I grew up “helping” with renovation around our house. I was probably no help at all, but I did learn a lot. I have always been familiar with basic tools, construction techniques, and the basic notion that the most complicated job can be broken down to smaller, simpler parts. I have found that this applies to every “hands-on” task in life as well as many intellectual ones.
Whether this ability to recognize the ‘smaller parts’ was taught to me or is a hereditary ability is debatable. I come from a family of ‘builders’. I have two uncles (on my mother’s side) that are successful steel fabricators. One of my brothers builds swimming pools while the other designs and builds custom vehicles. My father can, as far as I have seen, do anything he decides is worth his time. When I was a child he helped me make a mold of a Garfield piggy bank I had and then a plaster replica of the plastic toy from the mold all for a contest at school. He spent a lot of time showing me how to do it, which was very special as I didn’t often attract his attention unless I was misbehaving. In the end, I was disqualified from the contest because my school didn’t believe that I had made and painted the sculpture myself. They believed that I bought it. My memory is that I was so happy about my time with my dad and so flattered by the school’s unintentional compliment that the disqualification didn’t phase me!
The point I was originally trying to get to, before I was sidetracked by childhood memories, was that I have been bred or raised, or both, to build, design, and thrive in a creative, problem solving, environment. For this reason the entire idea of purchasing an older home to renovate was beyond exciting for me. I think my husband was petrified. I also think he was intrigued to see what I came up with.
The problem was that we couldn’t find a house that inspired me, was in our budget, and a yard inspired my husband. Everything we looked at was renovated badly, not old enough to technically need renovations, or uninspiring. The house we eventually bought was ignored because it didn’t have enough bedrooms, was uninspiring, and did absolutely nothing for us whatsoever.
My in-laws pushed us to look at it though (when we were running out of options and were facing a longer period of living with them than they liked). It was in the neighbourhood we wanted, had the size of yard we desired, and in a price point we could handle. Somehow, I started to get ideas on how I could make it work for us. And that’s where it started.
inspiredboredom 