This Sunday, two days ago, I decided I was tired of not taking writing as seriously as I’d like to. If I need to practice an instrument every day to improve, why would I not write every day to hone my craft? Therefore, I decided to challenge myself to write every day for 100 days on a random prompt. I asked ChatGPT to help me make a list of common tropes in different genres of writing (listen, if we don’t want the AI to take our creative jobs, we can at least use them to help out our own creativity!) and plugged that list into a wheel. (Check out the wheel HERE!) My plan is to use 3 tropes from this wheel, randomly generated, each day, and write in a stream-of consciousness style based on those tropes.
In order to focus on what I’m writing, I’ve learned I have to use some specific techniques. I’ve had ADHD since childhood and am on a constant journey to learn how to best accomodate my own mind. One tool I swear by for writing sprints or for simply forcing myself not to get distracted is Squibler’s Most Dangerous Writing App. It lets you choose either a time target (3, 5, 10, 15, 20, 30, or 60) or a word count target (75, 150, 250, 500, or 1667) and you must write for either the full length of time or the full amount of words without stopping. I plan on using this tool for a good amount of this challenge to myself, on the 1667 word setting, and just writing what comes to me.
Of course, I also hope to write some poetry, which will need to be produced a different way. But this should work for any story snippets or short stories that emerge from this experiment.
When we toured our new home during its open house, we loved the land, the space, and the potential. One thing we didn’t love? The design choices of the previous tenants. I’m not talking about dated furniture or weird light fixtures–I’m talking about chartreuse, crimson, and royal blue walls. Thankfully, the sellers had painted over some of these interesting choices from the original owners. (The sellers only lived in the home 6 months before we bought it.) Oh, boy, though, was one particular room a nightmare. The laundry room was in desparate need of renovation. Imagine ugly linoleum paired with just the most awful shade of green/chartreuse walls possible… it made me and my husband feel anxious to be in there. In fact, you don’t have to imagine, you can see it….
From the machines toward the garage door, dining area, and mini closet.
From the dining area into the room.
Our starting point
This room got to be our first to tackle, because my sweet mother-in-law let us know that she had ordered us a washer and dryer set as a housewarming gift. In her usual style, she goes totally overboard on giving gifts, which is incredibly kind. They were getting delivered a couple weeks after we moved in. That meant we had to move fast to update this room before they arrived. We pretty much started on the laundry room renovation the day we moved in.
The Beginnings
First things first, we pulled up the baseboards. We wanted to make sure to remove them carefully in order to keep them intact. First, we sliced along the top using utility knives to detach the layer of paint holding them to the wall. Then we used our Dasco Pro prybars in order to pull them away from the wall. Finally, we needed a hammer and crowbar to fully detach them.
We then pulled up the two door kick plates on the doors to the garage and back yard. Then, we removed the door to the tiny closet in the corner. (We decided to use that as a pet supplies/cleaning supplies closet with a kitty door at the bottom, and put the litter box at the bottom.) Floor scrapers like this one helped us pull up all the vinyl flooring without much hassle, and then we headed to the store to pick out tiles and paint.
We decided on the paint immediately above the tile in this picture, Valspar Snowy Dusk.
This was the heaviest cart I have ever pushed.
The Renovation
Once we picked out our tile, Della Torre Annabelle Grey, and our paint, Valspar Snowy Dusk (which we will also be using in both bathrooms), we started painting that night. We painted until 2 am in order to start tiling in the morning. Our neighbor used to work installing floors, so he helped us quite a bit. He showed us how to mix thinset (MAPEI Ceramic), cut the tiles (we rented a wet saw from Home Depot Rentals), and make sure they are spaced and leveled correctly (using TAVY 1/8 inch spacers). We’re super grateful for his help!
Inspector Willow checks out our work during the dry layout of the tiles, after paint had dried.
This is where it got tricky during mortaring, as we had to make sure each row and column was individually lined up correctly.
Finally, we grouted the tile with MAPEI Keracolor sanded grout after it had set for 24 hours. Costco delivered our awesome machines a couple days later! I don’t have any pictures of the room with the machines in it yet, unfortunately. (Currently it is full of laundry and an absolute disaster!) I am going to make a second post soon to update y’all. I plan on building a laundry basket shelf, a counter over the machines, and a freestanding pantry in the room within the next few weeks. Stay tuned for the next phase of our laundry room renovation!
The Results!
This was taken as the thinset was drying, with the spacers/levelers still in place.
And this was after grouting! I love how the pattern turned out.
About three months ago, John and I took the dive and bought our first home! I meant to make a post about it long ago but I (as I think most people do) underestimated how much time new homeownership and that adjustment takes. After a far too long search (I swear we saw a few dozen homes, between showings, open houses, and model homes) we were exhausted and near the end of our rope. We had made offers on another home we loved, and lost it, and tried to make offers on other homes that were then snatched out from under us. Maybe I’ll make a full post about the search process in the future. Finally, we found our home on March 14, made an offer that was accepted the next day, and then everything hit the fan with the COVID-19 pandemic on the 16th. Our interest rate spiked massively and we were worried that we would lose yet another house we loved–but God came through (as He does), as this was His plan for us.
The day we got the keys!
We are so grateful to finally have a home! Everything was getting so cramped in our little one-bedroom apartment, and we had reached a point where we were just moving our excess stuff from room to room, depending on which space we needed to use at the time. (Not having to compete for parking spots is also a blessing.) Escrow closed on April 20, and we spent the next month and a half moving in. This last month we’ve finally settled in enough to start doing renovations! The house has great bones, but was built ing 1996 (the year we were born!) and not updated since then.
So far, we’ve repainted the lime green laundry room, retiled it, got new machines, and created a makeshift pantry. A post on that whole process is to follow. Currently, the plan is to build a laundry basket shelf on the right side of the machines, a counter on top, and a cabinet pantry on the left side. We have one long 12′ by 6′ room that serves as the walk-through from the house to the garage, an exit to the outdoors, the laundry room, and the pantry. There was a tiny closet in the corner by the back door that was used as the pantry by the previous homeowners, but we cut a hole in the door, installed a cat door, and put the litterbox on the bottom level. The upper shelves are being used to store cleaning supplies, pet supplies, and other things that won’t be sullied by the smell of the litter box.
Our current project is the guest bathroom. One of the previous owners was handicapped, so they had cut the back off the guest bedroom closet. We’re in the midst of putting the wall back in, changing out the 90’s vanity for a new one (that actually has storage space!) and updating the bathroom in general. We’ve got a lot to do in the bathroom and the house in general, but it’s coming along!
I received a copy of this book free from Waterbrook & Multnomah in exchange for an unbiased review. All opinions are my own.
Sometimes you get handed the right thing at just the right time in life–Jordan Lee Dooley’s debut book Own Your Everyday is one of those things for me. If you read my last post, you’ll see that I’ve been in a time of major transition after graduating college and trying to figure out my place in the world. I’ve listened to Jordan’s podcast, The SHE Podcast, since it launched and followed her for several years. Her words of encouragement have helped me along this journey already, but I didn’t expect the impact this book would have. When I first joined the launch team for this book, I expected to read and promote a good book (of course)–not a book that spoke exactly to where I am right now and who I am right now. But that’s what I ended up doing.
Click on the photo above to be directed to where you can order the book!
Own Your Everyday is filled with personal anecdotes that can seem disjointed at first, but as you continue reading, Jordan connects each story to her points so artfully that you can’t help but admire the way she looks at her past experiences. Instead of seeing obstacles in her life as setbacks, she is able to acknowledge them for the growing points they were. Touching on topics such as outside pressure, un-met expectations, and discouragement, her words are applicable to almost any season of life the reader could be experiencing.
Although I resonated with many of the stories she told, her experience with her Nana really hit home for me. I was surprised, in fact, that her story could be so incredibly similar to my own. Without revealing too much of her own story, we both experienced losing our Nanas our first year of college (and it seems to have shaped us both in similar ways.) As I read about her thoughts on this specific experience, especially her teenage reluctance to be the caretaker (it’s true, it’s hard to see someone who is supposed to take care of you become the one who needs care), I went through all those feelings all over again. As she reminisced on the lessons her Nana taught her, I reminisced on mine. This may not have been something Jordan intended when writing this specific story, but oh how it did impact me.
The style of this book is very conversational. It’s been described by many as “feeling like a coffee shop girl talk,” and I would agree with that. From advice about purpose and planning to thoughts on freedom, envy, and vulnerability, this book has a little bit of it all. If you have anyone–a mom, sister, daughter, friend, anyone–who needs encouragement (or just a little push) at this point in life, I would recommend Own Your Everyday. I feel blessed to have read it and learned from it, and plan to come back to it throughout my life. Gift it to a graduate during this time of transition or a friend who needs it. You won’t regret it.
Pin this quote if it inspired you!
This review has been cross-posted to GwenithReads.
If you’ve been living on your own (or basically anywhere outside of your childhood home) for a while now, you might have figured out that cleaning without someone telling you to do it can be quite difficult sometimes. I did, at least. I feel like there are two sides to me–the side that wants everything clean all the time and the side that gets home from work and sits down with the idea of cleaning so far from my mind it might as well be nonexistent. There’s a disconnect in my desire to have a clean place and my exhaustion after working two jobs. Because of that, I’ve had to learn how to create a cleaning routine that actually WORKS, and doesn’t end me either in a pigsty of a home or a permanently exhausted pigeon (more than I already am, at least).
