THE BARE MINIMUM

I. LOVE. WINTER. I love everything about it. Sitting by a fire, watching the leaves change, taking a hike in the freshly fallen snow and even, on occasion, shoveling it. One more thing I love about this season is that most days it forces us to stay indoors and FINISH projects we started in the wretchedly hot, humid summer. It was on one of those particularly hot days that we took sledge hammers to our first major project: removing a wall between our entry and nasty, old kitchen to create a bright, airy, inviting living space. What stands before us now is a bare naked room, waiting for our creative hands to work their magic. As we draw plans for an expansion of our outdoor kitchen to make it a permanent fixture in our home (our summer project) the ground is still too frozen to break ground so we've turned our attention to a much warmer climate: our soon-to-be family room. Where once stood a moldy, rotten kitchen sink and broken refrigerator with greasy hand prints, now lives a beautiful built-in which will house a television and our library. We chose to use bead board, (purchased at the Home Depot for $25/4x6 sheet) which most people use for wainscoting, as the treatment on the entire wall behind the bookshelves. Joe loves the bare wood but I think, at the very least, we need to put a stain on it so the wood and its beautiful texture pop. To do this, I headed to the Home Depot and purchased several sample cans of MinWax wood stain. I came home and just like I've done with paint samples for clients (where I paint an entire board...not just a tiny swatch...so they can get a good feel for it) I stained several scraps of wood to get a better idea of how the final result will look. Minimum effort should garner a great return!

TIME TO COMPLETE TASK: Ten minutes to stain one wall, one hour to dry.

COST: Can of MinWax wood stain at the Home Depot or Lowes: $4-11

STRESS LEVEL: doing the bare minimum to make something beautiful: LOW