The Investment

Wow, how time has flown but also felt so slow in the moment. We just came out of about 8 weeks of renovations to our main bathroom, as well as a freshly painted kitchen. Which sounds absolutely lovely right? Well it was made a bit more stressful than it should have with Christmas around the corner and 6 guests staying with us for the course of a week. But I've learned so. much.

First and foremost, throughout the renovations I was reminded of an analogy we use alot in the media industry: the iron/impossible triangle. Implying that you can only pick two out of the three pillars: cheap, fast or good. For example, you can opt for cheap and fast, but it will be a low quality job, or cheap and good but it will take a long time, or the more rare: fast and good, but it will cost you a pretty penny. I can honestly say we had a good medium of all three when working with our contractor, which was incredibly lucky. We didn't do too many price comparisons before landing on BLC renos but considering we're first time home owners, wanted to go with someone local, and was instantly blown away by his expertise and attention to detail, we were sold. So the work started mid-October and now, we have a gorgeous new bathroom.

As you can see from the photo above, the bathroom is accessible through our bedroom which meant unless we wanted to breathe in a load of dust every night, we had to sleep elsewhere. Luckily, we had done up the guestroom in the basement in preparation for the holiday-full-house so we gave it a test run. To this day, I'm still unsure if it was the dry basement air, the change of seasons, the underlying stress of renos/hosting but my face had absolutely broken out in acne. When I was in my mid twenties I had cystic acne and this was pretty darn close to some of the breakouts I had then. Which is pretty insane considering my skin had been much more under control in the past 5 years or so. Funny enough, writing this now, in my new kitchen, on a quiet Sunday morning, my face is almost back to normal. 

Pretty crazy how a shift in lifestyle can impact your wellbeing, sometimes physically and mentally.

In addition to the bathroom being adjacent to our bedroom, my home office is right across from where the work was being done. So I spent most of my days either in the kitchen, the dining room or downstairs sitting at a desk which again, when we bought the house we were adamant on having enough space in addition to our own offices, so we could really separate work from other areas of the house. But this crossover of working in some of those common areas contributed to a bit of chaos. Depending on the work being done, I would either move downstairs for less noise, or go to the kitchen if I needed to stand for a change. Just something else to juggle while a portion of your home is being gutted and you're just crossing your fingers everyday that everything's going to be done in time for Christmas.

Spoiler alert: hosting Christmas was a huge undertaking by itself.

Looking back now, I think we didn't really get the proper break we were envisioning would happen once we were back in our regular bedroom, and we had our new bathroom to appreciate. We basically had the bathroom functioning on December 22nd, and then my family arrived the day after. On top of that, with the kitchen being painted earlier that week, we really only had the 20th onwards to do some food prep, let alone cook dinners in the kitchen. We made the best of it by treating ourselves out for dinner and  whatnot, but holy, once Christmas was underway it felt like we were at a mental-load capacity. I was reminded of the story I wrote about in The Break, where it felt like I could not handle making one more decision, or felt like I had almost everything riding on my shoulders. And as a result, in chatting with my husband post-holiday madness, we agreed there were times throughout the holidays that we were either short with each other, or family members due to the amount of things we were already dealing with and simply could not handle one other thing thrown at the pile.

Needless to say, after all the guests left on the 30th, we had our best sleep in 8 weeks.

And now, being on the other side of it all, being able to unwind in our tub on the weekend in complete silence, being able to stay in bed in the morning for however long we want to, eat meals on our own schedules and simply get back to our regularly scheduled programming - was it all worth it?

Abolsutely and 100% yes.

When we first moved in, we had recieved advice from a few family members regarding not making any drastic changes right away, and to live in the house a while to really pinpoint what is worth changing and prioritizing. Let's just say, my hypotheses didn't change too much with time. The plans we had for the kitchen and the bathroom were finally brought to life after mapping out a vision about a year and half ago. Seeing it come to fruition, after investing financially, mentally and physically is completely gratifying.

The idea of short term pain, long term gain has never been so clear to me after this undertaking. We're so thrilled with how everything turned out, including Christmas, but it's equally important to stop and smell the flowers and be proud of what you accomplished rather than constantly chasing what's next. As we step into the New Year, it may seem like we need to make resolutions, and constantly move up the ladder.

Take that with a grain of salt, and "remember when you wanted everything you currently have."

🪩