A Renovation Story
There are literally dozens of rehab, design, and flipping shows on TV in today’s market. Why are we so drawn to them? What is it about them that is so intriguing? It’s the process of taking a mess, chaos, or despair and creating something beautiful and desirable out of it. It mirrors what we all want in our lives.
As we go through life, we make good choices and bad choices. Sometimes those bad choices, habits, or traits, lead us down a path in life that we never thought we would take. Sometimes even the good choices (parenthood for example) take us into situations we never imagined. How many of you had clean houses before 3 kids, two dogs, and a cat joined the club? Got the picture now?
In watching these fix it shows, we enter into a world where all of our broken parts and clutter get repaired and organized. We can imagine a life that spaghetti isn’t thrown all over the wall by the jovial 14 month old and the itty bitty little hoarding problem you have isn’t taking over the living room. We can pretend for that 30 minute time span that everything gets made right- by someone else. We don’t even have to do the hard work.
That’s the catcher though. You could actually take this metaphor and apply it with a bit of elbow grease and determination. Its amazing what you can do to your emotional state by getting up and cleaning or fixing something in your house. Obviously, you don’t want to start tearing down walls, but with a trained tradesman by your side, productive demo could be possible.
As we at Seven6 set off to renovate a historic building, the 1st thing we did was go through the items left behind by the previous owners. Some of it had physical value, some had sentimental value, and some had no present day value. Once we cleared out the items, we came up with a game plan for renovations. We brought in an engineer to make sure that our overzealous design brains didn’t bring the building crashing down. Now that we know how to move forward, we are in the demo phase. This is the part that we as viewers like the most. Tear it up! But think about it. In order to build new and fresh, you have to tear down the old. See where I’m going here?
Once all of the unwanted walls, fixtures, flooring, etc are dismantled and removed, then we can bring in the shiny, sparkly, fun new stuff. This is the part in the show where you sit there daydreaming about what your house could look like. You’re mentally shopping right along with the host or designer, decorating your house as they go. This is where you also get kind of bitter about the leaking faucet and the light that doesn’t work quite right in your home. Remember though, this takes work too. None of this remodeling process happens without effort.
At the final reveal, everyone ooohhhs and aaahhhs, cries, hugs, and gives great thanks. Why? Because of the time, effort, and money invested into the project. It is an emotional process taking something less than desirable and turning it into something stunning. That’s when we hear the dryer go off. We sigh. Turn from the TV and return to “real” life. But, what if you decided to fix that leaky faucet or the light? What if you took one step to renovating your life? What would your renovation story look like?
