Greater than the sum of its parts (3)

 Let me start by saying the bathroom took a lot longer to finish then I planned, I guess having never tiled before I should have realised that to tile an entire bathroom floor to ceiling would take some time especially teaching myself as I went. Over the course of a few weeks I slowly got the room tiled and grouted, I finished my vanity and fitted all the fittings. I think the Photo's tell the story better than I could:

I must say that now that it’s all come together I am pretty pleased with it, I am happy that (at least in my opinion) the result has turned out to be better than the sum of its parts.

If you’ve read my previous posts you would remember that in ‘Greater than the sum of its parts 2’ I wrote about the unfortunate situation when something falls short of the sum of its parts but now due to my success with the bathroom its time to actually talk about surpassing the sum of its parts. Thinking about examples I was finding it hard to find one until I had a realisation; The Church!

Now just to be clear, when I say ‘The Church’ I don’t mean the institutions; in some cases I fear they would be an example of the opposite. What I mean is what I would call the ‘body of Christ’ all the people who know God and have given their lives over to work for him.

Let me explain this with a story, firstly because I like writing short stories but also because I think it will make my point:

Out side it's cold, the wind has picked up and the rain is getting heavy but inside its warm, the room is quiet and still. One look around the room however proves that no comfort is being found. 14 people sit silently on waiting room chairs, each face telling a story of fear and confusion. It has been hours now and every time the nurse comes in with an update she seems less and less optimistic. The lady sitting closest to the theatre door has tears running down her cheek and seemingly overcome by a wave of emotion she begins to whimper softly and whips her face with her sleeve. Everyone turns to look at the woman now hunched over sobbing and the older woman to her right takes her hand and squeezes it gently. The older woman’s face is different from the others; no fear or confusion instead she appears to be concerned but at peace, she looks up at the group who have turned their focus to her. Her voice is quiet but strong ‘Ok; let me pray’.

He walked briskly along the footpath; he had just dropped the keys to his Audi back to the fleet office and was on his way to the bus stop. Yesterday he had locked up his office for the last time and given the keys back to the real-estate agent along with the keys to his now empty apartment. He put his earphones in as he walked and the words struck him ‘your grace is enough’ and he finally knew what that meant. He got to the bus stop and looked into his wallet, all he had left was one shiny $2 coin and an old $1 coin the bus cost $2.50. He stepped onto the bus and the woman in front of him was frantically looking through her purse but was unable to come up with the money he reached over and gave her his and then stepped back off the bus, it wasn’t that far to his parents house and he wasn’t in a hurry.

With a strong flick of her wrist the white sheet unfolds itself and drifts gently to the bed, catching the sunlight from the open window the sheet reminds her of the sail on a boat but she runs her hand across it to flatten it out and tucks it into the mattress. She doesn’t really know who they are, but she knows they need a place to stay and she has the room.    

A teenage girl sits by herself in the quadrangle and watches the handball bouncing back and forth, her friends are few meter behind her & they’re noisy but she’s not hearing any of it. She stands up and begins to walk, she knows where he always sits and today she has decided he won’t sit alone.

The footpath is steeper than it was a few years back the old man thinks to himself as he walks; a teenager yells something at him from across the street and the others start to laugh, the old man looks up at them and he smiles.

A Middle aged man sits on the beach watching the waves lap at the sand, he knows he did the right thing but now he wonders how much it will cost him. 

Normal people doing more or less normal things; but as the body of Christ we can save the world. Pretty sure that is the ultimate example of something being 'Greater than the sum of its parts' ... my bathroom is pretty good too!

Old Floors.

It was always my intention to polish up the floor boards. I quite liked the darker finish that was on the floor in the entry way and front bedrooms however after looking into staining the rest of the floors to match I decided the best option was to strip back all the floors and put a clear water based CFP throughout the house. 

 

Sanding back all the floors was difficult and time consuming, I don’t think it had really grasped how much work was going to involved with getting the floorboards prepared to take the new finish. If I take you back to the beginning you will remember the floors were, pretty scuffed up, they had graffiti sprayed across them there were holes that I had patched but needed to sanded flat.

As the sanding went on it became evident that not all the boards were completely flat, some had quite deep scratches and marks all of witch took time hard work to clean up.

As the process continued I began to realise that I quite liked the results; it seemed the more damaged or mistreated the timber had been the more character it had when the process was finished. With enough sanding and coats of CFP the timber was beautiful again and although there are still nail marks from old masonite in the kitchen and dining, old scratches in the lounge room, visibly different timber where holes have been patched I think they actually make the house seem more homely. The floors tell a story, they’re truthful and unapologetically so. All our hard work has fixed the damage, smoothed the ruff edges and removed the stains that covered the timber but you can still see the markes left behind; its not hiding what it is or what it’s been through.

I think it’s the same with people, no matter what we’ve been through there is something beautiful about the truthful statement ‘This is where I’ve been, this is what I’ve been through and by the grace of God and through his help this is who I am today’.

What it was made to be.

My parent’s patio had been serving as a storage area for old furniture for a number of months but it was getting closer to the time to move into my house so the furniture needed to be fixed up and recovered so that it could be used.  You may remember all the old furniture I had collected from a previous post; my first project was the old arm chair.

I was sick for a few days and had to stay home in the warm watching movies, after a while I got a bit bored and decided it was a good opportunity to try my hand at upholstery.

 

 

  I stripped the old vinyl back and then used it as a template to cut the new fabric, for a first attempt I was pretty happy with it:

Next I Had to recover all the Dining chairs, these were much simpler but quite time consuming as there are six of them. I watched a lot stupid TV shows with my sister while I got them all done.

The other chair that needed to be recovered (actually it needed all new foam as well) took me a lot longer. This chair needed all new covers made accurately using a sewing machine; its not my forte but its turned out OK. If you look closely there are a lot of little mistakes, the pattern in the fabric doesn’t always line up and I must concede I had to do a lot of touch ups with a needle and thread because of my lack of skill with the machine, but hey; it’s done!

I do have a couple other chairs that I need to re-cover, but they’ll get done eventually and for now I’m happy with the way these have turned out. I love being able to take an old piece of furniture and look past the frayed edges, the stained fabric and the broken parts and see what it was made to be, what it was before life had made a mess of it and what (with a little work) it could be again. I’ve heard it said that Jesus see’s us in much the same way & he’s willing to do the repairs if we let him. 

A Cool Change

I may have mentioned before when speaking about the security alarm that the two things that the real-estate agent said would be necessary for the house to sell well would be a security system and Air-conditioning. It was getting well into winter and all I had out at the house was a small foot heater which would heat up one room fine but no more. Seeing that I would be moving in relatively soon I decided it would be best if I had the air-con system installed. 

The first step was for me to set a couple of concrete slabs in place for the external unit to sit on.

Then the a/c guys could come and install the system, I went for a split system because I didn’t want it sticking out one of the windows and a ducted system would have been far too expensive.

The internal and eternal units had to be installed and the conduits had to link them through a hole in the back wall.

While some of the work was being done the power had to be turned off; so I had some time to kill while the rest of the house was dark. I sat on a pile of doors, read a book and had a cup of tea (luckily I heated up the water before the power was turned off) I was sitting in what would soon be my bedroom and relaxing; with that the house took another baby step towards becoming a home and I snapped a photo to remember the otherwise ordinary moment.

As I’m writing this I’m sitting in a warn house on a cold rainy day: It occurs to me that it takes some warmth to make a house a real home but not always the type you get from a heater ... that said a good reverse cycle air conditioning unit doesn’t hurt and now I have one!!