I can’t believe another year has passed! MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY 2009 EVERYONE!
Christmas 2008
I also can’t believe the entire month of December somehow flew by without a single blog entry. All I can say is life has been crazy! (In a good way.) We have been crazy busy with our business…which is never a bad thing, but even less so when everyone else is talking about recession and lay-offs and such. Unfortunately those 11pm work nights for most of December also meant our house process just about came to a screeching halt. (That, and as Patrick noted in the previous blog entry, we were also out of town for a little bit.) Thankfully we were able to push ourselves to work a little bit more on paint removal in the dining room. We had a deadline to meet – the Westview book was being republished in time to make it back for Christmas and we wanted to update one of our detail fireplace pictures with a dining room shot…
Stripped wood in the dining room
…so at least from that angle it looks decent. And as we enter 2009 the business workload hasn’t slowed down, so we’ll just have to discipline ourselves to not entirely abandon all of our unfinished house projects. Actually that makes me laugh…unfinished projects…you get so used to them you don’t even notice anymore. We’ve had comments from people that we have “cool” kitchen crown molding and then we have to explain that it wasn’t actually meant to be unpainted, but was rather just another unfinished project, haha.
There are times where I feel that we’re not getting anything done on the house. The first few months so much happened and things seem to progress so slowly now. I suppose I need to remind myself that the first few months of work consisted of bringing the house up from a non-inhabitable space to an inhabitable space. Thankfully our house is very much livable now and we’re just working on the aesthetical items. As I was scanning through the folders of photos documenting our house process in 2008 I was actually excited to realize that perhaps we got more done than I thought. We painted the bedroom, worked on dining room paint removal off and on throughout the year, had the attic insulated, finished the interior of the bathroom built-in, had the brick foundation re-pointed and partially rebuilt, and tore out our shameful broken concrete front path and replaced it with a beautiful historic brick path.
In addition to reviewing our own house progress many things have happened in Westview in 2008, and we’re excited to be able to say we’ve been part of it. We’ve been active with our neighborhood association, the Westview Community Organization, and the Neighborhood Planning Unit (the official citizen advisory council to the City of Atlanta), as well as meetings with City Council Members, the Bureau of Planning, participating in the Atlanta Home Show, and the list goes on. Of course as many things in life the good also comes with some bad mixed in. We experienced a tornado narrowly passing our neighborhood (thankfully!) only to cause much damage downtown. We’ve witnessed the City of Atlanta spiral into a financial disaster, closing Fire Station #7 in neighboring West End, cutting city services and increasing our water fees. We were there to see mortgage fraud mastermind Kevin Wiggins get sentenced to 8 years in prison for leaving our neighborhoods devastated in the early 2000s.
But like a sprout pushing its way through the soil in spring Westview is up for an exciting year. I think 2009 will be big for Westview. I can feel it. Sometimes change is so gradual you don’t see it. But this feels like change. We’re gaining more and more homeowners who are also busy fixing up their homes. We have a new homeowner on our street working on the house, and another house under contract a few doors down from us. And we see new faces appearing at the Westview Community Organization meetings or emailing us saying “Hey, I’m a new neighbor…”. Hopefully all these new neighbors coming to Westview and working on their houses will inspire us to work extra hard in 2009. You know, ‘keeping up with the Jones‘…
