Home Improvements

Memorial Day weekend marks FOUR YEARS since we moved into our house. We never thought we'd rent this little place for so long, but now we don't want to live anywhere else. Over the past month, we have had several significant home improvements: book sorting, basement overhaul, a fresh coat of exterior paint, and three door replacements. But first, a bird horror story that also kind of falls under the home improvement category. 

I. Birds

For a few weeks, I noticed that every time I opened our garage door, a bird would fly in. It would perch on the handlebars of a bike or sometimes even venture further inside the garage. Every time I closed the garage, though, it would fly right back out again, so I figured it was just an oddly inquisitive bird. Our garage door is pretty decrepit, so on nice days I often leave it open while I'm home to avoid the battle of closing the warped door (our landlord has a new garage door on backorder). Sometimes the kids would open the garage to get their bikes out and then forget to close the garage over night. The weather was nice and we live in the country away from many prying eyes so it didn't seem like a big deal.

Fast forward to May 20th. When I pulled into the garage after dropping the girls off at school, I saw not one, but two birds flit into the garage. The determined way they were flying made me think of all the times I've watched robins tend to nests. They had a purpose. Still sitting inside the van, I followed one bird with my eyes. It perched up on a rafter of the garage in a very possessive, very parental way. No. Please no. Gathering my fortitude, I closed the garage, watched the birds fly out, and then got a step stool. There was a nest, carved out of pink insulation and mixed with twigs, sitting on the rafter. The garage ceiling is so low that I couldn't peek up over the edge of the rafter to see if there were any eggs inside the nest, so I held my phone up over the rim and snapped a picture. Two eggs. Great, now I had to become a baby bird murderer! 

Groaning and moaning and shuddering, I pulled on my rubber gloves, got a head lamp, and climbed back up the step stool. Thankfully the loosely-formed nest held its shape while I slid it off the rafter into my blue gloved hand. Thankfully the eggs didn't fall to the ground, smash open, and reveal the baby bird fetuses I was about to gently lower into the garbage can. I took a picture of the tiny eggs to show Jeff (trying my best not to call the eggs cute), and then laid the nest into a plastic bag. The plastic bag was tied up and lowered into our big trash can outside. I sanitized everything, including my phone and my hands that were inside the gloves, and then felt done for the day, even though it was barely 9:30am. Killing unborn baby animals is a decidedly draining tragedy of a task.

The nest on the rafter.

Teeny tiny eggs. Would they have even ever hatched? Their parents couldn't possibly have incubated them sufficiently with their limited access to our garage. But maybe the insulation did the trick? I'm going to choose to believe that the eggs were not viable. It makes me feel better about destroying them.

II. Books

Ok, on to the more palatable home improvements: At the end of April, I sorted, purged, and organized our books. I gave away 227 books and kept 778! It was a long-overdue massive home library overhaul. Since the girls moved their bedroom to the basement, we have had a small 10x10 empty bedroom. I decided to try making it the library room, and moved our library and bookshelves in there during the book sorting process. But now I never walk past the books since they're tucked away in a separate room rather than in a high-traffic area. Walking past full bookshelves multiple times each day is one of the small joys of life, so I'm already considering moving the bookshelves to a more well-traveled area so I can get more enjoyment out of them. I just don't feel like moving all of those books again quite yet!

All of the books, before the sorting.

A selfie for scale...although I don't think selfies do much for showing scale, they do help a little. The stacks of books were much taller than they looked from above.

I gave close to half of the books to some friends, then turned the rest over to Goodwill.

Zen is a well-organized bookshelf. We keep most of the picture books out in the front room, and the kids keep their favorite books in their bedrooms, so this isn't all of the books, but it is definitely most of them.

III. Basement

I had hoped to continue with a modified Marie Kondo version of tidying up and getting rid of non-joyful possessions, but my organizational momentum kind of died after the big book project. Something about lifting nearly 1,000 books multiple times took the wind out of my tidy-up sails. But Jeff jumped on the tidying train (pardon the mixed metaphors) and moved the kids' computers to the basement. He asked for my help reconfiguring the basement, and we spent an entire Sunday afternoon Tetris-puzzling through that process. We slid the couch this way to make room for that table. We moved those boxes thataway so we could get that stuff over this way. It's not like we have mountains of junk (maybe more like a small foothill) in our basement, but the skinny tight layout of the basement made the whole process quite complicated. Our basement may not be finished or pretty, but it is cool and comfortable down there when the weather gets hot. Having the kids' noisy Minecraft gatherings with friends farther from my eardrums was the main benefit of the basement overhaul.

Jeff put his computer in the former computer room, which is kind of like an antechamber to mine and Jeff's bedroom. We have to walk through that room to get to our room. That's where I want to put our bookshelves, even though I just moved them out of that room a month ago. Without four computers clogging the space, the bookshelves should fit much better there than they did before.

Our four kids, Minecrafting together. We have a fourth "friend computer" that has become know as Ian's computer because he uses it most. So basically, we have four kids.

That door opens into the garage.

We ended up jamming our old couch between the spare fridge and the old mint colored cabinets in the vintage basement kitchen. We haven't figured out what to do with the drawers and desk in the middle of the room. It's a work in progress.

IV. Paint and Doors

During the first few weeks of May, our landlord had the exterior of our house power washed and painted. He also had the three ancient, not-insulated, gappy, swollen exterior doors replaced with actual insulated, sleek, made-this-century doors! Our drab skinny little country cottage is looking sharp and spiffy. The process of power washing the house, sanding down lumps, covering windows in plastic, and painting was loud and invasive. The sanding especially was awful. It was like having a tooth drilled or polished at the dentist, but I was inside the mouth (house) and the high pitched whine of the drill (sander) lasted all day long. I had to leave when I thought too much about drilling teeth during the sanding, haha. 

Once the house was painted, they started on the doors, which was even louder and more invasive. Finally, after 2.5 weeks of steady noisy work, the job was done. Our house is bright happy white with black trim around the front windows that reminds me of mascara or a panda bear. Our house is a weird shape with its deep roof overhanging the front porch and its long skinny pieced-together shape. But the workers painted all of the random joints between cinder blocks and wood so the house looks more cohesive and much much nicer. 

The best part: since we're renting, we didn't have to pay for these improvements! In a way, renting is like suspended adolescence. We don't have to pay for home repairs, and we have to ask permission if we want to do anything to our house. But the tradeoff fits our lifestyle perfectly. We are not "house people," always searching for ways to make our house cuter or whatever. We just want to live without the burdens that come with owning a house. Renting is blissfully carefree. We were never curb appeal, decor-savvy homeowners, but we are pretty good tenants. We love renting!

Lots of pictures of the process:

Creepy!

The day they covered all of our windows with plastic so they could paint, I felt so claustrophobic. Our house is small but the windows allow me to breathe easy. When the windows are covered, the house seems disproportionately smaller. I need my sweeping countryside views!

Our poor blindfolded house.

Door replacement:

Amber admitted to karate chopping the plastic in the doorway. She said "I'm really good at punching plastic!"

One day we could only exit our house through the garage because all of the doors had plastic over them. They would hang the doors and leave for the night, then come back and remove the doors again to work on them the next day. It was not a linear process at all.

Replacing the doors was a complicated fascinating process that required quite a bit of carpentry and far more skills than I expected. The two-man work crew did an impressive job placing a modern door onto the very old odd crumbly doorway.

The old side door. It looks extra old because I took this picture after they painted the house.

The shiny new black front door, still slightly wet.

Sunset through the front door window caught my eye.

My desk on the edge of the abyss, with plastic covering the doorway. We never used that door in our bedroom because it was old and rattled in the wind so we shoved a tarp and a spare twin mattress against it to insulate the gaps. Now we have a firm, insulated, usable door!

Working on a photo book at my desk while a door was installed...weird.

The fancy new door in my bedroom! It's fun having a back door.

Our bedroom back door from the outside.

I love coming straight from my bedroom out to that scenery. When the sprinklers are on, however, we cannot use this door without getting drenched.

Finished front.

Finished side.

Finished back. There used to be an ugly tan corrugated joint between the wooden garage section and the cinder block front section, but they painted it white and it made such a difference.

Side-by-side of our cute house, before and after:

Home sweet home.