Harold's Renovation Blog: #112: One Week Of Living “Furniture Free”

Have you heard of the Furniture Free movement? Well, it piqued my interest so much that we’re challenging ourselves to try it for seven days (Sherry reluctantly agreed). So what does it mean? And how does it promise to improve our lives and homes? Will it make us happier or just annoyed? Plus, we were lucky to skate by without any damage from Hurricane Florence, but it did sent us on a rollercoaster of panic, relief, and then more panic, which left a big impression on us – and led to a pretty great reminder. We also share how we navigated a weird challenge involving holes in the duplex, and why Sherry’s getting a tattoo.

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WHAT’S NEW

If you’d like to help those affected by Hurricane Florence, this is a great round-up of organizations you can donate to (we chose to give to the Foundation for the Carolinas relief fund).
You can also read more about our last big hurricane here in Richmond back in 2011, Hurricane Irene, which left us powerless for several days and dropped a large tree on our neighbor’s house.
The photo above is from last Saturday in Cape Charles, when it was just overcast but pretty much devoid of wind and rain. The water was a little higher than normal and at some point on Friday it must’ve washed over most of the beach (see the darker, damp sand on the right side of the picture?) but otherwise there wasn’t any evidence of the hurricane.
And in the graphic below you can see how the storm’s track managed to miss us entirely while doing a complete loop around us (I marked Richmond and Cape Charles with yellow dots) – except for the tornados it brought on it’s way out, of course.

But in lighter news, here’s the article about the trend in house tattoos – and below are some of the examples they shared.

And here are some of the types of tattoos that Sherry has been pinning. I don’t have sources for all of these, unfortunately (here’s 1, 3, & 6) – but I labeled them all to make it easier for your to tell Sherry “my favorite is number X!”

Furniture Free Living

Apartment Therapy’s article “I Tried Furniture-Free Living for a Week to See if I Felt Healthier” is where I learned about this trend – and the author’s conclusions are really interesting! Scary Mommy’s article on it is also a good read.
Apparently it’s not that new either. Here’s a 2016 profile of one family in Good Housekeeping.
The photos shown below are a few that I found while searching #furniturefree and #furniturefreeliving on Instagram. For the living room below, the homeowner renovated her condo to specifically incorporate a furniture-free lifestyle.

image source

And again, since Sherry and I are trying on a “light” version of this for one week, our general parameters are:
- Work standing up (buh-bye desk chairs)
- No sitting on living room furniture while the children are awake (meaning we can still decompress there at the very end of the day – but otherwise it’s sitting on the floor/standing/squatting/kneeling/etc – but no couch)
- Try to eat meals standing (when it makes sense – not at restaurants!) – Sherry hates this one the most
- *Our children are still able to use our furniture as they normally would
We’ll report back next week to let you know how it turned out!

image source

We’re Digging

You can see in the photo above what we meant about the holes in the duplex front doors being all over the place. Like, why? WHY?!?
This is the handleset we ordered that makes everything look even and covers all of the old holes. We did NOT end up with a photo of them installed in time, so here’s one we found online. We got them in the dark bronze color.

Lastly, you can find the Slow Burn podcast wherever you listen to our podcast. We burned through Season 1 (pun! ha!) about Nixon’s resignation last month and the second season about Clinton’s impeachment is currently underway. It has been such a fascinating way to better understand these moments in American history.

If you’re looking for something we’ve dug in a past episode, but don’t remember which show notes to click into, here’s a master list of everything we’ve been digging from all of our past episodes. You can also see all the books we’ve recommended on our Book Club page.

And lastly, a big thank you to Annie Selke for sponsoring this episode. Their 20% off Labor Day sale is running August 29 – September 5th across their entire website. Plus, you can visit annieselke.com/YHL to get a look at their new fall collection.