Home Projects

We are working on a whole house-worth of projects lately. Every week much of my spare time has been spent working on our house. There is SO much to do! We had purchased this home as a massive DIY project, a neglected fixer-upper full of plenty of quirky 'character'.

It's time to finish all the endless to-do's and make this house pretty enough to entice future buyers. So. What does that mean?

In part, it means we finally are addressing the thing that I've wished most to alter about our home- the cosmetics of the kitchen. For the past three and half years, we've been busy like a triage nurse. It seems like there were always a multitude of projects waiting to be addressed, and there often was a bigger, more expensive project that would pop up unexpectedly to demand our full attention. This past summer it was our dead AC unit and insufficient duct work that needed attention and significant resources.

Before that it was our badly-leaking roof that always made a mini waterfall down the inside wall of our home when it rained. The wall was always saturated and began to disintegrate. Yeah, that project was rather important to address.

Before that it was our bad tile job in the shower, where the home builders had installed tile directly over drywall without any moisture barrier of any kind. Seriously. The first time we scrubbed the shower in our new home, the tiles popped out of place, disappeared into the wall space,and left behind gaping holes. Fun times.

Each year we've had massive projects to address in this place.

Finally- FINALLY- we are getting to the cosmetics. This month I have been busy refinishing all the cabinetry, painting every bit of door/trim/baseboards/wall, and patching drywall (the walls were in SUCH a bad state when we bought this place. it looked like a hockey team had free reign for team practice in here, with holes and dents covering each wall liberally.)

We've pulled down the nasty fake-butcher-block back splash in the kitchen, removed poorly-made shelves, removed some counter tops (and my Destination Imagination commitments have equaled a couple of months of missing counter tops....we've just been too busy to finish this project!), and removed boxes and BOXES of cracked tile flooring.

It's satisfying to see the progress happening in our home, even if it has been a perpetual construction zone for the past couple of months.

It will continue to stay a construction zone for several months, I'm sure. My vision of the end product is quite lovely.

Here is Matthew taking a turn with the hammer drill to remove kitchen tile. Oh heavens, it's nice to see all the horrendously-mismatched tile begin to disappear! The entire house has random colors of tile flooring, with no rhyme or reason to the random sections of various colors.

During the noisy demolition, Joseph and Daniel took refuge in our reading tent.  

Most days my hair is splattered with small dots of various paints, and my hands are perpetually paint-stained as we work on repainting every interior surface of this place. It's satisfying to see the transformations happening. 

I feel like it's an analogy for myself. I'm like the fixer-upper house, full of problems inside and out. It's glorious to see the Atonement of Christ at work in my life, gradually removing my character flaws and replacing them with prettier, nicer qualities. What a wondrous transformation to see as I look back over my lifetime. 

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