Six months ago, I shared some thoughts about how fixing up our house was going. The easy rooms had been getting done for the most part but other than the laundry room and guest bath, we hadn’t even begun to experience the “gut job” side of renovation life. Everything else involved some patch work, refinishing floors, […]

Six months ago, I shared some thoughts about how fixing up our house was going. The easy rooms had been getting done for the most part but other than the laundry room and guest bath, we hadn’t even begun to experience the “gut job” side of renovation life. Everything else involved some patch work, refinishing floors, switching out light fixtures and opening up some walls for new electrical — the small-scale stuff. Dirty stuff, but not long-lasting projects. What made the tiniest to largest projects feel more manageable in our home was the use of our unfinished family room. It was a 200-square-foot Spanish-themed room when we moved in, with red linoleum in a terra-cotta mosaic pattern and thickly textured walls painted yellow. Having a non-precious part of the house where things could be dumped to keep the rest of the house mostly livable was kind of amazing. We’ve lived here for almost 10 months and have seen every single room transform in some way — some for significantly better and some maybe worse than how we found them — and each has been dependent on this giant room on the main floor a...