#I feel a bit guilty with every purchasse

[iplaywithstring]

We're redoing our house. Nothing major - paint mostly, a couple light fixtures, and I'm going to try covering our counters. It's a lot of work, but it's not hard, and I enjoy it. Plus it's well past time for this to get taken care of. My husband and I have had a rough go of home ownership. We bought this place 14 years ago, a private sale from the person who was supposed to be our realtor but only showed us dumps. Then he said he had a few condos for sale and our daughter reminded him of his grand daughter and it would be great. And look, I understand I'm speaking from a place of privilege here - the fact that we have a mortgage is more blessing than curse and I know that. But it has been a lot. See, he only sold off 4 of the 12 units (and two were sold to his own kids) and then he just sort of...stopped. No proper condo association, no proper finances set up for the upkeep, wouldn't take calls or respond to messages or come to meetings. He lost his realtor license a couple years after selling us this place - apparently he was known for bad deals, but we had no idea. Every year for about 7 years someone from the city would knock on the door to ask about the abandoned properties. My husband and I did what we could for lawn care, the 4 owners pooled together for shared services (like snow clearing) and we managed to pay down 40k in debt to the city that we didn't know was building. Lawyers were involved, calls and emails to city and provincial offices. Not much could be done. Then a few years ago, the 8 empty units were sold in a tax sale to a new owner. We thought it would be better, and in a lot of ways it is, but it's still not good (and the new guy also isn't interested in following the law with regards to the condo, and he gets 8/12 votes, so there's not much we can do, and he won't do the things necessary to get paperwork so we can sell). All of this means that our relationship to the house is complicated. It's where our kids have grown up (we bought it when my daughter was a year old and we just found out I was pregnant), so there's a ton of good memories, but it's always felt not quite ours. We were too poor to invest much into it when we first bought it, and then as the problems piled up investing seemed like a bad idea (because who knows if the roof will leak or fall in). Last year it was almost condemned and I'm so thankful the other owners were willing and able to put the money in to fix the problem (electrical and water systems - we were out of the house for 6 weeks). We have done some updates - the bathroom got completely gutted because the paint wouldn't stop peeling from the walls, and half the grout between the awful orange tiles was missing. A few years ago we ripped up the old carpets on the second level and put down laminate flooring. We've done as much of the work ourselves as we can (and we're not very good at it). When we bought it, we were told it would be painted. What actually happened is they put a bunch of crack fill on the walls and then just primed it - lumpy and streaky and bad. One year I spent a week painting most of the walls - the hallways and downstairs and the kids room - but I didn't do any prep or fix work beforehand, I was just tired of the grungy off-white mess. Until today I had a yellow kitchen and hallways and a mint green dining/living room. I like the powder blue bathroom (with a ceiling to match), but the green in the main space is a problem, especially when I'm trying to take pictures of weaving. We spent some time in the spring trying to patch and sand, but at this point honestly it needs a skim coat and we are not up to that. So I bought flat paint and I'm calling it character. I've got plans for a big wall of family pictures and new lighting in the hallways. We've been living in a space that didn't really feel like ours, and now we're changing that and it feels so good. I'm hoping to get the downstairs done before it's too cold to paint with the windows open. Upstairs can wait a bit - our room feels like ours since we did the floors, so it's not as

urgent. The kids feel the same, and they can't quite decide on colours, so it's not a rush anyway. I haven't decided if I'm changing the colour in the bathroom. This is still just a stop-gap. I would like to move in the next few years (we never intended to live here more than 5 years, it's quite small for 4 of us, especially with two of us home full time now), but if that doesn't happen, I want to renovate. Take out a wall, put a pass-through in a different wall, completely tear out the kitchen. It's better to have dreams than to feel stuck.