It's About to Get Real Up In Here

Mosquito bites and afro hair. Love these Kansas City summers. But this 2013 summer has been full of even more to overcome than frizz. Like homelessness, no internet, a toddler in their terrible two's and the unwelcome back pain that this baby in my belly is gifting me with. Though I welcome the unwelcome pain just knowing that we get to shift our eyes from tantrums soon enough and hold a squirming baby boy in just under 8 weeks! And look how precious this sweet thing is in between her fussiness.

Anyway, needless to say, I haven't blogged much. At all. Okay, I just straight up haven't blogged. But this morning marks an important day - one worth an early wake-up call at my in-law's to snag some internet before the house wakes up.  Because today is the day I start ripping down wallpaper in our new house. The day I start pulling up carpet. The day the drapes go into the trash. And the chandelier comes down. Along with the kitchen cabinets. Along with the entire pantry and coat closet. Cover your eyes and ears, previous owner, today is the day your house stops looking like your house. 

Because last night we got the keys to our new Brookside address. And nothing about that process was easy. Paperwork a beast and the seller a nightmare. But it's ours. Floral wallpaper, blue backsplash and all. 

Given that it won't (pray to Jesus) look anything like it currently does in a few weeks, let's take a tour!

So the outside is huge part of why we bought the house. Because the inside is so bad in so many ways, that I needed to at least feel like by simply changing the black and white trim paint to something less...black and white, we'd have great curb appeal. Landscaping ain't my thing. So we needed a leg up here. But soon enough, goodbye bad paint and goodbye bad driveway.

Through the front door, you're welcomed, or in my opinion, accosted by a sea of popcorn ceilings and yellowed paint and yellowish hardwoods. It's almost blinding. But it's almost gone, too :) First half bath is to the right. All around ugliness up in there. Bad tile, fixtures, square toilet (what?!). It's weird. And it's staying. Because this little boy is kicking strong in my belly and we don't have time to do it all just yet. But savor your life, little powder room, because I'm only giving you another 12 months...tops.

Turn left through the front door and you're in the living room. Not much to say here. I'd like to square out the openings to the entry and dining room but our budget isn't exactly allowing for all these nonessentials.

We're told that the fireplace works. We'll see. Luckily John was a firefighter, right? We'll have extinguisher in hand as we light the first blaze this fall...

Back through the glass paned door in the picture above is this den/library. It's both my favorite room in the house and the room I'm most confused about as far as its future. For now and the sake of our sanity, we're keeping everything as-is. Down to the last thread of that stunningly red carpet. Painting wood is such a no-turning-back commitment that I want to live here awhile before we decide where we go with it. But say hi to the soon to be grab-a-blanket-and-watch-Homeland room.

Back into the living room and out through the back, curved case opening is the dining room. Won't lie. It's pretty small. But we'll be opening the right side up to the kitchen, so we'll see where that takes us.
For now, I'm dreaming of gray grasscloth. Yum.

And now for the real gem of the house. Ahem. Why bother? It's getting gutted in less than 24 hours. Anyone want the stove? Top dollar, folks. And an antique to boot. Check your local Craigslist soon!

What you can't see is that facing that indoor patio table is a 3ft by 5ft pantry plus a coat closet. Those two things will disappear and the opening to the dining room and entry will get bigger. Also, the window on the right below will shrink and sit above new countertops that will span the whole back wall.

There's a book that could be said about what we're doing with the new kitchen, but that's for another day.

And last but not least on the first floor, another fav of ours is the master suite off the dining room. While it's a sight for sore eyes now, it's a room we have big plans for. After hosting our makeshift kitchen for the next couple months during the remodel it's going to actually be our "family" room. Why, might you ask, do we need a family room on a floor with a living room and a den? Because often to our dismay we're crafty people with lots of crap. Like pianos and sewing machines and such. So while this room won't have a TV in it, it will have our desktop, John's upright, a couch, and a closet full of HomeEc things. Sounds cluttered, but we did something similar in our last few months in Branson and we were all about it. Spent way more time in that room than any other.

Then later, when we want to forget we have kids, we'll move the master back downstairs in here where it belongs, turn the left side of this next photograph into a walk in closet and update the bathroom.

In the meantime, we've already lost the wallpaper border and coordinating shower curtain drapes, so we're well on our way to a perfectly viable, low budget makeshift bathroom upgrade.

I'm out of breath. The rest of the house can come tomorrow. Speaking of tomorrow, that's when my dad's Scovell-Wolfe crew will come in and demo the kitchen. Then we've got an electrician coming to put canned lights throughout the first floor because there's zero overhead lighting in most of the rooms. Plus, we're overlaying all those popcorn ceiling and what better time to rip up the lids than when you're already scewing with them. After a week of that, we'll try to paint as much as we can muster before we have the hardwoods refinished to a dark ebony. A week of drying later and we'll try to actually live there! But for now, we're house hopping as our condo rented last month and all our stuff went into storage. Love living out of a suitcase. It's just sublime...but those hardwoods can't dry fast enough!

So that's the short of what's to come this month. But I'm going to try real bad hard to keep track of it all as we go here on the blog.

Silly bird.

Silly bird. That's what a friend of mine posted in the comment line when I wrote on Facebook a few weeks ago that we would be renting our condo AND buying a house. Silly bird because in all the ways we shuffled our options moving forward this scenario was never among them. And yet it's clearly the one that God had always intended for us. And everything we did to try to further our own agenda, in the end, worked out for our good and his glory because God redeemed those silly steps we took. And made them better. The mistake we made in refinancing our condo only to decide to sell two weeks later. Well, thank ya kindly, because now that we're keeping the place to rent, we're better than well off. The list goes on. The things we were doing and feeling and sorting through that we thought were bringing about a particular outcome months ago all worked toward better things we could never have foreseen. We were silly birds I suppose.

So here we are. Inspections are Sunday. A house is so close I can almost reach out and grab it. We love the gal who is planning on renting our condo. We love the ugly house we bought. It's perfectly dated and perfectly in need of transformation. I lose sleep at night dreaming of the ways I plan on ripping it apart and putting it back together. But all in time.

The last few months have been anything but quiet. Don't let the lack of posts fool you. I go between having too much to post about to wondering if what I would write about is really worth writing at all. So in the chaos of getting our condo ready to pass on to someone else, finding a new home and raising a child...and growing another (Have I mentioned that? We're pregnant!), I've taken a major hiatus from blogging. And there's the part where in an effort to pinch pennies before moving we haven't had Internet since May. That has made blogging a rather precarious endeavor. All that said, come August and come new house and come Google Fiber, I'll be right back here tracking the every nail hole we hammer. Get excited.

In the meantime I'm going to restrain myself from packing too early and try to enjoy the next few weeks of solace before moving. Moving and then soon thereafter waking up every three hours to nurse a newborn. And wipe the bottom of a toddler. And cook dinner. And tear down wallpaper only to hang new. And rip out crown only to install new. And all the while keep a spirit of gratitude and an abiding sense of longing beyond the material things of this world. A longing for the only thing that fulfills. Not for the paint colors and the new countertops. But a longing for the God above me, before me and beside me.

For now we're at the farm. And if we're not careful Annie is going to wreck a car and break a leg. So,  I'm off.

10,000 Hours

John and I went to a seminar several weeks ago on the Common Good. A guy named Andy Crouch was there and he basically killed it. Everything. The piano. The singing. The speaking. Everything. It was sort of a, 'why doesn't everyone know about you' kind of moment. Like, I would have dragged a lot more people here this weekend if I knew it would be this good. It was fried chicken good. I know I'm pregnant when I hear the word 'good' and think 'mmm, some KFC sounds good.' But I digress.

Andy Crouch wrote a book called Culture Making. A book that I haven't read. Oops. But it's ok. I never actually met him over the weekend so I never had to lie. Who does that? Not me. Anyway. This concept - from how he explained it over the weekend - is the idea that we as people are to be creators of culture, not just consumers, critics, and condemners of it.

Creators.

Scary word. But he talked about how God left major space for us to create. You see sound is good. But, music is very good. Color is good. But, art is very good. The forest is good. Gardens are very good.

Creators. I love this idea. I love the idea that God invites us into partnership with him to take what has been gifted us and make it flourish. Make it sing. Make it beautiful. He lets us make that happen.

I love that golf courses are so stunning. They're these highly manicured, highly man influenced landscapes and yet some of the most incredible manifestations of God's glory. And I love good food. Flavor packed ingredients coming up from God's ground made into succulent meals by human hands. And trees. Tall trees. With shade and blossoms in the Spring. But then houses made of that wood. Detailed carpentry. Gorgeous furniture.The list of ways in which we partner with God to create is endless. And endlessly inspiring.

One of the afternoons, Andy Crouch did a break-out session where he had us brainstorm the similarities and differences between two kinds of play. Playing a CD and playing a violin. The contrast was almost frightening. Consuming vs. creating. Passive vs. active. The restriction to listening vs the ability to collaborate. The concentration needed in playing the violin versus the mindless pressing of the play button. And one of my favorites, the autonomy of playing a CD vs the interaction and apprenticeship needed to learn an instrument. The coming over your shoulder and moving your arm teaching you can only get from another farther along on the road than you.

At the end of it all, he said this. Playing a CD will offer you instant gratification. You will listen to a virtually perfect recorded and mastered piece of music in which you probably had no hand. And playing the violin will offer years of frustration and practice. Obedience and discipline. Money and time. But 10,000 hours in, it will be among the most rewarding things you know.

10,000 hours in to playing the violin, my goodness. What does that even look like? I'm not sure given that I can't even read music and don't know the difference between a violin and a viola. But here's what I do know. I'm a consumer at my core. But I was created to be a creator. It's why I made myself stop reading so many blogs and start one. But I'm terrible at it. I have three pictures in this post. All taken within seconds of each other and yet I can't edit them with any consistency. Or for that matter, excellence. But I'm only a few hundred hours in. And though it's tedious and often disappointing. Though it's often vulnerable and often forgettable, I'm going to keep pushing through. And not just here on this blog. This is far from my deepest passion. But with being a creative mother. And wife. And designer. Creating moments for my kids at the zoo and not just in front of rectangles that glow. Creating. Doing. Digging in the dirt. Working. Making. Thinking. Trying.

I have now and have always had this tendency to think I'm older than I am. That I ought to be farther in life that I am. I ought to have mastered something by now. I ought to be more secure by now. I ought to know more by now. It's a terrible trait to have in a lot of respects. It's impatience breeding. So instead of trying harder to be better, smarter, wiser, I need to focus more on training harder to be all of those things...10,000 hours from now...for God's glory.

Before I sign off let me just say how intensely proud I am of my husband. I see his hands cook dinner and change diapers and type emails and hold me everyday. And then every now and again I get to see him behind the piano doing what he does so well and I have to remember the decades of practice and discipline poured into making it to where he is. The level he's attained.

In fact, the very evening that I wrote this post I went to an elementary school band performance that my mother-in-law is in charge of. I walked in a few minutes late and as I heard the first few notes of sound I sighed in relief and thought, 'Oh, no big deal. I'm not late after all. They're still tuning their instruments.' Oh JK that's just what they sound like. For reals. That first song was b-a-d. And those kids were s-t-r-u-g-g-l-i-n-g to stay afloat.

But I had nothing but a huge grin on my face as I had the enjoyment of watching them just a few hundred (or dozen?!) hours in. And even by the end of the night, the songs were better. FAR better. Good, even. I could actually tell what they were playing! Heavens, what a delight! But it was such sweet encouragement to see them faithfully enduring those early pains for the opportunity to participate in creating music. And it inspired such a deep respect in me for John as I realized what he once most certainly sounded like on piano back in a makeshift recital hall at St. Elizabeth's. And what he sounds like now. Oh, what he sounds like now.

So again, here's to being cloaked in the identity of a Creator God and going out and falling on my face to participate in creating.

But you know, when I think back to almost four weeks ago when I started writing this post before I got side-tracked and never finished, I wonder what was really at the heart of wanting to write it. And I think it maybe wasn't even so much about lighting some fire under my rear to start doing anything. I think it was just because I was so inspired learning from Andy Crouch about this Creator God of ours. God is just never as simple as I think he is.

Who, I ask, in His power, with His majesty, using His imagination would leave it up to us humans to draw things, grow things, make things? A God who is generous; who loves us. Loves to love us. Loves to let us work. Loves to watch us flourish. Loves to let us learn. Loves to accomplish things through us.

So maybe that's all this is. It's just a nod to a magnificently humble, merciful, awe-inspiring God. I've begun to think that my most fulfilling moments in life are the ones I devote to thinking about how beautiful and holy and brilliant and powerful and just and sovereign our God is.