The Daunting Task of Starting…Just Made Easier

August 27, 2012

My husband and I just bought our very first house, which is a minor miracle in itself as we had said for the good part of 10 years that this is something we would never do. Why would we want to work on a house on our days off when we could go shopping??? Well, after 9 years of having weekends all to ourselves, guess what? We got bored!! So, we now have a house and are all excited about doing home improvement projects. Believe me, we are more surprised by this turn of events than anyone else.

Here we are, all ready to start in on the hammering, mowing, replacing, and decorating, except we stand in the middle of our beautiful great room and scratch our heads. Where in the world does a person start, and how does one go about even doing it?! I figure I have a few options. Hit up every friend I have, which I try to limit. Contact lots of different contractors, which is expensive. Or, utilize the local Library sections on home maintenance and home decorating as well as Online Resources available just to grasp a clue of where to go from here, and what resources I want to keep on hand at home.

Well, as you can guess, I went with option number three, at least to figure out what step two would be. And you would be amazed at how many ideas and knowledge I gained from just browsing through all the books. I now know which books and resources I want to own that I will utilize regularly from my home collection, which contractors to hit up first, and which questions to ask friends. And since I just wandered the shelves here at my own branch as well as others, I could utilize the staff knowledge in the building with questions of where things are, and their thoughts on the subject.

Even working here, I found it to be a great resource to get started.

Kathleen A.
North Oak Branch