This past weekend we discovered a plumbing problem in our kitchen, so we decided to redo our bathroom, and landscape our front yard. By ‘we’, I mean Lianne. That may seem odd to some of you, but it reminds me of the time that we had termite damage in our living room and decided to add a 4th bedroom. It’s not as crazy as it sounds, trust me. Lianne just has a knack for turning small repairs into huge projects. In all fairness though, we’ve been planning to remodel our bathroom for quite some time.
I’ve never been much of a home improvement type. I mustered up the courage and energy to swap out a doorknob once, and I put a new faucet in our kitchen a while back. Something interesting happened yesterday, though. Lianne was slaving away in the bathroom taking down the wallpaper while I took care of the kids, (ie watched the NBA playoffs) and I went back to check up on her. She wanted some help removing the sink. An hour later the sink was sitting outside on the side of our house. The cabinet below the sink was still firmly in place though, and that thing had to go. After another hour of NBA playoff watching (I find it useful to offset any household labor with an equal amount of relaxation time) I went in to tackle the cabinet. I’m proud to say that it was no match for my hammer and my karate-like board breaking skills. It was soon sitting outside of the house next to the sink in under 45 minutes.
As I reflected on my accomplishments, minor though they be by home improvement standards, I had a strange sense of satisfaction. Maybe it was the joy of destroying things and ripping them apart, or maybe the realization that this stuff isn’t really all that difficult, I don’t know. Whatever the reason, the mission has begun and I’m a little more than mildly excited about seeing it through to completion.