Cleaning House

Making a house a home is one of life’s great ventures, definitions of achievement, and privileges. However, home-ownership includes the requirements of maintenance, fixing, cleaning, and paying a mortgage which can quickly become nagging chores. My family has been so blessed by our home at 480 Surrey Drive. This was the first house Leah and I had the pleasure of owning. It is also the address where my children were born. It helped us pay off our massive student loan debts after refinancing, and now it is going to fund this awesome adventure for us! The good old 480 deserves it’s own shout out, and I intend to try to give it the props it deserves within this post.

When Leah and I moved out shortly after marriage to Grants Pass Oregon, we gave ourselves a year to see if the town, location, and our jobs were the right fit for us. After about nine months of renting, we decided it was the right place for us in that period of our lives. Also, we realized we could do this thing called life across the country from our family. It timed out well in 2010 as the housing market market plummeted, so we capitalized by buying our first home. I honestly can’t tell you how many homes, properties, and “fixer uppers” Leah (she was really into HGTV at the time, way overestimating my skill set and time) and our extremely loyal agent looked at. No joke, I probably looked at about 45 plus houses, and would say it was a mere fifth of the houses she looked at.

For us, the house buying experience was definitely becoming frustrating. The type of “are you serious” frustration that can only be explained as God’s plan when looked back on. We put offers on two houses, both of which fell through due to the sellers not recognizing the home value at that time in the market (2010 – remember? Definitely not a seller’s market). We thought that we had just about exhausted our search until one Friday I came back from treating clients to my desk and found like seven missed calls and four voicemails from our agent. As I remember it, each voicemail was a progressively more hasty version of “I found your house call me back we need to get it now”.

That evening, we drove up to 480 Surrey Drive, and were immediately bowled over by the perfect location. Only five minutes from the interstate as I commuted to work, however deep in a secluded part of the neighborhood at the end of the street. The one acre lot and home, just shy of 2000 square feet, was surrounded by trees and undeveloped land. It had just come on the market as a foreclosure that day!

After looking around the house for about 15-20 minutes, Leah, while lying on top of the huge kitchen island doing “snow angels” (this is probably not hard to imagine for anyone who really knows Leah), said “I’M HOME!” Our agent said, “Good” and placed out the already prepared offer paperwork for us to sign on the counter. A few other offers were entertained by the bank, yet our agent fought tooth and nail to make sure that the house would become ours as we had the offer in first. Again, it all worked out, and soon enough, Leah and I got to work making this house, our home.

Referencing the above statement… not just with decor (😉). Within two years of living here, we decided to start our family. Right at 10 months later, along came our first: baby Faith….and then close to three years later came baby Fisher. The house was now definitely a home with the four of us. The house was solid – really not needing much more more than paint. The outside and backyard? Well, let’s just say mud pit is an understatement when referring to what the the back “yard” was. A lot of sweat and blood went into extending the concrete patio, putting in a French drain, playground, garden with raised beds and a dear fence. Oh and not just any fence. A fence that had to “look “ nice which included 10 foot by 8in diameter treated posts. If you want to discuss blood, sweat and curse words, the buck stops here. Dan… you were a life saver here!! Whoever you are reading this, hope you never have to dig 3 feet deep into a granite hillside, even with a two-man auger. That’s all I have to say about that.

We had our beautiful set up just the way that suited us best. But, like any home, things wear down and get dirty, needing fixing or replacing, or refinishing, or maintaining. And with two growing kids and two parents working professional jobs many things were getting swept under the rug – pun intended – despite our very best efforts. Now, please, don’t get me wrong, Leah continues to astound me with how organized she is, and I don’t like living in filth either. Pat myself on the back time – Leah has never cleaned a toilet since we have been married. We are clean people, and frequently one of the first thing things guests would remark is how clean and well-kept the house is- even with two kids.

Soon after deciding to sell the house, we quickly realized how much cleaning really needed to be done. Both bathroom floors and countertops along with the kitchen countertops and backsplash are tile, and much of the grout needed to be fixed and cleaned. There were a few boards on the deck that needed to be replaced. The base boards near the doors and showers were warped and need replacing. Did you know that around bull nosed corners, you have to make 4 cuts at 22.5 degrees for each corner – and if you have 6in base boards with a 4in table saw you need to make 8 precise cuts? I do. On top of all the other spring cleaning duties, this really mounted up to a big task. Preparing the house to sell was undoubtedly the first test as to how well Leah and I would work together as a team to pull this crazy idea off, ensuring the planned adventure.

We re-organized our work schedules, and figured out how to cover kid care to provide unobstructed work time – just in time to put the house on the market at the beginning of spring. When it came time to sell, the house looked spectacular. I have to admit that I had a thought, but Leah verbalized it first: “our house so looks so nice I might want to stay here!” This sums up the difficulty in leaving this awesome spot – the future buyers are lucky people.

Sweet spot – what a blessing this place has been for us!

Paralleling this thought, came another as I talked with my mom while scrubbing out the refrigerator. Wouldn’t it be awesome to have time to keep up on things this well while enjoying and using it? The maintenance schedule suggested on every new appliance, property equipment, and house structure alone is laughable! This house isn’t huge, but if I legitimately obeyed suggested maintance schedule for all this stuff, that would be a 40hour week in and of itself!

This really got me thinking. To truly enjoy everything we have around us does require maintenance in order to enjoy it to its fullest. They should be cleaned up from time to time, inventory taken, tuned up. This tactic will always endure the best chance at running into less problems. I’m not just talking about the weed-eater’s engine! What about our relationships, our talents, our spirituality?

Whether it is our house, ourselves, our relationships, crap builds up. Deal with it! Deal with it now, to enjoy it now! The way I see it, and I believe the God I worship sees it, each and everyone of us are sinners. No one person or sin is worse than the other. If you are not a believer, but care enough for some reason to keep reading this, you are at least a seeker. We are all at least that. If you can say you feel there is more to us and life than just a pile of cells that by astronomical odds became a human civilization. Or even if you agree there is such thing as evil acts, evil in this world. Then there has to be good – if this exists, who defines it? A creator! A being that created all of this – a look in the wrong direction is enough to be cast as unclean by this creator! He loves us – He gave us a choice and a way to ensure our eternity with Him 2000 years ago.

Life – we have only one! How awesome is that? Clean it up from time to time, and do it deeply so we can love more purely, laugh more fully, and live more meaningfully. 😘

These pictures are just epic – not really having much to do with this post.