Inside cleaned up

It's Sunday morning and I am not getting ready to go to church. I have a cold or influenza or some creeping crud. I could probably survive sitting through a hour service and I wanted to meet and talk to a few people this morning, but if I go and spend time in a crowd I am allowing others to be infected. That would show a lack of love and perhaps some of the legalism of my parents generation. We went to church as long as we could stand upright, sort of, if you slumped a bit while you were walking you were still good enough to go. If you didn't go it showed a lack of love for God. Now I realize sharing a virus with my neighbor shows a lack of love for my neighbor and by extension a lack of understanding God's love.

I didn't get sick till Friday. Sharon told me I should take a day off. Then what? Sit at home and feel miserable. I'm not some weenie! I soldiered on. I just hope I don't have to redo what I did on Friday and Saturday. Anyway, I am now able to see the light at the end of the tunnel on the house we have been working on. It is hard to see in this picture, but the blinds are up on the the windows upstairs. When you start hanging window treatments you are backing out of a house.

Doors are finished and actually have door knobs.

Always save some cardboard for the end. Polyurethane drips a lot. Much easier to slide a flooring box under the door and just pick up the cardboard and throw it away when finished. 

There are even clothes rods installed in one bedroom. The other bedroom upstairs still needs one, but that is the last project on the second floor.

 

I painted the interior of the exterior doors yesterday.

Sharon says she likes the earth tone colors in this house. The doors are painted "Mars Clay". I am not sure that is an earth tone. Extraterrestrial tone perhaps??

The bedroom on the ground floor has the finish on the floor. I was able to save the original wood flooring. It has some "Character". A few scratches and stains to show its age. On Tuesday a barn rail system is to be delivered. It will hold the sliding door for the closet.

I have built the closet door out of 2 antique windows. We will see how this project turns out. Question is, do I leave the glass panes transparent or do I spay the back side with a white paint to make them translucent?

The living room and hall floors have been cleaned and are ready for polyurethane. I wonder what was drug across the floor to make those scratches about an inch apart. They are deep enough they are not going to sand out, so once again some character to the floor.

The kitchen sink is in. The sink came without the holes for the faucet drilled. I found out you drill coriander with a regular hole saw. Who would have thought.

When we bought this house it was a total wreck. I removed the broken side door and replaced it the first week. 2 neighbors stopped to say they appreciated the broken door being fixed. Now the inside of the house looks pretty good. The out side needs a lot of work

Need some warmer weather to put on new siding and roof. Once that is finished this summer, the house will look good both inside and outside.

As I started writing today, I was thinking of how we used to go to church even when we were sick. It was important how we were viewed from the outside. Maybe inside we were a mess, but everyone else couldn't see that. We were quick to judge on what we saw instead of trying to understand the causes of what we saw in others.

As I have gained some experience dealing with people, I have found that some of those my ancestors would have judged as sinners, have an unseen side that knows the love and forgiveness of God.

That is more important, isn't it?

When Jesus was condemning the legalistic people of his day, he said,"Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean."

If you look at this house just from the outside, it is a wreck. If you take the time to walk inside and look, you find it is all cleaned up and new. Take the time to walk into some people's lives, hear their stories, and maybe rejoice in God's grace.

I had a woman share with me last week that when she was younger she was a drug addict. A friend helped her get clean. She said if she had been caught, she would have had her children removed from her home. Only because of God's grace was she able to break out of the addiction and she never lost her children. Her life looked like a wreck on the outside but God was working on a rehab on the inside. You know, come to think of it, He is on a lot of us.