroom fixtures.

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May 4, 2022Liked by Scott Hines

We remodeled two rooms last year, and I think our place is *still* three major renovations away. In the meantime, I Zillow-stalk for the once-a-year house that comes up for sale in Duke Forest backing onto the university cross country course. (That's my retirement daydream house.)

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May 5, 2022Liked by Scott Hines

We have already closed on a new house, but haven't moved quite yet, so I'm obsessing over every new listing because they don't seem as ridiculously expensive as everything was a month ago. I have to look at each one to pick it apart and explain to myself why the house we're about to sell hasn't suddenly lost a quarter of its "value."

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May 4, 2022Liked by Scott Hines

Quasi-related, I recently had the pleasure to walk through an open house down the street from a place I used to rent, with an identical floorplan and maintained/refreshed to a much higher standard.

If you're of the boring suburbia persuasion and therefore ever have an opportunity like this, I highly recommend it. A fascinating idea-generation process, taking the layout variable entirely out of the equation. Also spoooooky, which is fun in and of itself.

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I can’t stand the Fixer-Upper-ization of remodels now. Not every room should be all white with small black accents. There are other options beside white subway tile. I don’t know how the prevailing style became hospital chic but I don’t want to live in a house that I feel I’m ruining by way of the act of living there.

Even typing that out I feel like a crazy person.

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I don't own my own house (yet - fingers crossed for next year!) but I do almost exclusively residential projects at work and I love it (most of the time). People love (or hate! Or fear!) their homes so much and it's such a privilege to walk into someone's life and help them achieve their vision (without needing to hold their hand like the architect, or being our at the house a bunch like the contractor lol). The biggest thing I've learned has definitely been that if you look close enough, every single house is built weird. Every. Single. One.

Also, please, for the love of god people, stop removing all of the walls. What did they ever do to you anyway?!

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I don't look at Zillow for my current neighborhood for a couple of reasons: partly because so many houses are replacement builds that - conveniently - I neither like nor can afford, and partly because if I'm going to the trouble of moving, it would be "away." Preferably far away. I have a pang of sentiment about our first house which we sold when the girls were 2 1/2 and 5 respectively, the day we turned the keys over I was looking at where they took their first steps and misting up, that sort of thing. But this house, which we bought for space and schools, it's been a machine for living. The odds are pretty good that it will get torn down when we eventually sell it, we're at most 10 years from having it paid off, so neither my wife nor I have much enthusiasm for sinking high 5 figures into redoing the kitchen and bathrooms. We replace / repair what breaks, we freshen up the paint, that'll do.

As for color: as someone whose "color palate imprint" as a child came from living in new or recently built houses in the 70s in western Europe, I am completely okay with white walls. My enthusiasm for colored paint is largely contextual: we live in a 1958 split that gets tons of light, so in terms of era and affect, it is both thematically consistent and looks great to have the various paler colors we've used over the years.

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We're getting ready to modernize one of our bathrooms - we still have the original 1920s tub, no shower, which is an interesting thing to look at and has never once been turned on in the 3+ years we've lived here. I've been trying to look at Zillow, etc. for ideas on bathroom renovations, but even in historic homes, the bathrooms are all HGTV-ed to hell. Ugh. I saw the thing the other day about the new Avatar movie and how it's going to burn people's retinas because no one's seen a full color palette in film in 13 years, and I kinda feel that way about houses. Our house is full of colored walls, to the point where I don't have a single white surface in the whole joint, and every time someone comes by they're so surprised.

That said: if anyone has leads on pictures of bathrooms with 21st century plumbing that actually expand beyond white/grey, I am accepting all inspiration.

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The dead tree thing.

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