Scaling Back

Clint and I had a few discussions this weekend as to how to make our house bearable, without going into debt, and without duplicating too much work. We realized we’re all or none kind of people- he calls it stubborn, I called it optimistic. We get a vision in our head and it becomes that or nothing. Unfortunately in the case of our house there really is no all or none. The all would mean we’d have to turn around and sell it because we couldn’t afford the payments on any of the work we’d have done, and the none means that around every other Sunday one or the other of us is going to be lamenting the fact that we bought the house, and bought into the myth that we could actually afford to make it beautiful.

In the past our approach has been not to do anything twice- so with the bathroom for example, after tearing off the wallpaper, taking down the mirror, and making it look pretty much as bad as we could, we chose to abandon it until we were ready to gut the whole thing. Part of the painful lesson of all this has been realizing that we have to be realistic about our finances. I’m not sure if this is a part of youth or an aspect of our personalities but we both tend to hold on to the idea that around the corner there will be substantially more money. I think yesterday was the day that we confronted this head on and said ok, if not- then what. We came up with a middle ground for the bathroom for now- and we’re still working on ideas for the kitchen. It won’t be perfect, but neither will it look like it should be condemned. The whole goal is not to make it look like we ultimately want it to look, but to make it livable, and help us be able to live with the fact that yes we bought a house, no we really don’t have the money yet to do what we want to with it, but regardless- we’ll be ok.