How I’m Feeling About Our House

With Brady being home so much this summer, we’ve both been itching to do projects around our house. However, the trade off with him being home so much means there isn’t much money to actually take on the projects. I blame the project planning on Brady’s regular routine of being busy with work, and with my natural ache to be nesting and preparing our home. Yet, we’re basically sitting ducks. We have our basement framing package from earlier in summer, and that is mostly done. As the seasons are changing, though, there is more conversation flying back and forth between he and I.

Beware, because what is to come will make very little to no sense. “Jumbled” doesn’t begin to describe it!

A big priority is getting the garage empty enough to park the bus inside for winter. At this point, we have room for the bus, but it’ll be pretty stinking close. We purchased the tub/shower combo for the basement a few months back, and it remains in the garage because we just never think to ask for help when a big strong man is over! So once that thing is gone, we’ll have a decent chunk more room in there. A small chunk, anyway.

We have a big beast chest freezer in the basement, and recently noticed that it was about to kick the bucket. So we ate as much out of it as possible before buying a smaller freezer off of a buy and sell page, and putting what was left in there in our garage. We’ve since defrosted the big freezer and it seems like it might work again. Might. We’d like that one to the be in the garage, so we moved the little one (along with a mini fridge) down to our furnace room, but we can’t move the big one into the garage, because it’ll take up too much space in there.

Before we can move the big freezer into the garage, we need to clean out more storage stuff from the garage. Except that most of our storage will go in our furnace room. So that ALL has to happen on the same day. Which isn’t ominous at all…

We could just move the big freezer into the middle of the basement, build some shelves to store things in the furnace room, and then once things are rearranged, move the freezer into the garage. Thats probably our best bet. And I think its our next logical move.

“Is everything in your garage expected to go in your basement??”

Heck no. SO much of it will be purged when we finally start moving it, I am certain. But a HUGE chunk of what’s in our garage is also outdoor stuff. Bikes, tools, outdoor toys, beach stuff, outdoor Christmas stuff, etc. That stuff all needs to go in either a shed, or we need to enclose underneath our deck, which I think we’ll eventually do. But we can’t do that this season at all. Therefore, we definitely need to build some storage options in our garage. Except that everything is already in our garage, and it’ll all have to be moved around in a pretty big way to get the job done, if its even possible.

So. We need to finish framing our basement, build shelved in our furnace room, remove our freezer, store a bunch of the garage in our furnace room, put the freezer in our garage, build shelves in the garage, store everything else on them, and then maybe some of the mundane, daily life projects can go forward. It seems like, with every project or every job, we can’t go them without doing something else. They all overlap and roll into each other, and while I’m trying not to think too far ahead and set unrealistic goals, its super difficult to organize my thoughts! I don’t want to make a list, either, because I know it’ll be a list that takes YEARS to finish. All of these projects feel so important, and like they need to come before pretty much everything else, but what about the daily stuff??

We have a HUGE mess in one corner of our counter. Its ALWAYS been there. Its everything we would put in a desk/office area. We know where that area will be. It’ll be in the basement, next to the bedrooms. But that place isn’t finished, obviously, and we don’t yet have a desk for it because the one I want is specific, and its not a priority to spend our money on. So it waits, and that towering pile of paper/notebooks/cards/etc stares at me every single day.

I want to reorganize the pantry and two cabinets that have no real rhyme or reason. We have a beautiful abundance of cabinets, and a couple of them are just messy with things we never use. Our pantry is a cross between holding food and holding small appliances. I want to decide what stays in the pantry, what moves to the cabinets, and what goes downstairs in a little storage area of bulk items. Except that the stinking furnace room isn’t done, so I can’t actually visualize what space I’ll have down there. And anything I set up temporarily in our basement will eventually have to move back out when we actually get to finish finishing it. So instead, spaces in my kitchen are either overfilled and disorganized, or unused and dusty.

Besides all of these reasonable projects in my mind (yes, I’m going as far as to call them “reasonable”) I have a sad mommy ache that desperately wants to make a baby room. Trust me, friends, when I say I know that one isn’t reasonable. Not only have I not at all pregnant, but we have four kids in two rooms at the moment, and even if I decided to put a baby room together for our hypothetical next baby, we need our basement done so we have an extra kids room. Its just not even something I should be putting any brain power into at the moment, but I can’t help it. I’m not saying I’m going to do anything about it, but I do think about it, and it makes me want to get things moving around here even faster.

I’m just so ready. But reality also tells us that when Brady is busier back at work (Its already picking up a bit, thank you, Lord!) he’ll be gone! So there will be far less time to get these projects done.Its all logical. It all makes sense. But for some reason, today, its driving me bananas. I promise, I’m not ungrateful. My mind is just going a mile a minute, and I needed to get some of this out.

I told you this post wouldn’t make a lot of sense, didn’t I? You were warned.