Given how much time and energy we spent on it -- twenty hours a week for most of a year, at the height of the gut renovation chaos -- it's a good thing that I'm so happy with the end result. (End? What end? It's a house -- there are always new projects to work on. We're going to paint the inside of the garage next, possibly in quite kaleidoscopic colors. Maybe with added flower garden. We'll see.)
The renovation turned into its own kind of creative project, especially since we were trying our best to respect the history of this 1885 beauty, while still adapting it to our modern needs. So it's good that I love my house so much. The colors on the walls (inside and out), the wood we stripped of decades of white paint, the patterns slowly emerging in the zinc island top, the birds on the fireplace tile.
It's good, but also, still, a little weird. It's just a house. We plan to be here for fifteen more years or so (until the kids are done with public school), but if jobs changed, we could be gone tomorrow. And that would be okay, because there are other houses in need of saving out there. There are other houses to love. There have been a lot of families living in this house over a century plus, and hopefully there will be many more after us. Now that we've updated the wiring and plumbing, this house should stand for at least a century or two more; it should outlive us.
I just fret about whomever comes next -- I hope they love it. It's okay if they change things; they should, in fact. An industrial-modern-Victorian aesthetic with desi-medieval-Moroccan flavor is not for everyone. They should mold it to suit their lives instead of ours. (I might not want to look. :-)
But -- and I know this sounds goofy -- I do feel that the house has its own shape and soul, one that has somehow endured through all the changes (deep or cosmetic).
I just hope whomever comes after us loves it like I do.