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A great newsletter.
A great newsletter.
We moved to our home in July, 1982, just a month after my grandmother died. She had raised her 6 children here, including my mother, so I already had emotional ties to this place.
When we moved here, we had two sons, Chris and Jesse. As the years passed, our family grew. First Nick and then Boomer came along. In January of 1993, we were blessed with our first (and only) daughter, Maggie. I did not want to put my little girl in a bedroom with four boys.
We had looked at a few houses, a piece of property; we considered a double wide or building. In the end, Brian and I knew that we could never leave our neighborhood or our home. We would simply have to remodel.
It all started out as a small project; tear down the old garage and build a few bedrooms. We had built a garage in the back of the house the previous year; it had a bathroom so Brian could shower there after work. Little did I know that I'd end up living there.
Brian is a brick mason, but he can do almost any type of construction. He's also an active guy; he hates to do nothing. Once Brian got started on the house, there was no stopping him. After building the addition, he decided that the old roof needed to be replaced. With the roof off, it was clear that the inside walls were filled with coal dust from the old coal furnace. After tearing down the inside walls, there was no reason to leave up the old outside walls. In two days, Brian had torn down the house to the poured concrete basement and I came home from my mom's to find my kitchen scattered about my patio.
We put the necessary furniture in the garage--table, beds, chair and couch, tv--along with most of the appliances. It was summer so we put the washer and dryer on the patio. Brian promised we'd be in our house by the time school started, then by Halloween, then by my birthday in November, then by Thanksgiving. We moved back into our house on December 15, just 10 days before Christmas, 1993.
It was a long, hot summer. Winter came early when it snowed on Halloween. We used a woodburning stove to keep warm and had to wear shoes or flip-flops even when we showered. We began to get on each other's nerves.
Was it worth it? Absolutley! It isn't just that I have a beautiful house, it's that Brian built it himself and we all went through a tough eight months to have it. It's also the house where my grandparents raised their own family. This is our neighborhood; we've given our kids the same roots that my grandparents gave their own children. If my own kids turn out half as well as my mother and her siblings, I'll know we've done a good job.