Posts tagged Chesaning MI

This one time? In Chesaning? We bought this house? And it looked like this:

And we, along with lots of  help from our family, worked on it for 5 years straight in this order: 2nd floor, 1st floor, outside. Most people would do the outside or 1st floor first, but we knew if we did that, we’d get burned out and we wouldn’t finish the 2nd floor. A few years later, it looked like this:

And then we added a garage and it was done and we relaxed for a whole summer before putting on a 2-story addition and then, hahahaha, we moved to Columbus and rented. For four years. Because an experience like that scars a person.

The kids were looking at The House photo album with me and when they came to this series of pictures of the 2nd floor bathroom and hallway:

Liberty said, “ZOMG, where did you live when the house looked like that?” She couldn’t fathom that we would actually live on the filthy 1st floor, but we did:

I didn’t tell her that one very special day, three months after buying the house, the furnace guy was late for his appointment with us, so she and Lena were conceived in the midst of that filth. From the look on her face when she saw the above pictures, I think that knowledge would only add to the trauma of her birth story.

Oh, hello sexy. Wouldn’t it be a great idea to get pregnant with one or two babies exactly 44 days from the date this picture was taken? After all, we have a house, let’s put some babies in it!

And that’s what we did. The 2nd floor was finished the day I came home from the hospital, but I couldn’t do stairs, so we still slept on the 1st floor in what would later become this:

That’s all paint, not wallpaper. And it looks a bit dated already, but I guess that was seven years ago. I wonder what we would be doing to it if we still lived there today.

The 1st floor was completely finished right after Lena and Liberty turned 2, then we started on the outside. So we lived on the 2nd floor with them for a couple of years. I don’t remember it being as hard as it sounds. Maybe because Bryan worked steadily, so there was always progress to keep me excited. The 1st floor was painted over the course of I have no idea how long, but I remember a long stretch of time where Lena and Liberty’s naps consisted of me sneaking out from under them to do a faux painting technique or stencil or whatever. I totally got out of painting the 2nd floor because I was on bedrest in the hospital. I was so smart. Our relatives were excited for us because of the house and the coming twins, so we used them all up. I bet once the babies came and the fog cleared, they were like, WTF were were we doing? But whatevs.

So there were walls to move, hallways to make smaller in order to make a bathroom bigger. The electrical and all that crap had to be done. The kitchen was moved from one room to another and we knocked down a wall to open it up into the dining room. The roof, the siding, the drywall, the everything. It was hard. We don’t ever want to do that again. Watching HGTV sometimes gives me panic attacks. And that’s one reason we’ve reveled in the freedom of renting for the last 4 years. REVELED in it. Yes, it was super sad to leave that house, but it was definitely freeing to move into an apartment and not have that sense of ownership and pride because those senses make us work super hard and it’s always easier to work less hard. But now we think it’s time to re-join the land of grown-ups. We’re looking at houses again. With great fear. And excitement. Mostly fear. We’ll never do a rehab to that extent ever again. Probably. But we’re ready for something. Maybe.