Wednesday, April 14, 2010

My house

When I bought my house nine years ago I thought it was amazing. I was 25 and my boyfriend and I were moving out of a bachelor apartment to a four bedroom, semi-detached home away from the big city. The house needed a lot of work….it was approximately 30 years old when we bought it and although it had been upgraded somewhat….counters, roof and carpeting were all new…. a lot of major items needed to be addressed, such as the paneling on the living room walls, the peel and stick tile in the kitchen/hallway, the very old single paned windows, the gardens (my pleasure), redo the front step, add more insulation to the attic, the back patio needed to be graded away from the house and we also wanted to take all the wallpaper down and replace it with paint – to name a few. I think the first thing we did was replace the windows and sliding glass door. We replaced the peel and stick, replaced the furnace, added insulation to the attic, replaced the carpeting on the stairs and in the upstairs hallway, re-did the front stoop (twice) with interlock, replaced all the light fixtures in the house, graded the back patio, painted the kitchen cupboards, removed all the wallpaper, painted the house twice over, completely replaced the main floor bathroom down to the studs – whew! All this in nine years as well as getting married and having two children. I affectionately call this house “the Money Pit” as it reminds me of that glorious house that Tom Hanks bought and had to gut and rebuild. The nice thing is that the house finally looks complete and I walk in everyday feeling like I could have visitor’s over without having to explain why we have no baseboards or why the light fixture is hanging from the ceiling. It’s a nice feeling but there is still so much to be done…and we are woefully short on resources. I’m trying to be patient as a kitchen renovation is not realistic right now and neither is a complete basement overhaul. I feel frusterated. I’m looking for solutions but am finding it hard too when all I see are dollar signs. I console myself with the fact that we will eventually sell the house, win the lottery or get a loan to do a renovation but for right now it will have to wait. It’s no wonder I find it hard to relax, we’ve been going non-stop since we moved here! Have you done any renovations to your home? Did you hire someone or do them yourselves?

3 comments:

  1. You and your young family worked so hard to make your house so much better! House renovation is a money pit, and a never ending job. But, oh, to live in a house just like your dream house, must be heavenly. And to build something that turns into an investment in time, must be so rewarding. I rent. If I owned a house, I know it'd be a money pit too, but it would also - hopefully??? - bring me joy. Good luck Tanya!

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  2. Francesca, thank you for visiting my blog. For me it was necessity to do these renovations but it's far from our dream home. In my mind my dream home looks much like yours...a beautiful home in the country.

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  3. We have been doing renovations on and off, more or less constantly, since moving in here 7 years ago. There are still big parts of the house that I don't like. And as we've lived here new issues have arisen that didn't used to exist. That's life, I guess.

    We have done some stuff ourselves, but we've always contracted out the big stuff. And I've been glad for that. Yes, it's expensive, but so is total marital breakdown over installing kitchen cabinets.

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