In 2003 Kelly and I purchased our first house. It was an exciting time! We purposely bought a fixer upper so that we could learn how to do some cosmetic work to the house. We were just handy enough to be dangerous, but certainly up for the adventure. That fixer upper happened to have a leaky basement. Everything we tried over the 5 years we owned that house created another location for a basement leak and we could never get it stopped.
We found another house to buy less than a 1/4 mile away and were looking forward to moving up in size of our house to accommodate our growing family. This "new" house had a roofing issue. Our insurance company wouldn't cover it, and the seller refused to fix it. So, we walked away from the house less than 2 weeks before closing. Like most good sellers we had set up the timing to sell our current house to line up with buying another house. But, with the house we were buying falling through, we were now going to be homeless in 2 weeks. We decided that the past year plus had been too taxing with the birth of our second child, looking for a house, selling our own house, etc. So, we quickly found a place to live in a neighboring town and decided to rent for a year. Fortunately we sold our house for a nice profit and were able to pocket a chunk of change to put down on another house soon, or so we thought.
Instead, Elise was diagnosed with cancer just a few months later and our lives went in a totally different direction. As Elise finished up cancer treatment and began rehab in a Kansas City facility, I lost my job. Elise needed this therapy if we had any hope of getting our daughter back to where she was pre-cancer. With Kelly staying home with our kids, and myself without a job, we no longer had anything keeping us in the area where we lived. So, we decided it would be best if we relocated to the KC area. The grass will surely be greener there!Yeah.......not so much.
After moving to KC, finding a job was harder than I thought it would be. I was completely unemployed for 8 months until I eventally found a part time job. I applied for a job with K-State at their new Olathe (Kansas City area for those not local) campus and was never even contacted. Several months later my sister encouraged me to apply for a job that she saw in a similar unit that she with in Manhattan. I figured they didn't contact me for a KC area job, so they certainly wouldn't contact me for a job in Manhattan. But, as luck would have it, I landed that job in Manhattan. This was about 15 months after becoming unemployed. At the time I thought this might be a short term solution and that I could transfer this job up to the new Olathe campus. With that, I didn't want to move my family just to move them back nine months or a year later. That job never materialized, so we eventually all moved to be back together in Manhattan.
I never realized it at the time, but when the purchase of our new home fell through back in 2009, we embarked on a series of events that always felt like one giant holding pattern to me. We moved in to a rental so that we could regroup and think about looking for a new place. Cancer happened and our world got flipped upside down. We moved to KC as an instant fix to get our family back together after a really difficult previous eight months. We had no idea what the future held, so we decided to rent again to try to figure out our lives. The house we were in suddenly sold while we were living in it and we got short notice that we had to be out. So, back into the rental market we went. We were able to quickly find another place that worked for us and did not require a ton of effort. A couple "short" years later, as we planned to move to Manhattan, we decided that continuing to rent would be in our best interest.
We were a one income family, one child in preschool and another in first grade. Elise had lots of challenges that we were just beginning to work through. As she got older, the challenges changed. Getting around the house was always one of those challenges that we never quite knew how to tackle. Renting provided us the easiest way out if the housing situation wasn't working. Fortunately, we managed to handle it just fine for the next 5 years. But, "managing" and thriving were certainly two different things.
I love to look at houses. I like to go to the house sales sites and browse around. I don't just like to look at the stuff that I can't afford. I also like to look at the stuff that I can afford and dream a little bit. As I sat on the couch one December night, scrolling through Facebook after the kids went to bed, I came across a sponsored ad for a house for sale in Manhattan. I clicked on it and loved the layout of it almost immediately. As I frequently did, I told Kelly that she should check out this house that I found. I handed her the iPad and she scrolled through the pictures and said, "yeah, it looks okay". That was a pretty standard response and I honestly didn't think much about it. The next day she came home and said, "I drove by that house you showed me last night. I think we should go look at it." I was shocked! This was too good of an opportunity to pass up. I contacted the realtor immediately and we were in for a showing pretty quickly. Shortly after that we put in an offer on that house and would be closing on it soon!
We weren't house shopping. We looked at one place and bought it. We had been passively talking about buying a house. We loved having something of our own with our first house, but things were just "easier" when we rented. Honestly, there were a lot of aspects of renting that were easier and it worked well for us. But, without a place that we owned, we just weren't able to do much work to improve accessibility for Elise and ourselves. The doors of opportunity busted wide open when we committed to buying our own house. We have slowly but surely done some improvements to our home, but 2021 is shaping up to be a big year for us. When we were recently getting our house appraised we were asked to put together a list of improvements that we have made to the house since we moved in 2.5 years ago. What didn't seem like much actually filled up an entire sheet of paper. We have transformed the front of our house. What once was covered up by 8 foot tall bushes, is now wide open and covered in a paver patio along with a ramp to get Elise easily into the house. This was a game changer for us and has made getting in to our home so much easier. When we take her to the houses of our friends and family I am reminded of the challenges that we have with mobility and accessibility in most places. But, when we are home, all of those concerns go away.
At the same time we added a ramp to the front of our house we also did a bathroom renovation that provide us a roll in shower for Elise along with a new shower chair to move her around in. Gone were the days of lifting 80 pounds of teenager in and out of a bathtub. While the system we have is not perfect, it is far better than the lifting from the tub that we did for several years.
Sadly, life with Elise is often filled with regression. Over the past couple of years we have watched her physical abilities diminish to the point of her not being able to do much of anything for herself. She is not walking (even with assistance currently), moving herself around in the bed, or sitting up on her own. While we hold out hope that there will be improvements in these areas, we also know the reality that eventually the progress will stop and we will be faced with life as it is. Right now, we are better equipped to face that reality when it gets here and we are closer than we have ever been to being caught up to our needs.
Fingers crossed, in February of this year we will be getting a ceiling mounted track lift system installed in our house. While it is not sexy, it will make so many things easier. While we aren't THAT old, we sure do feel like it! And, as Elise gets older and heavier, we will be getting older and weaker. We all stand a better chance of being healthier if we can find a way to keep her active while also helping our own bodies. My back has enjoyed the improvements we have made already! In addition to this, we will also be widening a couple of doorways in the house. If I didn't write about it, people probably wouldn't even notice (unless I can't get the colors to match!). But, this will make for easier transitions as we move Elise around the house to various rooms.
A large majority of the our projects have been focused on making our life "easier" in one way or another. Several projects have been focused on Elise. We have already done an "unsexy" project of replacing our roof in 2021. We are contracted to get a new air conditioner this spring as well. We will repaint the pool, do some new light fixtures in several places and maybe even do some painting. But, most importantly, we are going to renovate our master bathroom. For the first time in almost 15 years, we are going to tackle a fairly major project like this. The last time I renovated a bathroom, Kelly was 8 months pregnant. I told her I could get it done on the weekend and to go visit her parents. I would get it done before she got home. Needless to say, that ambitious plan didn't quite work out that way. I did get it done before the baby came, but it was longer than a week and it took the pregnant lady helping me cut tile.
This time will be different. Kelly isn't pregnant and I don't think I can get it done in 2 days. But, I look forward to the challenge. More than anything I look forward to demolishing some things and having a nice relaxing place at the end of the day. I'll keep you posted.
No comments:
Post a Comment