The Unbecoming

Glennon Doyle says this: "Recovery is an unbecoming. My healing has been a peeling away of costume after costume until here I am, still and naked before God, stripped down to my real identity."

I say this: "Renovation is an unbecoming. Our home has been peeled away of layer after layer of past flooring and paint until here we are, stripped down to the bones and naked before us, stripped down to is original identity."

Demo day was yesterday. The main floor of our home has been stripped down to this:

Our cats have lost their "cat table" by the living room window ... but they are improvising

Our hallway is barren, as is the linen closet (note the new rounded corners!! I am quite excited about these)

The room formerly known as "Mom's room" awaits its new identity

This room has been my room, my two youngest sons' room (at two different times) and a spare room. What will it become next?

This has been our TV room and my room. In its "unbecoming", I am not certain of this room's fate

Our back entrance takes quite a beating - I can't wait for its fresh new look

Our kitchen has been in the process of "becoming" a new-to-us version of its old self. I love everything about it and cannot wait for its final reveal. It awaits grouting, flooring and a new light fixture over the table

And here our home stands, naked and awaiting a fresh coat of paint, new flooring, baseboards and doors.

Ever since I walked into this house, I have felt it was destined to become our home. Everything about it felt right. The location, the layout, the yard and the "feeling" I felt when I walked into this house had me sold. Throughout the years, the feeling has only grown stronger.

This house has housed us through raising my boys, in and out and through love, loss and everything in between, sixteen years of daycaring, two dogs and seven cats. If these walls could talk, they would have a lot to say.

Throughout it all (except for a short phase when I was frustrated at home ownership because it felt like I had another dependent child, without the income tax deduction), the knowledge this house was "meant to be ours" grew stronger with each passing year.

You can imagine my surprise and delight to find a "fix" a former renovator made while transitioning the front entrance flooring into the living room. In order to accommodate for the layer of linoleum which made the entrance a fraction of an inch higher than the living room floor, they MacGyvered a solution. They stapled a few layers of cardboard to the plywood in the living room to equal the height of the entrance. Guess what cardboard they used?

 A chip box! Me and chips go a long way back. We are still an item. I just laughed when we came upon a "chip box fix" built right into the floor we walk on every day.

The only thing we could have uncovered that defined me more than a box of Old Dutch chips, is if we had unveiled an empty can of Pringles.

In our home's "unbecoming" and revealing the layers of its past, I am "becoming" more of who I want to be. This is a good thing.