So, it’s decided. Next year is a “new normal” year. On a long walk yesterday morning with the sun just peaking through, we gave ourselves a gift we’ve needed for the past decade: time. As I wrote about yesterday, we plan to finish our deck this summer and fall. We have a few weekends between Thanksgiving and New Year’s when we can tackle the most pressing things on our list. And then? Well, we are going to be people again. No projects, just routine maintenance and a small garden. This family is going to remember what it’s like to just be normal homeowners. Not renovators, not yuppie gardeners, not overcommitted and overly stressed humans. Nope… we are gonna be people.
Now, we also met friends out yesterday and decided on a Caribbean sailboat cruise sometime this winter and that’s exciting as well. But I have to say, even the thought of having a vacation is trumped by the news of a whole year of obligation-free time. Right now, the possibilities seem endless.
There is so much to unpack here and as I often do, I use this forum I’ve created for myself to spill out my thoughts from my brain and get the ideas to a place where I can process them. A whole year? No projects? A small garden? Time to dream? Rediscover ourselves, both as individuals and as a couple. Time to enjoy all we’ve built? Time to save money we are repeatedly putting into the house. As I said when my husband proposed: “Really?”
I mean, sometimes it’s just too good to be true.
And yet, we are perfectly aligned on this. More than that, this makes sense. First, let’s not kid ourselves. The deck is going to be a huge project. Yes, we have the backhoe and the piers but it’s still going to be a tremendous amount of work and we’re not ready yet to even start. We have today and next weekend to finish getting everything ready to dig holes the following weekend. That’s job #1. Then, holes and piers, hopefully completed by the end of July. August will be all about framing. Finally, in September, we will put on the decking. We may be pouring the final pad and installing steps in October. Yep, that’s us. Just a couple of (not-so-young) kids, running around building things.
When said deck is finished in October, we can turn our attention inside until exactly January 1st. Then? Whatever’s on the list has to wait a full year… or at least it can wait. During yesterday’s negotiations, my husband asked a simple question: does our project list become our “do not work on” list? That prompted some discussion! On one hand, if we were absolutists and said it was, we would simply be destined to fail. Let’s face it, there’s going to be something on that list that gets done. On the other hand, if we don’t do something to stop ourselves, there is a very real threat that this will be just another good idea for getting our lives back.
As a classic example, there is a small piece of backsplash that runs next to our bar sink and above our ergonomically designed built-in cutting board. It had to be removed during our countertop redo last October. That two-inch area needs the mastic ground off and a new place put in. It’s like an hour or two project but just hasn’t risen to the list to be done. On a snowy, boring Saturday next winter, there may be nothing better to do and we may get a hankering to get it done. Do we have to say no? We decided that doing so was ridiculous. But then, we asked, what are our guardrails? How do we stop ourselves from making everything an exception? Do we allow ourselves the capacity to do a pre-determined number of projects off the list? Or make a rule that is has to be mutually agreeable? Or that we can only spend XX number of hours during the year on the list?
You are probably getting to where we got yesterday: that’s silly, right? We shouldn’t need to self-legislate our own interactions with the house and each other. Instead, we agreed in principle to our approach and we will figure out the rest during the year.
And with that? Well, we are decided. We have our “to-dos” for now and all of the work we can get done between now and January 1st is just going to make the Year of Normalcy (which I’ve just named it) all the easier to enjoy. Further, I am now highly motivated to get things done.
But as I was laying in bed last night, I had two final thoughts about what is and what is to come. The first is that it’s time to enjoy what we’ve built. We have been renovating for so long that we’ve done incredible things but enjoyed the results for mere days before moving on to the next project. We were like a team in the playoffs. We could rest maybe a day or two to enjoy what we achieved, but then we revisited “the list”. In this next year, there will be no pressure or incentive to look at the list. Instead, it’s time to look up and see what we’ve built. If I’m honest, it turned out amazing. Everything I ever wanted it to be. For a whole year, we can simply enjoy.
The second is that for all that a year may be simply an arbitrary time block with no real purpose, it serves what could be the most crucial of purposes: changing our mindset. Over the course of all of these years and renovations, we were highly focused on “what’s next?” We both shelved things we liked to do, sacrificed whatever free time we had and cut out anything that seemed at all “unnecessary” to get work done. Eventually, it had to end and I think we believed it would end when all of the projects ended. But in the last year, I had slowly come to the realization that all of the projects would never be done. Not because we weren’t striking things off the list, but because we were always adding more. It eventually dawned on me that we would always be saving for something and sacrificing time for something else. The projects would only be done when we committed to ending them.
Deep down, if I dig to the absolute center of what drove the decision to take a year off, it was that insight. We couldn’t stop and we wouldn’t have stopped but we were both getting tired, overwhelmed and starting to feel like the house was a burden. I think we both realized it HAD to stop. That’s what next year is about. Rather than keep going until we’re done, we can stop. We have addressed every single structural issue and the rest is cosmetic at best. Those items will get done, but only after we detox as the responsibility junkies we are. Then, when we restart, we can do a project every few months if we want and hopefully keep it under a control. (What will be left after the deck are small projects that will take less than a weekend to complete.) That will still leave us free weekends, time for friends and family and time to be ourselves.
It is time. And this may be one of the healthiest things we have ever done.
The Yuppie Homesteader 