Time At Home

It feels redundant to say that I’ve been spending a lot of time at home these past couple months. We all have, so it’s not new information. It’s just something that is necessary and its own kind of adventure. We’ve lived in our house for nearly six years, and I can confidently say that I haven’t ever spent this kind of time here. 

I love my house. I’m just the kind of person that is usually not at home. But that has changed over the past few months. And I think I’ll be spending more time here, even when it’s no longer a requirement. It’s been good for me in ways I’ve never expected. I’m learning to appreciate my home in a way I didn’t before.

When we bought our house, I loved the bones of it. It’s more than one hundred years old and full of character. The house felt comfortable from the moment we walked through it and I knew we would live here. We put an offer in that night. Out of everything, my favorite part was the front porch. It’s the kind you can sit on during a thunderstorm, feeling the breeze and never getting wet.

For everything we loved about the house, there was something we wanted to change. Let’s just say that the previous owner’s style was quite different from ours. It was a good house, but it wasn’t our house yet. That would take time and work that we were excited to do.

The night after we closed on our house, I was already taking a crowbar to a built-in entertainment center in the living room. In the two weeks it was ours before we moved in, we ripped up all the carpeting, stripped all the wallpaper, and had taken a sawzall to the wall that had been built around the now missing entertainment center.

Since then, we’ve almost always had a part of the house in some level of construction zone. We’ve done many of the big projects, so the in progress areas are smaller than they used to be. It’s either that, or after a while you stop noticing that there is always something unfinished. When we do finish a project we take the time to admire it, but we’ve already mentally started on the next one. Sometimes we’ve moved on before we’ve done the final touches.

We’ve been itching to start tearing apart the attic and the kitchen, but usually my dad comes to visit a few times during that level of project. He is much more of the expert than we are. He’s our foreman of every major project, and he teaches us as we work with him. So those projects will wait a little longer since we’ve been limiting all travel because, well, it’s a pandemic.

So I’ve been working on the finishing touches of projects long since finished. Last month, I finally primed and painted the French doors that were once a wall with a tiny window in our dining room. Doors that could have been painted any time in the last four years. Tomorrow I’ll use the wax crayon to cover nail holes in a window frame stained and installed three years ago. I’ll use the brown caulk to fill in the gaps in all our wood trim. And the next day I’ll varnish the replaced pieces of trim that still lack their final shine.

It’s tedious work, these final touches. But it’s work I’m strangely happy to be doing. It took close to 20 hours to paint the doors; almost half that time was applying or removing tape. No wonder I didn’t want to do it after spending months slowly layering mud to even out the wall around the doors. Now though, spending two days in the same few feet of my dining room, everywhere I looked I could see the work we’ve done. Now, I look at the door and wonder why it took me so long to open the can of paint I bought last year.

I’ve spent the last month looking around my house and realizing just how much we’ve done over the past six years. I don’t think I’ve ever appreciated every project in the way I do now. Until now, I haven’t spent enough time looking around my house and seeing the countless hours spent building, sanding, staining, and painting. We could have done it faster if we hired other people to do it, but I like that we’ve done it all ourselves. I like hanging out with our foreman at the end of a days work, paying him in bananas, beef jerky, and PBR.

One of my favorite projects we’ve ever done has been the front porch. Maybe because our front porch is my favorite part of our house. It took about three months to complete and I’ve always believed it was absolutely finished. But since I’ve been home so much, I’ve been spending more time on my front porch than ever before. It was comfortable, yet something felt unfinished. I’ve realized the porch itself was done, but we had never completed the room.

So, the other day I used the scrap wood leftover from other projects to build a bench and a coffee table. I found the tile I had bought for a practice project I never got around to, and I found the leftover paint from when I did the kick plates on our stairs. I spent $20 buying new stain and a saw blade that would cut through tile. And, I impulsively bought a mint green plant stand that makes the perfect little end table.

Until recently we had three Adirondack chairs on our porch. I’d sit out here sometimes, but I wasn’t on my porch enough to realize that I didn’t like sitting in the chairs for very long. There was nothing uncomfortable about them, they just didn’t make my front porch feel like home. When my bench and table were ready, we kept one chair on the porch and moved the other two to our back deck. It’s been a finishing touch I never knew our front porch project needed.

Our front porch is now my favorite coffee shop. I used to leave my house to work in a coffee shop when I needed a jolt of creativity, but now I don’t have to. I don’t even need to put on shoes. It didn’t take much to transform my porch; just being home enough to realize what it needed. Out here is where I do almost all my writing. And, I know I’m going to love watching storms roll in. I’ve even named it Bert’s Porch, both for my dog and my own nickname.

I believe that your home should be a place you feel comfortable and happy. It should be a place you enjoy, and ours is a happy place. I’ve known that we’ve worked hard turning an old house into our home. But before this spring, I might see the work we’ve done and only notice the kitchen floor we need to replace. Now though, I notice the time, precision, and memories that have gone into every detail of every project. 

It’s taken spending more time in our home to realize that there have been a lot of projects. Every room has been customized in at least several small ways. Looking around, I actually find it a little overwhelming, how much we’ve done. I still see the projects we have left, but I have a new appreciation for what’s already here. Our house might need more work, but spending more time here, I’m realizing how much we’ve already made it our home.