I haven’t written in a horribly long time, and I don’t even have a good excuse. Let’s blame the holidays and a touch of seasonal depression, shall we?

We’re planning quite a few big changes here at Fixer-Upper for 2008, many of which we’ll be sharing with all you blog readers in the near future. Right now, there are a lot of question marks and vague ideas floating around. We’re focusing on narrowing down our next moves.

That said, I think now is a good time to reflect on 2007….

Last January we were working diligently on our master bathroom. This turned out to be the most expensive project we have taken on… probably because we went overboard adding lots of pretty trim and I just *had* to have a clawfoot tub, complete with high-end chrome fixtures. It came out beautifully and is by far my favorite room in the house, but we put a lot of sweat and blood into that room. Not to mention the stress of shoving past each other each morning in the small downstairs bathroom.

After the bathroom was finished, we moved on to the laundry/craft room. We added a closet, some organizational goodies like shelving, and a cool new paint color. It went from a lackluster kitchen (leftover from when the house was a 2-family) to a hobby sanctuary. Martha Stewart would approve.

After that, we took a break. We were completely burned out and broke on top of it. We thought about painting the exterior, but didn’t have the necessary motivation to start something that big. Instead, we stuck to “little” projects. We installed a picket fence which I proceeded to stain white all summer while burning to a crisp. (Never, ever, again. Not by hand anyway!) We finished drywall repairs throughout the upstairs, making all of our walls and ceilings lovely and crumble-free. We carpeted 2 bedrooms, the craft room, and the hallway to cover up worn and paint-spattered (not in a charming way) wood floorboards. We painted three upstairs bedrooms. We built a closet in the master bedroom since normal people like to hang up their clothing in the room they sleep in.

And then? Then, we hit a wall. The biggest we’ve ever hit. There are always ups and downs when you’re remodeling, but this time we lost any and all motivation to work on the house. It was bound to happen. Everything we hated was fixed. Everything embarrassing had been repaired. We were living in a normal – NICE, even – house. After 3 years of very hard work, we had accomplished what we’d set out to do. We resurrected Dirty Gert from years and years of neglect and abuse and turned her into a nice place to live.

So  now we’re been resting on our laurels, remarking now and then about how refreshing it is to have our weekends free and money in the bank.  To have a clean, drywall-dust-free house. To see our friends and family and get back to hobbies we’ve neglected for the past three years. There is always something to be done in an old house, but for now we’re putting our to-do list in a drawer somewhere :)