One day, Chris told me he wanted to tear down the walls in our downstairs. As usual, his idea seemed preposterous to me. He likes to think of new possibilities, and I get attached to the way things are. 

I liked the small rooms in our house. Each room had a door so it could be closed off from the others. This is one of those ways our house showed its age. No one had opened up the rooms, even when a family with seven kids lived here. I love old New England houses, and the separate rooms seemed useful -- I envisioned the kids as teenagers, occupied in different rooms, doing different things. 

Our wood stove's heat couldn't reach the farther rooms, though, and we didn't like eating in a cold dining room. I decided to trust Chris' judgment and see what it would look like to open things up. We decided not to completely open the rooms, but left parts of the walls to divide them. We (and by we I mean Chris) put in new ceilings at the same time. Our old drop ceilings were stained and cracked, and felt like they would fall in on us.

Of course, a project of this magnitude meant a total disruption of life. When your house looks like this, it's time to take the kids out! For a week in July 2012, Chris worked long hours on this while the kids and I stayed out. All our furniture was crammed into the bedrooms, so we couldn't even hang out upstairs during the day. We spent a lot of time at the library and local parks. 
Fortunately, it was a sunny week! 

We couldn't use our kitchen at all, so food was a challenge. Could we avoid packaged food at a time like this? We had just avoided packaged food on a week's vacation earlier that month, so I had faith that we could. I spent a couple of weeks storing up food. We had lots of yogurt, bread and muffins ready for us before the kitchen was out of commission. Since it was summer, I bought lots of fruits and veggies, too. The kids loved having picnics for every meal! Sometimes I went to my parents' house to cook some eggs for breakfast or soup for dinner. We managed to get by without resorting to boxes or cans! 

Soon we had nice clean ceilings, with recessed lights! It feels like they're higher than before, but they're not. Of course, we love them and wonder how we lived for 3 years with the yucky old ones. 

As it turned out, I loved the rooms being open. We switched the playroom and dining room, so now the kitchen flows right into where we eat. It's much more functional! Uncovering the chimney turned out to be a nice bonus. We weren't sure what condition it would be in, or if we'd want it exposed. But it looks beautiful, and helps our house feel more homey. At first we wanted to paint it white, but I'm glad we changed our minds. I love the colors!

The playroom became a cozy dining room:

And the dining room became a playroom:

When Chris told me he wanted to build a garbage bin, I was skeptical. It seemed like a waste of time and money to build something unnecessary when we had so many big projects to do on the house. We had just finished the big downstairs renovation, and now needed to start the apartment soon. Why bother making a bin for the trash can that was just fine on its own? 

Then Chris built it, and I loved it. I really loved a garbage bin! That's a sentence I never dreamed I'd write. 

It was just so nice looking!

A year later, the inevitable happened. I still thought of the garbage bin as a new item, but to Chris it didn't measure up anymore. He started imagining how great it would be to have a coffee and tea station in our kitchen. Where could we fit it? On top of the garbage bin!

We looked at ideas on pinterest, and he drew up some plans. Then, in the blink of an eye, our garbage bin grew! 

We tried a basket under the counter, but didn't like how things all fell together. So Chris built a little drawer, custom made for the grinder and tea supplies. My little jars of herbs are ready to be brewed!

While he was at it, Chris made the little cork board/chalkboard wall nearby. We finally have an easy way to keep track of the daily kid chores. No more tattered paper on the fridge! Someday we'll figure out how we want to finish off that wall going into the playroom, but that's a problem for another day. 

The living room is a place to relax, somewhere to sink onto a couch with a good book after a stressful day. A place for the kids to build towns with train sets and Lincoln Logs on a rainy afternoon. Our living room was old. Very old and worn out! It was one of the better rooms when we bought the house, though, and we thought just a touch of TLC would make it a cozy place. Little did we know what awaited us in this room! The wallpaper seemed permanently attached to the walls, even with a steamer and then a special spray-on solution. The subfloor appeared to be just as securely attached, and became a huge frustration to Chris. The people who installed it had nailed it at one-inch intervals, so the pieces couldn't be lifted off easily with a crowbar. Chris worked for long hours after work, pulling out each nail. Finally, the original wood floors and plaster walls were exposed!

     Everything in the house had to be removed and packed into a storage unit. It was worth moving out, since we got new floors, doors, trim, windows and stairs. And our kids' blood was almost  free of lead just two weeks after moving back in! This work meant we needed to repaint, so we chose a completely different color. The floors which had been so painstakingly uncovered had to be covered again. If we had known about the lead in the floors, we would have put wood on top of those subfloors in the first place! 
     Next, we decided to see if a wood stove would make our heat affordable. We knew when we bought it that an old, uninsulated house would be drafty. We didn't expect our heat bill for the winter to hit $6,000! After insulating, the next winter it was still almost $4,000. Something had to change, because we couldn't pay that much. While paying so much for heat, we shivered all day with the thermostat in the high 50's as we tried to keep the bills low. We dressed in lots of warm layers, but had noses and hands that felt like ice cubes. A wood stove's warmth sounded great! Chris built a hearth in the unnecessary doorway between the living room and playroom, and we bought a Woodstock soapstone stove that heats our entire house. Now we enjoy our very warm house every winter, for just $1,000 a year. We enjoy warm winter days inside our house, since it can be 85 degrees downstairs when the stove is going, but that's much better than being cold!

In the spring of 2013, my Grandma gave us some furniture. Our very stained Ikea couch and chair went upstairs, and the living room got a new look. There's still work to do in this room (wainscoting and a gallery of old family pictures are two things on the idea list), but it's much nicer than it was just 3 years ago!

allowed any type of paint or play dough or anything remotely messy in the house with babies, because getting through the day was draining enough without extra messes to clean! Sometimes when I'm humming along to the Raffi music and putting clean diapers from the dryer into their basket, I laugh when I realize that diapers used to be such a huge annoyance to me, and back then all I did was throw them away after each change. I used to have days where I felt so exhausted that I wanted to hide in bed for a month. Please, no more diapers or wiping baby food off the high chair or having to pick up the same toys off the floor over and over, I thought. Right now, I really don't remember the last time I was exhausted. I feel tired sometimes, but a nice book and cup of tea at the kids' afternoon resting hour or bed time refreshes me. Before, I had kids who took 2-3 hour naps and went to bed a bit earlier than they do now, but was so overwhelmed. I had many days when the main goal was to get to bedtime with the least amount of messes and tantrums, but now I have much higher standards for our days! I expect to shower enough, and when I get dressed I take it for granted that clean clothes are waiting in my dresser. But I went for years feeling like showers were a rare luxury, and clean clothes were hard to find! 
     Why can I glide through my days with ease now? Is it because my three oldest kids are older and more independent? Or the fact that I've gotten into the rhythm of meal planning and cleaning, so I don't get overwhelmed by what I need to do? I don't think I'm more laid back about the house, because I now keep things cleaner than before. Maybe my healthy diet gives me more energy and fortitude for the daily tasks? 
     It's probably a combination of many things, but the reason doesn't really matter. My fourth baby gets so much attention, and doesn't hear Mommy complain all day about having too much to do. He sits on my lap for lots of books, and he rides in the Moby wrap while I bake cereal or crackers. The other kids had plenty of reading time and play time with me, too, but I was more distracted. 

We celebrate holidays with lots of fuss around here, and Valentines is no exception! I did special things when I had toddlers and babies, and wondered when they'd be old enough to be excited for them. It wasn't as much fun to carefully cut strawberries into hearts and place them nicely on top of yogurt, and then watch the kids simply gobble their food as usual. I still went to the trouble of making decorations and special foods each February, even though the reactions were disheartening. 

Why did I go to that trouble, when I was drowning in laundry and drained by the kids' unending neediness and fussing? Every year on February 13, I wondered why I was putting my energy into it. (I also wondered this on July 2 and Good Friday.) It seemed normal to put lots of effort into Thanksgiving and Christmas, but not smaller holidays. But I couldn't stop myself. Something in me HAD to cut out hearts and think of new heart foods, even though the kids would have been happy having an ordinary day. 

Looking back, I see that making small holidays special was worth the effort because it gave me an excuse to be creative. It let me step out of the piles of baby clothes and into something fun. I felt excitement build up as I took out doilies and red paper; my thoughts drifted to possible Valentines day fare as I wiped food off the dining room walls. I needed an outlet because my days were draining. 
Now that the kids are older, they join me in eager anticipation for the 14th to arrive. I overhear them guessing what kinds of foods they'll have. They jump for joy about little surprises. They work hard on cards for a few days before the holiday, calling out that I'm not allowed near them. At breakfast they hand out their cards with big grins.  I think they'll always enjoy making things special!

Restoration is our passion.

It sparks long discussions, even though we’ve been talking about it for ten years now.

It was the first thing we knew that we had in common, back in our college days when we found ourselves in the same psychology classes, giving our answers in each class about what we hoped to do with our lives.

We long to see people restored when they are trudging through life, feeling broken or lost. We long to see families restored when relationships are strained or seem irreparably damaged. We long to see places restored, too, places where beauty and vitality have long since faded away. The empty, run down storefronts in our area once saw shoppers step through their doors all day long, but now they stand quietly while people drive by, just like the house in Virginia Lee Burton’s book The Little House.

When our family grew too large for our apartment and we looked for a house, what did we buy? We wanted a comfortable, modest place where we could put our furniture and continue our day to day tasks. Something without too much work, since we had a newborn. A little painting was the most work we wanted to do.