The Life of Lou Ruppert

Every Sunday I like to review my life in miniature. I make sure my checkbook is balanced, that I’m on track for projects I’m working on, that I’m doing OK in my unpaid responsibilities, and that no trouble tickets for church computer work are getting out of hand. I also plan my week, reviewing my schedule, seeing what I want to add to it, etc. It takes one or two hours.

This week, I’m in the middle of a renovation project in my home. I was praying in what I used to call “the prayer room,” last week. The prayer room is the vacant third bedroom of my house, which I used to lend out for housing derelicts who would apply to my church for a place to stay. After we got a proper halfway house, I put an easy chair in there and used it as a quiet place to sit and read a book or pray. Anyway, while praying, I got the idea to move into the smaller room as my bedroom, after renovating it. I’m a simple kind of guy, and so the idea appealed to me. My current bedroom is sized for a married couple, and I’m not married. It just gives me too much of an opportunity to accumulate clutter. The smaller bedroom also gets a lot more light. And if I ever take an extended sabbatical, I can rent the house out, while keeping the smaller bedroom as a place to return to. I was excited.

The plan was to paint the room a cheerful shade of green and put a network jack in for my bedroom computer, and then I could move in. Maybe three hours and I’d be good to go. In practice, however, projects always have what we computer nerds like to call “scope creep”:

• It took me a couple days to figure out which bright cheerful shade of green I wanted. You wouldn’t think color choice would be difficult, but it really is. A friend of mine once went through a half dozen different shades before she settled on a color for a room she was doing. I had no idea.
• I decided against keeping the carpet. It’s a magnet for dust, and I’m allergic to dust. Ripping up an old carpet in a 10×10 room takes a couple hours, once you factor in moving furniture, pulling up the tack boards, extracting tricky nails, removing staples that were holding down the foam pad, etc.
• Tearing out the somewhat useless closet organizer shelves left big holes in the drywall which had to be filled with spackle, sanded, and the resulting spackle dust swept up. That took a couple hours, and I’m sure I’m going to need to redo a couple of the holes. The more I’ve used the closet shelving in my house, the more I realize how smart the traditional dresser/closet combo really is compared to “modern” solutions like that.
• In order not to do the same abysmal painting job as the previous DIY owners who left paint all over the hardwood floors, doorknobs, and windows, I had to remove the metal hardware from the windows and doors, mask the windows, and buy drop cloths big enough to actually cover the floor. That took a couple hours.

So, a week has passed and I haven’t even primed the walls yet! I’m hoping to get to that this afternoon. Maybe I’ll upload some pictures to mark my progress. The point is that things never play out as they appear in the design phase. In my more negative days, I’d have used that as an excuse not to start, or not to finish the project I started.

So what else is new? I got to have a great thanksgiving dinner with my parents and both of my brothers all sitting around the same table. It was really cool. When I was growing up, my brother Pete was still a baby, and my parents would always eat in front of the television, so it was always just Ray and I eating alone in the dining room. Not that that’s all bad, but there’s something really nourishing about a family all sitting at the same table. And seeing Pete as an adult, with the same quirky brilliance as the rest of us Ruppert men, was fun too. I love my family.

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