Three years ago...

With this coming Sunday being Fathers Day, I was reflecting that it was three years ago that Aimee and I bought our house. It was a foreclosure, and had been thoroughly TRASHED by the previous occupants, so we got it for a great deal. Catch was, there was a TON of work that it needed.

While I moved us into the new house, Aimee took Rowan (only a year old at the time) back to Indiana to visit her parents. We scheduled the contractors to come in that week and do the bulk of the really big work: rebuilding the upstairs bathroom, new drywall in several places, new windows, new floors, and a few other projects. All the minor stuff, we figured we'd do on our own after we moved in.

Aimee walks in front of our new house the day
the "SOLD" sign went up, end of May 2009

Which brings to me to my reminiscence of Fathers Day three years ago. The house was still a disaster, but the bulk of the big stuff was done. The girls were going to be home in a day or so, and I was on a mission: before they returned, I wanted the kitchen and Rowan's room to be more or less 'done'. I did the kitchen first, cleaning it thoroughly and putting all the dishes, pots, pans, and food away. Then came Rowan's room.

I spent that Fathers Day, the WHOLE day, prepping and painting her room. And when it was done, I spent a good chunk of the night and the next day unpacking her stuff and setting up the room to be ready for Rowan to occupy it and Aimee to take care of her in it. (I did stop long enough to take myself out to a steak dinner that night.)

Three years later, and some of the rest of the projects have been done. Many haven't. I've actually made a push recently to get a lot of the bigger ones we wanted to do completed, which feels very bittersweet to me (although there is NO downside to finally having closet doors in all the bedrooms, which I finally ordered). Those projects were ours, and it's hard to move forward with them without Aimee. But as I pass another Fathers Day and remember painting Rowan's room, I know that my job has not changed - to make this house a home for my family. Ultimately that's done through love, but closet doors and more efficient heating don't hurt either.

Like it or not, ready or not, life moves forward day by day.