With the prospect of moving looming, it’s time to finish all those little house projects that seem to never get done. It’s a little strange; we’ve done massive, massive renovations, but somehow we just seem to stall out on the little finishing details. Like, we were able to complete an entire kitchen renovation in the first trimester of my pregnancy, and managed to get the whole thing done in time to host Thanksgiving – but two years later, we still hadn’t hung the door to the coat closet.
Well, tonight that changed.
We’re working our way through a list of finishing details. It’s little things, like this coat closet door, or trimming and painting the banister on the stairs. All things we could have accomplished anytime in the years since our major renovations were finished, but didn’t.
And yes, admittedly, we did have two children in the meantime – but I have to admit that most of the stuff on our list is stuff that’s been unfinished since long before I got pregnant. We have lived in this house for ten years. It took us the better part of six years to finish the renovations to it, but in some ways once the house was comfortable enough to live in we just… stopped.
There are certainly a few big ticket items on our to-do list, too; we need to have a floor poured for the garage, and refinish the front porch, and build a back deck so that the french doors in the kitchen go somewhere. My perspective on a lot of this stuff has changed a bit now that us leaving this house is becoming a definite thing, with a deadline. I no longer need a gigantic, sprawling back deck. I just need one that exists. The front porch doesn’t need to be quaint and country charming; it just needs to have walls without holes in them.
So we’re working our way through. Our time is limited; even our weekends tend to be busy these days. But we’re pushing on, and crossing things off the list one by one. First up: a closet door, hung while our children slept peacefully upstairs. It’s happening.