Wandering into DIY territory

Are you guys on Pinterest? If you’re planning a wedding, redecorating your room, or doing anything at all that might involve keeping track of visual ideas (a dress here, pretty wall color and rug combo there), get on Pinterest. It’s fabulous.

I’m not currently planning any particular event or project, but I log on every few days to scroll through ideas and fun DIY projects I could do around my apartment. The idea is to curate your own pin boards of any category you want, whether it’s home décor, shoes, wedding table settings or places you’d like to travel. You can make a board for anything, and you can follow anyone else’s boards if you find them inspiring.

I’ve got boards for decorating and cute accessories – and if I’m particularly bored (no pun intended), I’ve got a “daydreaming” board for wedding dresses. But I didn’t tell you that.

Wouldn't this little guy be so adorable in bright turquoise?

Since moving into my current apartment, I’ve been bitten by the DIY bug. (See also: the Etsy bug). I haven’t done a ton of projects, but I’ve started to see things in a new way, like, I could spray paint that turquoise and it would be EFFING ADORABLE. I haven’t bought any paint yet because I’m kind of scared, but I’m considering it. Any tips for spray-painting a metal lamp base?

After I moved in, my dad found an old seat-less chair in the attic that matched an antique desk I have, so he fashioned a seat for it and I brought it back from Charlotte. It just needed a cushion and some fabric. I googled fabric stores in Richmond and found an independent store a few blocks away called u-fab, where I found a nice, sturdy dusty brown/cream coral patterned fabric for $8/yard. There was only a yard and a half left, so the guy just gave me the rest for $8. Not bad.

Not really knowing what I was doing, I just went for it and re-cushioned the chair with the help of google and my friend Haley’s staple gun. I’m pretty proud of my first try, although I think it’s safe to say my cushion is a bit thick. I’ll re-do it if I get bored with the brown coral fabric, but I like it for now.

Do any of you follow any good DIY blogs? Here in Richmond, there’s a family that’s become quasi-famous (in the blogosphere, anyway) for their DIY home blog, Young House Love. They’re also on Pinterest. They usually have some pretty great ideas and tips for redecorating.

Another blog I found is Nesting Place (also on Pinterest) and from what I can tell, she’s based in Charlotte. Her blog is more inspiration to improve your home than directions to reupholster your couch, and I love it. Her motto is, “It doesn’t have to be perfect to be beautiful.”

I’m not really interested in becoming a DIY blogger, but I am interested in making my home beautiful. I want to be happy where I live, and since I’m on a tight budget, finding quirky decorating ideas and doing projects myself is how I can best do that.

The joys of renting

At first I thought I wasn’t cleaning my sink well enough, or taking out the trash often enough. But when I woke up one night with a buzzing in my ear, I knew there was a bigger problem than my kitchen’s cleanliness.

Earlier this summer, my apartment became overrun with gnats, fruit flies, whatever you want to call them. Tiny little black bugs were everywhere. They flew around my kitchen and they dotted my shower curtain and bathtub. I swatted at them while I watched Parks & Recreation. Around this same time, my apartment was also starting to smell dank, damp and musty, like a basement. I didn’t put the two together though.

Living with so many bugs flying around was a nightmare and began to wear on my sanity. I googled tips for getting rid of gnats, which included vinegar traps (didn’t work) and soap traps (worked). I learned that gnats can’t resist a bowl of sudsy water. They get trapped in the suds and die. Sort of similar to the way spider webs trap bugs? You can start calling me Charlotte.

I began a nightly ritual for about a week or two of leaving out two to three bowls of soapy water in the sink. In the morning the suds had disappeared, but there were about a dozen or so dead gnats in the bottom of each bowl of water. I’d dump them out, and repeat. (If you’re good at math, you’ll know that meant I was getting rid of anywhere from 20-40 gnats each night. Yep. Gross.)

After doing my laundry one afternoon in my actual basement, which had also become noticeably smelly and musty, I realized there were significantly more gnats down there than had become my roommates upstairs. Clearly this was not just the result of an overflowing trashcan.

I called my maintenance guy, who came out the next day and fogged the basement. He said he thought the source might have been an old fridge down there, left long ago by someone else, and that the problem should get better. It did, slightly, over the weekend. Then it got worse.

A few days after the basement fog, I was inspecting things around my apartment and realized that around my floor vents were hundreds of black specks—dead gnats from the fog that came up through my vents when I ran the A/C. Disgusted, I vacuumed them up, combing my floors for more piles. Then started going after the still-living gnats flying around. “Gotcha, bitch!” I’d think each time I sucked one up. For a moment, I thought I was in the clear. But an hour later, it was worse than before.

I demanded an exterminator come out. He and maintenance guy quickly learned the fridge was not the source and said they needed to look for something “stagnant.” The search took them out of the basement, which is in the rear of the building, and instead into the crawl space that is in the front of the building—directly beneath my unit.

Maintenance guy alerted me that apparently, at some point in the past (months? years? Before my time, he said), faulty plumbing had created a sewage blockage in the pipes under my apartment. Keep in mind this was right around the time the weather began getting very hot. Just let that sink in.

“I don’t want to use the word cesspool,” he said, “… but it was pretty bad.”

It took about a week, but plumbers and exterminators fixed the pipes and cleaned up the cesspool. I still had plenty of dead gnats to vacuum up after I got back in my apartment, but the nightmare, the smell, the soap bowls and the paranoia of feeling like bugs were everywhere were all gone.

Ah, the joys of renting. I couldn’t have prevented—or even known about—the shitstorm I was living on top of, but at least I didn’t have to pay for its cleanup.