The first step toward an eventual backyard renovation began today, getting rid of the random mound of rocks and dirt sitting at the foundation of our house that just holds water there…
As you can tell the lil lady was extremely interested. The landscaper soon found he had a “helper”.
It has begun, it will take time, a lot of time. But we’re taking baby steps, necessary baby steps.
“You put in a french drain system? Sweet! I bet you’re really loving that.”
“Dude! LOVE the new roof and gutters man, it really shows off the house. Makes it like home ya know?”
What? You’ve never really walked into someone’s house and uttered those two things? Yeah, me neither. But see, that’s the balance of patience and renovations. We’re spending money on the big things right now, the foundational things, the absolute must have done things. And? While necessary, kinda sucks. It’s not the fun stuff. Being a grown up is hard to do.
We knew we’d need the french drain. Thought it was one of those “eventually we’ll get to that” things and not a “Oh wow! Look at that water coming down the basement walls!” kind of thing.
Patience, patience, patience. We have to remind ourselves of that as we look at our white walls and sparse original furniture (while I’m not knocking the $150 craigslist couch as its good with small kids definitely – not exactly our style).
It would be fun to spend that money turning this:
Into something like this from Falling Waters Landscape:
Or perhaps turn a room into something like such:
And so I’ll keep telling myself (and R), “Patience, patience, patience. Someday, someday, someday.”
“Patience is a virtue.”
“A man who is a master of patience is master of everything else.” – George Savile
“Endurance is patience concentrated.” – Thomas Carlyle
There’s a million quotes on patience. All true. All things I need to hear, because in this renovation PATIENCE is a key theme. One we must continue to remind ourselves of.
Patience can work out well in some areas. For example, getting a new roof was originally part the Plan A. Looking at our roof it was easy to see that it desperately needed to be done. Even the ex-owners told us so. In fact, they were getting ready to redo it by themselves. It was seeing the old dumpsters pulled into the driveway that made Raymonn call me and say, “They are getting ready to do some renovations and I know I’m not going to like them. We have to make a move on this house if we really think this is the house we want!” Have I told you we looked at this house for 10 months before we made an offer? Oh yes we did. So we even started out this journey with patience.
But basically the roof was on year 30 of a 25 year roof. It was bad. Moss everywhere, shingles gone from every spot on the roof. After every wind/rain storm we’d see more moss and be picking up more shingles from the yard. To me, why spend all the money we were spending on new un-popcorned (is this a word?) ceilings if they were just going to get ruined by a leaky roof? No matter that the roof wasn’t leaking, it COULD.
Lovely front view, minus the curling shingles.
Can you really enjoy and relax when you glance up and see this?
A close up of the yummy moss.
But the ridiculous electrical “work” done when the house was built and the redo of all of that took a couple thousand dollar chunk out of the roof budget. Kind of a big deal. So, we waited. And boy did our patience pay off. Because of a neighbor who was going into the roofing business himself and my hubby’s awesome, amazing, talented web design skills - we got ourselves a new roof for a very pleasing price.
Our patience pays off.
There’s another side to this whole patience thing though, when you’re right in the middle of gaining this so called “virtue” – heh. Stay tuned for part 2.
