House and Home

Sometime around March 1 my husband and I started the massive undertaking of remodeling our kitchen. Our home was built in the mid 1970s and we had only done minimal updating of our kitchen since we bought the house in 1992. I’d been asking for a remodel for approximately five years and was beginning to question if it would ever come to pass until one day I was standing in a small puddle of water created by a leak in our dishwasher. We made a homeowners’ claim on our insurance and received a nice little sum of money to repair the damage that had been done. It seems that was the final straw to get my husband to decide it was time to begin the remodel.

The demolition began. Cabinets were removed. Fixtures torn out. Appliances relegated to the living room or garage. Flooring ripped up. Big mess created!

Not only did we want to remodel the kitchen, we wanted to lay flooring that would make the kitchen, dining room, hall and living room look as if it was one big room. More flooring ripped up. More furniture moved. All personal items packed up and stored. Bigger mess created!

By the time all was said and done to demo the old and begin anew, the entire downstairs of my home was affected, including the garage. All fourteen hundred feet of my home was in complete and total chaos.

This caused me to want to go room to room and clean, purge, revamp, tidy up. Needless to say, this was a daunting task. But as I’ve been going about working to recreate an inviting space of comfort and cleanliness, I’ve been taking moments of time to consider the photos, the mementos, the knick-knacks that fill our home. I decided it was time to STOP and look at what I found important enough, valued enough to decorate our living space. As I was putting our home back together I saw our life in photos and trinkets from days gone by. Baby pictures of nieces and nephews. Souvenirs from our travels to foreign lands. Antiques passed on from prior generations. Treasured photos of loved ones who have passed on.

Over the past few days I have walked down memory lane and have enjoyed every.single.second. Prior to this project, I’d begun to think our home had become a big giant conglomerate of silly things that simply took up space. It was cluttered and dusty and unkempt. Now … well now these things have once again become the things I love, the tangible objects that we have spent a lifetime acquiring. I have a renewed appreciation for the things that collect dust in our home and I vow to not take them for granted again. The thousands of photos remind me that I come from a big and loving family and married into a big and loving family. These photos remind me that we have friends in all corners of the world. These photos remind me that we have not lived a lonely life. The trinkets remind me of a person or place that is part of our past. Each item I have displayed in our home carries a unique story and reminds me that I have lived an adventurous life. And I have done all this with the most amazing person, my husband Scott.

I’m so grateful Scott decided it was time to remodel the kitchen. There was an obvious benefit to it – increasing the value of our home. And as it turns out, there was also a silver lining – reminding me that this space we live in is truly our home! It tells our life story, almost without me needing to say a word.