If there's a Creative Cheapskate award for home decorating, I totally deserve it

Maybe it's the long years I spent in school -- not just college, where "fancy" decorating meant buying that expensive silly-putty-like stuff to hang your posters, instead of using plain old tape -- but graduate school, where I was ready to be a grown-up but still pulling in a measly and uncertain salary. Maybe it's my own personal competitiveness with myself: "THAT looks like a fun new project to try. I'll bet it's not that hard." Maybe it's just that I'm cheap. Whatever the underlying reason, my philosophy about most things in my life has long been: "Why would I buy that when I could make it?"

In house-ownership this has translated to countless hours of stripping our own wallpaper, filling holes, painting, retiling bathrooms, installing new vanities, putting up a fence, swapping out impossibly ugly light fixtures for bearable ones, experimenting with crazy techniques like faux finishes with paint, fixing leaky faucets, and generally being really stubborn about not hiring anyone to do work inside our home. (With the one quite reasonable exception of paying someone to install 400 sq. feet of hardwood floor, ditto of tile, and four bedrooms worth of carpet when I was 8 months pregnant. Not that I could have done the wood or carpet un-pregnant. But I might have given the tile a go...)

One pleasing side-effect of this is that if I don't like something I can either re-do it or shut up. I only have myself to blame. Case in point: the tile guys did an absolutely ABYSSMAL job in our kitchen; the tiles keep cracking, and I am bitter bitter bitter about the fact that they wouldn't listen to me and put down concrete backer board. If I'd done it myself, there's no saying the tiles wouldn't be cracking. (Face it: they probably wouldn't; I'd have used concrete backerboard and way too much cement in which to set the tiles, and those babies wouldn't have been able to move a millimeter.) But even if they were cracking, if I only had myself to blame, I couldn't really grumble. The paint in our bedroom is peeling because I was a novice at 1970s wallpaper paste removal and thought I'd gotten it all. I hadn't. It looks ugly, and one of these days we're going to have to hire someone to put a nice skim coat over the whole room (the one thing I think no amateur can do properly is plaster/drywall mud) so we can paint it again, but at least I learned from my mistake, and none of the other rooms in our house have that problem. The kitchen, on the other hand? That floor makes me NUTS every. single. day. Because seriously? What professional tile person lays tile on 1/4" plywood? Only an idiot. Even I know that.

The major downside to this stubborn sense that I can figure out how to do almost anything required in our house (I draw the line at replacing gutters -- ours are extremely high -- and anything involving gas lines) is that sometimes projects take a little longer to finish what with the fact that they have to be squeezed in amongst all the real obligations of life like a full-time job and raising two children.

So, for example, the kids' bathroom is all redone except for one wall where we intended to rehang the giant over-sink mirror, only once we got the new vanity and light fixture in, the mirror was too high by two inches to fit into the old space. So the ugly wall, with its lumpy bumps and wallpaper remnants -- all of which was supposed to be covered by the mirror -- is just there. Ugly. With a very pretty antique hanging over it. But I haven't gotten around to hiring a drywall guy to fix it. *sigh*

This past weekend, I finally got around to a project I've been meaning to do for about six months. I found out last year that I'm allergic to dust mites, and so I had to lose my beloved down comforter. We had several (ugly) fiber-fill comforters left over from our college years, so I didn't technically need to buy a new one. But the old ones were U.G.L.Y. and too small for our bed. My plan? Buy a king-sized gorgeous chocolate brown duvet cover on clearance, sew together the two smaller comforters to make one thicker, larger one, and then use that inside the duvet cover. This would cost me about 1/4 of the price of buying a new king-sized fiber-fill comforter in a pattern I really liked. Obviously, since I was capable, I was too cheap to do anything else.

But this past weekend, I finally got around to actually doing it. I even got ambitious, took apart the two king-sized pillow shams (we have no king-sized pillows), reassembled them in a pleasing manner to make one giant pillow sham for our body pillow, and now have a lovely bolster of a pillow across the whole top of the bed to match the duvet.

It looks serene and beautiful in there now, instead of like a mish-mosh of covers. Every time I walk past the door, it makes me smile.

There is something a little bittersweet in that Dog used to jump into our bed as soon as we left the house and burrow under the covers -- rendering it impossible for us to have really nice blankets because she'd just muck them up. And now, we can finally have our pristine bed because she can't jump that high anymore. But, honestly, she's holding her own, and I so love having my own bed back, that I'm okay with even that.

There is something so very empowering about DIY.

Even if it does emanate from a place of cheapskatery.


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Only tangentially related because I also did it this weekend: please tell me that I'm not the only one who has to scrub food splatters off her kitchen walls six feet up, even though her tallest child is only four feet tall.