The last thing to finish was to paint all the interior doors. Over the past few days Mike has painted them!! He started with the downstairs doors, then did the upstairs. It took of day of prepping and spraying them and then the next day he could hang them back up.
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| Painting process |
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| Kate's Closet Door is finally white! |
We took the kids out to dinner to celebrate. I brought the iPad with and we started looking through the blog while waiting for our food, but didn't get too far since there are so many entries!! It was fun to see how young the kids were when we started! We reminisced about the renovation - the good, the bad, the ugly, the most memorable moments, the moving things around, the crazy, the exciting times. The kids all agreed that they wouldn't do it again, but overall viewed it as a positive process. We all had a really good time talking about it and I'm really glad we got to share those memories together. It definitely feels amazing to have this behind us finally!
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| Faces of excitement! Reno Done!! |
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| The "Mother of All Burgers" we shared! |
I put away the last of my supplies I had out - a paint pail with touch-up white paint for the trim. I can't help but be amazed at the transformation our house has taken - it's a completely different house than the one we moved into 6 years ago. Every door and window has been moved, all the walls have been knocked down and moved. I remember saying in the beginning, the one thing I would not do myself is mud and sand all the walls --- but I did it! I can't believe I mudded this entire house! There was countless times my Mom would call and ask what I was doing, the answer was always "mudding again....I'll never get this done, I'm going to be mudding forever!" She always gave me such kind words of encouragement and would tell me how far we've come and say that we are doing so good. I could never see it at the time because there was always so much ahead of me, but it all makes sense now. I whined...A LOT....along the way, but it was a hard process! It was trying on the marriage, I felt a lot of guilt not spending that time with the kids, it was hard to be home all day in the house with tons of motivation to get things done - things that I couldn't do myself without Mike's help, and then he'd come home from working a full day and have to go full swing into working on the house. Little progress was made day to day but it all added up. We worked so hard and were so determined, I often look back at this blog just to remember those days and it still leaves me in awe of the determination we had. We also created lots of fun memories, the kids learned so much - they all could build a house themselves I bet! They were so patient and versatile when it came time again to move them into a different room or share with someone else, they slept through countless loud nights of us working late into the evening. There definitely will be future projects. but hopefully never again to this scale! For now we are figuring out how to relax again, something that doesn't come easy when you are used to working hard! It definitely feels good and like a big weight has been lifted off of us!
