What Needs to be Done

The other day I was talking with my husband about our house and how far it has come in the last nine months.  For those of you who don't know, we bought a house when we moved and to say it was "a bit of a fixer upper" would be the understatement of the year.  We looked at a few houses when we made the decision to move and we couldn't believe how expensive they were.  Anything we could afford didn't have enough room for our five person family-and we didn't want to rent.  Real estate in this area was more expensive than we were used to and we had no idea what kind of job my husband would get right away.  We were thinking maybe renting would just have to be the way to go-until we found the "cat house".  Our kids called it the cat house because when we walked in the door there was no mistaking the smell of cat urine.  The flooring was torn, the neon yellow and green paint was chipped and slopped all over the probably once amazing 1920s woodwork.  The finished basement had pink walls with stickers all over them.  Honestly, there's just no good way for me to explain how bad it was without pictures.  Even then, you wouldn't be able to smell the cats. Yuck.

We originally looked at the house on a day we set aside to look at houses in our new town.  We left that day deflated.  We didn't find anything we thought would work for our family, at least in our price range.  About halfway home, though, my husband's face lit up.  I knew he had an idea and I was scared of what he was going to say.  He had decided that if we took a couple weeks to completely clean and gut the "cat house", it should be livable after that.  We could continue working on it after we got it decent enough to live in.  Of course I did what any woman in this era would do and started looking at pinterest and got inspired.  I made a deal with my husband that we could buy the place if we could buy all new appliances to go in it.  Of course he was so excited by the idea that he was going to get to remodel a house (he loves that kind of stuff) that he agreed to buy new appliances. We also agreed that we would not show pictures to any of our friends or our parents, because they would probably all say that we were crazy.

For the first few weeks we lived in our new town, we spent every waking moment working on our house.  The kids stayed with my husband's parents and one of my lieutenants and his wife were nice enough to let my husband and me stay in their camper.  My husband worked every day from the time he got up until he went to bed.  I helped him on my days off.  We bleached, primed and painted walls, tore out carpet, and refinished old hard wood flooring.  We made it livable in 2 weeks.  When I look back on it now, I can hardly believe all the things we did.  I can't believe that in the months following, we worked on it as well. Remember-I said we made it livable in two weeks-not pretty.  We are still working on the pretty part. The inside looks pretty darn good, and in a few weeks we will paint the outside.  It has been quite the transformation.

Every time I think back to those first few weeks of working on this house I am amazed.  Its amazing how you just do what you have to do at the time and don't think a thing of it.  When you look back, you wonder how you did it-or if you could do it again.  Fire and EMS are the same way.  People ask me all the time how I can handle being around emergency situations.  I never really know what to say other than I just do what needs to be done.  When you're focused on a goal, getting tired or overwhelmed gets put on the back burner and you just act.  Your training takes over and you do the best you can.  Tension runs high for everyone involved, but focusing on your task becomes the most important thing you can do.

I think most of us will look back in 20 years at our lives now and wonder how we did it, but for now-we're just doing what we need to do, one day at a time.  The other day I said to a senior firefighter after we did a training that I didn't know how, at my size and strength, I would drag a large person out of a structure by myself if I had to.  He just smiled and said, "don't worry, if the time comes, you'll find it."  And I know he is right-when the time comes, we somehow find the strength to do what needs to be done.  We might hurt the next day.  We might look back and wonder how we did it-but we will get it done, and that is what counts.