A House Becomes A Home

My wife and I bought our house over two years ago with our hopes held high and our sleeves rolled up.  Or maybe it was with our hopes rolled up into a low interest FHA loan.  Regardless, we bought the house in foreclosure and faced many obstacles along the way, but nothing compared to what we would face after we held the deed in our hands.

There were the little things, the cleaning, the painting, did I mention the cleaning?  And then there were some bigger things.

  

The living room had no flooring, there were piles of trash in the basement and scattered throughout the backyard. In the kitchen, the dirt inspired linoleum  had empty squares where one would expect to find appliances. 

As is means just that.

This is all you, sucker.

None of this—including the internal combustion engine sitting on the basement floor or the bumper found in the woods behind the house—managed to scare away my wife.  We dove in, almost literally, and got to work.

With the help of friends, who showed up expecting light work and plenty of beer, we put flooring in the living room, tore down layers of wallpaper, replaced toilets, and light fixtures.  We sanded, patched, painted, scraped, cleaned, and, at times, cried (I did so on trips to Lowes, my wife didn’t tolerate crying in the house). 

We worked furiously, and a month later we moved in. Being the patient type, I proposed on our first night in our house.  My line of thinking being, if we didn’t kill each other during that, then we should be good. We got married and soon after the projects continued, one after another…..after another….after…you get the point.

Today the house is still a work in progress.  There are several things we want to do, but many of them will have to wait. 

For now, I’m content with the current project at hand, our most ambitious undertaking to date. 

Speaking of which, the other night  I was hiding in the kitchen, when I heard my son squealing from his room. I smiled to myself as I listened to his mother talk to him in soft soothing tones. 

A sudden warmth came over me, and I felt an intense glow on my chest as tears began to well in my eyes, (I had spilled soup down my shirt and it really, really, hurt).

My wife came down the hall--the hallway in which I once spent an arduous weekend peeling away three layers of pink wall paper, the baby wide awake and content in her arms. I stood on the floors we had put in, smiling at my little family and thinking to myself, 

So this is what our house was missing...