Letting go of fear and embracing your passion

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Fear.
Fear is the enemy of an old house. And water, but that is the subject of another post.
An old house has an enormous capacity for forgiveness, so long as it is truly loved in return.  We all start out on these homes with very little knowledge and understanding of what takes to maintain and restore them. The other thing we all have in common is the passion to possess such a magical thing as a tangible slice of history.  Old house people appreciate craftsmanship, quality, beauty, and a well-proportioned fireplace; and their hearts beat to the tune of a different drummer.
This love of old houses is not much different than any new relationship.  We fall in love with a pretty face, commit based on the promise of a bright future together, then wake up in the middle of our honeymoon night realizing for the first time that our new life partner snores, or it’s pipes bang.  Those beautiful windows we looked into with such a loving gaze, well, they are drafty and loose.  The glorious slate roof has cracked slates that you didn’t first notice, and those well-proportioned fireplaces have a collapsed chimney hidden behind their glorious mantels.  Aaaah, the courtship is over.  Welcome to to the rest of your life with this old house you have chosen to share your life’s journey with.
The "foundation" under the Chestnut Place Porch...At least there are other footers holding it up...
The "other" footer holing up the Chestnut Place porch. Yes, that IS the Gas Main coming into the house...

Then you have your first relationship crisis; the crash of a ceiling falling in the middle of the night, or the smell of smoke from an ancient annunciator, or the massive exodus of winged termites within the confines of the attic. Whatever the crisis, it leaves your heart pounding, and your senses stunned into breathlessness at the treachery that your house has just performed, mixed with a protectiveness for this beloved structure that is in direct conflict with the sudden realization that your bank account cannot possibly protect this home in the way that you wish it could.  And so begins the fear.

Is that smoke blowing out of the light switch?
Not smoke, but Steam...What?!!!!
2018-03-14 20.36.43
Yup, someone capped the flue to the steam boilers!

Fear that you can’t do for this house what it truly deserves.  Fear that you will lose it to someone who could treat it better than you. Fear that no matter what you do, it won’t be good enough.  Fear that others will think you don’t deserve this house.  Fear that you will fail in your attempts to make this house into what you know in your heart it can become.  Whatever your fears, know this; there is always some truth to them, but that truth does not matter.  None of us could possibly spend enough time, energy, or money to make these homes perfect.  Perfect is a myth that will kill your confidence if you let it.  It is a standard that people who don’t own old homes will always hold us to, and it is often the mindset we possess when we begin our restoration journey.  The sooner you let go of the “perfect”, the sooner you let go of your fears.  It is unattainable, unrealistic, and an altogether imaginary ideal.

South West Bathroom "before"
South West Bathroom "during"
Sough West Bathroom "almost done"
So what is there to aspire to, if not perfection? It is the lifelong devotion to learning.  The betterment of ourselves for the benefit of our homes.  Don’t be afraid to tackle any project so long as you go into it as an educational opportunity.  Carpentry 101, masonry 101, and plumbing 101 are necessary courses to enroll in before you can ever hope to achieve steam fitting 400 or even electrical 500.  We all start with the basic courses in “old house college” before we can tackle the advanced projects.  Oh, and if you fail your paint stripping class, you get to do it again and again until you get it right.  Eventually you will have achieved a masters degree in paint stripping, and can go back over the sections you did when you were a mere freshman, more focused on the action at the frat house rather than the serious professional that you are today.  
Another bathroom that will need an overhaul -- don't be afraid of such things...

Whatever mistakes you, or anyone else made with your house in the past, they are repairable.  When I think back on all of the “interesting” work done by previous owners, I realize that they were simply not passionate about old house restoration, but were simply living their lives inside a home loved by many generations of their family.  A love that expressed itself differently than our passion for restoration does.  Certainly, the previous generations of the original family had their own vision for the place, and their own ideas of what it meant to decorate and maintain the place, but they grew up with the house, knew its presence and comfort for so long that they loved and accepted it for what it was.  They removed the parts and pieces of the house that fell victim of time, wear, and weather and accepted the new look, adjusted to the losses, and moved on.  They repaired the essential, which allowed the home to function, loving it just as it was.  We saw the house for what it could be, what it once had been; a different perspective, nothing more.

First Floor Main Bathroom "before"
The "First Floor Main Bathroom "before"
First Floor Bathroom "during"
First Floor Bathroom "during"
This is what you get when you let go of fear...
Stop worrying about what other people will think...
It is a reminder, however, that you are not the first person to have a relationship with your house.  It has been loved before by others, and that love took many forms as the relationship between house and owner evolved.  It often starts out with kind attention, but as a house makes demands on the relationship, the mettle of the owner is tested as they have to continually decide whether or not to continue to commit to the needs of house when balanced against their own personal needs.  Some owners would eventually come to realize that they had a high-maintenance relationship on their hands that they hadn’t realized initially, and were not prepared for.  Others would realize the stubbornness of their project and have to work harder than others to make it work.  Some owners would be untrue to their original commitment and cheat on their house, spending valuable time and resources on other houses, sometimes even having multiple relationships, unintentionally neglecting their original love.  There are even those who would find themselves weakly committed in the first place, so that the initial challenges would end up destroying the relationship.  For some, that would mean separation and eventual sale of the property, though for others, financial constraints would force them to live, separated, under the same roof.  For those either owning a home or living in a home that they have already emotionally divorced, those homes would eventually find themselves the subject of abject neglect, and even sometimes, abuse.  Anyone who claims to love a home they are significantly neglecting are either fooling themselves, or simply lying.  They don’t love the house, they love the idea of the finished version of the house.  Falling in love with an idea without the passion to put the work into making that idea happen, guarantees the eventual death of that idea.

Quite honestly, it is the nature of an old house to make life a little difficult for those of us who love them, to force us to prove how much we love them.  They cannot help but present us with unexpected challenges, along with their regular maintenance.  This is how these homes keep the relationship going.  Every project that we work on is something that we have learned about our home.  Every finished room is a decorated corner that we show off proudly to the world, and every disaster that we deal with or avoid bonds us more tightly to these homes, so that they are so much a part of our lives, and who we are, and are so integral to our personal history that we and the house are one.  They are truly members of our family in a way that no modern house, designed by some architect, and constructed by some contractor’s work crew, could be for their residents.  

With every relationship, there is hard work to keep it going, but there is also an insecurity about not doing it right.  We look on Social Media and see other old house owners “doing it right” and showing off their perfect construction-free homes, the smooth walls, the seamless wallpaper.  Their floors are even and smooth, and their mantels even decorated with period objects.  Lighting and heating and cooling all seem to be in perfect order.  As you look around your own home at the ladders, scrapers, drop cloths, and random buckets of hinges and doorknobs, you fear that you are not doing it fast enough, good enough, smart enough.

 Old house magazines arrive in your mailbox, and you dream of the perfect Holiday at your house, with all of the appropriate picture-perfect decorations, then look around and realize that it will probably be at least eight years before that dream can be fulfilled, if ever, and you wonder why you are failing so miserably at achieving your goals.  What you don’t realize is that those days you spend scraping paint, repairing trim, installing tile, and pulling out poorly-thought out “updates” of previous owners.  The hours you spent scraping glue off old heart pine flooring, or scraping old mortar off of antique salvaged tile to re-install it, or pulling nails out of old boards to re-use them.  All of those days and hours and projects — these are the good old days.  These are the things you will one day reminisce fondly about.  The day the water poured from the kitchen ceiling as the entire ceiling ripped and tore and fell out all around you seemed like a complete and utter disaster at the time, but ultimately it is just a little part of your home that broke, and you found it to be something that can be fixed, even made better and stronger in the end.  The time you spend putting things back together with your personal flair is the time that you will look back on and be proud of.  When you entertain in your finished house, you will talk about those days and hours and challenges and regrets and successes and failures.  You will have a story to tell about your relationship with this house that no-one can take from you, and you will have a relationship deeper and stronger than anyone who simply walked in and purchased the finished product.


Let go of the fear, don’t worry about making mistakes.  Mistakes are what make us stronger in life.  It is the fear that will hold you back, prevent you from being able to start a project in the first place, which will leave you in the same place as where you started — an un-done project and no further knowledge about how to begin or even complete it.  At least if you open up that wall and take a look, or pull out that toilet and see what is going on, or simply purchase a heat gun and try your hand at scraping paint for the first time, you will eventually figure out what it is that you need to do differently to do it better.  We were once complete amateurs at old-house renovations.  There was a day where we laid our first bathroom tile ever.  There was a time when we knew nothing about how a steam boiler system works.  And yet, with this complete lack of knowledge, but possessing only a curiosity, a desire to learn, and a lack of fear about making mistakes, we were able to achieve what we have with this house, and a second house, to boot.

From this...
To this...

Though I would say that we still have many old house lessons to learn in our lives, we have certainly come a long way from where we started.  I laugh at an old photo of me sweeping the house with a broom, and my naivety that a broom was an efficient way to get the job done.  I eventually graduated to a regular vacuum cleaner, then after killing a couple of them, finally discovered the shop vac.  I’ve learned to scour the Florida swap meets for used dental tools to fit into nooks and crannies as I scrape paint, and I have learned to mix mortar for the optimal thickness for laying tile, depending upon the size of the tile.  I can now listen to a steam radiator’s hiss and know if there is a water pocket somewhere in the line, and I have learned where the water main shut-off is, and to keep it clear of furniture.  Some of these lessons were learned from doing, others from failure, and still others from listening to others.  And this only touches the tip of the education I received from this house.

South East Bedroom at its' worst

When you are worried about making mistakes your fear of what might happen can paralyze you and keep you from thinking rationally.  In learning how to properly sweat a pipe, I’ve turned the water back on many times before I got it right and there were no leaks.  Then I graduated to horizontal water lines, with their own special set of challenges.  None of this is rocket science, it’s old-house construction techniques that have been taught to able individuals for generations.  Sure, these houses don’t come with instructions, but they do come with a “family” of like-minded individuals whose experience can be a gold mine of advice and information.  Let those who have come before you be your guides and trust their advice only after you have seen evidence of their expertise.  If you get stuck and can’t even begin to imagine how to tackle a project, you will put that project off and ignore it until it has become a bigger problem altogether, requiring an even bigger outlay of cash, time, and skills.  In the meantime, it will sour your relationship with your house, as the number of un-started or un-finished tasks pile up; you will begin to see your beloved home as a burden rather than an object of beauty.  You will begin to avoid, resent, and eventually even despise the very thing you fell in love with.  It is the character of an old house that we all love, and that character simply comes with extra work.  Putting off projects because of fear robs you of the very thing you sought in the first place when you bought it: confidence, pride, knowledge, skills, and a return on your investment.  

North East (Master) Bedroom "before"
North East (Master) Bedroom "during"
North East (Master) Bedroom "almost there"

I look back on some of the biggest disasters we experienced with our house.  Not one of them was permanent.  The mantelpiece destroyed by the unethical stripping company was eventually steamed back into shape and glued back together.  The kitchen ceiling is now even more beautiful than original, and prompted our attack on the outdated kitchen in the first place.  The termite damage was repaired and the termites evicted, and all of myriad disasters at our other project at 841 Main Street are memories now.  Even the day we should have been dead from carbon monoxide poisoning remains as a testament to the fact that you have to live every day as though it is a gift, because, frankly, it is.  We are no longer afraid to do anything.

Un-painting the House

Without that fear, you will achieve the purest form of love: giving greatly of yourself to achieve something bigger than yourself, something that will last long after you are gone from this earth, a thing that can even shelter and comfort the generations of your family who come after you.  Not only are you leaving some tangible mark on the world in a way that new house owners never could, but you are teaching and mentoring those around you, either family members or friends, maybe even perfect strangers.  You are inspiring others, and creating an appreciation for an old house that perhaps the uninitiated have never known before, just by showing the world what mere humans can accomplish when they invest their time and money in something they are deeply passionate about.  This is the love that you give, that the house gives back to you.  The knowledge that eventually you learned how to do things right, and created something not only beautiful, but functional, safe, and secure.  This is how your house loves you back, by becoming a predictable home, a place of security and warmth, where the memories that you have built within it create a palpable sensation of a loving hug whenever you walk through the door.  It is forgiveness for all of the mistakes, for all of the things you have had to do twice (or three times), because as long as you eventually get it right in the end, your house will forgive you for the previous attempts every single time.  

An old house is simply your future relationship if only you will let go of fear, trust yourself, and follow your passion to the end of its’ journey.  Which, by the way, never ends.  Just like any solid relationship; so long as you possess it, you will continue to have to work toward mutual happiness.  It is not a free ride.  To be loved by an old house is a privilege that is earned.

Love is sometimes messy...
Love is the ability to see beyond the superficial to what can be...
Love is to dream of what your house can be, if only you have the bravery to make it so..
Love is the willingness to make things right...
Carla Minosh

While I am new to Blogging, I have always enjoyed sharing the stories of my crazy life, so this is simply another medium to share, and hopefully entertain and enrich others. Perhaps you can feel thankful that your life is so steady and predictable after reading these, perhaps you can appreciate the insanity and wish you had more of it in your life. Either way, the crazy tales are all true (to the best of my spotty recollection) and simply tell the tale of a life full of exploration, enthusiasm, curiosity and hard work. I hope you all enjoy being a part of the journey.

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90 thoughts on “Letting go of fear and embracing your passion”

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While I am new to Blogging, I have always enjoyed sharing the stories of my crazy life, so this is simply another medium to share, and hopefully entertain and enrich others. Perhaps you can feel thankful that your life is so steady and predictable after reading these, perhaps you can appreciate the insanity and wish you had more of it in your life. Either way, the crazy tales are all true and simply tell the tale of a life full of exploration, enthusiasm, curiosity and hard work. 

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