Old house revelations

I realized this week that I’ve been making a huge mistake in this old house of ours. Since the first time I toured what would become Casa HickJu, I have had plans in mind for how I want our home to look. The house – a 1910 Queen Anne – is about 50% restored. The previous owner did a whole lot, and in the last three years we have redone three bedrooms and made countless small improvements. But there are some very public rooms that are completely unrestored.

My immediate concerns for the house are to finish scraping and painting the front porch, and after that will come C’s room, because she doesn’t currently have one.

But even with C’s room, I’ve been distracted by dreams. I want so badly for it to be perfect that I am immobilized, when I should be doing all that I can for now and worrying about perfection some other day. Right now, the ceiling is textured (not popcorn), and we desperately want to rip it out and make it pretty and smooth. But that’s not something I can do, and it’s not really in the budget right now. And I need to be ok with that. I can paint the ceiling and it will look pretty nice. And I can paint the walls and repair the extremely slanted doors. The ceiling can be fixed in a few years.

And our dining room – one of the most public rooms in our house – desperately needs paint. I have grand dreams of fixing the ceiling up with crossbeams and restoring the walls to their original grandeur – complete with upgrading some of the windows. But right now, the room is a very dingy white, and while making it perfect isn’t going to happen any time soon, I can still make the room look immeasurably better with just some time and paint.

All I need to do is find the time, and while I won’t be getting where I want to be, I will be halfway there. And that’s better than stalling at the starting line.