Almost three months ago we moved out of our house into an apartment. Janine and I were married over twenty years ago. (One of the reasons she married me was because I already had a house.) From the beginning Janine has wanted to remodel the kitchen. We have had other parts of the house remodeled. The first job was expanding the master bedroom and fixing up the bathrooms. We had a couple other jobs which included turning the back porch into a screen room and splitting the upstairs room into a family room and an office. Now finally she was getting her dream to come true.
Living in a small two bedroom apartment has been an interesting experience. We have been a bit stressed in the tight quarters, but everyone has adjusted. I’ve been fascinated by how little we see our neighbors. Of the seven other apartments on the third floor with us I’ve only seen people go in or out of four of them. And we rarely see people going in and out of these four apartments. I heard that all the apartments are occupied, but I wonder.
Homeschooling hasn’t changed all that much. Janine still gives assignments to the girls. Our daughters do a fairly good job of staying focused and working through their topics. I think the biggest change is they have been operating much more independently. Janine has been greatly distracted by the dozens of decisions she has had to make.
Janine has been thinking about the new kitchen for years, but after the remodel started she was surprised to learn just how many choices she still needed to make. There were hundreds of little details. She has created a design committee on Facebook. Fairly often she would post a question about counter tops or appliances or what to put on the floor, and get dozens of comments. It has been an iterative process. For example once she decided on granite she then had to pick out which type of granite. Due to the marvels of technology she could take pictures of samples, post them on Facebook and get lots of feedback on which pattern people liked, and why.
We should be moving back into our home in another ten days. Soon this will just be a chapter in our family history. We’ll be able to look back and remember the fun things like having a pool!
3 comments:
Wow! This sounds like my life! We have remodeled our house adding a master suite, and expanding a kid's room (we had 3 kids under 4 at that time and I was pregnant with #4). We've updated one, and remodeled another bathroom. We redid our porch and now on schedule (for summer) is remodeling our kitchen. I hate the process ... exactly because of all those decisions that have to be made. I would have loved to have had access to that design committee. Way to go Janine!
Wow, the hotel and remodel process... whoo. Expensive stuff there! Enjoy your last few days!
Sleep-Deprived - Janine is going to be giving a speech at our Toastmaster's club on Wednesday. I asked her about the topic. She said she would talking about a lesson that she learned from the whole process. While the friends on facebook make great suggestions, if she were to do it over again she would hire someone to help her through the process.
Happy Elf Mom - we didn't stay in a hotel. We were in the apartment complex across the street and down just a bit. Still expensive, but not as bad as a hotel.
Post a Comment