Welcome to Week 4 of the One Room Challenge! If this is your first time here, let’s bring you up to speed!
We are renovating our powder room in our new-to-us home (it’s about 25 years old). Last Fall, when we renovated our laundry room, we claimed a few feet from the powder room to make the laundry space bigger. This resulted in making our powder room only 25 square feet, by far the smallest room in our home!
If you want to catch up on the previous weeks, here they are:
Week 1: Inspiration & Mood Board
Week 2: Demolition & “Before” Shots
Week 3: When Renovations Come to a Standstill
If you read last weeks update, you will know that we were at a complete standstill with the renovation. That was mainly because we were waiting on our plumbing pieces to arrive.
Well the good news is – THEY ARRIVED! As I shared last week the gorgeous console sink that we chose means that we will now have exposed plumbing. Initially when we chose the sink, I don’t think either Chris or I really realized we would need to do with the current plumbing to make it function in this new way.
We did some research and realized that we needed brass plumbing pieces, which are the ones we’ve been waiting one, and so we ordered them from Wayfair. They are gorgeous!
But apart from installing a few pipes and drains, we didn’t realize all the cutting, moving pipes and soldering that would need to be done.
So while we HAVE made some progress this week, it isn’t as obvious because it’s all within the walls. Now couldn’t that be a life lesson – working on your life starts with fixing the insides of your heart?! I digress…
Chris has to learn all things plumbing to make this work – he had to learn how to cut and move the existing pipes, how to solder the new ones, how to route the water through, etc.
And that’s what I wanted to talk about today – how much we learn from every home renovation we’ve ever taken on and how you can too!
You see, often times, we get overwhelmed when it comes to home renovation. Remodelling or redecorating isn’t as intimidating because there isn’t as much to screw up. But once you start tearing down walls, ripping up flooring and moving pipe around, it’s a whole other story.
When we first started doing renovations, we really had no clue what we were doing. While Chris studied for a year at trades school, he certainly isn’t an electrician, plumber, carpenter, drywaller, etc, etc.
But he hasn’t let that stop him.
In today’s day and age there is almost zero excuse for not knowing how to do something. We live in an age where almost everything is available at your fingertips with a quick search on Google, Pinterest or YouTube. In fact, much of this blog and the functions around it were built on the backs of other YouTuber’s sharing their knowledge for free online!
I can remember for our laundry room renovation, we realized we were going to have to move the dryer vent. It was installed halfway up the wall for some reason and was a total eye-sore. I remember mentioning it to Chris and he said “Well I have no clue how to do that.”
i was pretty sure it wasn’t going to be that challenging but because we were going to have to cut through the exterior brick of our home, I wanted to make sure we found a REALLY good tutorial.
And that’s exactly what we found! This older British gentleman did a quick tutorial on how to move a dryer vent through the exterior brick of your home! There wasn’t anything flashy about the tutorial, but it was step-by-step, useful information that gave us the confidence to drill through the brick of our home and move that dryer vent!
This goes for so many renovation projects we’ve done around the home. If we are ever in doubt, we simply go to YouTube and see if we can find some reinforcements on how to do it. And EVERY SINGLE TIME, we’ve found exactly what we were looking for.
I share all of that to hopefully encourage you today – if you are a novice home renovator, don’t be intimidated by all the big power tools or building supplies you’ve never heard of. If you want to renovate a space, take it slow, go task by task and don’t be afraid to YouTube your way out of a problem. (Now, as a disclaimer, I should say that not all the advice you find on YouTube will work for your situation and there is definitely some bad advice out there, so make sure to research more than just one tutorial for a certain project!)
Well friends, there is my week 4 update. This renovation is totally different than any we’ve done before and I PROMISE you there WILL be major progress pictures next week! I guess all this suspense will just make for an even greater final reveal!
Love & Blessings,
Christine
