Three Year Anniversary

With all the visitors this summer we totally forgot our three year anniversary on June 29th. That's three years we've been in the house, not the time we've been together. That is much, much longer.
So a little late, just like the remodel process, I've been looking back over the past twelve months, taking stock of the progress. Last year, our second year here, I wrote out a long list of things we'd done renovation-wise, and what we still had to do. Looking back on it now it seems I was a little optimistic, we haven't accomplished any of the things we set out to do this year.
Well maybe one: we replaced the window in the boys' bath; and oh yeah, we also replaced the glass in the back door. We did tackle a couple of things off the 2008 list, at least partially: we bought new appliances for the laundry, tore out the rotted cabinets and painted the space. We also replaced the gate and mended some fences from the 2009 list but we'll need to replace most of the fencing sometime. Continuing the outside projects, we decided it wasn't worth replacing the doors on the barbecue given the state of it and we demolished it. Then we put 3 Bluestone flags on the base and bought a new barbecue to sit on there. We pulled off the door on the pool bar and left it as an opening - great for trash now, maybe one day we can fit an outdoor fridge in there (in my dreams).
Of course the big ticket renovations this year were dictated by the leaks in the plumbing: the boys' bath, the girls' bath and the downstairs bath. Astute readers will have seen that there was no previous mention of these projects on our lists. That's because we weren't planning to do them at all and that, my friends, is where the best laid plans of the Vineyard Rd renovation go awry. Something crops up, maintenance becomes renovation and before you know it the budget and the timeline have taken on a life of their own.