We’ll be honest: we were quietly relieved when the holiday season finally ended. December is magical, but it’s also hectic — last-minute shopping, long-distance travel, family gatherings and unpredictable weather can wear you out. So when friends called us crazy for moving into a new house during the holidays, we couldn’t completely blame them.
It was a little wild, yes, but as Sherry and I talked about it, we realized this wasn’t a one-off. For the past FOUR YEARS IN A ROW we’ve found ourselves juggling major home projects right around Christmas. Update: Five years in a row — see the bottom of this post. Apparently we have a habit of complicating the holidays for ourselves.
At the end of 2007 we were wrapping up a kitchen remodel. By Christmas we had already been living without a proper kitchen for two months. Our new cabinets were in place, but we were still waiting on the countertops before the room could truly function again.
To make things weirder, we didn’t have a kitchen sink yet, so dishwashing fell to our tiny bathroom vanity. It was an efficient short-term solution, but also pretty miserable after a few days.
In 2008 the project was refinishing the floors. Right before we left town for a family Christmas, we crammed everything into the kitchen and den so the rest of the hardwood floors could be professionally refinished. It was noisy, dusty and more than a little chaotic.
Friends and family kindly described it as “disruptive,” which was putting it mildly.
Then came 2009 and a bathroom remodel that started the weekend after Thanksgiving. By New Year’s we were in the thick of tiling, which meant our only full bathroom was still a few weeks from being usable.
For that stretch we did a lot of showering at the gym and at my sister’s house. There was even a memorable, chilly backyard rinse: Sherry hose-sprayed me off after a particularly dusty day because she didn’t want me tracking grit into the car. Not glamorous, but memorable.
This year’s mid-December move was another adventure. We packed nearly every possession into a U-Haul and set off for the new house, determined to make the jump before Christmas. The trip did not go exactly as planned.
Less than a minute into the drive the truck slid off the road and into a ditch — an abrupt, stressful delay that made the whole move feel like an obstacle course. Thankfully nobody was hurt, and the situation eventually became one of those stories you tell later with a grin.
When we finally started unpacking, the new house looked like a maze of boxes and tools — a messy, transient snapshot of life in progress. It was tiring, but also oddly exciting to see our things settle into a new space.
Now that things have calmed down a bit and we’re more settled, those intense holiday projects don’t feel as harrowing as they did in the moment. They’ve become part of our story — chaotic chapters that eventually give way to finished rooms, new routines and a lot of laughs. That said, we’re already curious (and a little nervous) to see what project will keep the streak alive at the end of 2011. Perhaps we’ll attempt a simultaneous kitchen remodel, floor refinishing and bathroom tiling, just to keep things interesting.
Update: It turns out the tradition continued. We completed a major kitchen renovation in time for Christmas 2011, and in 2012 we balanced a hectic book tour while hosting Christmas for the first time at our house. The chaos kept coming — and somehow, so did the memories.