Unless you’re a brand new follower, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that we were somewhat forced into buying the house we currently live in. I've written about this before. If you don't know the full story, you can read it HERE. But, in that hasty purchase, we had to overlook a lot just to ensure we had a room over our heads by our eviction date.
One of the most annoying things for me that has gone uncorrected for three years now, is that we have a total of five lights in the entire house. Two in the kitchen, two in the hallway and one in the bathroom. Our living room and none of the three bedrooms have lights.
In our master bedroom, our headboard has small 20W reading lamps on either side, (which is the only light we've ever had in the bedroom) but they are plugged in and controlled from the headboard, so we still have to walk into a pitch black room and fumble for the switch on the cord which is tucked behind our bed. We've just learnt to leave at least one turned on 24/7. But, it's only a tiny reading light... so the function of the light is very limiting and I usually end up bringing a huge flashlight into the room to provide more light if I'm looking for something, or doing anything other than reading in bed.
My brother got us started on Phillips Hue about a year ago, and that is the answer for us as they have a wide array of products that will actually work perfectly in our house, however it's not cheap. He helped us get some lights into Liam's bedroom a few months ago, and it was so bittersweet seeing the reaction from Liam. He was so excited to finally get a light in his room, but I felt immensely guilty at the same time that it had taken me so long to make that happen.
Then an element of buying the property that was very exciting for me was the garden shed. This was no aluminum shed from the hardware store. No, this is a legit, properly built outbuilding. I immediately re-imagined it as my home office. I insulated it, hired an electrician to wire it with power, heat and an abundance of lighting (four lights in the shed compared to five in the entire house!), and had it ready to convert into a kick ass office. But then life took a major course correction with Lisa going back to work and me giving up my career to stay at home with my kids, that now the project has sat idle for two years. I want it done. I want drywall and proper flooring installed.
The flooring issue goes for the house too. When we moved in there wasn’t a single square foot of carpet installed anywhere. After four months of playing on the cold, hard floor with three kids under the age of two, we had had enough! Lisa went online and found a carpet installer selling off a roll of premium grade carpet that was only missing a few feet. He sold it to us for pennies on the dollar. However, even though I did a lot of the prep work, we still had to hire an installer and at the time we could only afford for him to install the carpet in our living room. The bedrooms were put on hold. Little did we know three years later they would still be on hold.
So there you have it. Carpet. Lighting. Drywall. Flooring.
The only problem is that I'm not a handyman. This goal is going to be tough. I'm gonna need to find someone to help me with this one.
