For the last few years my husband and I have been renovating the house that we bought in March of 2018. I’ve been posting pictures of it on my social media and writing up articles about it since we bought this money pit… And I was finally, finally, starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. That light might just have been a hanging bulb at the two-thirds point, who knows!?! (Full disclosure- The house is done and sold. It was a LONG slog to finish it that I’m still mentally processing… When I started writing this, I was deep in the trenches.)
It’s exciting when you get to that point in a renovation, when you start testing paint samples on the walls. Right then I had these beautiful stripes on 6 or 7 walls, just to test how they look in different lights. One looked too green…one looked too brown…one looked too blue/purple…and then there’s that ONE, that One that still looked White Grey on every wall. Finding the right paint color is almost like finding the right pair of running shoes or the best chocolate bar, sometimes you just know when you’ve got The One.
I feel the same way about tile, when you find the right tile combination things just fit…And in this last year when everything has gone truly sideways, heaven knows we all need things that are soothing.
While this Covid period has been unsettling for everyone, our family has had more upheaval than most people that we know. In February of 2020, my husband was offered a job hundreds of miles away from our project house (the house we were living in!). Our initial thought was for him to move ahead of the rest of the family and I would stay behind so the kids could finish the school year while I managed the finishing of the house. We figured this rough patch would last a few months, 3 or 4 at most. I had been paying close attention to the news, I was very aware of the Covid threat, but when we made this plan and he signed for the job there were 2 cases in the United States. We all know what happened with the numbers from there.
March 13th. I got the Voicemail Blast that nearly stopped my heart. The schools were shutting down in-person instruction, until at least the end of March, due to Covid-19 concerns. Classroom teachers would be sending out activities for each grade, using their chosen digital platforms each day, please make sure to check my email for these instructions… With one phone call I’d become a Home School Teacher and half my day of construction was gone. Each day that we worked on homework, there was a different issue to work through, it took at least 4 weeks to work the kinks out of the system. Remote learning went through March. Then through Spring Break. Then the governor extended the remote schooling mandate through the end of April. I’m spending half of my day working on the house and half of my day being a home school teacher; not in that order. I was going to bed well after midnight every night just so I could have some time to myself, but I knew the situation was becoming unhealthy.
My husband meanwhile started his job hundreds of miles away in mid March. Imagine moving into an unfurnished house last April…back when no one could find toilet paper or cleaning supplies and half the grocery store shelves were empty? Getting him set up in our empty house was no picnic! Thank heavens for the kindness of a couple guys working at Home Depot who tipped me off to a shipment of toilet paper that was being unloaded the next morning. The half pallet that was delivered was gone by 10am that next day. Thankfully, my husband had gone over there shortly after they opened. Home Depot toilet paper may not be the fluffiest stuff, but it sure beats going without!
When the Governor announced that the schools would not be resumeing in-person in instruction during the 2020 school year, I will admit to feeling the “depths of despair”. I could not see a way to continue home schooling two kids and finish a house and keep all of us safe with Covid cases rising quickly.
As often happens in life, blessings come from those around you who are inspired from above. Knowing about the bind I was in, my husbands parents (who live only a couple hours from the new job) offered to have the kids come stay with them while they finished the school year remotely. In the same week, my Mom decided that she was not going to wait until she felt that it was safe to fly again to come help me on the house; she was going to drive herself across the country…. So at the end of April I tearfully left my kids in the loving care of my in-laws and drove back to the construction site/house that felt like a mill-stone around my neck.
I took these pictures about a week before I stared hiring drywall people. I knew I would need reminders of how much progress had been made while I was working. What I didn’t know was just how much I would rely on these pictures, the nearly eternal optimism of other people and my own capacity burying my sense of panic in order to deal with the job at hand.
Things did get easier once my Mom got there…
TallpixiDIY 