I've got your back on this one too - one of the things I hate about home decor in this area is how completely devoid of color it is. I don't want white walls/grey floor/beige furniture/metal appliances. Just looking at that makes me sad.
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.
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.
We used to live in NW DC and at the time we decided to get a larger house, our money went much further per square foot even in higher priced MoCo neighborhoods - but that was before the great wave of rebuilds. I wish you luck.
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!
I've been having a similar realization, and it's coming on the heels of living in seven different places in 10 years prior to buying this house five years ago. Like "oh we suddenly have roots"
of course no discussion of "roots" is complete without referencing one of my all-time favorite Onion articles, "Horrified Man Suddenly Realizes He’s Putting Down Roots In Charlotte"
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.
That's my big fear about a bathroom renovation - my office is only separated from the bathroom by our bedroom. I'm actually considering renting a coworking space when the work starts just for sanity's sake.
Thankfully lots of the loud work happened outside (table saw, banging of stuff smashing into the dumpster)
We were out of town for the demolition, that’s the most chaotic part of the work. With our bathroom it was hard to have any more than two construction people in there at once so it wasn’t an 8 hour constant noise. It was just annoying at times.
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.)
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."
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.
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.
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?!
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.
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.
Not bathrooms per se, but a friend is a very talented designer who works in a lot of historic homes here in Louisville and actually respects them instead of stuffing new-build components inside them: https://www.instagram.com/christopherwelshdesigns/
We had a beautiful birch tree at the corner of our driveway when we moved here in 2019. Then, coincidentally alongside the pandemic, it started shedding branches a lot more than I thought it should, and those branches were often hollow. Then we had two hurricanes and half its leaves stopped sprouting. All it was hanging over was a corner of our patio, so it wasn't a threat to anyone else's stuff, but it had to go.
We finally got it pulled down last September as part of a broader project. It was done by a bonded/insured landscaper, but watching the work was unnerving - literally, the dude climbed the tree with a chainsaw and started cutting off hunks. Whump. Whump. Whump. He worked his way down the trunk of the tree till it was about human-height, then they took the rest down and removed the stump. It was well worth it.
I've seen enough TikToks to know how wrong it can go if you use the wrong person to cut down a tree.
In the house we rented before we bought this place, the landlord (who sucked) also owned a house across the street, which he spent a solid nine months and six figures renovating for his adult failson. The landscapers they used were consistently awful--always blocking neighbors' driveways with their trucks, etc.
One day, they were cutting down a big tree in the front yard, and we're just watching from the front window, thinking "they're going to knock down a power line". They didn't knock out power, but they cut out too big a chunk of the fairly-thick trunk at once, and the impact ruptured their newly-installed sprinkler system and flooded their yard and basement.
If you've ever seen that picture of Ivanka and Jared's neighbor watching protests while wearing a fur coat, drinking a glass of wine and smiling beatifically, that was me that day.
We have a bunch of big trees in the back - had one removed a few years ago and it's disconcerting to hear the impacts... but a couple of years before that, the missus happened to be looking out into the back garden when one of the similarly mature trees in the yard of our "behind" neighbor dropped a branch that was probably 3' in diameter straight down through the roof of her bedroom. There's no point in being sentimental about mature trees when they get feeble enough to start doing some real damage from uncontrolled collapses.
YEEEEEESH, yeah, that's awful. We were able to slow-play ours because there was no danger of that happening, but when people and their things are in danger, it's no contest.
We had a giant pine tree in our backyard that suddenly died that we had to take down and then the oak in our neighbor's backyard was dead on one side so my wife called the city and they actually ended up coming out and removing it at the owner's expense (haha got him!) but he's still got a huge oak in the front yard who's branches love to hang precariously low over our driveway and the power lines but that's a battle for a different day.
The pink tile bathroom defender has logged on
I've got your back on this one too - one of the things I hate about home decor in this area is how completely devoid of color it is. I don't want white walls/grey floor/beige furniture/metal appliances. Just looking at that makes me sad.
I agree with both of you that it can be charming in the right scenario, and I am decidedly NOT a fan of the trend toward greyscale refreshes.
I don’t hate the Flipper Grey when it’s done in moderation, but it sucks when it’s the entire house.
Oh, yeah, it can look good in spots. But some folks are going for the Full Desaturated House.
My lifetime-first non-beige wall was in graduate school. I don't think my folks knew that colored walls were allowed.
Now they have one. The living room has one sky-blue wall. I think they consider that box to now be checked off.
I just picture my grandmother's bathroom that stank of rose
Death, taxes, yardwork, home projects.
We have 3/4 of our kitchen wallpapered. It's been 2 months. Never wallpaper.
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.
I can't shake it. We close in June and I still have notifications on the Realtor app for houses that hit our checklist. Drives my wife crazy.
Man you're not joking. We moved in February and picked this house because it "didn't need anything." Famous last words.
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.
We used to live in NW DC and at the time we decided to get a larger house, our money went much further per square foot even in higher priced MoCo neighborhoods - but that was before the great wave of rebuilds. I wish you luck.
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!
I've been having a similar realization, and it's coming on the heels of living in seven different places in 10 years prior to buying this house five years ago. Like "oh we suddenly have roots"
of course no discussion of "roots" is complete without referencing one of my all-time favorite Onion articles, "Horrified Man Suddenly Realizes He’s Putting Down Roots In Charlotte"
https://www.theonion.com/horrified-man-suddenly-realizes-he-s-putting-down-roots-1819576060
lmao at the "this should be a new tradition" line
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.
That's my big fear about a bathroom renovation - my office is only separated from the bathroom by our bedroom. I'm actually considering renting a coworking space when the work starts just for sanity's sake.
Thankfully lots of the loud work happened outside (table saw, banging of stuff smashing into the dumpster)
We were out of town for the demolition, that’s the most chaotic part of the work. With our bathroom it was hard to have any more than two construction people in there at once so it wasn’t an 8 hour constant noise. It was just annoying at times.
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.)
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."
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.
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.
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?!
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.
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.
Not bathrooms per se, but a friend is a very talented designer who works in a lot of historic homes here in Louisville and actually respects them instead of stuffing new-build components inside them: https://www.instagram.com/christopherwelshdesigns/
The dead tree thing.
It's alive enough to be one problem and dead enough to be another. Schroedinger's Maple.
We had a beautiful birch tree at the corner of our driveway when we moved here in 2019. Then, coincidentally alongside the pandemic, it started shedding branches a lot more than I thought it should, and those branches were often hollow. Then we had two hurricanes and half its leaves stopped sprouting. All it was hanging over was a corner of our patio, so it wasn't a threat to anyone else's stuff, but it had to go.
We finally got it pulled down last September as part of a broader project. It was done by a bonded/insured landscaper, but watching the work was unnerving - literally, the dude climbed the tree with a chainsaw and started cutting off hunks. Whump. Whump. Whump. He worked his way down the trunk of the tree till it was about human-height, then they took the rest down and removed the stump. It was well worth it.
I've seen enough TikToks to know how wrong it can go if you use the wrong person to cut down a tree.
In the house we rented before we bought this place, the landlord (who sucked) also owned a house across the street, which he spent a solid nine months and six figures renovating for his adult failson. The landscapers they used were consistently awful--always blocking neighbors' driveways with their trucks, etc.
One day, they were cutting down a big tree in the front yard, and we're just watching from the front window, thinking "they're going to knock down a power line". They didn't knock out power, but they cut out too big a chunk of the fairly-thick trunk at once, and the impact ruptured their newly-installed sprinkler system and flooded their yard and basement.
If you've ever seen that picture of Ivanka and Jared's neighbor watching protests while wearing a fur coat, drinking a glass of wine and smiling beatifically, that was me that day.
Ohhhhh, that's DELICIOUS. I love it when a plan comes together.
We have a bunch of big trees in the back - had one removed a few years ago and it's disconcerting to hear the impacts... but a couple of years before that, the missus happened to be looking out into the back garden when one of the similarly mature trees in the yard of our "behind" neighbor dropped a branch that was probably 3' in diameter straight down through the roof of her bedroom. There's no point in being sentimental about mature trees when they get feeble enough to start doing some real damage from uncontrolled collapses.
YEEEEEESH, yeah, that's awful. We were able to slow-play ours because there was no danger of that happening, but when people and their things are in danger, it's no contest.
We had a giant pine tree in our backyard that suddenly died that we had to take down and then the oak in our neighbor's backyard was dead on one side so my wife called the city and they actually ended up coming out and removing it at the owner's expense (haha got him!) but he's still got a huge oak in the front yard who's branches love to hang precariously low over our driveway and the power lines but that's a battle for a different day.