What are you doing?

Every so often, people ask me what I'm doing during all of my "free time" during sabbatical. Tonight my sore muscles are reminding me that I don't do enough physical labor in my job as pastor. Since I started sabbatical, I have been working on and off on my back staircase. It has always been an eye sore in the house, but because it is not seen much, I have worked on other projects. Well, sabbatical seemed like the perfect time to work on this -- though I knew nothing about stripping wood, staining, etc. So I did some research, talked to people, talked to folks at Home Depot, got some pamphlets, and got to work.

My good friend, Marlis, always reminds me to take before and after pictures whenever you do home projects. The before picture is one view of my kitchen before I did any work to it.


In the past 18 months, I have re-painted the walls (you can see I was trying to determine which color to put over the ugly pale green paint that was there), got new flooring, got an island for the microwave, replaced the sink, countertops, hardware, new range and fridge. Needless to say, the place looks totally different ... but today, I'm most proud of the steps!


The project isn't totally finished -- I still have to do some touch up painting on the walls around the steps. And there are 4 steps that I'm still not satisfied with yet that I'll work on when I return from my time at AMBS ... but for now, I'm feeling quite proud of my project. After stripping 4 layers of paint (yes, I wore a mask -- I'm sure there was some strong lead paint in there), I'm grateful to see the bare wood with some stain on it.