Renovationism

My husband and I both have this disorder. Renovationism is the compulsion to renovate your home. Like other obsessive compulsive disorders it often takes years for the afflicted to recognize their problem. As I thought about my binges in an effort to better understand and control my disorder, I realized I've been renovating my living spaces since I was a little girl. I redesigned my childhood bedroom at least four times growing up. I was so intent on getting my first house just the way I wanted it that sometimes I would forget to eat. My second house was custom built, but I still found ways to improve it. Things only got worse after I married a fellow sufferer. The first house we bought together was practically brand new and we systematically renovated it room by room for the twelve years we lived there--the major landscaping project in the back yard was completed only a couple of months before we moved.

Now we've escalated--as serial renovators often do. We moved to the lower Hudson Valley, a suburb of New York City and fully intend to get this one renovated in a fraction of the time we've ever taken before. I suppose we are still delusional and believe if we just work faster we won't feel compelled to renovate any more. We'll see how that works out for us.

New York is a very expensive place to live. We discovered that we could buy half the house we had before for twice the money. We fully intended to buy a home that we did not have to renovate. We were going to recover and beat this sickness. But, we could not find a home that met our standards--at least not in our price range--and, I now believe there is no home, anywhere on earth, at any price, that ever could. So, we settled for a decent floor plan with rooms that were big enough for us to work with.

So, here is what we started with. These photos were all on the real estate listing.

As you can see, we had our work cut out for us. The house was maintained fairly well, but hadn't been updated in years.

Next post will be about our benchmark--our last house. Then, you can watch this renovation unfold.