Home Improvement--Be good to your home or else

Stephanie Rowe has written an article this month for the WetNoodlePosse e-zine about how improving your home can make your life better. She talks about getting her home ready to sell and learning a lot about how anyone can make improvements that will liven up your surroundings.

When I read her article, I could relate so well to what she was saying. Because of my husband's work, we made moves from a small town near Cincinnati where we started married life to Atlanta, then to Boston, and on to Dallas and from there to Chicago. Finally, we have settled in Florida. Each time we got ready to move, we cleaned out the closets, put away the clutter, painted the walls, sometimes replaced worn carpet and fixed the little things that were wrong with the house that we had been ignoring for months. When we were finished and the house sparkled almost like new, I wished we didn't to sell it. I had just made my home fresh and beautiful for someone else.

We have lived in our house in Florida for over five years. It was nearly new when we moved into it. Before we got there, our daughter had lived in it for about a year and a half while she went to college. After we moved in, with the help of an interior decorator, we painted and made some improvements, such as Stephanie mentioned. But now, five years later, the house is beginning to show some wear. The corners of the walls are nicked from people accidentally bumping them with something. The baseboards need a new coat of paint. The grout in our shower needs to be cleaned and in some cases replaced. I'm not as ambitious as Stephanie because I don't want to learn how to regrout my shower. I just don't have the time. I marvel that she learned how to lay tile and still had time to write books.

So we are in the process of finding someone to do the work for us. That is no easy task. Often people don't want to take on the small jobs. Hopefully, we will find someone to do our grout and fix the faucets in our bathroom.

In the meantime, I'm thinking about painting the baseboards (I do paint although very slowly) when I finish the book that is due on March 15. Until then I'll be right here at my computer painting word pictures.
Merrillee

posted by Merrillee @ 11:46 AM