WEEK 33
Not DAY 33, but week 33, day 3!

In our present renovation project, I’m guessing we are somewhere around halfway through. YIKES!!

Everyone loves before and after pictures, but getting there is the work! We are somewhere in the middle of this renovation project – and the middle is always the biggest part.

The longest part of any renovation is the space in between the before and after pictures. BEFORE … happens so quickly… you see the project in front of you as you look to the future. It may even have been its own journey to get there, but once at that initial point, all that remains are the steps required to get to the “after”.  And sometimes there are many, many steps to get there.

So while I sit here after a long day of finding a way through the puzzles and predicaments of the lake house renovation, I had to take a trip down memory lane to a crazy before and after renovation we worked on previously just to remind myself that it can be done! That middle between before and after of that crazy renovation lasted about 15 months :-).

Renovation Start

It started like this: we bought a house to renovate. The closing price was just above the price of the land. That’s because the house on that land had faced some difficult days in the BEFORE. Only pictures, BEFORE PICTURES, “way before the after would ever arrive” pictures can convey that kind of “before” with justice.

At first glance the house did not look too horribly bad. But sometimes, pictures lie.  Or at least some pictures can be made to lie.

This first picture is what we saw when we looked on the Web. The price was right. The house had that mid-century modern vibe. It was in a good neighborhood. What more could we ask for…right?
Well, we were about to find out that seeing the house in person painted a far clearer picture. The next pictures are what we took…in real life…undoctored and from all the wrong angles.

These are the real BEFORE PICTURES of our crazy house fire project. We bought it with a woefully unrealistic expectation of when we’d be able to take our AFTER PICTURES. Had we known, really, truly, known then the actual finish date of the project, it may have been a little overwhelming.

Renovation In Process

And so here we are now. The LAKE HOUSE, our current project, is 3 times the size of that crazy burned out hovel we took on in blissful ignorance of how distant the AFTER would ultimately be. And currently at 33 weeks of renovation and counting, I to go back and remember where big projects lead. They lead to an incredible set of “after pictures” … IF … and only if the in between of before and after can be navigated.

Any project worth taking on can often bring big middles of time. And those times are often filled with a call for endurance and a steady eye toward the AFTER that is certain to come. Very similar to the life we live on this earth and with an eye on the LIFE to come, each journey is filled with so many twists, challenges, puzzles, failures and victories, that this middle time can be a dramatically interesting time.

Finally Finished The Renovation

If you find yourself in the middle of a project and wonder if you’ll ever finish, you can always break out some old “after” pictures. It’s really a lot of fun. Even today, years after we rebuilt that burned out shell of a house, I can still hardly believe we made it through the 105 degree summer days and the winter mornings trying to thaw out before a space heater.
But we did.
AND we have the after pictures as reminders – for this big current lake house project and the projects still to come!