Renovating SunnyGrrrl HQ!
For the past 6 weeks, I’ve had contractors fixing the walls in what will be SunnyGrrrl HQ, and adding all new/more insulation to the whole house, which is a fucking expensive, unfun process, my god. 😭💸 While the noisiest of it was going on, I worked straight nights so I could sleep in the bedroom with Smudge during the day while they were here working and we could be out of their way. It’s *such* a small house and the chaos, with all my furniture and “stuff” we took out of the room now being piled in the studio, is overwhelming!
Contractor Shawn said there was hardly any insulation in my attic crawlspace, which explains part of my crazy heating bills! 😫💸
The other part of my heating woes is a very outdated furnace that both the contractor and the gas company say I also need to replace. All the windows in the house were already updated this winter, so all of this should make for warmer, cheaper winters for the rest of my life! Right?!
The workroom (formerly both kids’ bedrooms at different points in time) had water damage & mold in the ceiling, so I guess I also need to fix the roof somehow. Contractor Shawn says he’s got me covered and everything is fixable. He seems like a smart guy who knows how to do this stuff, so I trust that this is a process and it’ll all work out in the end. 🤷🏼♀️
All of this explains why the previous owner just put wood panelling over the walls in the workroom, wallpapered over it and then sold us the house. 😅
But I’m staying here, dammit! I love my house! I bought it 20 yrs ago this month because I knew it would carry me into my senior years with enough updates and tender loving care! Blake was not handy, and I was constantly asking him to please have “pride of ownership” with me, but he just didn’t or couldn’t for whatever reason. I didn’t have the adult faculties or resources to drive that bus for the both of us because I have a 15-year-old brain, manic psychosis happened in 2006, and pancreatitis in 2011. After those two things happened, most of my focus was on just trying to stay alive and semi-functional.
So I’m not blaming Blake. In fact I know once, he did try and now that I understand more about this process and how equity works, I think I understand why this house never got upgraded even once until now. I think it has more to do with timing and the housing market and equity not being available to do all of this “properly” until now, than anything else.
I remember a long time ago, maybe ~12 years ago because I think I was still really sick at the time, a contractor came in with a lady who drew blueprints, and they were asking us what we wanted to do with the carport. I’m honestly not sure I 100% knew what was going on at the time because I was on a TONNE of hydromorph contin. There are a lot of things Blake said I did or watched or we did or watched, that I just don’t remember happening and have to take his word for, for a good 2-3 year span. This blueprint lady is one of those things that happened while I was in this fog.
I remember the two of them asking us what we wanted to do with the carport and I know that I said a skylight would be nice and possibly patio doors at the back. That was the last I saw of them.
If I recall correctly, Blake told me that the lady’s blueprints were unrealistic and thus the contractor’s estimate was also out of budget. 🤷🏼♀️ Knowing what I know now about equity, and how much fixing the carport is probably gonna cost me a decade later (it’s a complete tear down/rebuild), the equity to properly upgrade this house probably just wasn’t there yet.
About a year ago, I was faced with a very adult decision: sell my house, buy a nicer house that was all ready to move into and decorate but farther away from Harold, my mom, my kids, my community, and literally start fresh all alone, orrrr take out equity, spend it all fixing this house and live in Elmvale for the rest of my life.
I knew it was going to come down to that, so I debated for a long time, a couple of years, and looked at a lot of houses online that were in small towns farther north or west of where I am now. A fresh start sounded nice, I mean, everyone else in my family post-divorce got to have one, but nothing really spoke to me the way this house and Elmvale did when I chose them in 2005.
My house is not special. It’s just a tiny, square, plain, black and white “Strawberry Box” with zero personality of its own from the outside. The painted black trim is faded and peeling, and the shutters are old and don’t fit the new windows. The stucco parts are ugly and don’t match the white siding, which is dirty and/or the paint worn away from the wind blowing across the farmer’s field behind me. After 60s years of it, it’s starting to turn silver, and that’s just the outside.
Inside, the carport, which is half outdoor carport, and half enclosed room with a big, old furnace in the middle of it, was never built legally or with any kind of long term safety in mind (or likely permits). Now it’s literally crumbling and leaking from both the top and bottom. The only thing that gives the house even remote curb appeal is the wildflower garden I grow in the front yard every summer, so I don’t have to mow or maintain more grass than I have to.
On the inside of the carport, there’s an inner wall that used to be an outer wall, so it’s still covered in the same dirty aluminum siding as the rest of the outside of the house. Every room except the workroom needs new flooring, and the floors in the bathroom, laundry room, and hallway are so soft and rotted from previous water damage, contractor Shawn says it’s actually a safety hazard. He does not advise we have baths anymore or we might end up wet and naked in the crawlspace below. 😬
The house’s electrical amperage is too low for a modern home, which means I can’t have an AC unit in the carport or run my t-shirt auto-press in the workroom without blowing the breakers, so the electrical panel has to be upgraded.
With so much work to be done on the house, you can see why selling it, moving away, and starting fresh was an attractive idea. But, like I said, I chose this house and Elmvale in 2005 and I’m choosing them again in 2025.
When I saw my house from the outside for the first time in 2005, I was not in love with it, I was bummed that this was “all” we could afford. But when I walked inside and saw the built-in carport, my attitude changed. The carport needed work, but the light was decent, it had good vibes, and I knew it would make a good place to make art in. It’s been my home base ever since!
The house is also pretty much only one floor – there’s only 3 steps down into the carport from the main part – which I always thought I’d appreciate in my old age both for just getting around, but also from a maintenance perspective. I don’t want to have to clean a big house, or mow a big property when I’m 70! This house and property are exactly the right size for me, my businesses, and my passions!
As far as Elmvale itself, I chose this town because it was pretty much self-contained and I can get anywhere within it, on foot, from my house. The primary criteria I had when we were looking for our 1st house, was that everyone needed their own bedroom, I needed a place to write and make art, it needed to be in a small town, and I needed to be able to walk to the grocery store and post office from it. This house, for all its flaws, fit the bill perfectly!
After weighing the pros & cons, I decided that staying here and fixing up this house the way I wanted to 20 years ago, would be more fulfilling than a big, scary do-over in a new city. So that’s what I’m doing!
Now this…
Is this…
…and will be whatever is to come!
I’m not 100% sure what I’m gonna do in the new workroom/SunnyGrrrl HQ once the walls are primed, the trim is up, and the doors are on their hinges, but this book, Dopamine Decor by Kate Rose Morgan, is serving as my guide and inspiration. Kate has a popular Instagram account that I’ve been following for about a year & a half, so when she wrote a book on home decorating, I pre-ordered it as soon as possible. It came out in May and I’m about 3/4 of the way through it, but I’ll admit, I’m not “getting” a lot of it or all that inspired yet. I’m hoping that by the end it’ll all “click” for me.
My house is a literal blank slate right now, I can do anything I want with it and no one’s opinion matters but mine, which is a bit overwhelming if I’m being honest. My mom owned a paint and wallpaper store and decorated rooms for a living – growing up, her house was beautiful – but not a lot of it really wore off on me. Perhaps my brain thinks it’s being a bit rebellious by being wilfully ignorant and giving me this massive creative blind spot, but it’s honestly really annoying right now!
I have a Cricut machine and in the workroom, I wanted to make decals of my skulls and flowers and stick them on one wall in a checker pattern, like the wallpapers I drew in my colouring pages but IRL, however admittedly I’m still a n00b with the Cricut machine, and doing 2-3 layer decals is advanced Cricutting. My friend Allison, Smudge’s original owner, was going to show me how to do that and we talked about it only 4 or 5 days before she died, so part of me is a bit bummed out and too intimidated by the idea, as cool as it would be.
I’ve been looking at wallpapers online for like, a feature wall, but I haven’t found anything that’s made me stop and think, “yeah, that’s worth $175 a roll.” Growing up in a wallpaper store, wallpaper was just sort of always “free” in my head as a kid (even though it wasn’t) because my mom just pulled it out of her own bins in the store to use at home. I had no idea it actually cost so much money until I was looking at it recently! Holy shit! 🙀
My bedroom has been painted for over a year, but the room still isn’t finished. It’s “a pink so light it looks white against my pink fluffy duvet, but pink against my white cast-iron bedframe” and I absolutely love it, but I wanted to paint slightly darker, thick, pink wavy lines on the wall with the headboard still. I also have to paint and hang a big, round mirror on the same wall. This would be done already if I had the paint and lived alone, but Harold sleeps in there at night, when I’m the most active, so it just hasn’t worked out yet. I think once I get the workroom looking how I want it, I’ll have the decorating “bug” and more confidence that I can do the same in every room.
I’ve been amassing home decor and organization objects over the past year or so to go in the workroom, but they’re all still in their packaging, in the corner of my storage room, so my ADHD brain has already forgotten what most of them are or look like. People with ADHD are very “out of sight, out of mind”, which I can attest to, so I’m sure I’ll be delighted by it all when the room is finished and I get to go through it!
My friend Jax used the term “Temu decor” as a pejorative the other day to be funny, but now I’m afraid all the things I found on there, Ali Express, and Amazon for the workroom that I thought were cool, like this rug, are only cool to me and are actually really tacky in a bad way. 😕 I guess if *I* love it, then it doesn’t matter, right? And I guess I just love cute, weird shit from Asia! 🤷🏼♀️
