Dear Fearless Homeowner,
Have you ever failed at a DIY home project? I mean REALLY failed...to the tune of around $1,000 and approximately three years down the drain. Now that is a true home project failure.
I’ve never been very good at accepting failure. I usually just keep muddling through things, even when it’s clear they aren’t going anywhere. Somehow in my mind, continuing to tilt at windmills means you don’t have to acknowledge failure. That said, I think I’m finally ready to admit I have a huge failure on my hands!
My good china and crystal (you know, the stuff you pull out for the holidays) has been stored in my grandmother’s hutch since I bought my first house. I was so honored to put my belongings in the beautiful hutch I had admired as a young girl. That worked out fine, until Chris and I moved to a new house a few years back and the guys moving our furniture actually made me promise not to hold them liable for any damage to the hutch during the move. Apparently the wooden legs were so old they were no longer sturdy enough to support the weight of the piece anymore. I finally realized the lovely furniture I had admired for so long was probably no longer up for storing Waterford.
The once beautiful hutch was relegated to holding books and knickknacks, and my search for new furniture began! Because of the placement of the doors and windows in our current living room, it made more sense to me to get two medium size pieces of furniture rather than one large hutch. Apparently, that doesn’t make sense to furniture manufacturers. I looked far and wide for the perfect pieces, and we finally resorted to a trip down I-35 to DFW to continue the search.
Always up for a challenge, and with complete confidence he can transform a bubble gum wrapper into a rocking chair, Chris suggested we visit Ikea. We ultimately decided on two matching cabinets, with the plan to paint them and dress them up to perfection for the living room.
From there, this is what happened...
I spent weeks deciding on my color scheme in the room. I finally decided on the perfect color, and of course it was only available in the expensive paint brand. Then we spent weeks painting several coats of paint on the shelves, and we even designed and bought new backings for the cabinets. They of course had to be in a different color of expensive paint! Just when we thought we were almost done, we realized the paint was peeling. We should have primed each piece before we started but hadn’t bothered. Then we had the joy of peeling off all of the paint completely so we could put Kilz on every piece and start over. Next, we repainted both of the cabinets again. Or at least we started to repaint them.
Three years into this project, and countless cans of paint later, we finally admitted to each other we were actually getting a little burnt out on the stupid cabinet project. Yet there they sat in our sunroom, and my crystal was still sitting carefully packed in boxes. And then in a sudden epiphany a few weeks ago, I realized maybe it was okay to not finish those cabinets. Maybe it wasn’t a bad idea to just leave them permanently in the sunroom! It had finally occurred to me that we could probably use some extra storage in that room anyway, and with as much work as I could accomplish in one afternoon, they’d be good enough for the casual look of the sunroom.
Honestly, it’s been a huge weight off my shoulders since I decided to let myself fail on those cabinets. My biggest lesson here is that sometimes you have to allow yourself to fail, and in certain circumstances, the sooner the better. This failure would have been of less magnitude if I had resigned myself to it a couple years and about eight paint cans earlier!
We’re driving to Ikea one day this week to buy new cabinets. They recently starting carrying a new design that looks perfect as is for our living room. I think I’ll give them a try.
Good luck with your own DIY home projects! I wish you success, or at least the wisdom to figure out when to give up.
~Kristin
