What Would Possess Us To Do This?

When you suddenly find yourself the lucky owners of a moldy round house at Tablerock Lake, built and furnished in 1976 and never updated, hope and inspiration are all you can cling to.

First of all, a confession. I am an HGTV addict. I flip it on when taking a shower and getting ready in the morning. When I go to another room I flip it on while primping and setting my face just-right, and then I flip it on when wrapping packages or doing non-work around the house. I love it! Every half hour another home has been transformed from ugh to amazing, and everyone is happy. There are no ED commercials on that channel, no vaginal mesh lawsuit commercials, etc. It’s just all happy perfection. How can anyone not like that?

I am also a Zillow addict. Every morning I receive a "helpful" email from Zillow highlighting homes that I might find interesting, and often I do. It's fun scrolling through various homes, and chuckling at the way they’ve been staged – or not staged – to show off their best assets. For example, how better to say, “Welcome to my peaceful bedtime retreat” than with neutral tones, pinks, blues and greens sprinkled casually about, the word “Dream” affixed above the bed…and a semi-automatic within arm’s reach! But the creativity doesn’t end there. Also of note is the ceiling fan, sans blades – for folks who simply enjoy the whirrrr of a motor to lull them to sleep.

Lest you think I am simply a voyeur in other people’s homes and lives, ogling at others' follies while munching on chips and collecting cats, my husband, Greg, and I DO actually do things.

With friends and family, we built an oversized 2-car garage for our previous lake house. Greg has ripped apart, re-tiled and replaced toilets in every bathroom in our home. He created a set of XL twin bunk beds that I designed for a rental home we used to own in Florida, and also restored a vintage boat motor and wired it as a floor lamp while I made the lampshade, using images clipped from vintage family home movies. I have a passion for vintage paint-by-number pictures, and have created a few wall-sized murals with HEAVY copying from a few of them! That is just a sampling of the projects that we’ve dabbled in.

Through the years we have toyed with the idea of doing an actual home flip, but the thought of taking that on has been overwhelming. I mean, Greg is not retired yet. He still has his day-job, so all of these things we’ve done have been weekender projects. Are we completely NUTS?! Nope. Just Flipping Idiots!