Brian Patton

Brian December 12th, 2006

After an extended hiatus from this blog, I think I am finally ready to get things rolling again. Over the past month, I have been incredibly busy.

As has been alluded to in the comments, on November 4, 2006, Jayne and I were married. She is, without a doubt, the best friend I have ever had and I am very lucky to have her. She and I had been dating for over four years, and were engaged last Christmas. We had not set an official date because we kept waiting to see if we would have a place to live. In February, I bought the house, which to put it slightly, “needed a little work.”

At that time, we agreed that we would get married once the house was complete, which we had hoped would take a few of months. This was the first house I had ever remodeled. She will tell you that she knew all along that we were in for a lot of stress and it would take closer to a year. I will now tell you that she was right.

Projects that I expected would take days ended up taking weeks. Weeks quickly turned into months. Everything that could go wrong, always did, and sometimes more than once. We ourselves worked, with only a couple of exceptions, every weekend on the house. We were always sanding, removing paint, painting, moving supplies (from one side of the house to the other), or something else that I was too stingy (and too broke) to pay a contractor to do. During most weeks, we had one and sometimes more contractors working on things around the house, such as the plaster, wiring, cabinets, heat pump, insulation, etc. Not to mention being over our budget, which we surpassed five times.

Sometime around mid-October we started seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. The house was nearly to a point where it could be lived in, so we set the wedding date. The date, November 4th, was prior to Election Day and just before Congressman Boucher’s annual rally in Clintwood, the weekend before the election. Jayne eventually, somewhat hesitantly, agreed to let me cut short the honeymoon so we could get back in time for the rally. I guess going in she knew I would always have a mistress named “Politics.”

Since the wedding was a small ceremony, with just our families, we planned a small reception here at the house to celebrate with friends. The first real deadline was now set. The house had to be at least presentable, if not completely done, if we were going to be inviting our friends over to see it.

This leads up to why I have not blogged in weeks. The contractors had mostly finished their part of the work, which meant all that was left were tasks we were responsible for. The bulk of those tasks being paint removal, sanding, and staining. Why people would have painted over the wood trim in my kitchen and bathroom is beyond me. Anyway, the day before the guests were to arrive, I was still sanding and staining the kitchen windows. But, I think we have just about everything done now, except for some more trim work, and we are ready to enjoy life a little.

For the last ten months we have, for the most part, done nothing but work on the house and it will be a real vacation to just sit around and enjoy married life.

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