Owning a home is a dream come true, but getting around to fixing your dream home can be a nightmare. In-between the tidying and gardening and the little and big repairs, how do you find the time to enjoy the comforts of home? Here’s here one home-owner has solved that old dilemma.
I’ll move out of home when the kids have flown and I hopefully find a little flat to rent, with space for a cat and a pot plant. (If I can afford it. Otherwise I’ll move in with them!) But right now this home is my sole responsibility – and it’s not easy, because the old house is old.
I’m very fortunate to own it, but hey, let’s not kid ourselves here, the bank does. What I do enjoy is the freedom to do with it what I want, and bang nails into the wall. But I wonder if I should consult the real owners (the bank) about the colours I intend painting the exterior? Or what I can and cannot do in the garden?
Imagine the person at the bank’s call centre patiently informing me that she cannot determine whether I should install a greywater pump. Well then, I’ll just ask her to escalate my enquiry!
Seriously, I am privileged to own this home. But as a single parent, the list of things to do is often overwhelming. There’s the constant tidying, for one. Every surface vies for attention. Then there’s the leaking gutter, the dodgy internet, the widening crack in the wall…
Sometimes I stop in astonishment at the woodshed I built back when I was married: how the heck did I do that? And how on earth did I use a pickaxe to smash through a foot of cement and re-lay the track for the gate? What possessed me to reclaim the flower beds at the back of my home and plant grass, plug by plug and blade by blade, over three years?
Yesterday evening, when surveying the rhus lancea that crowds my neighbour’s wall and feeling tempted to get the saw and clippers, I suddenly realised why: leave it for the weekend. Otherwise I’d have a whole pile of branches to deal with all week. If it’s not on my ‘must do’ list, leave it on my ‘should do’ list. That’s how I got all those things done. That’s the only way to deal with being a homeowner.
These are the two lists you need in life. I think the reason my besieged brother-in-law fails to address the household DIY tasks my sister lists on their fridge for him to do (before he goes fishing, she asks in vain) is that it’s simply too long. It’s really a ‘should do’ list.
Conversely, the ‘must do’ list consists of no more than three or four things, per day, which are migrated directly from the ‘should do’ list, which itself is a never ending, always-added-to boa constrictor of a thing. I can make it as big as I like and it will never destroy me. I’m safe from it, and can relax.
This may sound absurd, bit if I complete anything that wasn’t on my ‘must do’ list, then I write it onto the list and promptly cross it off. (I found this advice online so it must be true.) Restricting what I actually need to do every day is the only way I’ll get anything done, and not suffer the weight of things undone.
So internalised has this become for me, that at the end of a day that didn’t feel particularly productive, I’ll realise: hey, well at least I made that difficult phone call and went to see my sick friend. And I did that other thing and now I’m making myself a meal. That’s enough for today. Well done!
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