The To-Don't List

We have recently been doing home improvements to my parents' old house. They decided to sell it after the renters moved out. Like any home improvement situation, it has been endless, frustrating, and time consuming. At first, I was deeply sentimental about their putting the old homestead up for sale. Now, I'm starting to hate it and probably wouldn't even care if it got swallowed by a sinkhole or taken out by a F5 tornado.

The other night during a particularly arduous linoleum removal operation, Husband and I discussed how the helpful home shows you watch on TV are always giving you to-dos, when really they should be giving you to-don'ts. So with the help of my handsome assistant, I am providing a handy list for your reference:

1) DON'T sand and restain cabinets. Its a lot of effort for very little return. In fact, they will look so crappy you will just end up painting them, then realize it would have been 300% easier if you had done it in the first place, which will lead to self-loathing

2) DON'T let your 13 year old and her friends do anything, even extremely simple tasks such as painting the front door or pulling weeds, without close adult supervision when there is a cute boy living across the street. You may as well make a poster for counterproductivity.

3) DON'T think that if you start peeling up a corner of linoleum that was installed in 1967 (and hasn't been attractive since 1970) that the whole thing will just come off. It won't. Arm yourself with screwdrivers, scrapers, flat headed shovels, back-support braces, and hand grenades.

4) DON'T let family members who are not home-improvement savvy work in your absence without very specific instructions, or else they might spend an entire day vacuuming cobwebs out of the far corners of the attic and think they actually accomplished something helpful.

5) DON'T let your children pick out colors for interior decor. Royal blue trim is one of those things may seem like a good idea at the time and it might even look pretty good, but painting over it is a serious pain in the butt. Choose your paint colors in accordance with how easy they will be to paint over. Blaming said child for the color choice 20+ years after the fact is pointless.

6) DON'T let your sweet little dog run free in the house when the freshly painted cabinet doors are laid out to dry on the floor. You may find little footprints all over them. I'm speaking hypothetically, of course. My Sam would never do such a thing.

7) DON'T set an unrealistic timeline like, say, two weeks to paint an entire house, totally rehab a kitchen and bathroom, polish 1000 square feet of hardwood floors, and clean top to bottom. You can only fail, and failure is discouraging.

8) DON'T buy cheap painter's tape. When you remove it, some of the paint will come with it regardless of how soon you pull it off or how long you wait. This time around I accidentally bought the blue tape that cost twice as much; worth every penny, I tell you. Even after a few days, it came up easily and didn't pull any paint off with it. Best erroneous purchase I ever made.

9) Likewise, DON'T buy cheap paint. You will end up having to paint extra coats to get even coverage, and then as you paint your extra coats the coats beneath will get mushy and you will have to paint yet another coat on top of that. Buy the Valspar stuff with the primer in it. It costs, literally, five times as much but is soooo worth it.

10) DON'T try to mix your own paint. Leave that to the creepy friendly guy with a random extra "e" in his name at the Home Depot paint counter. You may think that adding white to brown will make tan, but it will actually be pink. Then you will have wasted a ton of paint. Again, this one is purely hypothetical.

If you follow our helpful to-dont's, perhaps you will emerge from your home improvement projects with a shred of your sanity intact. Or, if you are like my parents, you will just ignore any and all home improvements until the last second, when you can just make your children worry about it.