What we need and what we don't

It's hard to believe that it's been almost 1 month since we moved.  My oldest daughter has been asking all week to go back to our old house.  She keeps telling me that our house doesn't feel like "home".  Her biggest reason when I ask is because we're so busy.  She's right.  We've been working a lot on our house and I've honestly had less patience to sit with them.  My mom's made up for it, but really, she's not me.  I'm their mom.  So, as I was going to bed last night I realized this.  I need to fully do my job again.  I made a goal to work harder at doing things little by little rather than all at once.


Goal #1:  Bag 1 bag of leaves in the yard a day.  The former owner of this house had her yard mowed, but didn't do anything else.  There were sticks buried in the yard because they were never picked up.  It's overwhelming to me, but I need to just bag bit by bit.  It will eventually all get done, right?  Yup.  It will.


Besides feeling like we have to do the work at once this house has made us feel like it needs to be fixed all at once.  Sometimes that's been because it really needs to be, but sometimes it's been because of our own anxiety. This is why I titled this entry "what we need and what we don't".  


I don't need to rake the leaves all at once, but I feel like I do!  What I really need to do is not burn myself or my kids out but working too much all at once and not having time for them.


Our fireplace is the case of something we felt needed to be fixed right away because it didn't work properly, but really we made a mistake.  We didn't step back and think about the wisest way economically to fix it.  I'm thankful the Lord threw in a snag on Friday to help us see a better fix.  On Friday, as I've come to expect, the fireplace log set installer told me he couldn't do it.  He explained 2 snags to me.  1) the damper had to stay open 24/7 (which we didn't know) and we had no doors to keep our house from losing heat constantly up our chimney and 2) we had no screen or doors in front of the fireplace.  Ugh.


We were very upset because we can't get all of the money back that we spent on the log set--but we can get most of it.  We realized that we would rather put a grate for wood in the fireplace with a screen in front of the fireplace and on the side.  We've called someone to come disconnect the gas line that runs up into the fireplace this week.  In the end, we will lose a little money, but we'll also save a lot of money and feel better about the whole thing.


We thought we needed a gas insert, but really we don't.  We could have saved ourselves the loss and the weeks of waiting for something to be fixed that didn't end up being fixed.


Many people buy new houses and so everything is fixed to begin with.  But, when you buy an older home, there's many things that need to be fixed right from the beginning.  The hard, but important, part is to fix them as you go and figure out what really needs to be fixed when.  That's what we're working on...