Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Grateful!

"Perseverance is not a long race: it is many short races, one after another." ~ Walter Elliot~

With a lot of perseverance and some help on Sunday from my brother, we accomplished in one day what I anticipated would have taken three days on my own. I must say I have a mighty nice brother to have sacrificed his Sunday off for hard labor, but we've already arranged that I pay him back in sweat equity. He has a house full of popcorn ceilings that I will be more than happy to scrape for him. Again, thanks a ton! Literally!

"The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones."
~ Chinese Proverb~

So now I have a mountain of cement crumbles and broken tiles in twenty-three contractor bags and a mound of tile, cement and wire mesh in my garage. I figure it will take a couple of months to get it hauled away in the regular garbage.

In renovating a home, you uncover a bit of the social history related to the time it was built. In 1946 the United States was in post WWII, a time recovering from rationing, doing without, "waste not, want not". And these tin cans are indicative of that mentality. Have a hole to cover? Don't run off to the hardware store to buy sheet metal! What do we have here in the garbage? Sure! A tin can will do it! We could all use a bit more of that innovative frugality these days considering our current environmental concerns. So, I'll leave these charming bits of history as they are under my flooring doing their job just as good as the store bought kind. Perhaps our ancestors internalized the following quote and the importance of our actions:

"We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results." ~Herman Melville~

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