It is a crack home.

Forgive the silence.  We have had a lot of home improvement activity going on at the House o’ Dock and Kang for the past few weeks.

Years ago, when we first moved into the house, I had this wild idea of building in the deck and transforming it into another room. Like everyone else in the world, one more room is always needed in a home.  Just.  One.  More.  Due to budget constraints (ie:  complete lack of money) and trepidation, we decided to table that initiative for a long time.  The idea of someone removing walls, adding a foundation and rebuilding walls is just a wee too much for us right now.

We decided to stick our toes in the renovation pool by taking care of some things that we are incapable of doing ourselves due to lack of talent, patience and inclincation.  The foyer and hallway (upstairs and downstairs) has needed a new coat of paint since we signed the closing papers back in 2004.  The living room walls had been painted the week after we moved in.  Dock promised to take care of the trim. Seven years later, it was still the same color.

Also in consideration, the hideous color of the exterior.  It was (note:  was) a lovely shade of brown with green shutters and cream trim. That needed to go away.  Forever.

We had only hired a contractor once before and that was for a very small flooring job. Hiring someone to rip siding off your house and repaint was unchartered waters for us.

Everything had been humming right along until the tornado ate Raleigh.  Very, very tragically, some of the crew was directly impacted so work stopped for a week.  But now it’s back on and almost done.

One of the most peculiar things I have noticed is that the moment you make an improvement to one part of your home, the other areas become, well, painful to look at. Our home is now a happy shade of white with black shutters.  Just the way any good Yankee would have it. It’s lovely.  Incredibly lovely.  Alas, the gardens look pitiful in comparison.

If I had to identify one take-away from this particular exercise it would be – just leave your house looking like a dilapidated crack house.  Sure – your neighbors will be very unhappy.  Sure – you’ll lose any potential value you have in your home.  But – you won’t have to sit there and look at part of your home and think “Gee…it’s so lovely.  How unfortunate that (insert problem area here) sullies the improvement.”