My Favorite Day of the Year

No, June 27 is not my favorite day of the year. J

 My favorite day of the year is the day that I am finally finished (or mostly finished) with my front yard and porch spring spruce ups.

I took a small break from painting and other indoor chores last weekend and worked outside. It was glorious and warm, and I thought it was going to be cooler on Saturday, but it really wasn’t, and I kind of overworked myself to the point that I was on the couch in my pjs by 4:30 in the afternoon feeling like an old, out of shape wimpy loser. One of the things I hate the most about getting older is that I can’t work outside the way I want to. I used to spend days and days planting flowers, pulling weeds, spreading mulch--doing whatever needed to be done and finishing it in a few days. I just cannot do that anymore, and I hate it! It takes me several weeks of weekends to accomplish what used to take me 2 or 3 days. And I don’t even plant the amount of flowers that I used to. Now, if I spend a couple of hours out in the heat doing all those spring/summer chores, I have to come inside for lots of cool-off breaks, and even then, I end up feeling like I am going to pass out and die of heat exhaustion right in my front yard. Good thing I live on a busy street; there’s a pretty good chance if I do keel over, someone will notice. And things take me sooo much longer since I have to come inside and cool off every so often. Ugh. Getting older is better than the alternative, but it sure does suck sometimes.

Even though I can’t work outside the way I used to, I still so enjoyed whipping my front porch into shape for the summer, even if it is almost July and I just finished it. I love my front porch; it is my most favorite thing about our house. The covered porch is one of the main reasons we chose this model of home to build. When we first moved in, I sat in a fold up lawn chair from Target on my new front porch in the evenings after the boys went to sleep, gazed out over the scraggly new sprouts of grass that poked up through a layer of straw and fell so in love with my house. That fall, I decorated the porch for the first time with mums and corn husks. At Christmas time, we bought wreaths, tied big red bows onto them, and hung them on each of the front windows. We draped garland with more red bows along the front porch railing and wound white lights through it all.

When spring came I filled the yard with flowers—pots on the porch overflowed with red geraniums, and mounds of vibrant petunias surrounded scrawny trees and filled in empty spaces amongst our newly-planted bushes in front of the porch railing. A few years after we moved in, Tony surprised me with a porch swing on Mother’s Day. I practically lived on that swing, watching the kids play kickball and whiffle ball with their friends or visiting with friends over a glass of wine. In those days, my porch seemed to be a magnet for neighbors and others who were passing by, and I loved it.  Back then, Tony worked nights, and there were very few of my evenings that were not spent on my cozy porch.

It quickly became the heart of my home in the warmer months, and I now spend time there as long into the fall as possible, wrapping myself in blankets when necessary. At the first sign of spring, the chairs are dragged from the shed, and I start dreaming of flowers and ferns and late evenings reading on the porch, even though it is still months away from when I can actually start planting. While I miss the days of hanging out with friends and neighbors while oodles of kids ran through sprinklers or covered the driveway with their chalky art, the best parts of my day are still those spent rocking the time away sipping coffee or wine or iced tea while reading or chatting with a friend on the phone. A few weeks ago, I got together with an old friend I haven’t seen for a while, and of course, we ended up on the porch with a bottle of wine. It was about 200 degrees and mosquitos were out in full force, but we didn’t care. We scattered citronella candles around our feet, wiped sweat from our faces, and after a few minutes, she propped her feet up on the railing and said, “You’re going to think I’m sappy and stupid, but I miss this. I miss hanging out on your porch.” She went on to tell me that times spent on my porch watching our kids when they were little were some of her very favorite memories.

Mine too.

22 years ago, I had such grand dreams of a happy home, filled with family and friends. That moment with an old friend made me remember the days when I relaxed on my porch while thinking, “Life just cannot get any better than this!”

I have been feeling rather sappy and stupid right along with my friend. (A few weeks ago, I wrote that all of our remodeling projects have brought up a lot of memories that I have been compelled to write about, and this is one of those times!) I have been longing for the days when I so very aware of how blessed I was with this beautiful home, because in the past few years, I have tended to treat it with more criticism than love. Whenever I am frustrated or discouraged with how things are going right now, I give my best effort to putting the brakes on my pity party and remind myself that I am still lucky to have this house, even if some of the shine has worn off. The inside may be a dirty disaster, but outside, I still have this oasis to escape to:

 

 

I love it even more now than I did the day we moved in and all I had to sit on was a cheap plastic folding chair. (And I loved it plenty even then). I have made great memories here, and it is my peaceful spot. Too bad I can’t live out there since it is cleaner and prettier than inside!

Very Slowly but Surely...

We are making little tiny bits of progress.

Very little tiny bits!

This past weekend, the weather was simply perfect. We don’t often see such days here in the Lou—days that are warm, blue-skied and sunny without being miserably hot and humid at the same time. Saturday was Rachel’s graduation day, so we accomplished next to nothing. I can’t say nothing at all because between me, Lauren and the one-armed bandit, we managed to fix the broken water pipe in the upstairs bathroom. Who knew I could be a plumber! Don’t be too impressed—my foray into the plumbing world was helped along by Tony getting his phone up in the giant hole in my kitchen ceiling and taking a picture of the pipe I had to help him fit in. My plumbing repertoire consists of holding a pipe from the underneath while he attached it from above in the bathroom. I have a bruise on my arm to prove it. :) Whatever. The broken pipe is fixed, the bathroom can be used again, but I still have a giant hole in my kitchen ceiling.

 Sunday, while I wanted to spend it painting the hallway and possibly the kitchen, my back was achy and right on the verge of kicking me to the curb, so I decided to supervise some yard work instead. Since we have been concentrating all of our housekeeping efforts indoors lately, the outdoors was sorely neglected and very weed-choked. I’m rather embarrassed to show these photos, but this is what the area in front of my porch looked like before Lauren and I went to work Sunday morning:

 

Why yes, you do see weeds that are taller than the bushes.

YIKES. 

This is what it looks like now, thanks to my girl who helped me dig up/pull weeds, clean up the piles of debris and spread mulch.

 

Lauren did most of the work, but I did pull a few weeds and trim the bushes. Amazing what you do when your husband has a broken arm and is pretty much useless in the yard work department. I’m just thankful I didn’t drop that trimmer and cut my nose off.

 

 

I still have things I need/want to do to get my porch ready for a lot of summer porch sitting, but I bought these ginormous flowers to hang.

 



My yard finally looks cared for and pretty, but oh, I paid dearly for my weekend shenanigans. Monday morning, I woke up to a back that clearly spent the night thinking of ways to torture me and make me miserable.

Seriously? Like I haven’t already moved through Plans A and B, now I have to come up with C? I honestly didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at that point.

I did neither and went to work. When I got home that night, I was determined that NO. MATTER. WHAT. I was going to get the hallway painted before I went to bed.

Yeah, that did NOT happen. I really did give it my best effort, but the more I rolled, and bended and stooped and climbed on a chair to do the trim, the more my back screamed at me, “Would you just STOP, you damn fool???”

I finally listened, and by the time I did, I was in so much pain I could barely stand at the sink to clean out my paint brush. I was in so much pain, that I sat down on my dirty, gross kitchen floor and cried. Then, I could barely get up, which made me cry even more. By the time Tony got home, I was on the porch reading, still in tears, and I'm sure he was thinking that I was being a big baby. My back often gives me grief, but it is the first time I have been in tears, and I usually just suck it up and carry on as much as I can. Though the tears were likely out of frustration as much as pain by that point because it seems like we just can’t seem to have anything go our way.

I have cried some more and gone to the chiropractor and regrouped once again. I have done nothing in the house this whole week because I wanted to give my back a chance to heal so it will decide to be nice to me.

So Plan C is this:  This weekend, I am hoping to finish painting the downstairs hallway and paint the kitchen. Then, if all goes well, big, giant IF, I am taking next week off to paint the kitchen cabinets.

In the meantime, I am on the hunt for the perfect shade of green paint for my kitchen. I think I have gathered every green swatch from every store that sells paint in St. Charles. I just can’t decide!

Thankfully, I am still feeling pretty positive most of the time, even if I do shed some tears now and then. I am tired of my dirty house. I am tired of floors that I can't walk on barefoot. I am tired of not being able to find things I need because they are packed away in boxes. But, I am still trying to enjoy this whole process and keep my thoughts focused on how lovely my house will look like when we are finished. If we are ever finished, that is.

I am crossing my fingers that my Plan C is the final plan, and that the next week is smooth and problem free.

Life...Under Construction

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how much I loved my house when it was brand-spanking new and full of promise. What I didn’t write was how the process of building our house 22 years ago was a bit of a healing process for me.  More than “a bit” really. I’ll get to that in a moment or two. Or three. Probably more knowing me.

Years ago, when I used to scrapbook, I wanted to make one that told the “story” of my house. I gathered photos, started thinking what I wanted the book to show, and then, I chickened out because I thought I would be too emotional. I didn’t want people to look through the pages and perhaps be embarrassed to read such personal things when my scrapbooks were usually light-hearted and fun. Back in those days, I was afraid of my writing. Maybe “afraid” is not quite the right word, but I had never written about emotional things other than in my own private journals, and even then, I often held back for fear that someone would discover them and read my deep, dark “secrets.”

Over the years, I have gotten better about sharing more of my heart when I write because my job often requires me to. Having a couple of special people in my life who have always responded in positive ways to my writing and encouraged me to be “real” without fear has also helped me to be able to open up a bit more.

So, here I am today. The ME from 1993/94, when our house was being built, would never in a bazillion years have written a blog. Well, since blogs had not even been invented yet, I couldn’t have even if I wanted to. But the thought of writing about my feeeeelings in a public way would have never occurred to me. I censored my words and thoughts when I was writing privately.

Yeah, those days are LOOONG gone. And really, I have to say “Good riddance!” to those days. I rather enjoy writing about things that are important to me, and some days, I don’t know where I would be if I wasn’t able to sit at my computer and let my crazy thoughts spill from my brain into and through my fingers. I don’t always share what I write with anyone, in fact, most of the time I don’t, but now, I don’t really care if someday someone comes across my journals. Even if I am still alive when they do, I won’t be embarrassed by them. Well, maybe I would be a teensy little bit embarrassed, but mostly, whoever someday comes across the things I have written will know that I have been real. That I was able to take the emotions from my heart and put them into written words. And they will know what and who mattered most to me since that is often what I write about.

So, here I am now. Not quite someone who is always willing to put it all out there, but someone who does enjoy writing about things that can be a challenge to write about.

Now, I will get back to the story of my humble home.

We spent the spring and summer of 1993 looking for a house to buy. Right after we moved into the groovy 70s pad, we talked to our landlord about buying it, but he wanted way too much money considering all the work we would have to do to drag it out of the time warp it was it stuck in. We also looked at other existing homes. But by far, our favorite way to spend a Sunday afternoon was going from one new subdivision to the next and wandering through beautifully decorated display homes. Most of them were far out of our reach price-wise, but we continued to tour and dream anyway.

We also spent time in homes and neighborhoods that were in our price range, and when we stumbled upon our current house, we fell in love with it. We didn’t, however, fall in love with the location of the subdivision it was being built in. So, we went to a neighborhood we loved, CC, and asked the builder if he was willing to build this perfect-for-us house we saw somewhere else, and he told us no, that he only built from his plans. Discouraged, we spent the summer continuing to look at both new and older houses, but we were leaning toward building new. Finding no other neighborhood that we loved as much as CC, we made our way back there in late summer, intending to choose one of the available plans.

Much to our surprise, when we finally told his sales agent which plan we were going to go with, she said, “Oh, if you like that house, you will love this one! It’s a new plan, and it’s been very popular!” When she showed us the blueprints, we were quite surprised to see that it was the house we loved in the neighborhood we didn’t love. Apparently, we were not the only ones who loved that home and wanted to build it in Cambridge Crossing, so the builder checked it out and decided to offer it in his development. It seemed like it was meant to be, and we were thrilled. We had found our new house! My excitement wasn’t even dampened a week or so later when I took my mom to show her where we decided to build, and I slid off a wet, curvy hill and hit a tree.

It has taken me too much time to get to the point of this story, but here it is: The time we spent looking for a new home that spring and summer gave me something wonderful and exciting to look forward to. It was the only bright spot in a very gloomy and sad time; I had experienced two miscarriages in the previous few months, and I wasn’t doing so well. We really wanted to have another child, yet it didn’t seem to be in the cards for us, and after four miscarriages, (2 before our son, and 2 after) I was ready to give up. Looking for a new place to raise our little boy Brandon put a smile in my heart and a stirred up my creative juices. I couldn’t wait to get out of that ugly 70s house that held so many bad memories and tears and pain. I had done what I could to make it homey, but it wasn’t our home, and I couldn’t wait to leave and start over fresh somewhere else. I began to think of it as leaving the dark, sad past behind me and stepping into a sunny, fresh new future where ugly harvest gold and ugly memories were just that…distant, old memories.

While the previous months had been filled with searching for the perfect home, the next couple of months became filled with planning how I would decorate, furnish and landscape. The house was much bigger than we would need with only one child, but we didn’t care. Better Homes and Gardens magazine became my favorite thing to read, and every issue soon had colorful strips of paper marking pages of furniture, wallpaper, paint colors and accessories I loved. We continued to spend our Sundays visiting model homes, jotting down ideas and making sketches. I collected paint swatches and spent hours looking at wallpaper samples. I knew that we would never be able to do everything we imagined, but we enjoyed every minute of the planning. While a new house certainly couldn’t come close to taking the place of new baby, it gave me something positive and happy to focus on for the first time in a long time.

Then, on a crisp, blue-skied day just before Halloween, I peed on a stick and the lines turned pink.  I was pregnant again, and I didn’t know if I should jump for joy or curl up in bed and cry.I did neither of those things, but I was in shock for sure. The fleeting moment of joy I felt was quickly overtaken by fear and disbelief, and I couldn’t help but think, “Why now?” I had resigned myself to not having any more children. In fact, I had a pack of birth control pills in the bathroom cabinet waiting for me to start taking them the very day I found out I was pregnant. I was finally on my way to being in a good place, enjoying my son, finding ways to be happy again, and I was completely terrified to hop back on the rollercoaster of emotions and crazy fears that I had no doubt that pregnancy would be.

In a state of panic, I called my doctor about a nanosecond after I took the test. The next day, I started bleeding. It seemed as if my ride on the rollercoaster would be short lived, and remember thinking that if I was going to lose the baby, I wished it would hurry up and happen so.  But alas, it did not, and my focus shifted from our new house to our new and growing (I hoped so anyway!) little bean. The day after we spent an afternoon picking out flooring, cabinets and countertops, I was seven weeks pregnant and bleeding heavily as we sat in front of the loan officer at our mortgage company filling out loan construction papers. I tried to focus and tried even harder not to cry. It has been 22 ½ years, and I will never forget the details…it was a blustery, rainy, frigid November day. As we drove home from the meeting at the mortgage company, cold rain streamed down the car windows and hot, burning tears streamed down my face as I prayed for, no begged, for God to let me keep this baby. I silently bargained with Him that I would give up on the house I loved if only my baby was okay.

The next day, an ultrasound showed us that our baby was, at least for the time being okay, but I knew there was still a long way to go. My life then became a whirlwind of weekly visits to a perinatologist, almost daily blood draws, progesterone supplements and ultrasounds while the bleeding continued.  

It was a rough couple of months. I spent a great deal of time that fall and early winter resting on the couch while my little boy watched Disney movies. We stopped spending our weekends going to model homes, but I didn’t stop dreaming of all I wanted to do to our new house. I still marked pages in magazines and created a cozy, restful home in my thoughts. If only Pinterest had been around back then! Christmas came and, finally, I was out of the first trimester. The bleeding I had experienced for 2 months finally slowed then stopped altogether. I was released from the specialist, and my twice monthly visits to my regular ob, who I dearly loved, put my mind at ease. I slowly began to relax and enjoy the pregnancy with my baby boy.

We began making the rounds of display homes once again. Since we lived nearby, we drove to our lot regularly, and I remember how excited we were on a March day when a hole in the ground and a mountain of reddish mud next to it meant construction on our home had finally began. Tony carried Brandon to the edge and told him, “This is going to be our new house!” I will never forget how Brandon looked at him with a puzzled look and said, “I don’t wanna live in that hole, I wanna live in OUR house!” As the days and weeks went by, we made daily trips to our lot and excitedly watched every bit of progress. We took so many photos as the skeleton of boards eventually turned into walls and window openings. When there were rooms we could actually walk around in, we did that and excitedly envisioned our life there. I so enjoyed watching our home take shape. It was an experience I will always remember and cherish. I would love to share some photos from when we were building and first moving in, but since my house is in disarray right now, and pretty much everything I own is packed away, including photo albums, I will have to share them another time.

By then, our little guy was bouncing and kicking around, letting me know every day that he was happy and well.

And I was happy. How could I not be? In a short time, we would be moving into a brand new house and a short time later, we would be joyously welcoming a new baby into our family. I thought about how not only was our new home under construction, but our very lives were under construction. We were so close to both dreams coming true, and it was one of the happiest times of my life. After experiencing so much heartache, good things were happening. And while those good things didn’t erase the heartache, they made it easier to bear.

I really believed and felt as if life was turning the direction I wanted it to go. Growing a new baby and constructing a new house at the same time was soothing my soul and slowly healing my broken heart. 

I was inspired to write this post because I am feeling much as I felt back then. My soul and heart are once again in need of healing after what has been a very rough year. Not for the same reason, and in some ways, this past year has been more crushing than the one we spent trying to have a baby. I can’t publicly write about it, not because I don’t want to, but because other people are involved, and the story affects more than just me. What is important though is that I find it kind of ironic that once again, this house is playing a vital role in my well-being. I have wanted to do most of these home renovations for years and was not able to get my husband to agree to any of them. I really had given up, and all of the improvements we are working on now have been mostly his idea. I did not ever imagine we would be in this deep a couple of months ago when he said, "Let's rip up the carpet in the dining room and office and put down wood floors." I also had no clue how healing I would find the process of ripping up old floors, choosing new ones, clearing out debris and choosing paint colors.

There have been many times over the years that I have really hated my house and wished that we could move and start over somewhere fresh and new. This whole renovation process has brought up so many memories from when we were building it, and it is causing me to fall in love with my house all over again. I won’t say I am in love with my life right at the moment, but I am working on that, too.

Even houses that are great and loved can use some love and sprucing up.

Just like life.

Speaking of sprucing up…I’ve been out of town all week for a work trip, and Tony had the flu, but I did manage to get the dining room painted before I left. I just love this color. I am still a looooonnnngggg way away from having everything painted that I want to paint before we put the floor down, and there is still a huge hole in my kitchen ceiling, but slowly but surely, things are improving!