Ohhhhhh my sweet people. How in the dark you've been about the past six months of our lives...which is the way I like it sometimes. But when friends text me bright, chipper things like, 'You make the home renovation process look so fun and easy!' I think to myself...hmmmm...I am clearly not painting this in an accurate light.
How do I put this...it was not fun and easy. It was the exact opposite of those things times eleventy-billion. It was hard. And constant. And all-consuming. And stressful and dirty and I would honestly not recommend it to anyone. Buy a beautiful-move-in-ready home IF AT ALL POSSIBLE.
Here's a quick little timeline for you:
November 1st - Look at the house for the first time. Decide it's way overpriced and way too much work. Basically write it off and never discuss it again.
December 8th - Realize the price dropped, decide to go look again on a whim.
December 9th - Bring parents and contractor. Decide to make an offer (WAY UNDER ASKING PRICE) at 2pm. #itsfinethisisfine
December 9th - Offer is accepted at 6pm without negotiations. WHAT. And the seller requests closing BY DECEMBER 31ST. ALSO WHAT.
*Christmas is spent talking about down payments and financing and taxes and expenses and utilities and getting quotes for all the work we're about to do. I'm still depressed about it.*
December 29th - Close and get to work! Except Josh is plowing snow all day + and we have a family Christmas happening over the weekend. Not stressful at all.
So in less than two months, we went from living our sweet little content life in our Ames house to renovating + moving to 4,200 SF home on an acreage. Plus we needed to find renters for our Ames house. And ENDLESS AMOUNTS of snow needed to be plowed and invoiced.
All of that that in and of itself would be *enough* for any two sane people to handle. Now please take into consideration that Josh and I just don't work well together on large, expensive projects, exactly like this one (might I remind you about The Great Tile Floor Project of 2014-15). And this was set to be our biggest, most expensive 'project' to date.
Josh is an extreme perfectionist. I don't know how else to describe it to you, except to say that it is EXTREME. I see a space, transform it in my mind, decide the paint color, the pictures for the walls, the furniture placement, and conclude that it will all look amazing in the end, despite a few flaws...but nothing I do can convince Josh that no one will ever see the small imperfection on the walls/floor/doors/ceiling. It's ALL HE SEES. It's still all he sees. If you've been here for a house tour, you might comment on how great the wood floors look in the old part of the house...and you'd be right! They look AMAZING! Josh spent a week working so hard on them and it really shows! But he is the first (and only) person to point out all the 'bad spots' and tell you how bad the floors look overall. It makes just me want to kill him, in front of company, no less.
It continually frustrated me that he couldn't step back and see the bigger picture... and that if this house didn't meet his unrealistic PERFECT standard, it would all be a failure (I continually reminded him that if he wanted a perfect house, we could have built a perfect house). I just call imperfection 'character' hang a wreath on it and move on with my day. Josh is good with millions of tiny perfect details, I am not. I'm good with letting certain things go due to deadlines/priorities/schedules, he is not.
Thank goodness we had an unbiased witness in our presence most of the time...in one day Brent laid our dining room floor, met Josh's crazy Aunt Kerry, overheard us in a decent argument, and I fed him lunch...by the end of it he was part of the family whether he liked it or not, but I was SO thankful for his perspective on things. Aside from doing the jobs we couldn't handle (rotten siding, building countertops, replacing windows), he was the professional voice of reason when Josh and I couldn't agree on something. Brent's answer trumped either of our preference and that was invaluable. If you ever do anything like this YOU NEED A 'BRENT.'
Right or wrong, my standard is always much lower than Josh's. I'm a BIG FAN of the eyeballing method and the 'good enough!' phrase. Josh only sees one perfect way of doing things, end of story. As we all know, there is a time and place to use each of these approaches and have success, but to say we clashed on how to do almost everything would be...an understatement.
So our house renovation was a whole lot of what I just described. Me standing back, seeing the bigger picture, deciding it was 'good enough' or that at least it would be in the end...then Josh coming in (typically exhausted from plowing snow) to tell me how I should have done something, pointing out the imperfections *argument ensues* we land somewhere on someone's side (or occasionally in the middle). Repeat for two months.
It's true we balance each other out, and it's cute sometimes. Josh is the meticulous-details-man and I'm the grand-big-picture designer. But when it comes to projects like this, we are such polar opposites and when that gets magnified to the extreme...it's just not so good. But if you're married you know all of this. I'm just trying to be real, although we appeared cute at parties or on Instagram, we were not cute in January.
Moving in without having a kitchen sink, master bathroom sinks, or kitchen countertops wasn't great. The water heater exploding on move-in day was less than ideal. The un-repairable dishwasher, smoking light switch, incessant mouse infestation, leaky master bedroom doors, extensive carpenter ant damage, and the (current) surprise, non-stop, undetectable roof leak are all just items on a long list of extra issues that we encountered during our little fixer-upper experience. #itsfine
Last year on August 5th, I posted a picture to Instagram with the following caption:
"Yesterday we offered on a big beautiful fixer upper farmhouse on an acreage. And I prayed that God would give us a quick and decisive answer and that's exactly what we got. A fast no. So it's not what God has planned for us, which is obviously better than we can imagine, but for a minute we wondered if THIS was the ONE we've been waiting for. Tami called with the news and the first thing she said was, 'God is protecting you from something,' and she is so right (she always is). So today I'm back to being fully content where God has us and the farmhouse dreams are on hold for the fourth time...but I know we can trust him with those dreams."
I'm not crying, you're crying.
Do I think this house was an amazing undeserved blessing from God? Yes. I still fully believe that despite the ups and downs and hardships we've had. When we sit on our porch with friends until 2am or watch Mav play with the dogs and ride the Gator to the burn pile to dump his sticks, it feels like home and it feels perfect. 100%. I have a porch that WRAPS AROUND TO OUR BEDROOM. It's more than I could have ever dreamed or asked for. He took our desire for a reasonable white farmhouse with a front porch and multiplied it into something so much greater than we imagined.
Do I ever want to do this again? Absa-fricking-loutley NOT. Never. Someone texted me last week asking if I would take on a small wall-paper-removal job and I wanted to say, 'not if you paid me all the money in the world.' Ultimately the hard work was worth it. We now know the potential we saw back in December wasn't completely crazy. But there was a lot of crazy to GET to this point, and and it's too much for me to recommend doing a fixer upper of this magnitude, while raising a family/running a business/trying to stay healthy/alive/sane. That's as honest an assessment as I can give.
But wow, I really do love our house.
MmB
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