Oh My Sanity

I think that I am having issues with my sanity. For the past 2 weeks our house has gone through some major renovations. We have wanted to get new windows since we moved into the house 2 ½ years ago. Every winter we have had to hang layers of blankets over the windows to cut down the draft, but that only partially worked. All winter long it is either way to hot or very cold. So with all the talk of rising natural gas prices, we decided that now was the time for new windows. And we figured as long as we were getting new windows, the 50 year old siding need an update. Of course now is the perfect time to get our leaky roof fixed too…for the 3rd time in about 18 months. And then there was that huge dead tree dropping branches on our house…We had somebody come and cut the tree down, and we gave all the wood to a family in need of heat, and wow it was a huge tree, I could only get my arms around half of it. It was one of the tallest trees on our street, I would love to see what it was like before it stated dying. It was sad to see it go, but now it will help keep some one warm this winter. For some reason I thought that it would be a good idea to upgrade from dial-up service and take the plunge into the world of high-speed internet…since I spend entirely too much time updating my webpage and I was sick of wasting time with a slow connection, I also thought that as long as I have the cable guy out here for the internet, I would get basic cable. And of course I had to schedule installation the same day that the contractor doing the siding and windows was coming. From 8am when the cable guy showed two weeks ago, up to present time my life has been a spinning vortex of confusion and chaos.

So now that the roof over our bedroom doesn’t leak any more, we can gut our bedroom and get rid of the damp and the dank, along with the mold and the mildew. Very exciting. So everything in the bedroom is packed throughout the house, I couldn’t even get to my studio table for over a week. That was depressing. Our bedroom is mostly empty now, except for the bed that suddenly has nowhere to go because in the middle of everything else, our kitchen has been gutted and of course everything in the kitchen had to go somewhere…it was small and tiny, which made cooking difficult…but also we need to replace the ceiling around the chimney because of the big hole that dripped water when it rained. (Sigh) Hopefully it won’t leak there anymore either.

Yes we Knew it was a fixer-upper.

So now the back of the house that was all windows is all plywood and I have no sunlight at all in the whole back of our house, along with half of the southern side…talk about depressing. The windows are actually supposed to start to be installed tomorrow. Just in time for the really cold weather. The contractor doing the siding and the windows did the siding and shingles on our shed that my husband built last spring that he never got around to finishing. So we actually have one project finished. And as long as we are getting new windows and new siding and a new kitchen and a new bedroom, of course we had to replace the doors, well 2 out of 3 for now. It’s an efficiency thing. We went to Home Depot this afternoon and got 2 new doors, thinking that we will accomplish something else today. After my husband got our old front door out, and we were getting ready to install it, he found a crack in the glass….big bummer. We got the last door in the style we wanted that was in our price range…Now the Home Depot in our town is 5 minutes down the road…the next closest Homey is 45 minutes way. Big big bummer since we have been without a stove for 3 days…man I sure am sick of cereal and take out…because of the huge hole in the front of my house we had to cancel dinner with my dear friends, one of them being the supreme webmaster, so we had leftover pizza…again. I think that I have overdosed on all my favorite take-out places.

I think that we have about 2 more weeks to go and I won’t have to climb over stacks of boxes to find a bowl to eat cereal. I am glad that we are doing a lot of the work, we have always done most of the remodeling ourselves, mostly the indoor jobs. We gutted our tiny bathroom last winter, we knocked out a closet jutting into the bathroom and added space and rearranged the whole thing. My husband does tile and for the past 6 months our bathroom has been the nicest room in the house. It was actually a winter-spring job, lasting about 4 months. It took way too long. So it is nice to know that all of this work that we are doing now will only take 4-5 weeks for the most part before I can get my house back. When we were fixing up our bathroom, we went for 1 whole month with nothing but a toilet in the bathroom while we figured out what to do about the plumbing. When all was said and done I think the one thing that pulled everything together was our wedding at the end of May. I think the vanity and cabinets got installed the day before every one helping with the wedding arrived. Thanks to all our friends who offered their showers!! And now it looks like everything for this overwhelmingly huge project will be done just in time for my family to arrive for Thanksgiving. As long as I have an oven to cook dinner, I will be happy enough not to have a meltdown. After seeing everything involved in the siding and the windows I am so glad that we hired some one for that. I am soo glad that our home equity line went through before it got too cold.