Last week, I promised you results. So today, I come bearing gifts: the outcome of four furniture refinishing projects completed over the course of a few months. The process introduced us to skills (and muscles) that we didn’t know we had; apparently, they were lying dormant, only to be revealed when our need for attractive home furnishings became too much to bear.

First on the project list was this cherry-colored mirror, which I thought would look more modern in a darker mahogany stain.

Before:

Little did we know that tackling this project might break us before we’d really gotten started. Unfortunately, the process of sanding and staining is much more onerous than sanding, priming and painting. As I advised last week, when you’re getting ready to paint a piece of furniture, you just need to sand it enough to rough up the surface for proper paint adhesion. When you want to stain a piece of furniture, however, you need to sand it first to the bare wood (see below). And that process, my friends, is no walk in the park.

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You might remember me grumbling under my breath somewhere in these pages, complaining about all our mismatched furniture. Sound familiar? If not, here’s a primer to bring you up to speed: poor twentysomethings rely on the generosity of parents to furnish starter apartments, compile collection of well-made but totally incongruous castoff wooden furniture from different parents’ houses.

There’s a happy ending to this story, though, in which the poor twentysomethings purchase paint and sandpaper, and with a little bit of elbow grease, start to turn things around style-wise. We’ve written this happy ending, word by painstaking word, over the past six months—and now I get to share the results with you!

Well, to be more accurate, today I’ll be sharing one of the results with you, whetting your appetites for a full reveal next week. And I’ll go through the step-by-step process we used to make over each of these lovely-but-tired pieces. Sound good? Then here’s the “before” photo for our first subject, the antique bureau I pilfered from my father’s house. It has some great history, having come originally from my grandfather’s home, but the years hadn’t been too kind to it (or its brass handles—read their story here). These pictures were taken after a light scrub with sandpaper, but paint a pretty accurate portrait of what we were dealing with.

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Happy Friday, my friends! I’d like to celebrate the impending weekend with some end-of-fall photos—a perfect segue into winter, I guess, as we Chicagoans celebrated our first snowflakes of the season yesterday.

But the story behind these photos, I think, is even nicer than the results themselves. A few weeks back, I met up with the extremely talented Jacqui of Happy Jack Eats; we wanted to capture Morton Arboretum, in all its autumnal glory, on film. I took the train out to meet her, through new-to-me villages with sweet storefronts, and ended up having a blast. (I sincerely believe that the best part of moving to a new place has to do with the new relationships that follow. Between meeting lovely people like Jacqui and Maggie in person, hanging out with my hilarious coworkers, and reconnecting with high school and college friends, my heart has been quite full lately. So has my social calendar, but that’s something I can learn to live with.) We talked about photography and our futures, got ourselves just a little bit lost, ran into a troupe of zombie-actors, and had an extremely satisfying meal at Honey Cafe. Basically, there was no room for improvement.

So enjoy these snapshots (Portra 400 for the win!), then call up a friend. You know, just to chat. They make the transition from autumn into winter just a little bit less bittersweet.

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In the comments section of last week’s Business post, I heard this question a couple of times over: how does one learn how to budget? So, my lovely readers, I’ve returned with a few thoughts on the subject, and the promise of more details on the horizon.

Why the #@&$ do I need a budget?

Let’s be honest: budgeting doesn’t sound like a very sexy undertaking. Why even bother?

It boils down to this: most of us don’t have a lot of money to throw around. (See: Great Recession. Employment insecurity. Depressed salaries. Exorbitant student loan balances. Widening wealth gap. Sound familiar?) What we do have, then, we need to spend intentionally, in order to maximize our financial security and our enjoyment of life.

Like it or not, budgeting is the practice of intentional spending. Handling your money with intention helps you emphasize things that are important to you, cast aside the things that aren’t, and help you stay afloat next time you’re faced with a financial tsunami.

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Decorating an apartment sounds like good, clean fun, but in reality, it involves a lot of sweat equity. There are walls to tape off and paint, furniture to refinish (more on that soon!), and—inevitably—way too many Ikea purchases to weld together.

In my opinion, the best part of the decorating process comes before the big move: picking out a color scheme! In our previous abode, I made the mistake of winging it when it came to the color palette, and those random stylistic decisions never came together as a cohesive whole. This time, I vowed to be more strategic about the whole process.

Here, my friends, is the result:

After living with blue walls that were just slightly too vivid in our old place, I knew I’d go for neutral paint this time. Enter: light gray, which is more fun than beige but just as low-key. A sane wall color would allow for pops of cheerful pigment elsewhere in red, gold, and navy—a modified primary color scheme. Against this palette, I figured that bright white trim and deep mahogany wood pieces would make for especially crisp accents.

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It feels good to have my own space again. My belongings are finally unpacked (well, most of them, anyway) and put away in closets, cabinets and atop shelves—a sure sign of permanence in a housing situation.

There’s a supreme comfort in having your possessions accessible to you, isn’t there? As soon as I unpacked my cookbooks, which had remained sealed in storage since Virginia, I couldn’t stop tearing them from the bookshelves and rifling through their photos and recipes. I was ravenous not for the food, but for the return of a sense of ownership. Even if I wasn’t planning on making anything—and for awhile, the fridge and pantry were too barren to raid—it was still nice to know that Ina Garten’s Tuscan Lemon Chicken was there, just in case my eyes (or my soul) got hungry.

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The one downside of dispatching with all your student loans? When you emerge debt-free on the other side, you have to figure out a new set of motivations for your financial life. Not that I have much money to throw around, even now, but I’m a very intention-driven person: with one goal gone, another must follow.

With a huge chunk of my paycheck back in my pocket, safe again from the grubby fingers of Sallie Mae, I started to mull over what I wanted my money to do for me. And I wasn’t content to consider the question as a false dichotomy (splurge on luxuries with the excess, or hoard it for a rainy day?). After much thought, I came up with a mission statement for my money: I was going to invest in myself.

One aspect of investing in yourself is pretty stodgy-sounding, albeit important: socking away money in emergency and retirement savings. Those two things are the first things I do with my paycheck every month. And I’ll definitely sit you down here at some point, hand you a stiff drink, and talk to you about the intricacies of both of them.

But honestly, I think the other kind of investment in yourself—the kind where you figure out what you’re passionate about and educate the hell out of yourself to make yourself proficient in it—that’s the hard one. That’s harder than determining a proper 401(k) investment allocation, or setting up automatic deposits to your savings account. It requires you to dig down deep in yourself, ask some difficult and painful questions about why you’re here on this earth, and then believe in the answers—even, or especially, if they scare you. Most importantly, it then requires you to become the first investor in an (unproven) venture based on that dream.

But if you do it right, I think you could be the safest investment you ever made.

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Moving day came and went—our fourth move in two and a half years!—and now we’re steadily building our nest together, twig by twig, in Chicago’s lakeside Edgewater neighborhood. We still look around slack-jawed on a daily basis, unable to believe that all this high-ceilinged glory is ours. We don’t have nearly enough stuff to fill up the myriad closets and cabinets (three cheers for storage space!) and highly doubt that we ever will, given our minimalist tendencies. And while half of our belongings have yet to be unpacked, and the walls need a fresh coat of paint—Benjamin Moore’s Moonshine, if you were wondering—we already feel quite at home.

Want to take a look around?

I’ll lead you around from front to back. Above is our little dining nook, with its big south-facing windows.

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In a beauty contest pitting Chicago’s neighborhoods against each other, Goose Island wouldn’t exactly make the top ten. She might have some great insights to share during the interview competition—about the amazing beer brewed on her shores, or the fact that she’s the only island on the Chicago River—but even an evening gown couldn’t hide her homely features.

Nevertheless, I found myself walking around there the other week, around those streets flagged with banners proudly reading “Chicago’s Industrial Corridor,” in order to find Calumet Photo. It was there that a bespectacled guy named Fred taught me how to use my new Yashica Mat 124, loaded it up with a roll of Tri-X, and sent me out to capture the world on medium format film.

Unable to contain my excitement, I shot my test roll there without the guidance of a light meter. Somehow, the gritty black-and-white film, the striking square frames, and the eerie emptiness of the neighborhood made for some pretty cool shots. I can’t wait to see what else this thing can do!

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I’ve started writing a lot about home, an intention that I shared with you in February. But since I haven’t fully explained why I think these discussions are so important, or even exactly what I mean by home, I’d like to do that here today. Hold onto your seats!

Here’s the best definition of home that I can offer you: home is the place you always come back to. In a literal sense, it can be a physical place, defined by the boundary of your abode’s four walls, or a set of latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates you can pin down on a map. In an emotional sense, home is the place you come back to for comfort at the end of a long day (and who you are after your public or professional persona has been turned off). More broadly, it encompasses everything from the relationships you share with your partner, family, pets, and roommates to the community that surrounds you. In some cases, home might be a constant, something you could set your watch to—in others, it might be a fluid thing defined by some aspects more than others (like, say, your relationships, more so than place). So when I talk about “home,” I mean different things in different instances: your living space, your values, your people. It’s your personal sphere of influence, whatever that looks like.

As young adults graduating into the world, we don’t exactly lose our old homes, but we are expected to create new ones for ourselves—a heady task that probably requires more guidance than we’re given by our parents, educators, and society. I’m no expert on this matter, but that’s the point—none of us are. We’re leaving a previous life of structure for an undefined new existence. We make our way as best we can, and glean knowledge from our mistakes and experiences.

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