I saw on TV the other day that you should probably redecorate your house, at least enough to update it a little, every five years. After I realized it wasn't a comedy show and stopped laughing I started looking around and I think they may have been on to something. The show was about getting your house ready to sell. Every time we have sold a house in the past we have broken our necks painting and fixing and cleaning and then never getting to enjoy the benefits of all that labor.
The problem (one of them) is that the people who lived in the house we own now hadn't seen that show so they had not updated before selling it to us and there was more than five years worth of things to do when we got here. It wasn't really their fault. The house was not on the market when I knocked on the door and asked them if they were interested in selling it, so they didn't have much warning. They may have been a little shocked to see me but they were gracious and let me come in and look around (if burglars were smart they would get rid of those hoodies and disguise themselves as sweet little ol' ladies. Just sayin') They said they were considering moving when school was over and we eventually struck a deal. (Oh, stop! The neighbor told me they were kind of thinking about it. You know how shy I am! I wouldn't have just knocked on their door at random.....It was the neighbor's door I knocked on at random.)
The size and location of this house (just a few streets over from our granddaughters) was just right for us, but it was pretty much a museum of early eighties décor. The fun began before we moved in. All by myself I "mudded" a wall (I had never even heard of such a thing, much less did it) stripped wallpaper, (three layers in one instance), hung wallpaper, pulled up kitchen carpet (the hardest physical labor I have done in my life including giving birth!) put down vinyl tiles, took doors off the pantry, reconfigured the pantry shelves, did the same for the linen closet shelves, scraped off popcorn ceilings, painted ceilings where the popcorn junk had been, made curtains for every room but one, hung curtains, painted every wall in the house except the living room including one bedroom that turned out school-bus gold and had to be redone twice, and the "red-leather-Bible" color I chose for the kitchen that needed about a billion, okay, more like seventeen, all right, actually four coats to get it right, and primed and painted more than----I am not making this up----1,356 running feet of wood trim, plus thirteen doors. And the people at Lowe's were so used to seeing me each day that they sent someone to check on me if I wasn't there by lunch time. For the second time.
So you see, I may have "smoked the pack", as it were, concerning remodeling. Once my hands unclenched from the holding-paint-brush-grip I didn't care if I never saw another brush, hammer, scraper, or simple-to-use, revolutionary, all-in-one tool (They all lie!) again. All I wanted to do was lie on the couch and watch HGTV where somebody else was doing the work.
This is not a good thing since it has been seven year since we moved here, and after awhile there are touch-ups that need doing. I did drag out an old can of paint last fall before relatives came to stay and hit some of the spots on the woodwork that were looking kind of rough. And when my neighbor put some perfectly good boards in his trash I brought them in just in case they were ever needed. The walls in the entry were looking a little bare after the Christmas decorations came down, so I used one of those boards to make a coat rack, although the neighbor wound up drilling the holes for me. He was quite surprised to recognize one of the boards he thought he threw out.
Now I've been eyeing the kitchen cabinets. I wanted to paint them when we first moved here but I finally collapsed, got Legionaries Disease, which laid me low for about three months and Dennis made me quit But I keep looking at those cabinets. I wish redecorating was like childbirth. You forget how painful it was after you see the baby.
Maybe I'll lay on the couch and think about it some more.
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