Fixated on a fixer-upper or—When that penchant for fixer-uppers gets you in a real fix

You know how amazed you get when you see the beauty some people, (like Chip and Joanna Gaines on Fixer-Upper) can make out of a wreck of a house? Just knock out this wall here and put in a stainless steel kitchen there. And ta-da! A new house is born right before your eyes.

It’s easy if you have the ability (and the money) to “see” the vision. I can see the end result when I have something to work with—we knocked out walls in confident abandon in my present home

before

—but I have no, absolutely none, conceptual ability to transpose a

after

flat scale drawing of a layout into an actual 3-dimensional space. And I can’t sleep or think on anything else until I get it.

So for the past three days I have been walking around my house measuring spaces, measuring couches and desks and doorways in an attempt to imagine what they would look like in a new little house that doesn’t yet exist. My left eye is bloodshot, my brains are beat and I’ve used up a whole pad of graph paper trying to “see” the house that will replace the one we bought after we tear it down.

Yep. That’s it above. I was afraid when our kids saw what we just purchased, they’d be putting us in a home all right but it wouldn’t be the one on the hill.

Now, I have the ability to make beauty out of anything I live in. One summer it was a teepee.

 Another time it was a one-room shack on a Chippewa reservation. 

I’ve set up housekeeping in adobe houses with scorpions and outside sinks.

And then there was the pink ranch—pink inside and out. But I have never entertained a mobile home that was buried under a tangle of brush so thick not one speck of light could get inside. Until last Thursday.

Thing is, when we moved south several years ago we said we were finished with renovations. Had it with carrying ¾” thick sheets of plywood. We were ready to buy a tidy, no maintenance home and get on with other things in life. Simplify. Enjoy.

I can see some of the places I’ve lived are metaphors for the stage of life, state of mind I was in at the time. If that’s so, perhaps I should be worried about this one. 

Maybe fixer-upperitis is incurable.

I’ll keep you posted. And if anyone has good info on building a small, efficient, light and airy home on a budget—send it on over, please.

I don’t know how this saga will play out but I do know that my final home is already filled with beauty and I won’t be doing any more fixing up!

In the joy of the Lord,

Marcia