Documenting Life as We Knew It | Renovation Journal

Documenting Life as We Knew It

I tried to figure out the best order in which to present our renovation and have decided that as long as it makes sense, I’m going to take you through the project just as we lived it. That means there will be some jumping around and coming back to projects, and waiting right along as we did to get to a “finished” project! We diligently documented our progress with a gazillion pictures and my renovation journal. Every  once and awhile, I will give you a little “Break” from the actual projects and post an image or entire post, like this one.  Just images I came across or memories that surfaced as I was going through all of the renovation documentation. It will give you a sense of our life as we experienced it along the way!

And some of those experiences involve things like having to move your bed from one room to another as projects progressed around you and warranted a relocation. You have to realize that we lived in utter chaos for so long and even when we first got the house, we had to sleep here the very first night with nasty stinky carpet and I’m sure more mice than I want to think about! Fortunately, the guest room had the least offensive carpet of all so that was our first  bedroom. We decided pretty quickly that we wanted to get the master bedroom done early in the process so that we would have a clean and “finished” retreat to go to at the end of each day. Unfortunately, the guest room would not be the last place we slept in before moving into our master bedroom. Floors and painting needed to happen upstairs and so we ended up moving our bed down to what would be my office until the master was ready. And after we finally moved to our master, my office served as our first legit living space, but you can’t see that picture quite yet as it has finished walls and flooring! Sorry…you’re travelling along with us, every step of the way!

You Make Do

I guess my point is that you can get really resourceful when you need to. During the time in which we were waiting to close on the house, we started to purchase items we knew we would need if for example, there was a sale on the item. We purchased both our fridge and our dishwasher before we closed because they were deeply discounted right before Christmas. We were able to have the store hold them for delivery and so they arrived long before we had a place to put them. So what if the fridge lived in the foyer for months and the dishwasher in the office until which time we needed it to be our bedroom! You just make do!

And lest anyone thinks that I was always flexible and cheery about all that “making do”, let me just say I was not. I have a very anal retentive personality and fortunately for me, I also have a husband with the patience of a saint! And while things like appliances in odd places did drive me a bit nuts, overall, given my tendencies, I think I did really well. My saintly husband may have a different recollection however!

Some other “making do”: how about taking nothing but baths for nearly two years because  Warren’s first shower in the house resulted in a leak that created a steady downpour in the sitting room below? Or cooking, dining, and watching TV in what our son Brandyn referred to as our “Toilet Kitchen”(you’ll have to YouTube “Toilet Kitchen” from The League to fully appreciate the reference but warning,  it is a bit inappropriate!)

And while the sitting room never contained a toilet, we did use it for pretty much everything else long before we had any completed living spaces. Remind me to tell you just how many different foods you can microwave over the course of about eight months while waiting for your kitchen to come together!

So that’s it for this “Break”; I thought I’d give you a quick  look into our lives back then. It served as a good time for me to remember that we all have the ability, with gifts from God, to make do with what we have during any season of our lives. I never thought I could get through some of the inconveniences that we did and for so long, but it feels good to be able to look back through all of these images and see just how far we’ve come. It’s easy to forget about the progress you’ve made when everything still seems chaotic. But what wonderful things we can learn about ourselves after getting through such challenges! And what small challenges they really are in the grand scheme of things! Back to projects in the next post, promise. {Shelley}