Seeing the light at Jenny’s

Jenny’s house has new life, although rehabilitating my husband’s childhood home nearly killed us at the end.

Hard physical labor is never easy, but it pays dividends upon completion; in my book, that included a great big party right up in the mix of it all.

There was no way we could have finished at Jenny’s by ourselves. It took a village of family and friends, lots of sweat, a few drops of blood and, yes, even one or two tears. That and a pile of money — so this is what it feels like to be a do-it-yourself investor. Home improvement wise, we did a little bit of everything.

The project spanned three years, including about six months of utter inaction, which I attribute to the grieving process.

Jenny died in the house three years ago this September, and I found her there on the couch one warm evening, TV blaring and the stove cranked up the way she liked it.

My husband was out-of-town on business the day his mother died and needless to say it was a shock for both of us.

The house passed to him upon her death, like his dad — who died when my husband was a toddler — had always intended. It needed a lot of work to be habitable again though it’s in a great location — center of town, close to school, park, library, bakery, pizza place, museum etc.

I would say the house hadn’t had any substantial maintenance in decades. Plus, the stuff — floor to ceiling stuff.

We spent the first year alone emptying the place of her many crafts, antiques, pieces of furniture, articles of clothing, jewelry, collections and otherwise, a process I had started in the final months of her life.

We held multiple yard sales in the spring after she passed and started cleaning the place like it had never been cleaned before. But when winter came it was especially cold and gloomy over there so we mostly stayed away.

In the second year, my husband and his brother tackled the kitchen, tearing out its frame tattered by time and leaky plumbing and rebuilding it from the dirt floor halfway up the wall. An electrician friend came and did some rewiring. I scraped wallpaper and helped with painting and cleaning.

Those last two would comprise the story of my life these past three years. The bathroom, well, that took a triple cleaning, probably nine hours all told, and included one session with my little sister’s help. God bless her.

We moved on to the back bedrooms after the kitchen, cleaning walls, floors, ceilings, closets and windows before whitewashing everything and hanging new blinds. We were rolling.

But things slowed down again as the cold set in and we retreated back to our warm house across town. At one point during one of those winters, my husband almost quit. He was ready to sell his childhood house or level it. In his opinion, the more we worked on it, the more we found that needed to be done.

I could see his point.

While we had completed so much, we still had so much left to do, including at least two major demolition and reconstruction tasks that would require a skilled carpenter. As the third spring arrived, things were looking bleak. It was hard not to get depressed. It was hard to see an end, forget about a light.

Yet, we were over there pretty regularly keeping the yard maintained and making sure the place was still standing.

Just as our clean windows started to look dingy again, hope arrived in the form of my husband’s nephew, a good old boy from over the mountain who works like a mule. He’s a talented woodworker as well with the type of optimistic attitude rarely seen in the face of the type of hard work left at Jenny’s.

He told us, “That’ll be no problem,” so many times I started to believe him. He agreed to help.

Their incentive was moving into the place when the work was done. His wife, our niece, who is slightly younger than me, wanted to live at her grandma Jenny’s. They have three little ones and are a lovely family.

And if momma’s happy, everybody’s happy and we were happy to work up an arrangement whereby they could move in if he would take the lead to finish the place in exchange for rent. That was in June.

By August 1, they were in.

In two months, our new project manager — with help from his brother-in-law — rebuilt the master bedroom from the dirt floor halfway up, installed new wall paneling, replaced a window and rebuilt a wall in the living room decimated by termites and laid new flooring in the master bedroom and bathroom. A spot in the hallway had to be reconstructed as well.

Behind them, my husband painted, painted, painted and I cleaned, cleaned, cleaned. I painted also, including endless strips of room trim, doors and new cabinet doors. In the process, I contracted a wicked case of poison ivy dragging rubbish out to the brush pile.

We all worked fulltime jobs in addition to spending most evenings at Jenny’s (it was brutal) though I did escape to the Eastern Shore for two weeks.

Somewhere in between, I pulled off a big surprise party for my husband’s big birthday and in celebration of getting the house done. The party had to be held there (location, location, location) and it was — on the weekend before our new tenants moved in.

But first my husband and I had to tackle the last job we were responsible for — sanding and refinishing the floors in the back bedrooms and living room.

Sure, that would be an easy one, like everything else, right? No, nothing was ever easy at Jenny’s, and like I said, it almost killed us at the end.

Check out next week’s Culpeper Living for the dramatic final chapter of our labor of love at Jenny’s and the surprise party that will go down in history.