A Goodbye Letter and Final Tour of All We've Accomplished
Well friends, the time has come for us to say goodbye. We just celebrated the four year anniversary of living in our forever home. It's felt like a lifetime just as much as it feels just like yesterday. We bought this house not for the style it posessed but for the potential it had, and we have enjoyed sharing our renovation journey with you! We started this blog as a scrapbook, which become a hobby and motivator to keep working. And as a way to explore building streams of passive income and play in the publisher space of advertising (contrary to the consumer side I spend my 8-5 in). We've accomplished a TON making this house our home, and we still have big dreams to do more. But the time has come to close our blog chapter. There's something that's been on my heart, and I'll tell you about it, and then we'll get to one last good ol' fashioned before and after of our home, floor by floor, room by room!
Why the Time is Now
We took a break from projects and the blog to wind down summer, spend some family time on vacation and to help unplug a bit during a busy season for me at work. But, because I believe everything happens for a reason, I think that unplugged time was designed to give me the time and space to read and reflect on a book I picked up a couple months ago that I hadn't gotten the chance to read: The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. I heard that a neighboring school district was reading it as a parent book study which caught my attention. Why would an entire school district recommend this (and why hadn't mine?)
According to The Anxious Generation website, the synopsis of the book is this:
In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the *play-based childhood" began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the "phone-based childhood" in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this "great rewiring of childhood" has interfered with children's social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies. Most important, Haidt issues a clear call to action. He diagnoses the "collective action problems" that trap us, and then proposes four simple rules that might set us free. He describes steps that parents, teachers, schools, tech companies, and governments can take to end the epidemic of mental illness and restore a more humane childhood.
The data and information he presented was riveting. One of the lines that stood out to me most was "we're over protecting our kids in the physical world and under protecting them in the virtual world." It was validating on one hand, because we've been having a lot of conversations lately with Hank about technology, the impact on the way time is spent with friends, and the fact that we know it's not the popular choice to parent against what is becoming social norm (grade schoolers with smart phones.) But extremely concerning on the other... the shocking trends of mental health issues in our teens, predominently anxiety and depression, and suicide, is terrifying. Gen Z was the first generation to grow up with this phone-based childhood and the data is proving why that's a seriously bad idea. As a society, we have the ability to change this but it's going to take our collective actions as he outlined so thoughtfully. I've got underlines like this on nearly every page of the book, but this last summary page took the cake. The challenge seems simple, yet complicated - but I'm hoping more people decide to jump in this boat with us. It takes a village, literally - and we're better together.
So what does this have to do with our little home renovation blog? Quite a lot. While this book was a study on Gen Z and a foreshadow on future generations to come including the one we're raising right now, there's plenty of "look in the mirror" moments throughout for all adults everywhere. We're impacted and guilty of a lot of what is addressed, but we were lucky our sense-of-self wasn't defined by what social media is today, and that we didn't have to go through puberty with it! And while this blog and our related social channels aren't intentionally out to do any harm - quite the opposite really - the threads tying to many of the concerns are aplenty: figuring out how different posts draw different attention and finding ways to leave more breadcrumbs for the algorithms and the big Google machine to find people who want to spend more time consuming content, to contributing to the comparison game we all play, showcasing perfectionism (we're far from it for the record), and certainly contributing to attention fragmention... all of it is very real and we want to be good examples for our kids.
Beacuse if we're going to impose and encourage the practical advice given in this book, then we better try to do better ourselves. The projects will still continue, as they're helping us create spaces we love to be in and for friends and family to come, be present and have fun together in the physical world. But we're going to start limiting the rest of the time we spend focusing on, and contriubting to, larger societal problems in the virtual world.
I encourage you, whether you have kids of any age, know people with kids, are working in the schools or leading extracurriculars, or were once a kid yourself, read this book and see what you think. Share your thoughts. Get the conversation going in your circles. It immediately changed me and I've started to parent differently beacuse of it. I want our kids to grow up to be fully functioning members of society - who know and love who they are and trust in who God made them to be, without being consumed in screens, retracting from the physical world and feeling bad about themselves because of the imperfect, unreal, virtual, artificially "intelligent" social comparison world. We want them to be kids. Play. Get out. Use their brains and problem solving skills. Take risks and overcome them. In the very first small stretch moment of independence I've given allowing them to ride their bikes further from MY comfort zone, they came back with beaming visible confidence and growth. SHOCKINGLY fast and positive ROI. That is something I'd rather become "addicted" to and spend my time working on.
We have to be the ones to get out of the way and give them more opporutnities to do that. And find community with people who want the same for their families and future generations. Hope you'll consider joining us... we need you! And for the record, the principal at our school also read this book over the summer and she was equally inspired so she is launching a study with parents at our school this fall, and I hear there are going to be new fun independent play items at recess too. Small steps I'm so thrilled with - hope the rest of the district - and state - follows her lead. If you're a parent in our school, please check it out!
So there's that. We got pretty deep there, but I told you this was on my heart. :) Before we sign off, let's take one last trip down memory lane together to see how things have changed the last four years. This is a HOME blog afterall!
A Final Before and After Look at All We've Accomplished
All of the "before" photos were from the listing or photos taken during a walkthrough before we owned it and the after our very last formal shot we've shared with you of the same space.
The Second Floor
Let's start upstairs and work our way down.
Hank's Room
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Abbey's Room
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Kids Bathroom
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The Guest Bedroom
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Primary Bedroom
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Primary Bath
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The Main Level
Main Entry
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Music Room
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Dining Room
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Kitchen
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Laundry Room
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Living Room
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Four Season Sun Room
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The Basement
Workout Room
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Man Cave Living Room + Bar
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Bathroom
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Under the Stairs
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Storage Room + Workshop
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Outside - Front and Back
Front Landscaping + Curb Appeal
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Back Landscaping + Pool
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See You Later, Friends!
There we have it folks. Four years of progress, blood, sweat and tears. Thanks for reading and rooting us on. As we close this chapter, we're looking forward to the next. We're not sure what it will look like exactly. Hopefully more focused on the community and people right in front of us, and less on the one through the screen.
May God Bless You and Your Homes! Stop by sometime.
XOXO,
Kiersten and Zach
