Making a Home

After returning from Blaise’s intensive in Boston, much of our focus shifted to the “new” old house we had decided to take a chance on and make our own. Much has also been going on with regards to Blaise and his N of 1 trial as well as with Kara and her ever-expanding role in the rare disease community (more on all that later), but our day-to-day life was very much occupied with our massive house renovation. Does every house project turn out so much larger than planned?!

Let’s rewind a bit. After learning of our move to North Carolina in early 2019, Kara had had enough of moving and wanted a home where we could plant our roots, with no intention of moving any time soon. So we took a bit of a leap at the time and found ourselves a wonderful home in a great community that was a short commute to Carl’s workplace. All of this, of course, was before we learned of Blaise’s diagnosis. While the house was great, we couldn’t ignore the fact that the living arrangements were less than ideal for a child with a disability. Our children’s bedrooms were upstairs, which meant a lot of carrying Blaise up and down throughout the day. It didn’t help that those stairs were a bit steep, and even our typically developing son had slipped and fell down a few steps on more than one occasion. We knew this would become an issue at some point, so alas, we started looking at houses all over again.

Just before Thanksgiving 2021 we finally walked into a house that felt like we could really make our own. We made an offer, had it accepted, and immediately started making plans. The “new” house was built in the early 1980’s, and had one owner that entire time. It was single story living, but with an unfinished upstairs that we envisioned as a great guest space or future office. Best of all, it felt like a time capsule from the decade in which it was constructed. Colorful paint, different shades and textures in every room (and I mean EVERY room, including bathrooms), and even chocolate brown matching jacuzzi tub, toilet and bidet in the master bathroom. It needed a major facelift. We found a contractor we felt good about, and came up with an ambitious plan to basically gut the entire house, reconfigure the downstairs to create a more open main living space, and begin work on turning the upstairs into livable space. We intended to do some work ourselves to help contain the budget. And while the project was ongoing we had rented a 2 bedroom apartment to ensure we had plenty of “family time” throughout it all.

We initially planned on the project lasting around 9 months… It took closer to double that. Budget of course increased along with the timeline, which led to us performing more and more work ourselves to help with cost. What was envisioned as some hobby-ish DIY became essentially a second full-time job during the renovation, absorbing much of our evenings, weekends and vacation leave. There was plenty of frustration, exhaustion, sore limbs and blood, sweat and tears. And the apartment life even had our sociable older son wishing he could just have some alone time. But ultimately move-in day arrived and we set about finally turning this house of our dreams that we had agonized over for so long into a reality. And I must say, it turned out pretty darn great. Walking around the house on a day-to-day basis it’s hard not to take pride in so many little details that we dreamt and brought to life. I think there’s a bit of each of us built into the house, and Blaise is certainly no exception. A few such details include a below-counter microwave drawer, ovens with side-open doors that allow easy access, a curbless (aka walk-in) shower and wet room that can accommodate a wheelchair if needed, or the extra-tall baseboard to protect our walls from Blaise’s various walking devices. We couldn’t be happier with the end result and couldn’t be more proud of the work we put in to making it so.

Before…

After…

Along the Way…