Guess what? I'm still sick. Yes, you envy me. I know this, don't deny it. My right lymph node is slightly smaller than a golf ball, the coughing continues, the throat is still sore, the fatigue rages, the tissues continue to dwindle.
Having asthma in a house full of remodeling dust, moisture, bacteria and animals... well, it sucks, but it wasn't always this bad. I can't deny that my health has suffered since we moved into this house a year ago. I haven't yet gotten a massive raging asthma flare-up that's left me in the hospital (like I did in our condo), but I do seem to get sick on a smaller scale more often. We knew there was moisture and leaking in the basement when we bought it, but we vowed to fix all that. However, what we did not know was that the beautiful hardwood floor that we thought was just underneath yucky carpet was actually ruined by fire damage and that Monkey Family had also allowed water to come into the walls for years without ever fixing the problem. So guess what? All that moisture we smelled wasn't coming from the basement. It was coming from everywhere. (And don't even get me started on the fact that they never cleaned the jets on their whirlpool bath, so there's years of encrusted mildew on our bathtub jets that refuses to come off.) Believe it or not, with six pets in our house, we've always kept it reasonably clean. But in this house? You'd think we never clean at all.
We've now fixed the water in the walls (we hope) and the floor is up next. Sadly, even after the new sanitary hardwood floor goes in, the ducts are absolutely disgusting and will need cleaned as well. It just feels like ever since we've moved in, we are constantly fighting either 1) moisture or 2) semi-toxic dust. Welcome to the world of the constant remodel. This house wasn't our first choice, but it was the choice that seemed best for us at the time. What I'm learning now is that if you choose to buy a Fixer Upper and you don't absolutely love it? Don't buy it. Because on those days when the ceiling starts to cave in and your walls are suddenly gushing water and the basement floods and all you see are massive road blocks and even more massive dollar signs... well, it's on those days that you really need to still LOVE your house. Because if you don't love it and it becomes a nightmare? You can't get out fast enough.
That's the predicament we're currently in. We know that we will be here for another couple of years and that the improvements we're making to it will (hopefully) pay off, but people often ask us if we would do it again. Our answer simply and immediately is always a firm "No." There were other fixer-upper houses that had more storage, bigger yards, less maintenance, but weren't where we wanted to be. What we're finding now is that those other neighborhoods that we turned down are now looking pretty good. The reason? They would have given us freedom. As it is, our life is this house and this house is our life. Sure, we escape into a few select favorite TV shows, we go out to the movies every now and then, we take the dogs and get out when we can. But we always have to come back here and walk in the front door to whatever new demolition or catastrophe awaits us today. It's a never-ending process, living in a Fixer Upper. It's something I don't know I would do again.
It hasn't been all bad though. We've learned so much about houses and how they work. We've learned that we can do most of the work ourselves and when to hire someone when we can't. We've learned we actually have good ideas and that people actually enjoy seeing the progress we make on our little house near the city. We've learned how to do good work on a crappy house with little money and that there are richer people out there doing a whole lot worse things to perfectly good houses. Also, if we hadn't bought this house when we did, we wouldn't have been able to get Bogey and that makes it all worthwhile to me right there.
Still, we miss having free time. We miss planning vacations and being able to use money for fun things rather than another emergency trip to Lowe's. We miss the days when a project was done after a room was painted, not when the floor is replaced and the drywall is replaced and the carpet replaced, yadda yadda yadda.
Oh, and closets. We really miss the damned closets. Seriously, if you have a nice big closet that you can stand up in and look into without crouching, go hug it. Those things are brilliant.