House Weekend

This is our house. It's an old house, built just before 1910. We've been living here since May 2006. It's home now, and we enjoy it.

Unfortunately, any house needs work. This is especially true if you move in with almost exclusively borrowed/second hand/cast off furniture that you've bought in the "If we don't have a couch we'll have to sit on the floor" mode of shopping and would like to make it homey and nice. We've made good progress, but it's tough to find the time for planning and little projects that make a big difference. About a year ago, we introduced the House Weekend. We pick a weekend (usually three or four over as many months) and devote it to working on the house. We'll allow ourselves one evening out with friends, but otherwise turn down all invitations and make no plans to do anything other than work on the house. It sounds kind of boring, but it works.

Since it's been a while since we did any concentrated work on the house - something about getting married and a perfectly insane fall semester at work slowed us down - we started yesterday with a giant inventory. We walked through the house with a pad of paper and just wrote down everything we dream of doing in each room of the house. Now we've got a starting point for setting priorities and getting things done. Not such a bad system, really. Of course, my favorite was my comment about our kitchen. Everything goes at list writing time, so I said, "Rip it out and start over." I don't think that's going to make our final cut. I tried...