i love it. i really do. i love that it is full of dyer family memories and i love how much donald loves it. but older homes are not for the faint of heart!
we have a laundry list of decorating ideas and updates we'd like to do to the house, and honestly a lot of time the thing that slows us down is the decision making process. [which is a nice way of saying i take forever to make up my mind about things...like sometimes it is literally almost forever] but there's also the pesky fact that none of the trees on our property have been growing money lately.
despite these facts we have still managed to get ourselves a whole lot of new house in the past six months or so. it started awhile back when we decided the next big project we would save for would be new windows. this would be our most significant home improvement to date, and i was really excited about the idea of having windows that would open and close without making me want to punch them. so we started to save.
then last june there was the storm that knocked over one of our trees in the backyard and onto the electric and communication lines. this was followed by a delightful five months of donald making a weekly phone call to google [because they seemed the most likely to help] to ask for them to get their lines taken care of so we could take care of our tree.
by the time fall rolled around we had our window money saved and were ready to go. we placed the order, paid our deposit and sat back to wait for them to show up. then about a week later we noticed a large crack in the foundation of our garage that had likely been there for years, but was now acting as an additional window since you could see through the wall into the backyard. assuming this was not ideal, we made some calls and discovered our house was sort of falling down on one side and needed to be piered. but the tricky part was that we couldn't install new windows into a crooked house, so the piers had to be in before the windows.
this chain of events initiated what i like to call 'the week we spring cleaned our bank accounts', because in a span of six days we had six piers put under the house, eighteen windows put in the house and, since google had finally come along to take care of the lines, we also had the tree guy come and cut down the rest of our fallen tree.
then just a few months later our main sewer line, which we knew was probably coming to the end of its lifespan, started letting us know it was time for some attention. not wanting to be overshadowed by the shiny new windows, the sewer line succeeded in breaking the previous and short lived record for the most significant home improvement to date. we're hopeful that this new record will stand for some time...perhaps forever.
