One-day yard makeover: before

Last weekend, my friend Tim—the same one whose den I helped redecorate last winter—asked me if I could help him make over his front yard. For as long as I've known him, he's mostly ignored this part of his property. He'd tend to critical matters like filling in holes in the driveway or removing trees that grew too close to the house, but with just about everything else, his approach was "live and let live." Hence, the weeds have run rampant; the foundation shrubs have grown up to obscure the windows; the gravel drive is overgrown with moss and lined with rotting landscape timbers; the outdoor lamp-post is nonfunctional, missing all its glass, and rusted nearly clean through; and, although the yard boasts several mature trees, there's nothing under them but bare dirt.

None of this bothered him at all until just recently, when he started dating a woman whose own yard he describes as "very nice," and he began to think he ought to make his more presentable before letting her see it. So not only is he trying to make up for years of benign neglect, he's also trying to do it on a rush schedule. So the plan is for me and Brian to go over there and help him with the biggest jobs tomorrow, in the hopes that we can accomplish enough to make the yard pass muster.

Clearly it isn't going to be possible to fix everything that's wrong with this yard in one day of work, so I went over for a preliminary visit earlier in the week and we set a few priorities. Our goals for tomorrow are:

• Clear away all the rotting landscape timbers. (His original goal was to put something nicer-looking in place to define the boundaries of the driveway, but I thought they'd look reasonably okay undefined, and it seemed to me that a lot of other jobs were more urgent.) 
• Remove the worst of the weeds. These include a couple of stands of poison ivy and a stubborn catalpa tree that's growing perilously close to the house; Tim has already tried to remove it twice, and it keeps coming back. Looks like a job for our King of Spades.
• Trim back the overgrown foundation shrubs. (Personally, I'd like to remove them completely and replace them with something more reasonably sized, but even if I could talk Tim into it, I'm assuming it's not a job we could do in one day.)
• Build a path from the driveway to the front door. Currently, there is none, or at least none that's navigable. Tim didn't see this as a problem because he never uses his front door anyway, preferring to enter the house from the garage side—but I suppose he eventually came to the conclusion that it looks a bit unwelcoming. Fortunately, most of the slate flagstones that used to form the path to the front door are still in his yard and reasonably intact, and we also have a few in our yard that we don't have a use for. By pooling our resources, we should be able to manage a path leading diagonally from the driveway to the house, so you can traverse it without having to wrestle with the shrubbery.
• Add a bit of greenery to the area under the trees. Grass doesn't grow well in full shade, which is why there's none of it left, but there are various other things that do. My first thought was, since he has plenty of moss in various parts of the yard, he should try to spread it across the entire bare section using the "moss milkshake" method: grinding up moss with buttermilk in a blender and just painting it on the areas where you want it to grow. Sadly, when I went looking for the recipe, what I found instead was a site all about moss that says this method doesn't actually work very well. It's still possible, according to the same site, to propagate moss by planting tufts of it directly on bare soil and keeping it moist and clear of debris, but the process takes months if not years. Tim is still planning to try and spread some moss in the area, but it's not going to turn into a lush, green carpet overnight.

Fortunately, we had something else in our yard that thrives in shade and grows so vigorously it's hard to get rid of even if you want to. Directly in front of our wildflower bed, there was a heavy stand of lilies of the valley. They used to form a dense carpet all around the foundation shrubs before we ripped them out; we thought we'd removed most of them with the shrubs, but several big clumps survived, forming an untidy mass in front of the wildflowers.

So this evening, we dug the whole lot of these up (or at least, all of them that we could see; they spread by underground rhizomes, so we shouldn't be surprised if a few more pop up in the spring and have to be yanked). We piled as many as we could fit into our collection of big garden buckets, as well as an old litter box we had sitting downstairs the workshop; the rest we threw in the compost bin, where we'll hope they don't take root and start taking over the yard again. So if all goes well, we should be able to add a splash of green to Tim's yard tomorrow, and come spring, he'll have several patches of fragrant flowers. Perhaps eventually we can even turn it into a proper woodland garden with a whole bunch of perennials that bloom at different times, like bleeding hearts or forget-me nots...but for now, we'll just work with what we have.

Tune in on Monday for the exciting conclusion of Tim's garden makeover. Or at least, I hope it will be exciting.

Our latest IKEA hack: DIY standing/sitting desk

In my recent account of our anniversary IKEA binge, I noted that one of the items we picked up was a little Lack side table, which Brian planned to use to modify his work desk so he could use it in either a sitting or a standing position. He even decided to spend the extra $2 on the "birch effect" version, rather than plain white, so that it would match the rest of his cubicle furniture. (Side note: I see from the IKEA website that if we had waited until this month, we could have picked up the same table for $5 instead of $10 with our IKEA Family discount. But oh well—it wouldn't have been worth postponing our anniversary trip just for a $5 savings, and it certainly wouldn't been worth making a separate trip later for the table, since gas and tolls would have eaten up the whole $5 savings and then some.)

Anyway, I couldn't report right away on the success of this experiment, since he needed a new, longer cable for his monitor in order to set everything up properly. But now that he has everything in place, I thought you might like to see how this cheap and easy desk hack turned out.

First, here's Brian's workstation in its "seated" configuration. He uses a back-friendly kneeling chair (picked up at the big town-wide yard sale two years back), and the Lack table sits stowed away beneath the desk to the left.

Next, here's the "standing" configuration. The monitor, keyboard, and mouse all hop up onto the desktop, the chair is nudged aside, and everything is at eye level. (Of course, that's Brian's eye level, which is nearly six feet off the ground. A shorter person trying to use the same setup would probably have to shorten the legs of the Lack somewhat.)

He can also leave the monitor and peripherals where they are and use the standing desk for working on his laptop. Or, if for some reason he needs to use use both the laptop and the other computer, he can bounce back and forth between sitting and standing and get some healthy workplace exercise.

It's certainly not as fancy as other standing desks, like this $330 convertible Alekto model, or even these more complex IKEA-hack standing desks featured on Lifehacker. However, I personally think it has distinct advantages over all its competitors, including:

• Flexibility. The standing desks in the Lifehacker article are for standing only; you can't sit down at them when your feet get tired. The Alekto can be configured for either sitting or standing, but it can't really go back and forth between the two; you'd have to unplug and rearrange everything on the desk, which isn't something you want to do multiple times during the workday. With the Lack hack, by contrast, it takes only a minute to switch from sitting to standing and vice versa.
• Ease of assembly. The other IKEA hacks have difficulty ratings from easy to medium. The easiest one requires only "assembly of main desk and platform with a screwdriver," but this Lack doesn't require even that; just screw the legs into the top by hand, set it under your desk, and it's ready to go.
• Cost. The Alekto costs $350, and even the "on the cheap" IKEA hacks range from $140 to $245. Adding this Lack table to an existing workstation, by contrast, costs only $10 (or $5, if you do it this month). 
• Looks. The $350 Alekto is, in my opinion, downright ugly. Some of the IKEA hacks are quite nice-looking, but they would definitely stand out if you plunked them down in the middle of an existing office where everyone but you had the same standardized furniture. The little Lack, by contrast, blends in quite unobtrusively. (Brian's coworkers particularly appreciated the fact that he chose a birch finish to match the desk, so that was two dollars well spent.) And with 14 colors and finishes to choose from, there's sure to be one that will blend in with your office decor as well.

Bottom line: if you're not sure whether a standing desk is for you, dropping $10 on one of these little Lack tables is probably the cheapest and easiest way to find out.

Conquering the gazingus pin

One of my favorite bloggers, Emily Guy Birkin, recently posted at Live Like a Mensch on the topic of "gazingus pins." This concept comes from the classic personal-finance work Your Money or Your Life, by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, which has taken on the status of a near-sacred text among the frugal set. The authors use the term "gazingus pin" to refer to "any item that you just can't pass by without buying." This isn't the same thing as any item you buy regularly: shopping for groceries and gas on a weekly basis, for instance, doesn't make them gazingus pins. What sets the gazingus pin apart is that it's something you're always prepared to buy another of, even if you already have all you could possibly use and then some.

Everyone's gazingus pins are different. For example, some people—mostly people of the female variety—can't resist new shoes, no matter how many pairs they own already. Others keep acquiring shiny new kitchen gadgets or technological toys. Birkin confesses in her post that she personally has an incurable addiction to books, calendars, and office supplies. So when she concluded the post by asking her readers to share their "personal gazingus pins," I tried to come up with some equally amusing quirk that I could disclose...and came up blank. Not only couldn't I think of a single thing that falls into the category of "mindless spending" for either of us, I couldn't even really wrap my brain around the concept. We're both such compulsive analyzers that we can't make even the smallest of purchases without considering all the angles first; I don't think we could spend mindlessly if we tried.

It's true that we are currently rather oversupplied with books; thanks to several recent sales, we have two good-sized piles of them in our soon-to-be guest room that are either waiting to be read (the pile on the left) or waiting to be passed on to other readers, having failed to earn a place on our overcrowded bookshelves (on the right). But the only reason we've accumulated so many is that we've had an unusual run of luck at finding them secondhand or otherwise dirt-cheap. If we go to Barnes and Noble, by contrast, where even the paperbacks cost $9 and up, we almost invariably walk out empty-handed. We can enjoy a carefree hour of browsing, but when it comes to actually carrying something to the checkout, we can never quite convince ourselves that it's worth the money. Even if we happen to see something we like, we generally prefer to hold off on buying it at least until we can look for it at the library instead.

The thing is, we weren't always like this. When I brought up the topic with Brian, he came up with three gazingus pins he used to have: books, comic books, and CDs. He used to binge on these regularly, buying ten or twelve at a pop. These days, he still buys all of these things occasionally, but only in a measured, thoughtful way. He will actually think about how much he wants a particular book or CD and, more often than not, will leave it on the rack. He's not sure quite how he made the shift from buying compulsively to analyzing obsessively, but at some point it just became a habit. These days, he more often needs to be talked into buying something when it's clearly worth the money than to be talked out of it when it isn't.

One thing that many people say they find helpful for dealing with their gazingus pins is to set ground rules. Birkin, for instance, says she now has a "one in, two out" rule with books: every time she acquires a new one, she has to purge two from her shelves. (This doesn't necessarily limit her spending, but at least it keeps the size of her collection in check.) In similar fashion, I have tamed my coffeehouse habit (not exactly a traditional gazingus pin because it's not something you amass a huge collection of, but it does run into money) by training myself to buy coffee only with the money I earn from survey rewards. Since I only accumulate survey rewards at a limited rate, I now enjoy these treats only once a month or so—which is good news for my waistline as well as my wallet.

Many people on the Dollar Stretcher forums have mentioned a different rule: when they get the urge to buy something, they must put it in their online shopping cart and then leave it there for at least 24 hours. By the time they come back to it, they say, they often find they can abandon it without regret. I've never tried this exact strategy myself (I'm always afraid I'll somehow hit the "check out" button by accident and find I've already paid for something without having a chance to reconsider), but I have a similar trick: when I see something I like, I add it to my wish list on Amazon.com. I find this sort of equivalent to "bookmarking" the item so I can find it again if I decide to buy it. Sometimes I end up buying it, sometimes I manage to find it for free (e.g., at the library) instead, and sometimes I conclude I don't really need it after all—but just the act of putting it on the list is enough to satisfy that urge to "get this, now." The simple act of bookmarking removes all sense of urgency; I know that if and when I decide it's worth the money, the item will still be right there waiting for me. And of course, as a side benefit, if anyone asks me what I want for my birthday, I can just direct them to the list. (You might wonder whether it's really reasonable to send my family and friends to Amazon to buy for me when I refuse to shop there myself on account of their evil labor practices, but I've actually found a way around this. Amazon now allows you to add items from other sites to your Wish List as well—so I went through my list and replaced all the items I'd found on Amazon with identical items from other sites. Now I have all my potential purchases stored in one convenient place, and I'm not actually directing any revenue to the mythical monster.)

So on the whole, it seems that, with a little retraining, it is possible to break (or at least control) a gazingus-pin habit. Some people, like Brian, can just gradually modify their spending habits over time; others need to trick themselves into behaving differently. Just as everyone's gazingus pins are different, the strategies that work for breaking free of them are likely to be different as well—but with a little trial and error, I'm convinced, anyone can hit on the right one sooner or later. Shoppers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your massive collection of gazingus pins!

Recipe of the Month: Summer Pasta Salad

Once again, our basil crop has gotten out of hand. Today, Brian had to pull out two entire plants because they'd grown so tall that they were shading the rest of the garden bed. He also picked, at the same time, two Early Girl tomatoes (the first of the season, since all our Sun Gold plants this year met with an early demise) and two large cucumbers. (That makes twenty-four cucumbers so far, and the plants have only been producing for about a month. Our fridge is already stuffed with pickles, and we've made every cucumber-based dish we know of and gone hunting for more. I think we can safely say ten cucumber vines are too many.)

Anyway, in an effort to think of a way to use all this bounty, Brian started improvising. He chopped up the veggies and started mixing them in with beans and pasta until the ratio looked right. Asked to suggest a dressing to go with this mixture, I proposed a lemon vinaigrette, which reminded Brian that he had some leftover lemon juice sitting in the freezer. So this got mixed with olive oil in a roughly 2-to-1 ratio, and he also threw in a couple of cloves of garlic, because, well, why wouldn't you? Then he tossed it all together, and presto, a healthy and colorful salad.

For a totally impromptu dinner, this was surprisingly tasty. The light citrusy dressing was just the right complement to the fresh veggies, and the garlic, in its uncooked state, packed a distinct punch. Between us, we ate most of it, leaving only one lunch's worth of leftovers. (Say what you will about the healthfulness of our diet as a whole, you can't accuse us of not eating our veggies—at least not during the summertime.)

So, since this ad hoc recipe proved such a success, I hastened to commit it to paper before we forgot it. Here, for your dining pleasure, is Brian's Summer Pasta Salad:

• 1 1/2 medium cucumbers (or 1 very large one), diced
• 2 tomatoes, diced
• 1 tightly-packed cup basil leaves, finely shredded (Brian just chopped them coarsely, but we agreed that smaller pieces would probably distribute the flavor better)
• 1/4 pound tubettini pasta, cooked and drained
• 1 can cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
• 3 cloves garlic, crushed
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice
• 1/2 teaspoon salt

Toss everything together willy-nilly in a large mixing bowl. Let it sit for about 15 minutes to let the flavors mix, and serve.

Bon appétit!

Quick update

The title of this post has two meanings: the post itself is just a quick update, and its purpose is to tell you about a quick update in our kitchen. Specifically, to our kitchen cabinets.

As I mentioned last week, our attempt to upgrade our dingy kitchen cabinet handles with oil-rubbed bronze (ORB) spray paint wasn't very successful. So I took the plunge and ordered some new ones, which arrived last weekend. And as I hoped, installing them was a pretty simple job; a couple of the screws on the existing hardware required some coaxing to come loose, but for the most part, it was just two screws out, two screws in, boom. The whole process took maybe an hour. As a result, our kitchen cabinets have gone from looking like this...

...to looking like this.

Now, that may not look like a very dramatic transformation, so let's pull in for an extreme close-up of just what the old handles used to look like. Pretty grungy, right? You can definitely see the base metal under the copper plating, and even the copper parts don't make a very good contrast with the dark wood of the cabinet doors.

The new handles, by comparison, are not only in better shape, they also have a much darker finish that stands out better against the wood. And the nifty basket-weave design in the metal somehow seems to tie in with a whole lot of other pieces in our house that I'd never thought to connect before, from the decorative metalwork in these lamp bases...

to the Celtic knotwork in this tapestry...

...and even some other art pieces that aren't visually similar, but just have a Renaissance theme.

So, with an investment of $45 (which we didn't even pay out of pocket, thanks to survey reward points) and an hour of work, not only does our kitchen look much more elegant, but the whole house feels just a little more pulled-together. And we still have two extra handles left from the package of 25, in case we damage one or take a notion to install one on something else.

Now, I guess, all that remains is to dispose of the old ones. They're in such cruddy shape that I'm not confident anyone on Freecycle will want them...but I guess it can't hurt to try.

Gardeners' Holidays 2014: Squashmas

Squashmas this year is a slightly subdued celebration for us, because both our zucchini plants have fallen prey to the dreaded squash vine borer. These pests are particularly nasty because, by the time your plant starts to wilt, they're already inside and making their way up the stem, killing as they go. Last year we tried to stop the little buggers from infesting in the first place by wrapping the vines in foil, which would, in theory, keep the moths from laying their eggs at the base of the stem where the larvae can hatch and burrow their way in. That tactic quickly proved to be pointless, because (duh) zucchini plants aren't like butternut squash, which have just one big main stem; they branch out, forming dozens of individual stems, and there's no way you could possibly wrap every one of them without breaking off the leaves and damaging the plant. We also tried setting out yellow cups filled with water around the plants; these are supposed to attract the moths so that they fall in and drown. These had, as far as we can tell, no effect at all. So instead, we just watched the plants vigilantly for signs of damage, and as soon as we spotted the dreaded wilting and orange, sawdust-like debris, we performed surgery on the plants to extract the grubs. Result: our plants stayed healthy all summer long and produced a good 14 pounds of squash throughout the growing season.

Based on these results, we figured there was no point in bothering with prevention measures this year; we'd just watch the plants and perform surgery at the first sign of damage. Sadly, our efforts don't seem to have been quite as successful as they were last year. Maybe we didn't catch the problem early enough, or maybe we didn't manage to catch all the grubs, but the results were...ambiguous. The smaller of the two plants was heavily infested; Brian ended up pulling out the entire plant, then cutting off one the section that looked healthy, re-burying it, and hoping for the best. As you can see in this picture, the replanted vine doesn't look any too well; all its largest leaves have wilted and turned yellow, and at first glance, you might say the whole plant was dead or dying. Yet if you look closely, there is a small core of green, healthy-looking foliage right at the heart of the plant, and it's actually producing new blossoms and even one tiny squash. So I guess we'll have to wait and see. The plant may be done for, or it may have more fight left in it then we thought.

As for the larger plant, it didn't seem at first blush to be as badly infested; Brian only dug two grubs out of it before cutting off the dead leaves and heaping dirt over the stem. Yet it's not exactly thriving, either. Its outermost leaves are looking wilted, and some of them have developed a sort of whitish, patchy discoloration. Gardening forums indicate that this is probably powdery mildew, which is unrelated to the borer damage, but equally dangerous to the plant. So I'll have to go out there today and cut off all those leaves before the damage spreads too much, and then maybe give the leaves a good spraying in the morning to keep it from coming back.

For the time being, however, we still have plenty of zucchini. I managed to get one good-sized one off the larger vine today, and added to the three others we already had in the fridge (one small, one large, and one absolute whopper), we definitely have more than enough to celebrate the annual zucchini-fest in style. In fact, we're likely to be scrambling to come up with ways to use it all up. All in all, this looks like a job for Barbara Kingsolver's Disappearing Zucchini Orzo, as presented in her fascinating book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. It magically absorbs the contents of 3 large zucchini, plus an onion, into just 12 ounces of orzo, with just a bit of grated cheese and herbs added for flavor. (I'm considering leaving out the oregano, which I'm not that crazy about, and perhaps adding a touch of garlic, which I think improves just about anything.)

And for dessert? Well, earlier this week Brian made up a big batch of zucchini brownies. I'm not sure just where I originally found the recipe, so I guess there's no harm in just reproducing it and seeing if anyone claims it:

Zucchini Brownies 

2 c. Shredded zucchini
2 c. flour
2 tsp. vanilla
3 Tbsp. cocoa
1/2 c. oil
1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/2 c. sugar
1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 c. nuts (optional)
2 eggs
Grease and flour 9x13 pan. Mix as listed. Bake 350 for 22-30 mins. Can be doubled and fill cookie sheet. I always do .. 

For frosting:
1/3 c. milk
5 Tbsp. butter
1 c. sugar
Boil for 4 minutes then add 1 cup of chocolate chips.

Brian made some modifications to this: first, we decided to skip the frosting, since what kind of brownie needs it? He also doubled the amount of cocoa, considering 3 tablespoons too small an amount to chocolafy anything. The third change was accidental: he used baking powder instead of baking soda, resulting in a finished product that was very moist and much more like a cake than a brownie. Good, though, and a good way to make one whole large zucchini disappear. But next time I think I might be inclined to go with this version from AllRecipes.com, which boosts the cocoa to 1/2 cup and leaves out the eggs entirely. It, too, calls for frosting, but I think if the recipe we made tasted fine without it, probably this one will too.

Best budget decor, part 3

One of my favorite features on Blogger is the "stats" section, which lets me see not only how many hits my blog is getting overall, but also which particular posts have been the most popular. That's how I know that over the past month, my second post on budget decor has earned a remarkable number of hits; in addition to being the most-read post of the month, it's reached number nine on the all-time top ten list. (Click on "greatest hits" in the "labels" section to see the others.) Apparently, budget decor is a topic that readers just can't get enough of.

If you happen to be one of those readers who helped skyrocket this post to its current position, you're in luck, because I just happen to have collected several more interesting budget home makeovers to share with you. We'll start, as I did last time, with a budget bathroom redo that I found on a blog called Kruse's Workshop. I can't remember just how I first came across it (it wasn't on either Apartment Therapy or Young House Love, which are my two main sources for interesting room remodels), but it depicts what the blogger calls a "medium scale bathroom remodel" on a budget of $600—and a timeline of only two days. The family didn't move any walls or plumbing fixtures (that would probably have kicked it up to "large scale"), but they retiled the entire room, replacing old, moldy shower tile with floor-to-ceiling white subway tile and replacing the old vinyl floor with new tile as well. Like so many projects, this one grew in scale as it went along, since demoing out the old tile revealed that all the plaster behind it was also moldy and would have to go. But that turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because it gave them the opportunity to remodel the wall, building in a jumbo-sized niche to hold the lady of the house's extensive collection of bath products, which I think is definitely the bit player that steals the show in this remodel. As for the rest of the room, they kept the old tub, but replaced the plumbing fixtures, and kept the old vanity, but gave it a coat of sharp charcoal-grey paint. Topped off with new window treatments and accessories, the room looks like a brand-new bathroom for just a few Benjamins.

Moving on from bathrooms to kitchens, here are several that I came across at (where else) TheKitchn.com, a sub-site of Apartment Therapy. The first one is a quick spruce-up job in a rental in sunny Mexico. This one is noteworthy not because the space looks so incredible in the "after" pictures, but because of how much the tenant has managed to do with a meager budget of just $150. The "before" space is dark and drab, with beige walls, mismatched furniture, and a sink with exposed pipes. She brightened it with glossy white paint, colorful fabric (which hides the plumbing), and some floating shelves—a couple from Home Depot (I guess they have Home Depot in Mexico) and a DIY painted board in a cheerful, vivid blue. She also brought in a long, low table and some wall racks from IKEA (they don't have IKEA in Mexico, but she found them on eBay) to provide much-needed counter and storage space. The finished kitchen is still small, still plain, but it's small and bright and cheery rather than small and dull and depressing. (Reminds me a bit of my first apartment's kitchen, with its teeny-tiny block of countertop that I ended up covering in wood-grain contact paper to make it look more presentable, and its teeny-tiny little eating area into which I managed to squeeze an IKEA gateleg table that folded up against the wall. It was still kind of shabby, truth be told, but it was homey.)

The next kitchen redo is a much bigger room, but its budget is still quite petite at only $500. In the "before" pictures, everything is dark: dark wood cabinets, dark fixtures, dark stone counters, and dark grey paint on the walls. Without actually moving anything, the owners brightened the room from top to bottom, with a lighter paint color on the walls, a coat of crisp white paint on the cabinets (with dark hardware for contrast), and new butcher block countertops (once again, from IKEA) that they actually cut and installed themselves. The homeowner says these new countertops took up "nearly all" of her $500 budget, but they're her favorite part of the remodel. Personally, I think my favorite touches are the DIY pendant lamp, made from a craft-store basket, and the whimsical yardstick backsplash, which she came up with while roaming up and down the aisles of Lowe's looking for something she could afford to install with the dregs she had left in her budget. Necessity truly is the mother of invention! (You can see still more photos from this remodel on the homeowner's site, Ashley Ann Photography.)

TheKitchn.com bills the next remodel as a $500 budget as well, but a look at the more detailed post on the homeowner's site reveals that this isn't strictly true: she planned to do the whole room on a $500 budget, but her husband surprised her with the gift of a new fridge, so her final cost turned out to be $497 plus the cost of a nice new counter-depth side-by-side fridge. These aren't cheap—the ones reviewed by Consumer Reports start at around $1400—so the total cost of this redo was almost certainly over my $1,000 limit for a true budget remodel, but I just had to include it because it is such an AMAZING transformation. The "before" pictures are so utterly plain and drab and dingy, and the "after" ones look like you've stepped into the kitchen of a chic country inn...in Tuscany...in the 1930s. The homeowner painted absolutely everything in this room: the old metal cabinets, the old Formica counters, even the linoleum floor. And when I say painted, I don't mean she just slapped a fresh color on there; she created a faux aged-plaster look on the walls, she stenciled an elaborate design onto the floor, and she redid the counters with a color and faux finish that she made up all by herself. If I set out to do a project on this scale, it would probably take me years just to choose all those paint finishes, let alone execute them. I mean, I am in awe.

Now, to be fair, she didn't actually transform the entire room with just paint. In fact, she brought in a lot of pieces that she already owned, so they didn't count toward her $500 budget, some of which would cost well over $500 to buy. For instance, she replaced the perfectly decent, utilitarian gas range (in fact, from the pictures it looks like exactly the same one we have) with a magnificent vintage stove from the 1940s. To buy a piece like this, you'd probably have to scour antique sites and shell out a couple of grand for it. She also had a really cool old workbench that just happened to fit perfectly into an unused back corner (though she points out that if you don't have one of these lying around, you could always "tear off the counter top of your kitchen island and put a cool old wooden door on top of it, or an old chunky counter from a bar you find in a rehab thrift store or at a garage sale"). But what makes the room for me isn't these big pieces; it's the tiny touches she mocked up on a shoestring, like the fascinating window treatments made of old European grain sacks and the umbrellas that she hung as wall decorations because "I had them in my basement and I was too lazy to go hunt for something better."

What inspires me most of all about this remodel is the fact that she painted her countertops even though, like ours, they have those annoying metal strips on them to hold down the laminate. Every tutorial I'd ever seen on painting over laminate assumed that you were starting with a smooth, bare expanse of counter, so I figured that having those strips in the way meant painting the countertops wasn't an option for us. But if she could do it, who knows, maybe I could too. She says all she did was clean them well, sand them lightly, and then apply two coats of primer, two of paint, the faux finish, and multiple coats of water-based poly. That's not too different from what I did on my bathroom vanity, so...why not? True, I had hoped to get rid of those metal strips because they always seem to trap dirt, but perhaps with a darker color on the counters that wouldn't matter so much.

If you still think it's cheating to include a kitchen redo that didn't really come in under $1,000, then perhaps I can make it up to you by wrapping up this edition with the most absolutely bare-bones budget I've ever seen for any room redo, anywhere. This homeowner, featured in Sunset magazine, perked up her entire kitchen using nothing but paint for a mere $30. No, not $300: $30, three-zero. When most kitchen remodels featured on TV and in magazines involve budgets of five figures or even more, this person redid her kitchen with two. Admittedly, all she really did was change the colors, but the pictures accompanying the article show what a big difference a simple change like this can really make. The space she started with was dark and dated, sporting a brown-on-brown color scheme; the redesigned space, with its pale yellow cabinets and bright blue appliances, looks cheery and whimsical. The article mentions that she also transformed a wall cabinet by removing some doors and "exposing the handsome beadboard paneling," and even turned one of these removed doors into a new table—but there aren't any before-and-after pics of this part of the room, so it's hard to evaluate the impact of this part of the redo. But even the bit that you can see is a pretty remarkable transformation for a mere 30 smackers. Just goes to show how much you can do by replacing money with imagination.