My husband and I have a second home in Ohio. Nine years ago, we bought an old house in the town near where I grew up and where my parents were born. It was built in 1890. While it has been well taken care of throughout the years, it could use a little love as well as some modernization. We are looking forward to each project knowing that there will be more to it than what meets the eye. There always is when you remodel an older home. You may be hearing of some of our adventures along the way…actually you will be hearing about our adventures.
Especially those that are perplexing. We started our journey with two simple projects. You can begin laughing now. The first was to just paint the upstairs bathroom. Easy. Done. Took half a day. We then moved to one of the bedrooms. It is wallpapered, including the small closet in the room. Which is where we started. We took all the stuff off the walls and then removed the wallpaper. That is where the head scratching began. You see once the wallpaper was off, and the baseboard removed (who paints quarter sawn oak!?!) we discovered there was a pipe in the wall that was hooked to the air conditioner in the basement. When we bought the house, we were told there was no A/C upstairs except for the bathroom. OK, so now we have an A/C pipe that is blowing COLD air INTO the walls. Not into the bedroom…the walls. Now I don’t know about any of you, but that just doesn’t seem logical.
So, the project to strip wallpaper from the closet, paint the walls, and install a closet organizer…a two-day project at most…is now a longer project. Timeline to be determined. We might have to have parts manufactured to get them to fit properly onto the existing pipe and part of the wall will have to be cut out in order to get good access to the pipe in the wall, and then we will have to repair said hole in a lath and plaster wall…and then…the next time I have a “good Idea” about a project, I think my husband might disagree with me. In the meantime, we soldier on…
And of course, the pastor in me can’t help but see the parallel to life. We think that the plans we make will go smoothly. They are simple, straight forward…easy. But then life happens. I was talking to a friend recently and told her I would never have planned my life to turn out the way it did…and yet here I am. Many of the things I wanted never happened. The things I didn’t want, well…they did. I could have retreated and sometimes I have, but for the most part, I have taken the broken pieces that have been handed to me and figured out a way to make them work for me. It is a little like the Japanese art of Kintsugi. This is where they repair broken pottery by putting the pieces back together with lacquer dusted with gold or other precious metals. The pottery pieces are beautiful when they are done being repaired. Sometimes they are better than before they were broken. Which is also true of our lives…sometimes our lives are better because of the broken parts that happened to us. We are stronger, more resilient.
Here’s the thing: The lives we have may not be how we would have planned them, but they can still be beautiful. It is all in how we choose to fix the broken pieces.
Peace,
Beth
BTW…the closet is finished. It took 6 days. I want to give a huge shout out to Fox plumbing and A/C in Galion, Ohio. They were super helpful and knew exactly what we needed and had the parts on hand to fix the A/C pipe going to nowhere and now that pipe brings life cooling air into a bedroom.
Beth's Blog 