Ups
We picked a great time of year to do something where the windows and doors were wide open during the day; the weather was unseasonably cool, with lower-than-usual humidity, thank goodness. Originally I thought we'd wait until July or August to start but I'm so glad we didn't wait...we would have been miserable with the heat and no air conditioning.
No air conditioning = a lower utility bill during an expensive month. Oddly enough, with no gas stove hooked up and no heat being used, I got a higher-than-normal gas bill. I called the gas company about that and they said it was estimated, which, don't get me started on that nonsense. I sent a picture of my meter to the company and their reading went from a usage of 31 to 6:
File this under incredibly random pictures found on my blog. Hey, at least it's not a toilet flange?
We had a great excuse to eat out often, which we like to do anyway:
French toast at First Watch - can you tell I was craving fruit?
With very little normal things to do, we treated ourselves to a movie On Demand - yes, we paid to watch a movie at home, which we never do. It was I, Tonya and it was really good.
I had enough time on my hands to clean my keyboard:
Why yes, I did take every single key off, wipe each one down, and used canned air to clean the board. As you can see by the jumble, I did this Shelley-style, which is to dive in without thinking things through. Did you know that the same keys can have slightly different shapes depending on which side of the keyboard they go on? Found that out. Also, it would have been helpful to take a picture of it before removing the keys...you think you know a keyboard, but there were a few questionable moments.
Seeing the contractor's crew's faces as they came in after big changes had been made - they really seemed to like what we chose and took pride in their part of the renovation.
Seeing the choices that we made come to life - every few days there would be something that made a noticeable difference in the house.
Downs
The amount of dirt and dust - we were warned it would be bad, but holy cow. Until you live through something like this, you really can't imagine just how dusty EVERYTHING got. We went through a lot of Swiffer dusters just trying to make our small living area somewhat clean.
Having to live in one room for nearly two months was rough, plus it wasn't even our normal room, as we had tons of stuff jammed into it and our bathroom. The bathtub was filled with pots and pans and a mixer and...well, just imagine emptying your kitchen cabinets into a bathtub and that's what we had.
I knew our refrigerator would always be plugged in somewhere in the house (it got moved around a lot depending on which room was being worked on), but I didn't anticipate that it would be wrapped with plastic to protect it from dust and paint. My plans for yogurt breakfasts and cold cuts for lunches were thwarted because of this.
We tired of using paper plates and disposable cups and flatware. I just wanted a real spoon!
Excessive amount of trash and recycling. When you use disposable everything, you have to dispose of everything. I didn't think I was a strong land steward, but this really bothered me after a while.
We got tired of having to eat out. It's great when you chose to do it, but not having a kitchen for so long really wore on us.
Zero knitting done - it was just too dirty and I was too discombobulated to relax and knit.
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Now that the renovation is finished and we've mostly put everything away, and we've gotten some mental rest from constantly making decisions, we are, of course, very glad we did this. It's a bigger challenge to do a renovation, even with a contractor doing all of the work, than we realized. But the payoff is amazing and every day we can't believe how nice our house is and how lucky we are to be able to make it happen.
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