This little family is making that turn towards home. You know the route, right? It’s been a long trip and you’re tired. The car smells of old food and a little sweat, and you stopped caring three stops ago about keeping things organized or clean. Instead, in a fatigue-driven sense of exasperation, you just decided, “I’ll deal with it when I get home.”
Then, you start planning on actually being home. I like to do milestones. When I hit “X”, I’ll be an hour from home or when I hit “Y”, it’s 15 minutes. While that last two hours seems like a killer, you eventually hit the turn signal one last time. For us, it’s a right turn towards home. Whether it’s work or personal travel, when that turn signal goes on, I know I’m 1.1 miles from my home and I can finally get out of the car and reclaim my life.
The same feeling, it appears, happens when you make the rhetorical turn towards the end of renovations. (Honestly, the same smell of sweat, too.) And this little family? Yep, we hit the turn signal.
Now, I should be clear: we are not “in the clear” on renovations. Instead, we have a hard summer and early fall ahead to build our deck, which we have barely started. And then, we still have a list of 29 “small projects” that need to be done before our house can be declared “done done”. But nothing on the small projects list is urgent or structural, it’s mostly punch list kind of stuff. And we won’t pull into our rhetorical driveway until January 1st, so we can not only finish the deck but also scratch off 1-2 of the small project items as well. But 2026? It’s a year without a renovation. Even greater? When we do get back at it in 2027, we will attempt to only do a project as we can fit it in to our newly rediscovered life. This furious, pressure-filled pace we’ve been keeping up for the last few years? Over.
And not a moment too soon.
While we likely could have continued, the renovations were actually slowly crushing this family. When we got married, we promised each other two very important things. The first was to give the best of ourselves that we could everyday. The second was to put “us” first but to never lose our sense of self. In a decade of renovations, we were coming perilously close to doing neither of those things. The house and its projects had become all-consuming. Even more, when we were chest-deep into projects, I realized we were also losing perspective. We became fervent about “getting things done,” even expressing both being overwhelmed and not being able to rest until things were done. Yep. Time to do a significant reset. What had started out as a healthy project to make our home comfortable had become an obsession. We had lost perspective.
Now, it would have been nice to say, “Okay, we’re done now,” and immediately go into renovation detox, but that wasn’t exactly practical. Replacing the deck is a structural issue that could no longer be denied. It is – thankfully – the last of our structural issues and the very key reason why we can quit after it’s done. But that’s also okay. Neither of us would have relaxed without the deck replaced and right now, we are both motivated to get it done knowing that it’s that last project. Just like making that last turn towards home, we’ve perked up and we can make it now.
But, I’ve also learned something incredibly valuable here. Sometimes good enough is genuinely good enough. And if you keep toiling to get to perfect, you are likely only going to be disappointed when perfect never comes. It’s easy and some would say even noble to keep toiling and driving towards “complete”, but we were doing so to the detriment of ourselves. That had to stop. At some point, you have to stop talking about balance and actually find it. And you can’t let your demons chase you. For me, it was this desire to be like my mom and create a soft, comfortable and completely done space for us to enjoy. For my husband, it was an offhand comment his aunt made when he completed his Ph.D. In making this decision I’ve learned that it is truly better to recognize that what drives you sometimes isn’t good for you if you can’t control it. We couldn’t control it. We went too far, too hard and too long. Because we let our demons control us, we didn’t know how to pace ourselves or make room for a life within our renovations.
The next year is a reset for us. Hopefully, we will take a vacation, my husband will identify an event he really wants to do and we will live up to those promises we made all those years ago. Inside these walls, we have built what truly matters to us – a home filled with an easy love that makes room for human and furry heartbeats alike. And now, we have to learn to enjoy what is without letting the demons in again. If we can manage to do it for a year, we can revisit the list and strike off those final tasks at a leisurely pace which respects our need to finish things as well as our human need to be whole, complete people.
The Yuppie Homesteader 