There was a point where I actually asked my husband to let me be in charge of the renovations with our investment house…even at the risk of feeling more stressed. I realized losing out on this opportunity would be more emotionally distressing (or disappointing?) for me than taking on the extra task of figuring out how to manage this new project on top of my already busy life without letting it encroach upon my time with my husband or become a stressor I end up taking out on my husband (for which price he would gladly take on the responsibilities himself, or pay someone else to take on).
One of the reasons I was excited (and kinda scared at the same time…but not overwhelmingly so, which made this a great growing/stretching opportunity) about taking on the responsibility for home renovations, was the number of decisions I would need to make along the way. There are a number of specific decisions that would have to be made, and with some time sensitive urgency, so…as unqualified or un-ready I may feel about making certain decisions, I knew that by the end of this project (we have tenants moving in November 1st, so…that will be the “end” hopefully!), I can say that I did it. For better or for worse, the goal of finishing renovations will have been accomplished to whatever is the best of my ability at this time.
Basically, the big things on my list are replacing all the old, worn out greenish-blue carpet with laminate floors, replacing old flooring in lower-level laundry and utility room, hallway and washroom with tile floors, re-tiling a shower, updating kitchen counter and some appliances, and then PAINTING the entire interior of the house (this involved removal of quite a bit of older wallpaper).
Most of these things were simple enough for me to pick out–picked wood floors to match all the railings and wood cabinets and doors and door frames etc., picked simple tiles that are similar to the tiles in the entrance-way, as they were in perfect shape…
However, what really preoccupied my mind for basically an entire week, and which has now thankfully become something I can check off my to-do list with relief, was the whole process of choosing paint colors for the entire interior of the house.
I realized that I could basically choose whatever color scheme I wanted, because at the end of the day, the flooring and the paint, and the labor costs involved, would all basically add up to the same amount, whether I had the house painted in beautiful, sophisticated, modern colors OR if I chose to make the whole house pink, OR if I chickened out again on selecting colors and just had everything painted white…
The last time I ever actually chose a paint color was for my bedroom, once, perhaps as a pre-teen, and even then, it wasn`t like I went and selected the shade — it was just mom or dad asking me, what color do you like now, and I said blue, and then they brought home this nice sky blue. Nothing fancy, and probably just one can of paint did the trick. Oh, and then there was the summer after I graduated from university, where I helped my dad to paint his big office/warehouse building. I was basically at a total loss there, so I either just painted everything white, or I just copied the colors that had been there previously. Not a project I think fondly upon, as I felt completely under-qualified, and was not particularly proud of the results at all.
For the first condo my husband and I purchased, we were given 3 professionally determined color-pallets to choose from, which I felt rather happy and empowered to do because we really couldn`t go wrong… Then when we sold the condo to move into our first home, although it was an older home, it was recently renovated by the previous owners to colors very similar to our condo, so there didn`t seem much point to paint. For our current house, since the last house mimicked the condo where we picked out our favorite designer-pallet, it was pretty easy for me to recognize by then what colors we tend to like…and what would easily match all of our already-acquired furniture =), so I guess we chose a house that already matched our furniture…and us…and, again, no painting required.
The thing with colors is that even though I know I don`t know much about them and finding them and knowing what goes with what, I am still actually quite particular about colors. For example, with nail polish, there are certain seasons where I will envision a color in a dream–a very particular shade of pink or what-not–and then it will be my obsession for the next few months to hunt that color down, with hopes that it actually exists out there somewhere, within my reach, that I can actually try on, because experience has taught me that how it looks in the bottle is not exactly how it will look on any one particular person. If the color I ended up buying is not quite right, even if it is just by a shade or two, it will bother me. And I may or may not lament the $5-$10 I spent on that particular polish (now that I`ve got girls, it`s not as big of an issue, cause I can always let them use it with their friends…).
So, to me, painting a house is kinda like choosing nail polish color, but on a much, much BIGGER scale… with a higher price tag (for the paint & especially the labour — Ivan said `no,` I do not have the time to paint a whole house myself…) and with much, much more PERMANENT and VISIBLE impact…
Anyhow, the way I decided to approach choosing colors was to first find pictures in magazines of paint colors that seemed to look good with the floor colors I had picked out. I cut out pictures, and then narrowed them down to a small poster board I could use to consult when choosing colors from the painter’s pallet:
Not super professional, but for an investment rental property where a big goal was to minimize expenses while making the house more updated so it didn’t make sense to hire an interior designer, I was pretty happy that I could find some pictures of designed-rooms to work off of.
At first, this seemed simple enough. I tried my best to find a yellow like in the photo (wasn’t an exact match, but the same idea) for a more modern stand-out color to use in the kitchen, and then because I just really liked the sky blue color of the laundry/utility room in one of my magazines, I picked that color for the laundry/utility room of our house. For the main color, I picked a greyish tan-ish beige that would be used for basically most of the house and rooms, and I picked one darker brown accent color.
These last two were a bit tricky because there were so many different shades and hues to choose from, but I tried my best to find a match, with the reassurance that the painter would let me see swatches of the main colors on the walls before he would purchase the larger quantities of paint.
So the next day, when I went back to the house to check out the colors, they seemed “okay’ to me, but without the floors in, and with only swatches of paint on the wall, I wasn’t 100% sure if it was okay. On most of the walls, the greyish tan-ish beige looked as I expected — beige with grey/tan tints. However, on one of the main walls, it looked pink =( — the wall with the most sunlight hitting it. I told the painter it was fine, thinking I’m sure it can’t be that bad when it’s all done.
But when I got home, I couldn’t stop worrying that maybe I had picked the wrong color. And now I’m going to pay all this money to buy lots and lots of this wrong-color-paint, and for the painters to put this wrong-color-paint on all of the walls. And what if it’s a simple fix, like I just need to tweak the shade I choose by one or two notches and that would make it “right” instead of “wrong.” How horrible that would be, if it could possibly be this easy fix, but because I don’t know enough about paint colors, I would be the reason the house looks “wrong.”
I Google-searched beige paints that look to pink. And I posted my ‘issue’ on Facebook to see if any of my friends could help. I discovered that the issue I had not accounted for was lighting, and that lighting could be changed if needed by changing light bulbs…but that also the color may not look so pink when the entire room was painted. I also found out that “greyish” tints tend to have more of a risk of looking pinkish, whereas something more green might help eliminate this issue.
So I went back to the house and grabbed the painter’s pallet to try and figure out if there was a more green version of the color that might work better. But that too was difficult for me to tell when I would hold the colors up against the wall, whether it would end up looking not quite right to me as well.
I decided then to go grab leftover paint from my own house–since I know these colors look good on my walls–and try them out on the same wall in the investment house, only to discover that they were really completely different shades on the wall–everything looked so different, even though on my sample paper the colors were all so close.
This made me realize that if I wanted to stick with a greyish tannish beige (my house colors were definitely more brownish), I may have to choose like 4 or 5 different shades for the painter to grab samples of and test on the walls, and that even then I may not find the exact color I’m envisioning… And really, I don’t exactly have that kind of time to be running back and forth all day on top of watching over my children and driving them to and from schools and lessons.
I wrestled in my head over what I should do all day and night, until around 2 a.m., and then I finally had peace to just make a decision…that it’s “okay” if at the end of the day I don’t 100% like it…or if even I do decide to change the color on one or two walls in the case that I actually really really don’t like it.
That really this isn’t about “right” verses “wrong,” that this isn’t some test I feel uncomfortably set up to fail.
Through this experience, I realized that so often when there are choices to make that are not really about “right” versus “wrong,” but because in my head I have somehow convinced myself that there is such a thing as “right” versus “wrong,” I get paralyzed by my fear of failure, of choosing the wrong thing, of possibly making a mistake. And then my head goes into overdrive analytical mode, trying as hard as I can to figure out what is the right decision.
At the end of the day, for many of the choices I have and am now facing, I’m realizing there really isn’t a right or wrong per se, but more of being able to quiet all that analytical chatter in my brain to be able to just hear my heart — to hear and be able to acknowledge and articulate and work with what I like, what I want.
Like with the paint, it’s only wrong if I end up wasting more time and energy than needed regretting my decision and beating myself up over it.
Even if it turns out I’m unhappy with it, if I can stop worrying about being right versus wrong, succeeding versus failing, I can decide how I want to deal with it when the time comes, decide if it’s worth my time and energy to try another color. Regardless of how this goes, it is a great learning opportunity for me, a chance to build experience in something I didn’t have experience in before…
Also, if I do decide I like it, even if it is pink, but others don’t, that is fine too, because it is my house. I get to decide. It maybe stands no chance of ever being featured in a home design magazine, but then again, that was never a goal in the first place.
*Today I took my husband to go see the house renovations and the floors are almost all in. The kitchen is a bit of a mess, but next week it should be complete as well. When it’s all done, I will share some “before and after” photos, and any final reflections on how this process has impacted and grown me…