Renovate This
16/10/17 16:56
It doesn't look like I'll be getting in my bike ride today. There was just too much to do and not enough time to get it all done. Nancy packaged up all the return items that we had for Amazon and I brought them to the local UPS store for shipping. She mentioned to me in passing that not all of the packages were pre-paid in terms of the shipping so I brought along a few bucks to cover the anticipated expense. The store employee processed my packages and told me that all were pre-paid and that I owed nothing. Of course, I told him that I wasn't leaving the store until he charged me something since my wife sent me there with explicit instructions to pay for the packages that were not pre-paid.
It was all in jest, of course, and I happily left the store with receipt in hand which quite clearly showed that all items were indeed pre-paid. Nonetheless, when I visited with Nancy for our daily walk not even an hour later she was having none of it. That aside, the packages were en route to their destination pre-paid or not and there was simply nothing to be done about it one way or another. Receipts for some but not all have since come into our mailbox already with mere hours passing since my visit to the UPS store. Talk about remarkable.
It's quite amazing how having renovations done in your home can open your eyes to so many things. I suppose change for the sake of change can be good and yes, even eye opening. It makes you wonder where the time went. It makes you wonder what inertia with all of its faults has wrought yet you only need to open your eyes to see for yourself. Only now when you open your eyes you see glitter, glamour, and grandeur. It leaves you wondering why on god's good earth it took you so long to open your eyes. To open your eyes and see things that have faded over time, things that have lost their luster, things that no longer cry out to be noticed, things that function but just barely, things that no longer sing to you when you're down, things that don't want to hold you up anymore, and where mediocrity and malaise strangle your sensibilities until you become numb to your visual environment.
Everything not being renovated suddenly seems to beg for renovation. We can no longer walk a city block in nearby downtown Portsmouth, a lovely city by all accounts, without looking longingly at gutters that work, pristine paint jobs, new townhouses with 15 foot ceilings and recessed power lines, marble adorned entrances, properties seemingly sculpted elsewhere and placed on postage stamp sized lots that promise to change the skyline for the next hundred years and for the better to be sure. It is a macro example of what we're seeing in our own home when it comes to identifying opportunities for improvement. Fact of the matter is that you don't have to look too far to see the opportunities that until now were there but just not obvious. With the renovations done, whether it be in the city of Portsmouth or right here in our own home, examples of what can be provide a path to what is possible. You just have to open your eyes.
The replacement vanity top and sink finally arrived and it has been properly installed. Can't recall if I commented previously that they delivered the wrong size vanity top and sink. Good thing we noticed and good thing we got that squared away. I told Nancy that I've never seen her so excited about 4 inches before. I'm referring, of course, to the space between the edge of the sink and the actual sink. It should be 4 inches or so and not the nearly six inches that we took measure of when they delivered the original vanity top and sink.
Now if I can just get Nancy to stop splashing so much when she washes her face that will be a good thing. Water ends up everywhere and every inch of the 36 inch vanity top is splattered with water. I may have noticed this before but, like everything else, stuff just went unnoticed or tolerated before the renovations. And any thought of a smaller vanity short of the 36 inch vanity we now have would have been preposterously small especially in light of the splashing taking place daily. The shower door is not yet in place either so we had to put up a shower curtain. What a cluster that's been. Nancy tells me that we should have gotten one with magnets to make sure the fit was tight and to avoid water getting everywhere inside and outside the tub. It was never meant to be anything but temporary so you go cheap and hope for the best. All of that ends today when they put in the shower door. Nancy's only question is now, is it opaque enough?
It was all in jest, of course, and I happily left the store with receipt in hand which quite clearly showed that all items were indeed pre-paid. Nonetheless, when I visited with Nancy for our daily walk not even an hour later she was having none of it. That aside, the packages were en route to their destination pre-paid or not and there was simply nothing to be done about it one way or another. Receipts for some but not all have since come into our mailbox already with mere hours passing since my visit to the UPS store. Talk about remarkable.
It's quite amazing how having renovations done in your home can open your eyes to so many things. I suppose change for the sake of change can be good and yes, even eye opening. It makes you wonder where the time went. It makes you wonder what inertia with all of its faults has wrought yet you only need to open your eyes to see for yourself. Only now when you open your eyes you see glitter, glamour, and grandeur. It leaves you wondering why on god's good earth it took you so long to open your eyes. To open your eyes and see things that have faded over time, things that have lost their luster, things that no longer cry out to be noticed, things that function but just barely, things that no longer sing to you when you're down, things that don't want to hold you up anymore, and where mediocrity and malaise strangle your sensibilities until you become numb to your visual environment.
Everything not being renovated suddenly seems to beg for renovation. We can no longer walk a city block in nearby downtown Portsmouth, a lovely city by all accounts, without looking longingly at gutters that work, pristine paint jobs, new townhouses with 15 foot ceilings and recessed power lines, marble adorned entrances, properties seemingly sculpted elsewhere and placed on postage stamp sized lots that promise to change the skyline for the next hundred years and for the better to be sure. It is a macro example of what we're seeing in our own home when it comes to identifying opportunities for improvement. Fact of the matter is that you don't have to look too far to see the opportunities that until now were there but just not obvious. With the renovations done, whether it be in the city of Portsmouth or right here in our own home, examples of what can be provide a path to what is possible. You just have to open your eyes.
The replacement vanity top and sink finally arrived and it has been properly installed. Can't recall if I commented previously that they delivered the wrong size vanity top and sink. Good thing we noticed and good thing we got that squared away. I told Nancy that I've never seen her so excited about 4 inches before. I'm referring, of course, to the space between the edge of the sink and the actual sink. It should be 4 inches or so and not the nearly six inches that we took measure of when they delivered the original vanity top and sink.
Now if I can just get Nancy to stop splashing so much when she washes her face that will be a good thing. Water ends up everywhere and every inch of the 36 inch vanity top is splattered with water. I may have noticed this before but, like everything else, stuff just went unnoticed or tolerated before the renovations. And any thought of a smaller vanity short of the 36 inch vanity we now have would have been preposterously small especially in light of the splashing taking place daily. The shower door is not yet in place either so we had to put up a shower curtain. What a cluster that's been. Nancy tells me that we should have gotten one with magnets to make sure the fit was tight and to avoid water getting everywhere inside and outside the tub. It was never meant to be anything but temporary so you go cheap and hope for the best. All of that ends today when they put in the shower door. Nancy's only question is now, is it opaque enough?