Friday Musings: Plank and Nail

Last week, I reprised some thoughts that I’d written early on about the feeling of home and the many places where we may experience it. I did this purposely because I wanted to lay a foundation for today’s ideas which revolve around the experience of helping my youngest work on his house before moving in last weekend. I was with him when he initially went to see the house and again later when the inspector came to deliver his well-earned, dire report. There were a few issues, as there always are, but I agreed with Connor when he said that he thought the house was move-in ready. I nodded my head vigorously and exclaimed “Absolutely!” when he articulated the thought that there was nothing of an urgent nature that needed to be done. Is it any surprise to anyone who owns a home that the day after settlement found him taking down ceilings and ripping up laminate floors? And oh those colors that we thought could be tolerated: midnight blue, dark purple, highlighter orange… what were these people thinking?? As much as I knew that a good bit of the work was going to involve me, I couldn’t help but smile. This is what we all do. We buy a house thinking that it’ll be okay to occupy what was once someone else’s vision, but we quickly learn that we really do need to take almost immediate action. It’s all part of the process of making the house our own, giving it a new identity, and manifesting our own dream.
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