You have yours, and I have mine.

Along with writing a bit about life around our lake, I will be including stories surrounding our upcoming remodel ~ partly because I think it will hold some entertainment and partly so there is a record of it, a timeline. For posterity or what have you.

This weather has not been getting any friendlier.  This may be a late spring, a wet spring, a just ugly spring.  Quite frankly, I am not even sure we can call it spring, except for the fact the trees have leafed out.  I can no longer see into my neighbor’s driveway across the way…which is a detriment to nosey neighboring, hi dee ho.

 

I did go up into the woods last week and identified five or six dogwood trees that I didn’t realize were still there.  They are tall, leafed out only at the top, having been shaded for too long by other scrub trees.  I hope to clear around them a bit and encourage their development going forward.  A couple of them even had a few blossoms!  I literally pushed over two dead dogwood trees about the same height so I guess that’s a start to clearing, right?  But, it’s the maples and some scraggly branches of existing pine trees that are causing some of the blocking of room and sun…a bit much for me to take care of alone, but, I’ll work towards it! We actually need to have a tree service out to do some trimming and removing of trees before the construction begins so I might have a few “add ons” before that time comes.

So, regarding the construction.  Hubs is going to be doing a lot of the work himself, with the help of a family friend who happens to also be in the trade.  We actually had our first pow-wow with him and laid out a schedule of sorts.  It made me tingle, seriously, as I know that we really are getting to a start phase! Hubs mentioned he had begun an estimate of materials and I began to look through some websites for gas fireplace information.  Our eyes have met more than once with a dismissed “Are we crazy?” look as we go back to our research and reading, drawing and measuring. 

 

Here's what I have learned.  If we had done this when we were in our 40s and 50s, we would have struggled with decisions and direction, disagreed over silly things like door handles or paint colors.   Having gone through the county-property-tax-revamping-from-hell years, we would have almost priced ourselves out of our home by adding too many square feet to be taxed at too high of a rate.  In some ways, having that screwed up for about 8 years prevented us from biting off more than we should chew, especially during the ultra lean years of 2008-2014.  Lumber business, husband’s livelihood, you must realize, was deeply affected by the housing fiasco, and so was our bank balance.

  

A recent conversation we had over the above mentioned gas fireplace is stacked stone above the mantel, to the ceiling, or not.  I came armed with more than 20 pictures from the internet on my iPad, hoping for meaningful thought and consideration from both our points of view.  He looked at two options, responded with a gruff “No” and moved on.  I was left somewhat unsatisfied, to be honest.  I realized then that we are not going to have long drawn out conversations on design like we may have had in previous decades, when we were more dreamers than doers.   This will work in my favor, I decided and I may need to rethink the whole conversation thing in general as overrated.  What I don’t ask doesn’t get answered and I have to answer for myself.

 

While hubs is busy counting how many 2X4 studs we need, which we don’t discuss, I can go about choosing paint, and finishes and fireplace material without so much as a “tell me what you think about…” Yeah, this is going to work out just fine.