Before + After: A Couple's Cabin in New York, DIYed During Quarantine
Photography courtesy of Yi-Mei Truxes
With all the time spent inside over the past year, there’s been a return to tinkering away at little projects: baking a loaf of bread, say, or stitching a quilt. Or, if you’re like Yi-Mei Truxes and her husband Gray Reinhard, renovating an entire cabin by hand.
Over 100-odd days inside last spring, the couple transformed their upstate New York cabin from its 1980s dark, dated interior to bright, white-washed, and quiet—all DIYed. "Looking back, we’re both extremely grateful that we had something like home renovation to keep us busy and motivated during that time,” says Yi-Mei. Join us for a look at the transformation.
“The cabin is located in the western part of the Catskills,” Yi-Mei says. “The cabin itself is situated atop a small mountain and is only accessible up a mile-long private, windy, unpaved road.”
The kitchen in progress. “My number one issue with the interior was that it was overwhelmingly dark and monochromatic,” Yi-Mei says, with “pine logs, pine shiplap, and pine floorboards and trim."
Before
After
The finished kitchen.
The couple preserved the bones of the place while brightening the interiors and doing away with the pine-everywhere look, stripping and whitewashing the logs and painting the shiplap a milky off-white.
The couple poured their own concrete counters ("this was one of the many places we were able to save, but it was also perhaps the scariest part of the renovation," says Yi-Mei). The cabinets are unfinished solid pine Home Depot units that the couple painted themselves.
The main room, with a stone hearth and the newly stripped and white-washed walls.
A hanging paper light and art print brighten the dining area.
Before
The bedrooms were paneled in pine.
After
The couple sheet-rocked the bedroom walls and coated them in “an earthy limewash finish."
A setup for simple outdoor dinners at the cabin, looking out at the valley below.