Sometimes at lunch with friends I tell this story. I call it my father’s ‘American dream’ and my ‘American nightmare’.
We grew up in the capital of Washington State, Olympia. It’s not necessarily a small town, but it’s not huge either. We had our little suburban lifestyle with our suburban friends and their suburban parents driving suburbans. Welcome to suburbia.
It was great.
But we didn’t always live there. When we were younger, we lived on a very small farmish type of thing. We had cows, pigs, goats, rabbits, chickens, dogs, cats and probably a few other things I don’t remember.
After our suburbia time, my dad decided he wanted his farmish thing back, and this time with some “hired” help… us kids. We were old enough to help now, and that meant slave labor. Good times.
So, off we went into a home which “had potential.” I’ll never forget those words. I hated them for years to come. The house was (from my city-boy perspective) run down. My dad saw it as an opportunity to do home improvements.
Can you see the headlines in his head? “City family makes wonderful life out of their own hands!” Uh huh.
First came the typical duties of running a farm, this time with horses who have stalls which they fill on a nightly basis. Of course, horses don’t have hands that can pick up giant turds with a rake, filter out the nice expensive sawdust, and throw it into the manure pile. So, that’s left up to us.
While we’re flinging horse crap, dad’s inside swearing at the pipes and walls. I’ve never seen my father sweat so much in my life. I’ve also not seen so much mayhem made of a house before. Dad was trying to remodel it, home improvement style.
The sad part is that once we were just about completely finished with the house, The Great 100 Year Flood of 1996 (which came 5 years after the other Great 100 Year Flood) came through and filled up about 3-4 feet of our newly remodeled home with muck.
So, we remodeled again.
Now, the end of the story goes like this: Pay someone else to fix your house. It’s not glamorous. It’s not “fun” (unless it’s a small project). It’s a pain in the ass, and if you have kids, they might talk about this one time where someone got a brilliant idea to find a house with “potential” and fix it up.
In case you’re doing some home improvements, specifically adding conservatories in the UK, you might check out Anglian Home.
If all else fails, at least wait until your kids are off to college.
Simple disclaimer: This post is a sponsored post, meaning I got paid to write it.
