I Suck At Home Improvement

Today was the first time in awhile that I felt motivated to work on my house. I generally suck at home improvement. I have a long list of items planned as home improvement projects. Unfortunately, it has been very easy for me to procrastinate on those projects. And by procrastinate, I mean forget altogether.

Case in point, I have some free time right now. Granted, it's after midnight at this very moment, but I could spend this time working on my house as opposed to writing this post. In general, my free time seems to be during the wee hours of night after everything is done and Karen and my little daughter are fast asleep. I haven't quite found the rhythm yet of finding a consistent pattern during the normal course of the day.

My motivation for working on a home improvement project, although fleeting, was inspired by my friends (Cass and Ellen) who stopped by today with their baby daughter for a quick visit. Cass had asked to borrow some tools as he was planning to work on his own home improvement project. Naturally, that got me thinking. Sure, I started thinking about how lazy I have been, but it got me thinking at least.

Needless to say, when Cass, Ellen, and their daughter (Elyse) left, I thought about an easy home improvement project to tackle. I had to think of a project that could be done while my own daughter (Briana) napped. Briana's nap ranges from 45 minutes to 2 hours. You can never tell on some days.

The project I came up with: remove the old casing around the sliding door in our back entrance way. The back entrance has been mostly untouched since Karen and I got our house. We did seal up a wall in there because the layout in that area was a little bizarre. For anyone curious, the back entrance has another sliding door that leads to the kitchen. Prior to our sealing up the wall, there was a very narrow door that led to an adjoining bathroom. You had to be very thin to walk into that doorway.

We have since added a regular doorway to the bathroom that is accessible from the kitchen. But for the longest time, the back entrance way has remained unchanged with the exception of the drywall. Of course, it helped that we stored an old drawer in the back entrance for the longest time. Thank you Freecycle for finally taking it.

Anyway, the project was not too thrilling for sure, but I knew it could be done within the given time frame of 45 minutes to 2 hours. Baby steps. And I must say, it actually felt great to finally get something around the house accomplished. Raising a toddler, I sometimes feel like our house is in constant disarray regardless of how often I clean the place (which is quite often because Briana is in to throwing food lately). So feeling like I have done something to improve the place feels just wonderful.

I actually rode that high all the way to my friends' (Marc and Kelley) place where they hosted a UFC pay per view later that night. As usual, it was good to see them, along with my friends (Andrea, De and Carol) and my BFF (Kerry) and Cass again. Interestingly enough, I hadn't seen Cass in over a month, yet I saw him twice in one day. The pay per view was actually disappointing, despite the blood of one of the matches and the shiny ring girls, but it was a good way to end the night.