A Room For Living

May 10, 2011

As we prepare to move (only 10 more days!) I've been writing a series about the renovations we've done on our house over the years. This is the fourth post in the series. Here are the rest:

The reality of leaving our home of six years, and saying goodbye to all that we've invested, is starting to hit me.

We've poured a lot of our lives into this house but the truth is a house is just a house. Home is where your heart is. So for me wherever Damien and the kids are is home. But still, it's not easy saying goodbye to this house. You'll forgive my melancholy mood.

The living room was the first room we started to renovate when we bought our house. We removed the carpets the same day we signed the papers with our mortgage company.

Friends helped us that first hot July night as we ripped up staples, peeling back the carpet to reveal the wood beneath. That was the easiest part of the whole renovation.

We tackled this room first because it was the easiest project to start of the most lived-in areas (living, kitchen and dining room).

Although we started right away we didn't get the job completely finished till last month when we replaced the radiators. No wait, we're still not completely done. We have a small piece of trim to install along the top of the wide baseboard. Houses, they're never done.

Over the years we Damien painted both rooms celery sprig green, replaced the fixtures, and built (from scratch) window trim to match the original trim throughout the rest of the house. The window trim took the longest and required (of course) the purchase of expensive tools and hard-to-find wood.

My Dad came one fall and helped us install energy efficient windows.

Our living room is truly where we live. I spend a lot of time in our kitchen and we eat in the dining room but all the other activity of life - learning, playing, hosting friends, computer stuff, movie watching, birthdays, packing and unpacking from adventures, and even guests sleeping on the futon - has happened mostly in our living room.

My kids never want to far from the action and have always played and crafted in this room. If you stop by in the middle of the day it's sure to be in a state of creative chaos.

A living room is for living in (and sometimes even scootering in).

The worst of the chaos, coming home from trips

The room is looking forlorn this days (not quite so much as when we first bought it). The walls are bare. The nail holes, where art once hung, are patched and ready for touch up paint. Boxes are piled around the perimeter. Furniture we don't truly love or need is already sold or given away.

There are so many memories attached to this room. The big moments and the small. Saying goodbye to these memories and this room that we created over the years gives me a little lump in my throat.