Last updated on November 26, 2023
With or without the COVID-19 pandemic, Susan and I would be updating our home.
As I’ve written and discussed before, spaces are important to me and many autistics. We need to have our safe, quiet, calm spaces. For me, those spaces are the backyard and my office.
Sundays are usually “yard work” days. Extra days off, such as random holidays, tend to be “home improvement” days. Vacations are for the really big projects, inside and outside.
Instead of big trips, I’d rather invest in the house. Fancy car or home upgrades? The home upgrades would win because we live in the house.
We’ve spent a lot of time, energy, and money upgrading our house to be our forever home during 2021. The upgrades include:
- Landscaping in our backyard;
- Bookcases with storage in the living area; and
- Hardwood flooring in my office.
We’re spending the Thanksgiving “holiday” renovating the room I use as an office. My office has to be “just so” for me to focus and work. Productivity, for me, requires having my work area my way. A few years ago, Susan bought me a wonderful solid-oak desk with a return. This gives me a writing area, at the main desk, and an open table for my laptop and two extra monitors on the return. A printer sits in the corner.
By the end of this year, my office will be painted and have new hardwood floors.
Susan’s office needs to be updated next, with some paint, shelving, and whatever storage system she might want. Moving my desk into what was designed as a guest suite has opened up her office a lot.
Custom bookcases also freed up space around the house. The bookcases reach the ceiling, so we also have a library ladder and rail system for the shelves. For the first time since the 1990s, we have most of our books on shelves instead of stacked in boxes. (There are still some boxes of books, but we’ll get there.)
Eventually, we want a closet organizer in at least the main walk-in closet. Every room has a walk-in closet with high ceilings. It would be nice to maximize our usable storage space.
Every home we’ve owned needed updates to the landscaping. The yard is where I want plants, especially roses. I also love hostas, lilies, mums, and more. Color and variety add to any yard, in my opinion. I understand some people want yards of nothing but grass. Not me. I want planting beds, a vegetable garden, and trees.
This year, we added a lot of trees, roses, and other plants. We also had our raised vegetable garden area prepared.
We hope to add a patio to the backyard in the future. We like to have a place to sit and eat outside in the cool evenings.
We thought our last two homes were our “forever homes” and things didn’t go as planned. This time is different. That’s the cliché. The first forever home had serious flooding issues and was going to cost a small fortune to update. But, I did love the lot with its large yard and trees. Unfortunately, the home in Pennsylvania with a great backyard had so many other issues that we never did anything with the outside spaces. I believe the most we did outside was paint and seal the deck.
The second home was nice, but Pennsylvania wasn’t meant to be. (I hated the snow, the ice, and the job market.) We did manage some amazing landscaping for that second home. Too bad so little of the yard was usable.
Central Texas is our forever home. It’s a nice house in a good community. But, like most homeowners, we always see a few more things we’d like to update.
Vacations spent making this house better and better are worth the time, energy, and expense.