Slow change

Today Micah and I finished the inside of the Blue House (except I still need the bathroom light fixture)

Speaking of the bathroom, this was the original state of the bathroom. When walking through the house before we purchased it, I did not even want to go in there.

Now it looks a lot better. The 18 inch vanity has been replaced with a 48 inch vanity. I rented another house this week and showed several people this one as well. They would look through the door and say "nice size bathroom." I would say you need to walk on in and look.

Everyone said "ooh" when they saw the shower. 

Original kitchen.

 

I don't have a good picture of the finished kitchen. You'll have to trust me that it is greatly improved.

  This was the living room.

Same room with less windows and that closet that filled half the room gone.

This was one of the 2 bedrooms. Nice big closet. Too bad it made the bedroom 6 feet wide for half of the room.

Closet gone and door where the closet used to be.

Oh the lovely green bedroom, with the same closet problem.

Much more usable space now.

And then there was this wasted space on the east side of the kitchen.

Makes a wonderful master bedroom.

We put in a laundry room across the hall from the bathroom.

Micah swept out the basement and we carried all the junk out.

 

We still have a lot of work to do on the outside and the new Central air goes in  second week of July. We did put up a couple of pieces of siding so we could install the outside water faucet this morning.

After lunch we started siding the west side of the house that is toward the street. Have another siding project we are working on but we wanted everyone to know the house will soon cease to be an eyesore. 

 

We spent the rest of the afternoon siding a garage. I have time on this one as I told the city it would be done before the snow flies, but I need to get it off my to do list.

We started on the blue house 83 days ago. During that time we shingled 6 roofs and sided 3/4 of another house as well. Still it seems like it was a job that was never going to end.

Sometimes I look back and think of some of the things I did and said when I was younger. I wish I could go back and do things differently and make some of the words I said disappear.

If we know Jesus as our savior we are in the process of sanctification. Growing in faith, love and knowledge of how to live God's way. 

I have a feeling God could look at my life and say, Royce started out needing a lot of work it has been a long process to get him from where he was to where he is now, and Royce still needs a lot of work before he is finished.

God has been working on me and I hope everyone around me can see that he is making improvements in me the same way I can now look back and see the changes in the blue house. It was a slow process and there were times the house seemed to look the same at the end of the week as it did at the beginning. Slowly but surely it was changed from deplorable to usable living space. 

May God grant me the grace to  have changed from deplorable to now usable in building his kingdom.

A week in the life

I took pictures at the end of every day this week.

I went down to Menards on Monday and bought doors. Installed all the interior doors. Looking at this picture I see that the flooring was not under the range yet and the vanity was not in the bathroom.

But I had doors on the bedrooms

and the basement stairway

The exterior door was at least in the house.

So Monday was a productive day.

 Tuesday I laid the floor in the laundry area and the hallway

 Started putting trim around the doors and the windows

And more trim

 and more trim

and more trim

 and more trim

At the end of the day the app on my phone read 13,798 steps. I felt like I had walked that much.

 Wednesday the vanity went into the bathroom and it was time to start running plumbing.

Supply lines are under the kitchen sink.

 The house was vacant for a winter and all the pipes needed to be replaced.

 I wanted the water hooked up to the shower to make sure there were no leaks in the wall we were going to tile.

 I should have used red and blue pex lines. I was getting confused which was hot line and which was cold line after a while.

 When I went back to trace all the lines I had to cut and switch 2 lines because I had hooked a hot to the cold supply and vise versa.

 I still need to go through to cut out all the old cvpc lines and put clips on the new plumbing to hold it up.

New washer hookup lines but the drain still has to be cut through the floor. The floors in this house are 2 and 1/2 inch thick. I have never seen that before.

The water heater is full of water and does not leak but we do not have the gas turned on yet so I wonder if it will light.

 Of course in my extra time did some trim

and some more trim

 You might find this hard to believe but I put up more trim on Thursday.

Kitchen window is set back 6 inches from the interior wall so I had to put trim in the frame around the window .

Put all the trim between the kitchen and the laundry room. 

Put the closet in the one bedroom.

and the thresholds in the doorways 

 I cut them out of cedar wood.

Drove past a tenant house and saw they they had added a water feature.

It looks pretty cool. 

 Then I spent the rest of Thursday putting up trim

 and more trim

 and more trim

 Friday I spent most of my day brushing on polyurethane 

The cupboards have a pretty good finish but all the wood work needs to be done again.

Micah started tiling the shower on Friday and finished it on Saturday.

I put in the exterior door. It was a tight fit and I had to adjust it to make it open and close.

Then we laid the floor in the bathroom.

Then to finish off the day I put trim in the bathroom.

I haven't walked through the house to check yet but I sure hope I have the last of the trim up.

The house looks a lot different on the inside now than it did Monday morning. It was not 1 large project that changed the house but a lot of small projects day after day.

All too often we want to do something big in the kingdom of God and all God is asking us to do is to be faithful with the small jobs he asks us to do every day. 

Very few of us will be the evangelist that leads thousands of people to salvation, but all of us can be the person who shows God's love to our neighbor.

This week I did a lot of repetitious small jobs to change a house. I did some small things to help others also. What I am saying is sometimes when building God's kingdom it is the constant steady small tasks that make the changes.