Taking a Leap of Faith
"I found the perfect house for you," said my brother over the phone. He bought and flipped houses for a living. I was immediately excited to see what all his fuss was about. When my brother called me about a property he had bought, I imagined a beautiful house on a hilltop, in need of some repair, but overall move-in ready. What we discovered upon entering the large wooden oversized cape, was nothing like anything we could have dreamt.
The house had been abandoned for ten years. Every window was broken. The kitchen cabinets were filled with mouse poop. The carpets were filthy. The lighting was outdated. The plumbing had been ripped out of the walls and there was broken glass everywhere.
As we walked around the abandoned property on that cold day in March, keeping our hands in our pockets to stay warm as our breath formed little bits of fog in the air, my husband and brother discussed the electrical panels, checked out the wood stove, and examined the structure of the house. I, on the other hand, saw the open space, the large family room, the empty canvas. My husband Jay and I looked at each other, he had a worried look on his face, I could tell everything in his being was willing me to say no.
While he saw an enormous amount of work, I saw the opportunity to create the house of our dreams. "I love it!" I exclaimed. And thus begun our adventure of renovating our house - nothing we had ever anticipated doing - especially at this scale.
For the purpose of being completely honest, this project took a lot of convincing and support from our families. I saw the vision of what the house could be, but the amount of money and time that needed to be invested to make it happen was intense. In order to complete this project, Jay would have to do all the work on his own - he understood what that meant better than me. He had experience working in carpentry, but never anything to this scale, nor completely on his own. My dad volunteered himself as our second main man and thank God he did! We took out a reconstruction loan along with money we had in savings (we had been planning to move from our 900 square foot home that had gotten incredibly small with the arrival of our 2 girls). We had found the way to begin our journey and basically only did so with a vision of what was possible and faith in that we could actually accomplish it.
