Reconstruction

"Look past the mess," the listing for our future home said. The place was absolutely trashed when we saw it the first time. There were fast food wrappers strewn all over the house, beer bottles in every closet, graffiti stenciled the garage, cigarette butts sprinkled throughout the lawn. Exploring past the obvious, we found all sorts of other gems: a broken bong in one of the smaller bedrooms, a picture of a teenager using said bong in the kitchen, tidy-whities (neither tidy nor white) strung up over the shower rod, and a latex glove in one of the toilets. I'm purposely skipping over one other item, because it deserves special mention in a future entry.

We spent days just cleaning. Our house.

Since then we've moved into renovation land, and I suddenly understand why there are five Home Depots and four Lowes within ten miles of our house. I get it. The figurative lightbulb (once I bought it) is on. All hail the home improvement store.

I spent last weekend ripping up the hideous tile in our entryway, extending our laminate flooring to the front door (that's new by the way -- no chance in hell that any of the old carpet was staying). As a bonus, removing the tile also allowed me to fix some of the problem spots with the hardwood (it was the very first section of the floor I worked on). The process took two days, and I had to pull up half the hallway to pull it off. In retrospect we were idiotic not to have taken out the tile in the first place. It looks fantastic now, if I don't say so myself.

I used to hate doing home projects. Anything wrong with a house was an annoyance. Now it's a challenge.