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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In my last post, when I asked you about a time when your home was in control of you, you responded with a wealth of different answers. Dana talked about the breakdown and renovation of her new house, and Stephanie, Shanna, and Jacqui talked about the stress of homes invaded by clutter (whether good clutter, like wedding gifts, or bad clutter, as seen in Hoarders…eek). Both of which are very different from my unfortunate, pest-related experience of home invasion, but it was clear to me that there was a thread tying all those experiences together: when we are forced to take care of our homes, rather than our homes taking care of us, some crucial balance is thrown off.

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Glamorous, this post is not (you may have gleaned that from the title). But after all I’ve been through since August, I need to get it off my chest, and I think it’s something that needs to be said. I can’t start talking about making a new home until I talk about losing the old one.

Here, in a nutshell, is what I’ve learned: When you lose control of the stuff inside your apartment, you lose control of yourself.

I was never the biggest fan of Falls Church, Virginia, but I made do for about a year with fine, even pleasant, results. It’s because my 500-ish square feet of one-bedroom was just that: mine, as much as any renter could claim. I picked out paint colors for the whole place, and managed to furnish it handsomely. Ted and I moved in together, merged all of our boxes of things, and had just managed to get to the point where each item had its own place in a drawer, closet or under-bed storage. After long commutes and sometimes frustrating workdays, we nonetheless came back to a place we had customized to hold ourselves and our possessions both comfortably and stylishly.

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Ask a little less of yourself. When was the last time someone said that to you? Because I have the sneaking suspicion that the minute I learned how to crawl, society started wagering about when I’d get on my feet and walk already. Whenever I accomplished something big, it was celebrated sincerely, and then assumed I’d wake up the next morning to try for something bigger. And so on and so forth, until I’d adopted the treadmill as my own, as an intrinsic thing I couldn’t shake, that would periodically drive me nuts and require Jersey Shore marathons and copious amounts of brownies to face the next expectation I thought I had to live up to.

Whew. Is it just me? I certainly hope so. I hope somebody told you, preferably early on, that there’s another way. That you’d be okay if you stopped to enjoy the scenic overlook for awhile before driving single-mindedly on to the next landmark. That it’s normal to tread water every once in awhile, saving your strength for the next push forward. It’s been a realization I’ve come to naturally with age—that is, with experience and perspective. Still, I hope your parents, teachers and mentors gave you a knowing pat on the head whenever you got that crazed look in your eyes and said “Shhh. Just relax.”

After a tiring few weeks, that little voice in my head started telling me the exact same thing. So last weekend, I made no plans. I soaked in a tub full of lavender Epsom salts and finally read the last chapter of that book I’d been working on. I watched entirely too much True Blood—plus a particularly bad Lifetime movie about a haunted sorority—and didn’t even let myself feel like a waste of space. I went on a bike ride at sunset just to feel the wind whooshing in my ears, then let the mosquitoes chase me back home. I even managed to clean my apartment, but only because it felt like active meditation, especially with something on the record player and the smell of Murphy’s Oil Soap hanging in the air.

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The countertops have been 409-ed, the floors vacuumed of Styrofoam peanut residue, and the dishes lifted from cardboard boxes into my refurbished cabinets. Ostensibly, the construction workers (or as I like to call them, “my sometimes roommates”) have left my apartment for good after two weeks of disruptive work and ridiculous shenanigans (one day, they made no repairs but did take the time to unplug my fridge). It’s at times like these—or, more realistically, after times like these, when you’ve had a chance to reclaim your 610 square feet—when it seems appropriate to substitute the occasional agonies of adulthood for the simple pleasures of childhood. In the middle of a June heatwave, that most certainly means ice cream, and lots of it.

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I thought I was done with living out of boxes. Far away from college now, I no longer have to switch dormitories every year or shuttle between Washington and Chicago as the summer waxes and wanes; I’ve got a lease, people, and the quiet stability that comes with one. Right?

Not this week. With contractors here daily to renovate everyone’s kitchens and bathrooms, and “all personal items” ordered out of those rooms (that’s a lot of personal items. Like, a lot), I’ve been stumbling bleary-eyed through my life. You know, trying valiantly to ensure that I don’t leave the coffee-maker napping on my counter after breakfast, or my dishes anywhere in, on, or near a dishwasher, drying rack, or cabinet. Somehow, though, I actually managed to eat all my CSA vegetables. Aren’t you proud of me? Admittedly, though, I’m too tired to remember how I achieved such a feat. A recap is in order, to jog my memory:

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I’m fresh off the heels of a post about sunning myself in California, and even fresher off the heels of turning that daydream into a concrete plan (just bought my cheap-o plane ticket last night!). But in a stroke of irony, the powers that be have decided to turn my Southern state into a snow globe.

In the end, though, this is not a particularly cruel twist of fate. In fact, it only feels like my old Chicago home when the inclement weather starts a-blowin’. After this particular winter, I’m convinced that the gods have tried to ease me into my starter year in Virginia by unleashing the flurries — just in time for Christmas, but not stopping there. Case in point: Snowpocalyse 2009, also known as That Time The Federal Government Shut Down, when my town drowned in 18 inches of snow; this past weekend, when the sky surprised us with half a foot of powder; tonight, as we’re in the midst of a blanketing of three to six inches; and this weekend, which will bring another major winter storm.

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