Project House [30 days of getting chores done behind the scenes]

Somewhere last year, Joran and I went for dinner at friends of ours. They bought their house a few months before, and they gave us a tour.

They would excitedly show me their wardrobe, and say things like: “Look, it has doors!” Or: “We have a living room light!” And I would think, “It sorta looks like a normal wardrobe and light to me.”

I mean, it’s not that I didn’t like their house. I did. Doors and lights just didn’t seem to be things to get excited over to me. I just thought the house seemed pretty normal, perhaps still a bit empty.

Ha!

How little did I know.

Now, I understand.

After you’ve been through months of renovating, painting, decluttering, chores, organisation, you get excited by the basics.

We have running water! We have a kitchen! The dishwasher works! Now the kitchen has tiles even!

In that sense, buying and renovating a house has been a great practice for gratitude. You tend to get overly excited by the basics.

I tell you this story because you may watch the above video of the process, and you may even like the progress, but not seem too impressed because of the lack of rainbows, artwork, style and general creativity despite my amazing glitter door with rainbow window.

“Okay, so she has a guest room. Nice, still a bit empty perhaps.”

I like to look at it this way; these last few months, I have been prepping the canvas. I have been creating the big empty clear space that first needs to exist before you can make a beautiful painting on it. The basic layer.

Now, very slowly, I’m moving to the fun part. Here and there I’ve already made a sneaky colourful brushstroke on the canvas: a glitter door, a stained-glass window, a colourful pillowcase, a turquoise wall or some pretty awesome tiles for our hallway.

Now that most of the basics are finally covered, I’m looking forward to
1. Sleep and fun and a social life but not too much because introvert and
2. Getting creative with the space and make it come alive with DIY’s, art and infuse it with personality.

Thankfully, when my excitement over running water starts to run out I still have enough opportunities for future gratitude: we still don’t have wardrobe doors or a proper living room light.

So, if somewhere in the near future we finally get the downstairs toilet to work, we might start to invite people to dinner again. And when we do, and I show you around and get overly excited about the fact that we have a working toilet, tiles, and doors, just play along and pretend that it’s the most amazing thing ever.