Final verdict on whether you should move out of your house for seven months so that you can get your kitchen and bathroom replaced
...My final verdict is that yes, you should do this!
It's been around a month now since we started moving back in to our house. It took us sixteen solid full-workday days to move back in. This is mostly because we had to rinse, wipe, or launder everything we own... because everything we own was in the apartment the entire time, under a big tarp, so it got construction dust on it. And the walls had construction dust on them, too. And so did the floor! We ran a Corsi-Rosenthal box in here for basically two continuous weeks!
But now that all that clean-up work is done, I can say: I do not regret it. Holy shit, it's way better to have a bathroom with new fittings than a bathroom with sixty-year-old fittings. It's way better to not have, like, sacs of stretched-out paint hanging from water-damaged parts of your ceiling. I no longer feel like I live in a cave!
It is really astonishing how much my attitude has changed. I am no longer living like some kind of bat, or sightless salamander. A lot of my hobbies over the last few years have been focused on getting me out of the house, and this must have been largely due to a subliminal need to escape the house. It was not nice to be here. Now it is nice in here! My attitude toward a day at home has completely changed.
I'm sure that eventually I will lose the sense of novelty and excitement I have, but I am currently thinking: yes, it was worth it to become itinerant for half a year, and to suffer the indignities of living in uncomfortable and inconvenient places. I could have done without the extreme back pain from sleeping on a very hard bed for most of that time... but in the end, it was worth it!! I would do it again.
I am reminded of The Big Dig, a podcast about the Big Dig project to move Boston's major highways underground. The podcast ends with a bunch of interviews with normal people who actually use the tunnels. Most people seem to really enjoy the new infrastructure. The verdict seems to be: yes, it was worth it! All the annoyance and pain of building was actually worth it. I am always recommending this podcast to people. Now, I'm thinking about how I've now lived through my own miniature version of it. Turning my entire life upside-down for half a year was worth it! Cleaning my house for sixteen days was worth it. I got rid of, like, half my stuff. I recommend it. It does rule to bring basically half of your books to Goodwill.
Here is a funny thing: one person bought my annotated copy of The Hobbit from Goodwill, found my information in it, and DMed me on Bluesky. Wild! It turns out they are a Gamer and their friends actually knew about Skin Deep and had read this blog before. The world is so small!! This story is kind of unrelated to the main topic of this post but I figured I would include it anyway because it is so strange!
One of the hardest things about moving back home is that I've had to completely reinvent the entire rhythm of my life again.
It feels like I have spent the last half-year in a state of complete limbo - first I moved out off my home, then I lost my job, then I gained several small new jobs, and now I'm juggling two extremely part-time jobs - each less than half-time. I am basically trying to re-learn how to exist, now that my entire environment is different and my schedule is weird and my desk is in a new place. I am also certainly missing a certain amount of the extrinsic pressure I used to rely on to get things done and work efficiently.
I think I can figure it out!! Anything is survivable. I survived sleeping on the hardest bed in the world for five months. It was worth it. I can do it!!