Good morning!
I’m kind of about to lose my mind. Home ownership is testing the limits of my patience (and checkbook) right now.
Seriously. My living room still looks like this. It’s been a month now. To say that this doesn’t feel very feng shui would be an understatement. Walking in my door every day makes me want to cry a little.
Here’s what happened. As I’ve written about recently, I’m doing a lot of work around the house to make home a sanctuary. The biggest piece is a kitchen facelift. As part of this I put in granite countertops, painted the walls, had a new under mount sink and nice faucet installed, had a cabinet extension built, had some new lighting installed, have a new dishwasher and microwave going in and painted the cabinets. Oh, the cabinets.
The cabinets are original to the house and were custom built for the kitchen. Replacing them entirely was out of the budget so I decided to paint them and change the hardware. I have a fabulous painter who has done all the other paining work in my house but I agreed to have the cabinets painted by another guy who did them as a trade for free yoga for his wife for a year. BAD IDEA.
He assured me he had experience with painting cabinets but nothing was done right. He used the wrong kind of paint on the cabinets so the paint was peeling off as soon as I tried to put things back in, the work was “unfinished’ and messy in a lot of places, the cabinets weren’t hung back up straight and he used the wrong color! I chose a warm gray but somehow he came back from the paint store with this blue-green-gray instead.
After all of this came to light he said he would come and fix everything but instead ended up bailing on the project and left me with this mess. I called my painter who has now had to spend double as much time as it would have taken originally to fix everything. I should have just paid him to do it to start with. You live and you learn!
The good news is that he’s almost done and the work looks AMAZING. (Charlotte people, let me know if you want my painter’s info. I’ve worked with him for years and his work is great and prices reasonable.) And check out the color. 10 times better, right? I think the work will finally be wrapped up today and I can start putting my home back together again. I can’t wait to live without the smell of paint.
Some might take one look at their kitchen in this state and decide to get takeout. I look at it as a challenge. It’s been an entertaining month of shuttling between the living room and the kitchen with a variety of kitchen tools, pots and pans. And I’ve been washing the same sink full of dishes over and over again. Fun times!
My therapist told me this is the universe teaching me that even when I am trying to make my life feel calm, comforting and orderly that I still have to learn live with a certain degree of messiness and chaos. Some things we just have no control over.
I can’t wait to show you pictures of the FINISHED kitchen! Soon!
In other home ownership news, I got home at 9:30 p.m. last night and found two gigantic limbs in my driveway. My first thought was “thank god my car wasn’t parked in the driveway” (I’ve already made one insurance claim for tree damage several months ago) and my second thought was “please god don’t let there be a hole in my roof” (that happened last year right after I put a new roof on my house).
The good news is the roof seems to be okay. The bad news is that I’m going to have to hire a tree service to do some limb removal on that tree. This is the third major incident with limbs falling and causing damage.
I need a hug. And a cupcake.
Have a good day! I’ll be back later with a my new favorite way to stretch my hips. Get excited, this is a good one!
