In The Words of a Novice
Our computer seems to be feeling overworked and decided to stop cooperating with us, so I am unable to upload new photos. Therefore, I will be reposting the very first post I ever wrote for this blog when home remodeling was still a new thing that Joey and I had recently thrown ourselves into. I can’t believe I was already feeling disheartened then, only several months in to it. I had no idea how bad it was going to get or how much we’d become capable of doing.
I’m hoping I’ll have a new post up tomorrow, assuming our computer realizes it is not allowed to take unauthorized breaks. One other thing, on a totally different note, based on the tightness of all of my jeans, I’m fairly certain I’m growing this baby in my ass, not my belly. Just wanted to let you know.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
This is a small example of the “remodeling” we’ve been doing to our house. By “remodeling” I mean tearing apart 90% of our house all at the same time while trying to live in it. After 5 months of taking it apart, we have yet to start the “put it back together” phase of the project. But we’re really close…
What are we doing to our house? Originally, the house, which was built in 1913, had 4 bedrooms and 1 bath, all of which were ugly and had plaster walls that needed repair. (By the way, the plaster has horse hair in it. Apparently is was used as a binding agent.) When we finish…someday…the house will have two bedrooms, a master suite with its own master bath and a half bath on the first floor (so a total of 2.5 bathrooms), as well as a rec room in the walk up attic. When that’s completed…someday…we will still have the kitchen and front hall to remodel. But then we will be done! Someday.
Why would we do this? Good question. Mainly we were naive, first-time home buyers and first-time “fix-it-uppers” who had an unrealistic idea of what remodeling involves. When we bought our house, we knew every room needed work. And we knew we would need to do the work ourselves. All that aside, as a woman who adores historic architecture, I fell in love with this house the moment I saw the detailed banister, built-in china cabinets and original push-button light switches.
Do I still love this house? Another good question. Since moving in, we have learned that someone had a heart attack in the bathroom and died there, which freaks me out – the bathroom is already hideously ugly without imagining a corpse in it. I have also developed a new appreciation for modern conveniences, like dry wall, wiring from the 21st century and heaters that were not at one time fed with coal. I still appreciate the character of our house and the history of it, but the blood, sweat and tears of remodeling have washed away my enchantment with it.
Would I buy an old home again and fix it up? Absolutely. I have romantic notions about historic homes – I imagine the events that occurred within the walls 80 years ago, how those people lived and what life was like for them. Although historic preservation is very important to me, in my mind, preserving an old home is less about saving history and more about respecting those who once lived in it. If you stop and think about what a home really is, you might find it’s the place where you lived your happiest and saddest moments – it’s where a large portion of your life happened. Dreams where erected with the walls, and for me, those dreams still somehow continue as long as the building remains standing.
There are few thing I love more than discovering some hint of the people who lived here before us – it’s like walking back in time and getting the tiniest peek at who they were. So far, we’ve found an old high school jacket, a stamp from 1942, a pencil with a business name and our address on it, a valentine for a woman named Judy, part of a shoe and old crates from the car company that was once up the street. I’ve saved all of it. We plan to stick a note and maybe a picture of us into one of the walls before closing them all up. Should someone ever find it, I hope they might wonder about who we were. Hopefully they won’t be thinking “So, these are the idiots who messed up this house.”
An oldie but a goodie:-)