Last Easter Leah and I closed on our first house. It’s a fixer-upper, which we bought despite being warned by friends who in the past also bought fixer-uppers. But hey! Everyone’s doing it, and our parents all did the same, and so far it has been a joy.

Without getting too into the intricacies of plumbing and wiring projects, of gutter repair, of chimney demolition, of floor leveling, or shower repairing, of taking down three (THREE! Ha ha!) different doorbells on the inside, of patching and sanding and priming and painting walls… here’s a quick blurb about “Leah’s door.” Which is really our door, but is the project that Leah’s been working on mostly herself. And what a hard worker she’s been!

A door, of course, isn’t the world’s biggest priority, which is why we did other things during the summer and up until I started tennis coaching and got real busy. Our house was built in 1948, and as far as we can tell the door is original. It also has at least ten coats of paint on it (it is hard to count some of the colors, since they are similar shades) which actually add a quarter inch of thickness, which is insane. Also, the door weighs FAR beyond a hundred pounds—blame all the paint, or the fact that it is solid wood, or both.

But back to the paint—the top two or so coats were peeling when we bought the door, and it looked awful. So for months now, Leah has been stripping, scrapping, heat-gunning, sanding, and doing all sorts of other things to it. I’ve never seen paint like this, and neither had my mom (who loves refinishing wood) and the amount of just sandpaper we have gone through is astronomical. IT. JUST. DOESN’T. COME. OFF. But oh, what a fun adventure it has been!

Now, I wish I could say that the door is done, but today we took it off of its hinges and both Leah and I worked on it from morning until night, and finally we have one side to the point where it could be painted. It’s relatively flat, it’s wood-puttied, it’s dremeled, and there’s only one more side to go. Halejuiah! I think we might finish before Christmas

–Jeff and Leah