If you ask Mark, we’ve opened up a resort here at the house. Our new master suite feels like a room you’d get at a vacation getaway, a bed & breakfast, a place you’d pay money to stay at. Of course, then I remember how much this renovation cost us and realize oh yeah, we are paying money to stay here.

We’re still not done with this renovation. Close, but not quite. While technically I can show “after” photos – as in after we began the renovation months ago – I cannot show you “done” photos. Hopefully, that will come in about 24-48 hours.

For now it feels important to detail some of the recent lessons I’ve learned:

• Renovations age you. Mark offhandedly remarked the other day “I bet doing home improvement ages you about ten times faster than normal.” Up and down the ladder a million times a day. Bending over to nail the flooring or move the baseboard trim, or dip the paintbrush into the bucket… You start and end the day with aches and pains.

• Home renovations are an emotional experience. I’ve recently been on the verge of tears every time we accomplish something big. We finished installing the flooring! Mark built the transom window! I finished painting the bedroom! Happy tears? Yes. But I’ve also been led to cry by the sheer frustration and stress of this experience. Why stress? Partly because there’s a real time constraint on us (relating to the TV show) and partly because, well, it’s a stressful experience. We took the bedroom and office, rooms where I could conceivably spend the entire day (because I love sleep and I mostly work from home), and turned them into an uninhabitable  construction zone for about 5 weeks. My work desk is now our dining room table, which, also doubles (quadruples?) as our occasional workstation when we’re building something, or as a place to leave spare tools so we can find them later. Other stress factors: We can’t find anything, least of all one of the dozen or so tape measurers we own when we need one. We’re tracking sawdust, drywall dust, stray nails, and tools throughout the house everytime we move. Mark and I haven’t had time for a social life, R&R, or hardly even time to spend in the garden taking care of necessities like tying up the tomato plants, weeding, and watering. We’re not even sleeping in our bedroom anymore. Once known as a retreat from the heat, a cushion on the basement floor is now our semi-permanent bed until the renovation is complete. Our lives have been consumed by this renovation. And when I say consumed, I mean it. We’re being consumers in ways that we hate: Shopping at big box home improvement stores every other day. Eating take-out because it’s less time and effort than making our own meals. This life is not sustainable, and thankfully, after just a few more days of this, we can return to some normalcy.

• Buying sample cans of paint is worth the investment. Typically we pick up a paint card at Lowe’s, bring it home to look at it in different lighting, and choose one that looks okay. Isn’t this the way you’re supposed to do it? But we always end up hating the color once we bring home a gallon of it and start applying it to the walls. This time, we invested $3 each in 8 – yes, eight! – sample paint cans and took several days of looking at the paint applied to three different walls in the suite to make our decision. I must say, the color we ended up selecting through this process is fabulous. Not fabulous in the sense that New York is now the sixth state in the nation to allow gay marriage kind of fabulous. More like a subtle, organic kind of fabulous. Beautiful, Graceful. Wonderful.

• It’s okay to specialize. Mark and I both tend to enjoy being generalists. We pretty much share all duties equally without the separation and power plays that can happen when one person takes over (or is relegated to) a certain task or chore. We enjoy being able to do a little bit of everything, and being able to learn how to do it if we don’t already know. In fact, my entire freelance career these days is built upon the fact that I’m a Jill of all trades. But I’ve learned that it’s okay if you’re slightly better at doing a task, to just stick with it until it’s done. Or to find a project that your partner is more excited about and let them have at it. At this point in the renovation, we don’t need to learn from each other how to do every aspect of the project or think through the details of each step together – though sometimes this is immensely helpful. We just need to get it done. Tonight for example, I took on a project I’m fairly skilled at: cutting in the corners of the room with my favorite paintbrush, while Mark worked on installing the ceiling fan.  After a short period of time enjoying his favorite pastime – cursing at inanimate objects – he made progress with the ceiling fan, ultimately installing it without any help at all. Personally I think we have a budding electrician in our midst.

I make a promise to you blog readers: I will include more photos and less words in the next post. I also make a promise to me: More sleep, bike riding, and garden time in my near future, and less inhaling paint fumes and shopping at hardware stores. One thing I can’t promise, though: I can’t promise I’ll stop crying tears of joy once this renovation is over.