#diy things

So I made her a battle jacket

We like the DIY life.

Added some blushy marks and a really poorly done heart but it makes it unique in my eyes.

Also a garter on the thigh because reasons.

I wanna put

How does a regular heart can be so hard to get right ?

I'm an artist, I'm supposed to know how to do shapes T-T

I often feel like I wasn’t taught skills that would lead to success when I was young. I didn’t know how to stop my toilet from running, didn’t know how make a paycheck last longer than a weekend, I didn’t even really know how to actually look that kind of stuff up. There’s that joke about millennials having to take “adulting” classes, but let’s be honest, no one had taught us. Everything was so automated when we were young, everything was paid for, probably because our parents were working too much to do it themselves. Or at least that’s how it was in my case. 

Now, we’re working too much. We kind of have to. I stay home with my son, but that only means for me that I need to make sure we don’t have to pay for any simple household maintenance--like the fact I woke up this morning to the toilet running. Or the garbage disposal that’s been out for a week and I just haven’t gotten around to trying to troubleshoot because honestly the thing kind of scares me. And it’s kind of overwhelming at first, all the things I don’t know how to do. But we are easing into it. 

I don’t know about you, but when I turned twenty-two I thought “I’m so old now” and I honestly thought I was never going to gain any new skills. Had I only known. It kind of felt like if I didn’t learn something as a teenager, I was never going to be able to learn it. Which is ridiculous but it certainly is harder to try to learn without hands on guidance. That’s one of the reasons I want to have these skills, and develop the skill of seeking out new information, so that I can ingrain these skills in my son early on. I feel like that would give him an advantage I didn’t have. That and not push him to go into debt immediately out of high school not even knowing what he really wants to do with his life. Maybe if he learns to work with his hands before he gets out of school he won’t look down on blue collar work like they tried to make us do. 

Without the hands on guidance, you definitely have to force yourself to watch the video or read the paragraph or study the diagram again and again and again until you’re sure you understand “this piece is this” or “these deductions are those” or “this means off and I won’t spray water everywhere”. Which is often more difficult than it really should be, but y’know. It is what it is. At least these days you can get video tutorial for just about everything and what you can’t you’re sure to find a step by step guide somewhere from Google. 

So the toilet is running. And I’m pretty sure it’s either the flapper or the float, I’m just not sure which or how to determine that. So I hopped on YouTube, and wouldn’t you know, first video that came up was a certified plumber showing exactly what to do and how to check. The garbage disposal won’t turn on, so I got on Google and after a few clicks found a nice little step by step to troubleshooting the thing. My husband’s pants lost a button, I YouTubed how to sew it back on. I wanted to make something new, AllRecipe had my back with about a million suggestions. We are in an age where the answers to everything are right here at our fingertips if we just look. Which means we can do a lot more ourselves, with a lot easier time learning than our parents learning from books or trial and error. 

And I am ready to start. Like, right now, let’s go get a sander and a table saw and paint and wood glue, Momma is ready to transform some of our old junk. Which, of course, stopping and thinking about it… It’s just a reach right now. Some day, I will have myself a nice table saw, and a nice round saw, and a nice nail gun. Right now tho, it’s very clear I have neither the tools nor the skills to actually take my kitchen apart and put it back together in a way that is more aesthetically pleasing to me. And really it doesn’t need it, like the cabinets need some paint but otherwise it’s a nice little kitchen. I’ve just been watching a lot of videos and vaguely hate everything. 

Starting your DIY lifestyle is ridiculously expensive up front. Just browsing through Lowe’s online with my fantasies all I can think is “oh that’s years and years and several raises away.” Lumber, of course, is pricey. So is paint, and glue and caulk and grout and my lord the prices on tile. But here’s the thing, you don’t have to start with the major projects. You probably shouldn’t start with renovating your kitchen as a total beginner. Find some of the smaller projects you want to do--building shelves, painting an old nightstand, putting up new curtain rods--that will build up your skills and help you accumulate tools slowly. Or, like in my case with a few items, borrow them if you have someone willing to lend it. Then it’s a matter of getting materials, which is slightly less expensive and (most) won’t go bad while you build up to the major projects you want to do. 

As for skills, or lack thereof, well YouTube has just about everything out there. I, knowing absolutely nothing about cars, learned how to change the oil in our old truck. It took probably ten minutes to find a video and maybe an hour of watching and rewatching and looking at the truck, but I can confidently say I could probably do it again with minimal guidance. Now I, knowing absolutely nothing about patching drywall, am watching a video how to fix a dent in our wall. I am mostly confident I can do it now. It won’t be super pretty or efficient right now, but I’m pretty sure I can do it myself. I’m trying to learn the skills I should have learned when I was younger so I don’t have to rely on handymen to keep my house nice and running smooth. 

Of course, this is because I, as a stay at home mom, am able to make plenty of time to do things myself. Right now my son is 7 months old and can be contained by gates and walkers and play pens, but I fully plan to incorporate him in helping me with projects as he gets older so he learns these skills that I’m struggling to learn as an adult. Let it be known tho, when I was working, I was absolutely fine with paying someone to come cover our gutters or fix our deck because that was just time I wasn’t willing to take out of my day or weekend to do. Which makes me a little mad now but at the time it was no big deal. And it really isn’t. DIY is great when you have the skills but we’ve all seen how DIY can easily go wrong, and then you’re paying more to fix your mess up on top of the original problem. So really, whatever you are comfortable with is what you should be doing.