Repainting a garage sounded easy at first. Four weeks of vacation was plenty of time. On paper, it would have worked. Never has time evaporated more quickly for me. I strongly disagree with victim mentality, but in this case the primary reason for the missed deadline can be blamed primarily on external factors: Stomach sickness in sunny weather and Constant rain while healthy.
Read MoreWe are currently re-painting our houses, starting with the dog kennel and the garage the first year. The houses haven’t even been cleaned for a very long time, perhaps never, and it is a massive undertaking, at least three years. To outsource it would cost a small fortune and it isn’t that difficult to do a half-decent job so we went the DIY route to invest the money in more challenging tasks like plumbing and construction. However, things are only free if your time has no value. And time is the most precious commodity of all. Projects like these really highlight the importance of choosing a place you call home that you love.
Read MoreSometimes things happen, that are so unlikely that they can only be explained by some kind of divine intervention. We’ve had two of those occasions recently during our renovation project. The first one, and most unlikely, was the impeccable timing of our electrician who arrived here just in time to install new wiring in my office at the same time as the construction workers had torn down the old roof. To have a house without a roof is obviously a bad idea, so this type of work is dependent on weather conditions. Then they work very fast to remove and replace the ceiling in a day. So, we’re talking about a time window of 4-6 hours, maximum, when the roof is gone (i.e. half of it). And there will never be a better time to reinstall the electrical wiring. I booked my electrician months ago, with a gut feeling that “this day will probably be the day when the roof is removed”. And he arrived with the precision of a Japanese bullet train, exactly when the roof was gone.
Read MoreWe are now (hopefully) in our last two week of renovations. Our houses have been in dire need of not just upkeep, but improvement. On the top of my head, I can think of two reasons why everything seemed to break down at once. Some of the broken stuff should have been fixed last year, but much of the schedule had to be postponed due to a little baby boy. That’s the obvious one. The not so obvious one is that we might have started a momentum of fixing things, that is hard to stop once you get it in motion.
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