Well, it’s hard to believe it but we have had our farmhouse now for nearly a year. We wrote on August 17th, 2006, that we were going to closing…and although everything wasn’t final until a few months later, we started cleaning out the house that same weekend. There were moments of excitement and joy…and moments of despair, depression and complete wonderment at our naivety! 🙂 When we look back now and think about everything we’ve done here and how many things we’ve changed, it’s really incredible. And then we look at the long list of things we still have ahead of us and start thinking we might indeed be as crazy as some think we are…but at least we’re still having fun with it – most of the time 😉
One crucial thing to remember, which I may have mentioned often lately, is do not let yourself get burnt out when you start renovating a house, especially if you intend to do a lot of the work yourself. The first few months we only cleaned things out and moved stuff around…and then of course we did a few things like destroying our bathroom and laying a new wood floor in my now office…but it was mostly just a whole lot of physical labor and watching over our contractors until we could finally move in. That finally happened at the end of January and that when we started getting more inspired to take on more projects such as building our greenhouse and taking on the chicken coop…and there are certainly many, many more things we’re looking forward to doing with our own two hands (and perhaps a few borrowed hands from friends from time-to-time) .
But back to my point – it is so easy to just focus on trying to get as much done as possible that you start to get overwhelmed with it all. You look forward to every weekend knowing you have a massive lists of projects and random little things that really need to be completed and weekends are really the only time when you can put in any effort. So you work all weekend, ticking things off the list and realize at the end of the weekend that you still have a massive amount of things to do left on the list. So it carries over to the next weekend and more stuff gets added, diminishing any hope that you will ever get to the bottom of the list – and at some point it all just comes crashing down on you that it’s just too much and you’re working yourself too hard with no time for playing and no projects that you might actually be able to enjoy.
So this weekend, despite us playing last weekend (actually the party was quite a bit of work but still fun of course), we are looking to find a “fun” project for this weekend. We talked about going rock climbing but the weather is totally iffy these days and we’ve been so tired from barely sleeping last weekend, we’re thinking that sleeping until about 9 and just working on something like Jake’s chairs or building the couch in our chicken coop may be just enough fun .
And in the meantime, in honor of our nearly one year anniversary in the house, we’ll be posting some before and after pictures to not only show those who have recently found us what we’ve done…but also remind ourselves just how far we’ve come!!
