Living With It

For those of you who have ever given birth, you'll recognize this feeling. After the baby is born, when you look into her eyes for the first time, when you feel her breath rising up and down as she sleeps on your chest, you forget all about the pain of labor and you think how perfect everything is. Then when you find out you're pregnant again, the imminent labor pains are the farthest thing from your mind; all you think about is meeting your perfect, beautiful baby. I have heard the theory that women are prepared to have more than one child just because our brains block out all the pain and only let in the happiness. Because let's face it, if we remembered every second of body-wrenching, sweat-inducing, muscle-torturing contractions, we might not be so willing to go through it all again.

So it must be with remodeling. When I look at the craziness that has been my house for the past four months, the constant dust, the lack of running water at random times, the frustration of dealing with things that you have absolutely no control over, I wonder how anyone ever chooses to go through a project like this. Yet I'm guessing that in a month from now, when everything is pretty much done, I'll forget all of that and instead enjoy the pleasure that the new rooms will bring us all.

Bookcases, end tables and teapots, oh my!

Everyone who has been through a remodel has told me how lucky I am that we're only working on the back of the house and so the rest of the living space won't be affected. Ha ha ha. True, we haven't had to give up the kitchen, we could still take showers whenever we wanted (almost), and we weren't turfed out of our bedrooms. But to say we haven't been affected wouldn't be true at all, as I realize every night when I go to bed and negotiate the two bookcases that are stuck in my bedroom. Not to mention the times when I have stubbed my toe on the china hutch that is shoved between the bedroom door and the closet door, making it an obstacle course every time I make the bed. Then there are the two end tables stacked on top of each other in the corner, forcing us to move the laundry hamper, and creating mountains of dirty clothes on the floor. (OK, that last part isn't strictly the remodel's fault. There are always dirty clothes on the floor - I live with a teenager!)

The china hutch does double duty as a storage
space for all our important documents

In the living room, I haven't seen the surface of my coffee tables in months. Darryl has decided that it's the perfect spot for every receipt, every bill, every contract that relates to the remodel. They're spread across the table like huge piles of oversize confetti, randomly scattered in absolutely no order (although he claims he can find everything at a moment's notice). Today I tried dusting around the paper but gave up pretty quickly when I realized I was just moving the dust from one spot to another. Did you know how hard it is to clean the surface of a piece of paper?

So I wait anxiously for the time when all of this will be a blur, when the discomfort is forgotten, the stubbed toe pain is a memory, and the drop-cloths are long put away. The time when the contractors are gone, the furniture is in place and my house is my own. Not long now.

Somewhere under here is a coffee table