AmandaJC's Profile

CLUTTER. Oh my goodness. He just puts things down wherever. There have been times when 3 out of 4 dining room chairs, a large (4 foot long) coffee table, and half of our kitchen counters were all just covered in random crap. Now, I understand leaving a thing here and there, but not when it makes our whole living room and kitchen unusable!

What's worse is when I'm too busy and stressed to stay on his case about it, I just give in and start leaving stuff all over the place too because I think, what's the use in trying to keep it neat when failure is inevitable anyway? :/

My flaw: I take off socks and just drop them wherever I am. When I do laundry I have to wander through the house picking up my socks. Pretty sure this bugs him a lot!

Oh, dear. Open shelving for breakable items in a California home? I hope they're not too attached to any of that glassware because it's going to be on the floor in the next earthquake!

Absolutely beautiful home, though.

When I lived on my one, at one point I lived in a room with an "efficiency" kitchen (two hot plates, no counter space) and a tiny bathroom with just a shower, no tub. The whole thing was, I don't know, maybe 200 sq. ft. That was okay, I could live like that!

Living as a couple, though, I need at least one bedroom. I could not handle life in a studio with someone else. I'm an introvert and I need some space where I can shut the door and be alone! Right now we live in 1200 sq. ft. but we have a guest bedroom/office that isn't used very heavily. I think we could be okay living in as little as 700 sq. ft., but I would have to make my boyfriend part with a lot of boxes of unused things that he's packratting first. It would be hard.

I really love our spacious living room, though. For me, the biggest downside to having a super small space is that you don't have room to have more than a couple people over. We have a lot of friends and we like being able to have 20 people come over and play board games in our living room!

One man's amazing upgrade is another man's hot mess. This is definitely not for everyone, but it's very well-done. Hats off to the maker for not being afraid of something quirky and bold! And I don't mean that as a euphemism for ugly. Not my style but still cool.

Oh. Wow. I want to have that bathroom's babies. It is nuts how beautiful it is, and how much I want to shower in there.

I don't know how much you need to worry about paint toxicity, but I wanted to point you towards Safecoat (www.afmsafecoat.com). I haven't used their products but younghouselove.com recommend them for safe and non-toxic wood stain and sealer. It looks like they do have floor paint that's water-based, which might be good for you!

As far as drying times: I recently did a staining project. Everything was dry enough to handle within a few hours at the most so you could probably walk on it fine. I'd be worried about tracking any excess stain around with my feet, though. Plus, the directions for my polyurathane top coat said not to use the newly-coated wood for three days to give it time to cure properly. I think you could get away with doing it all at once (as long as you could handle not using the stairs for a few hours) but it would be best to paint/stain every other stair so you could be sure that you wouldn't accidentally mess up your hard work.