For several weeks I have been packing a little at a time in preparation for moving out of the house I lived in for 16 years. This weekend it really dawned on me how many thousands of hours it took me to make the house the way I wanted it. Sunday I pulled apart one small part of my shop - the dust collection system. It wasn't all that complicated really, about 7 blast gates that remotely turned on the dust collection unit, two main 4" feeds going from the garage into the shed where the unit was located, and a cyclone separator before the main unit. But in the ~3 hours it took to tear down and pack up, I realized that this one project took me at least 15 hours of work to set up, and that is after reworking the layout at least two times. There are literally dozens of small projects like that throughout the house that I did over the years, and those are just the small projects that make a house into a home. The big projects, where walls came down, floors came up, or roofs came off, those things I feel I am being paid back on from the sale of the house, but those little things, they are hitting me hard.
And that is not to mention all the things I built in that garage. 3 arcade cabinets, an entire set of kitchen cabinets, dozens of small pieces of furniture, and the list goes on and on.
The reason this struck me so hard is partly because all that time spent doing things over the years to really make my house something I loved is going to be gone with the stroke of a pen, but also because it is dawning on me just how long it will take (and how much hard work) to get my new house to this point. And that is between work, the holidays (new house wont be done until T-day), and the building of my new home theater, which will be an insanely big project in itself. And I can't do much of anything before I have the new shop set up. When I look back at all the hours I spent just setting up the shop to do all those projects, I can't help but wonder if I will even get started on making my new house a home before next summer...
10 more days in my home and then I get to live in an apartment for the next 7-8 months... O.o
You ever feel like you just inadvertently pried apart your own life?