Home INCHprovement

Home maintenance and decoration have never been among my strong points. Now, as a full-time spousal caregiver with a completely disabled husband, maintaining our house in decent condition has been really difficult for me.

Since my husband became disabled mentally and physically shortly after our marriage, it was left up to me pretty much completely to make his house livable - he had neglected the house for the 18 years between his first wife's death and our marriage. In the past ten years, I have replaced just about everything in the house - siding, electrical system, all appliances including hot water heater and heating A/C system, paint, carpet, floors, totally redone two bathrooms (one with handicap modifications), termite-proofed the house and water-proofed the basement, replaced windows, doors and locks, and the list goes on and on.

At this point, the house is basically presentable, but far from what I or anyone else would consider attractive. After the initial paint job 10 years ago, the inside of the house pretty much needs to be painted all over. But I just cannot handle the stress of having it painted - and don't even begin to think I can do it myself! However, our upstairs hallway and walls on the stairway have gotten so badly marked up from Vince's walker and our aides banging into them, that I finally decided I need to just paint that much. It's the only part of the house I can have painted without moving furniture.

So today - right now - the painting is in progress, and I hope it will be done in time to be dry by tonight when we bring Vince upstairs to bed and the walls begin to get banged up again.

Really, I am so worn out from my years of caregiving and dealing with all the related issues by myself withOUT my husband's help - this house being a main source of problems (but don't even say the word "move" to me - my mind could not begin to deal with that) - that every time I get work done in the house, it is a source of anxiety. So far, today has been okay, as long as I don't look at the job in progress, and I won't have to move back any furniture when it's done.

I am grateful I can afford to pay people to do home improvements for me - at least for now - and I try to be very conservative about what I do. But I really have to do things inch by inch - I call it "damage control", and just do what absolutely must be done at any one time.

A lot of my home maintenance anxiety comes from bad experiences in making "improvements." It seems that every time a worker would come to make an improvement, there would be a complication where I'd have to address fixing another problem in the house. Like the pest control people who showed my all the openings in our house whereby the occasional mouse and lots of bugs were gaining entry - then came the construction job to patch that all up. Then when the chimney sweep came - just once because I never use the fireplace - he advised that the vent or whatever was sticking up on the roof was all rusted - so that needed painting. And it goes on and on like that. Rarely has a home improvement gone smoothly for me. So I have come to fear them!

When I was having all the windows replaced several years ago, and the job took two weeks instead of the three days the installers had promised, and there were other complications with that as well - I just blew my top one day. I realized that now I have to minimize stress when I have work done in the house - inch by inch, and only do what absolutely must be done.

I have neighbors across the street totally redoing their house from top to bottom and everything in between inside and out because they are selling the house. But they are a functional married couple so they can do it together without one having to caregive the other. God help me if I ever have to go through that to sell this house! I don't think about that - it would totally destroy me - the future of me and this house are safely in God's hands.

And hopefully, if and when I get to heaven someday, God will have a lovely, clean, repair-free home for me!