Coming Up for Air

It's been more than two months since I've posted anything here. It's partly because I'm lazy, but also partly because I've been incredibly busy.

Back in January I told you we were moving. Since that post, nearly all of our free time has been spent working on the house we're moving into in Mishawaka. We've been averaging somewhere around 30 hours per week at the house in Mishawaka.

The project we've been spending so much time on is a complete renovation of the top floor. When we started out it contained two bedrooms, two hallway closets and some attic space. Now it has two bedrooms with closets in each, a hallway closet, a bathroom and two playrooms. Nearly the whole space was stripped down to the wall studs, rewired, insulated and covered with new drywall. We are nearly finished with all the new drywall and ready for it to be mudded and sanded, then painted.

In addition to the work on the top floor, we've also been working on getting the rest of the house cleaned out so we can begin other renovation projects.

The cleaning-out process is probably the most fun, interesting, frustrating, time-consuming thing we've done. It's fun and interesting because of all the amazing things we've found in the house. It's frustrating and time-consuming because of all the clutter in the house.

It took us two full weekends to clear out the top floor before we could begin demolition. It's taken much longer than that to work on the main floor and the basement. Part of the reason there's so much stuff is because the house has always been in the family and nobody has ever really moved out and taken stuff with them. So, there's nearly 100 years' worth of stuff in there.

For all of you garage sale fanatics out there, we're going to have one heck of a sale sometime in the next few weeks. Don't worry, I'll let you all know when it's happening!

I have learned a lot from this process. I can do rough carpentry work, insulation and drywall. But I've also learned a lot of life lessons through all of this. I'm considering starting a blog series to help me process all of those.

Here's just a few pictures to prove that I've got a good reason for not blogging much lately: