I can do this

No one could ever accuse me or my sweet husband of being talented Do-It-Yourself people. We are far from it. Over the years, we have become very talented at saving money to pay others to do things for us.

When we first became homeowners, we quickly learned our limits, not that we didn't try new things, but we knew when to call in the professionals. Snake a drain? No problem. Replace hardware in the shower? Easy. That is until the ancient, corroded pipe snapped off in Jason's hand. Time to call the plumber. Take down the ceiling tiles? Maybe. Until we discovered lead paint behind them. Professional time.

We did attempt to paint a room... once. Isn't painting the number one easy DIY project? Everyone says that on TV. We tried it. I wouldn't call it a disaster, but the end result wasn't very pretty to look at. Not really the effect we were going for. We haven't painted a room since.

I find our DIY aversion rather peculiar since we both come from hardy DIY stock. Jason's mother can wield a power tool like no other. If she can't do it herself, it probably isn't worth doing. On my side of the family, my father is meticulous with a project once he gets going and sets his mind to something. His strong suit is landscaping and gardening, another area we struggle with. Jason's philosophy is "if it's green and grows, I'm mowing it" and that's just about the extent of what he wants to do in the form of yard work. I'm not much better. I try, every year I try, to stay on top of the weeding and the edging and the deadheading and trimming. It just all seems so never ending that I lose my motivation, get overwhelmed and give in to the weeds.

I'm determined to change.

In November, we finally put a hardwood floor in our living room. I say "we" as in we paid a very nice local business to install it. My part of the project consisted of picking the floor and then staying home while the floor was installed. Tough, huh? What I didn't expect was that the new floor would lead to another project (don't they all?). I didn't realize that to install the floor the existing wood baseboard molding needed to be removed. I suppose someone must have mentioned that to me along the way, but I must have blocked it out. Much to my dismay, the molding suffered some damage being pried off and later reattached to the wall. We now had a beautiful floor and marked up, ugly baseboards.

My first reaction was to cry. My second was to hire someone to fix it. The more we talked about it the more we convinced ourselves we could do this. The affected areas weren't all that big once you looked around the room.Wood filler. Sand. Paint. We could do this.

Today I pulled out my brand new putty knife, donned some rubber gloves and started scraping filler into the dents and nail holes. I can do this. Maybe if I keep telling myself that, I'll start to believe it. Stay tuned for sanding. One step at a time.