What’s a woman to do with herself when her plans are thwarted?
We had a move date. San Jose, CA to Foster City, CA on July seventh. We were all set. I gave my written notice to my landlord. I changed my address with the post office. I arranged my work schedule so that I would have time to focus on prepping the new house and the move itself. I scheduled movers. We purged and donated what felt like an entire household worth of stuff. I had a buyer in line for the appliances we needed to sell. We packed about half of our stuff. We took everything off the walls and patched it all up. Everything was all set. We made plans for where the furniture would go and the paint colors we wanted. We had two weeks left to our move date.
Until we didn’t. (Enter screeching noises here.)
To make a long story short, our new property hit a “snag.” (That is a euphemism, in case you didn’t catch it.) The icky, unpleasant snag led to one inevitable and very unfortunate conclusion: There was absolutely no way we would be able to move on time, and no way to know when the snag would be…unsnagged.
Well, crap.
In a panic, I rushed to contact my landlord and cancel our notice (thank God they didn’t have anyone lined up for the property yet). I contacted the woman who wanted to purchase our appliances and cancelled the sale, since she was on a timeline that no longer aligned with ours. I contacted the post office to cancel the change of address.
Surprisingly, cancelling all our plans was not as tricky as it might sound. It probably took me a grand total of an hour to do it all. Everyone, including my rocking landlord, was understanding and sympathetic.
Phew. (Relieved sigh.)Yep. OK. Hmm.
The kids and I started sitting around staring at each other. Um…what do we do now?
As I may have previously mentioned, I don’t do well with waiting. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a completely impatient, impulsive brat or anything. Only just a little. Less Veruca Salt from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and more like Cher from Clueless. Toward the end of the movie, that is. Anyhoo, when I know what will happen and when, I can totally handle it! But my youngest son said it best when he declared, “Mom, what do we do now? It feels like we’re in purgatory!”
Well said, my eleven-year-old scholar. Well said.
The worst part about the situation was the sheer powerlessness I felt. All I could do was wait, without any idea if we would be able to move in one month or five! No joke! I couldn’t plan anything. I couldn’t tell my landlord a new estimate for when we would vacate our property. Nothing!
A few days later, I found myself working with my social skills group clients. (You know, for the job that actually pays me money?) We were working on this mindfulness exercise in which you actively challenge your thoughts and feelings about a problem. It dawned on me (duh!) that these lessons applied to me too.
(Therapist, heal thyself, right?)
So I quickly applied these strategies to my situation. I began by challenging my thinking. (Needless to say, my thoughts were not very nice.) I realized none of my unpleasant and even outright nasty thoughts were doing me any good at all. I didn’t fully understand the situation and there was nothing I could do about it anyway. Constantly stirring in negativity was a completely useless waste of energy.
Next, I challenged my feelings. What was I feeling? Frustrated, angry, helpless, and stressed as hell! I had to ask myself: what good were these feelings doing me? There was no outlet for them, after all. There was nothing I could do about the situation.
What good is anger if it doesn’t act as a motivator for change?
What good is stress if not used as a drive to get stuff done?
I couldn’t help with the “unsnagging” business. So, what could I do? (I am a doer, and I always feel better when I am neck-deep in a project.) I realized I needed to do…something. But what?
I thought about all the things I had planned for after the move. I wanted to paint all the walls, I wanted to redecorate, and I wanted to paint some furniture. Hmm. That gave me an idea. If I started on projects for the new house, I would feel productive and as if I were working toward the goal of (eventually) moving into it. That would keep me busy, keep my focused positively on our new home, and keep me from ruminating nastily on things outside of my control.
I found paint in my garage the very next day and got to work.
I started with my blindingly stark-white craft and office storage cubbies. I decided they were boring and needed a little zing.
At the time I did this, my impulsive nature took over and I didn’t even think about taking before and after pictures. Heck, I didn’t even think about blogging about this until a couple weeks later! Anyway, I dug into the archives of old photos to do my best at a before and after photo.
I didn’t stop there!
I decided our new living room is going to have a beachy feel to it. It might be an overdone concept, but I really don’t care. We’ve already established I have an obsession with beaches so why not live the dream?
I had an adorable and well-built circular table I had been using for the last fifteen years. It had a black granite table top that I didn’t like very much, and it certainly would not fit with our beach theme.
So, I spent some time on the oracle. (That’s Pinterest, for those of you who are new to my posts.)
I discovered it was really easy to paint furniture if you used chalk paint. Sweet! I purchased some from Amazon right away. I also discovered…WALLPAPER!
Did you know wallpaper is self-adhesive now? I didn’t! I found links to YouTube videos of people doing all kinds of crazy things with it! They aren’t just using it on walls. I saw people covering kitchen countertops, cupboards, and furniture with the stuff. Brilliant.
So, here’s what I did to my table to make it beachy. First I spray-painted the top with a white primer, because I didn’t want the blackness of the table to show from under the light-colored wallpaper. Then, I simply applied the wallpaper as if it were a ginormous sticker. The edges of the circular table were damned tricky to manage. There were multiple swear words involved in the process and they still didn’t turn out perfect. Still, I’m happy with the end result.
I then painted the base of the table an off-white color, then distressed it so it matched the table top better. I decided I didn’t like it, so I repainted it again. Hey, I can be fickle if I want. That’s the nice thing about paint. It’s just paint! You can put it on, take it off, whatever. As long as you’ve got the time and patience, the sky’s the limit.
I absolutely loved the white color of the table. So, after it was done, I looked to my china cabinet and cringed. It was built in the late 90s and completely outdated. It was still a solid and completely awesome piece of furniture, but the color and style wouldn’t work for my living room plans.
Before you ask, yes, I know it’s weird to put a china cabinet in the living room, but the house is small and the dining room is being commandeered by my office. So the dining room is relegated to the living room. Deal with it, home deco snobs!
Yet again, I didn’t have the before-and-after foresight. . I dug into my archives once more and found this partial pic of the cabinet as it appeared before.
And after some chalk paint and new cabinet pulls, here is our beachy makeover! I think it is going to look stunning against the ocean blue paint we will use at the new house. As you can see, the drawers aren’t in the cabinet yet. We’re still waiting on the drawer pulls. They will match the cabinet pulls perfectly.
Did you know you can use chalk paint on glass? Sweet. So, I painted the glass shelves white, too. I left them out of the cabinet for now. We are moving, after all! No point in putting the fragile things back in just to take them out again.
I couldn’t believe how long it took to paint the cabinet. There were so many nooks and crannies! It took me five days to complete it (with two coats each of chalk paint and protective topcoat), but it kept me busy, it was fun, and it was worth it.
I didn’t stop there. I decided my new bedroom would be painted in pink, chocolate brown and suede. At least, that’s my plan so far. Regardless of how it actually turns out, most of my bedroom furniture would certainly be the wrong color.
Time for more chalk paint! I love this stuff! I started with a few small things: my mirror and stool. I also added an embellishment to the stool. I pulled out my vinyl cutter (hooray that I hadn’t packed it yet) and put it to use.
I guess this is my very longwinded way of explaining that our move was delayed, but we made the best of a bad situation. I’m proud of myself. I didn’t sink into a pit of despair about it, and actually kicked a little butt while waiting for things to work out.
Remember that I said my move was cancelled two weeks before we were supposed to move? Now, here we are once again, a month later, and it is two weeks before our move. For real, this time.
Everything has been resolved and we are once again set to move. We didn’t even have to wait longer than a month, thank goodness! Not too shabby. And, I got so much done in the meantime that I feel productive and positive about it.
