Sure…I have time

Maybe some of you remember that about a year ago, we had finally saved enough to renovate our kitchen.  It doesn’t just need a facelift.  It needs to be torn down to even the floor.  The floor is not level.  The shelves inside the cupboards are broken or iffy.  The cupboard doors don’t hang straight.  The countertops are cracked and stained.  There is a serious lack of electrical outlets for small appliances.  I’m continually touching up the glue on the back of the wallpaper that wants to peel off.  I think our fridge is older than Knut.  I’m not sure.  We have dreams of a different layout.

Even though nearly everything needs to be taken out and redone, I still think the room has some beautiful bones.  The high ceiling has this pretty bead board and molding.  The light fixtures were salvaged from a local one room school house that closed years back.  As the family story goes, my father in law tossed my brother in law in the air when he was little, and broke one of the light fixtures with his head.  It took my mother in law 5 years of antique shopping before she found a matching replacement.  I know when we bought the place, she understandably had a tough time leaving the light fixtures.  We were determined to keep them.  🙂  They’re just so perfect for the house.

Anyway, we had saved up enough to redo the kitchen.  It wasn’t too surprising, though, when some farm land that we rented became available for sale last year, that our kitchen fund was completely depleted so that we could have a down payment for the acreage.  I felt like it we really became farmers then: land rich and cash poor.  So now we start saving again.

So it looks like it will be some years before the kitchen gets gutted.  I joked with Knut that it wouldn’t surprise me a bit if it took us 10 years before it actually came to fruition.  You know, when our older kids are starting college.  He laughed back that I probably was right.  Seeing this opportunity, I asked him what he thought about me painting the cupboards.  Knut hates painted cupboards, but told me awhile back that he didn’t mind me painting these ones, since they would be trashed soon anyway.  If I have another decade looking at them, I think I may freshen them up this summer.  He had no problem with that.

A coat of paint can do so much good sometimes.

I feel like I’m at that awkward age where I fully know that I’m in over my head with 5 kids, and a painting project during the peak of garden/canning time, and with possible new animals joining our farm this year, and Knut’s big project this summer will likely be residing the barn, as it needs it very, very badly.  I know better than to take on a project of this size, that will likely be more work than I expect.  Yet I’m young enough to not care and plan to do it anyway.  Even if it means I have a string of late night work ahead of me.

Though, with a list of house projects from the last few years behind us, I’ve learned some things.  As I look at inspirational pictures on Pinterest, deciding what to do and how to do it, the thought crossed my mind that maybe we could tear down the wallpaper too, and paint the walls as well.  That’s when experience took over in my brain and it told me:

Painted cupboards this year.  Wallpaper down next year.  Or in 10 years.  Don’t be that crazy.  Tearing down wallpaper is a whole other project.