Stairway to Heaven

Behold! The Hallway of Divinity! (Do you hear the angels singing, the echo of their voices ricocheting off the drywall?)

Hmmmm. Perhaps I built that up a bit too much. Maybe if I start with the ‘Before’ photos the dramatic introduction will be more appropriate. Okay, let’s start over. Pretend you didn’t see that photo.

Hi! Three months ago, my hallway looked like this:

It was such a mess that I didn’t even know we had that dog. She just turned up when I took that picture. Random dogs aside (that’s actually my parent’s dog, Clover), our hallway might as well have been a furniture superstore because it was loaded with three dressers, two sets of large bookshelves and miscellaneous extension cords that ran down from the attic so we could have electricity on the second floor.

Yes, that’s right. There was no power on the second floor. I had one extension cord running to a bedroom for a lamp and an alarm clock and another one in the bathroom for a construction-style work lamp and my hair dryer. Life was so glamorous back then.

But my point is actually this: That hallway – chock full of furniture – also had no electricity, so as soon as the sun set, it transformed into a set from a murder mystery movie where a poor young girl dies from being battered by the sharp edges of her protruding furniture.

Life remained this way for a year, until we decided to hire an electrician and a drywaller to make the hallway a friendlier place – one where thuds and profanities don’t fill the air and there are things like walls and lights.

It was exactly one week and two days ago that I turned on a light in the hallway for the first time in 12 months. Although it may seem mundane, the action of flipping a toggle switch from ‘off’ to ‘on’ and seeing the hall flood with light brought such a deep feeling of gratitude and relief that I almost cried. It was dark out, but I could still see our perfectly smooth new walls – walls that I, for the first time since buying this home, did not have to hang myself. And those beautiful new walls were already textured and painted, a job that was completed by a professional in just over an hour.

Does this mean my days of DIYing are over? Not a chance. We still have a kitchen, a bathroom, a dining room and an attic to improve, and no matter how amazing it is to see rapid progress happen while you’re away doing other things, there is no replacement or comparison for the overwhelming pride that comes from doing a job yourself. Not to mention the loads of money it saves.

So, as I mentioned before…Let’s try this again, shall we?

Ladies and Gentlemen…Behold! The Hallway of Divinity!

Hallelujah.