Bad habits

After a hiatus in latter December and first week of January, winter has come back with a vengeance. 

Before I was able to start working on the house we are rehabbing this week I had to shovel snow off the sidewalk too many mornings.

Thursday morning I also loaded up some insulation and went to make sure the water meter in a garage was well covered. At some point a bad decision was made to put the water meter in the garage instead of in the crawl space under the house. It generally does not freeze in crawl spaces. It does freeze in garages. Why would you put water pipes where they can freeze? It makes no sense to me. I built an insulated closet for it last summer after having to thaw the pipes last winter during that stretch of below zero weather. We were heading for Michigan on Friday morning and I did not want a call from the tenant when we were part way to Michigan that her water was frozen.Inside an insulated closet and packed in insulation I hope it says thawed during the -24 expected Wed. night of this week.

I spent most of the week finishing ceilings and walls.

The first coat of paint is on the bedroom and living room ceilings

See that brownish color on the ceiling of the bedroom before I painted? That ceiling had never been painted before. It was just the sprayed on texture. I am willing to bet someone smoked in the house and turned the ceiling brown. Having seen the residue that is left by smokers on walls, ceilings, and even in cupboards, I would strongly suggest never starting that habit.

What was once white had been turned a nasty brown.

It is going to take at least 2 coats of paint to cover the brown. I hate painting ceilings. It gives me a pain in the neck. 

I painted part of the kitchen ceiling before I ran out of the 2 gallon of paint I had purchased for the ceilings. It also had that lovely brown color of embedded smoke and tar.

I spent my week covering up the results of bad habits and a bad decision. I'd like to think I don't have bad habits and I don't make bad decisions, but who am I kidding. I just try to cover them up so they can't be seen. Instead of taking down the sheet rock and putting up all new I painted over the smoke damage. Instead of re-plumbing the house with the pipes out of frost's reach I buried them in insulation.

That may work and be perfectly acceptable in a house but it is not acceptable in our lives is it? If we have bad decisions and bad habits we can't just cover them up, we need to admit our mistakes and our sins and tear them out of our lives and start over. I think I may have to work on that this week. Take a hard look to make sure I am not just covering up instead of renewing my life with Christ.