The Two Categories of Home Improvement

As you might imagine, we're in the middle of lots of home improvement projects here as we set up our new home. What you might not realize, however, is that home improvement projects come in two categories, at least in my mind.

Category #1 is when you take something you have and make it better. For example, I have this green secretary-type thing that I found at a yard sale years ago:

As you can see, it's a nice enough piece of furniture, but it really doesn't go with how we're decorating our new house. Therefore, I have decided to paint it and try and make it look more like this:

This picture is of course taken straight from the Pottery Barn catalog, which would be my dream source of house decorating, by the way.

Anyway, we'll have to see how that goes. Right now the drawers of my green chest are out on the back patio with a layer of primer on them, since I got up early and painted them. (It can be a little tricky doing Paint Home Improvement here. The instructions on the can of paint say not to paint in temperatures above 90 degrees, and quite frankly, that's not many hours of the day in this season.)

Category #2 of Home Improvement is when you mess something up and you have to fix it. Alas, I have already put one big item on my Category #2 Home Improvement list. It all started when I wanted to move these bookshelves

...into this corner (where Mocha was marking the spot for me).

Of course, even with all the books and shelves removed, these are quite heavy, so I started looked around for those plastic slider things that we have that are supposed to make moving heavy furniture so much easier. Unfortunately, two of them were still wedged under this piece of furniture (which incidentally is the buffet that the previous owners left in the house for us.)

See, here is one of the sliders, most likely bent beyond recognition with the weight of this piece and all the pieces of crystal and dishes that I have put in there.

Well, obviously I didn't want to unload all that stuff just to get those two sliders, so I searched around in my mind for other options. The idea occurred to me that perhaps I could sit with my back to the buffet and push against the wall to budge the buffet over just enough to get the plastic slider out. I suppose I could have reenacted this move to add to this photo journal, but honestly, some things are just better left unphotographed. Here is the space, without me.

Ahhh, little did I know that when one pushes hard against a wall, one should push against a stud, and not...bare drywall. Only when my heel went through the drywall did I realize this in full. Here is the sad evidence of this:

Surprise, honey!

(No, actually, to my credit, I did show this to Jason before I posted this. But only when I could tell that he was in a really good mood).

My next project? Learning how to patch in a piece of drywall - or searching out someone who can do that for me.