Spring Cleaning the House That Love Built

This house we call home was built almost forty years ago by my husband’s hands. It was a true labor of love.

While it was under construction he held down a full-time job as a heavy equipment operator in the oilpatch and ran the farm.

He was married with four beautiful daughters and this is his wife’s dream home. It was carefully built to her grandiose specs, 2800 square feet, with 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, an open concept kitchen and dining room, sunken living room, vaulted ceiling, solid oak cabinets, and trim, and a huge recreation room. There are really far too many features to prattle off each and every one.

My husband is neither an architect nor a carpenter. He is just a simple farmer with no technical training, and yet the house he designed and built for his wife, with his own two hands, is truly a masterpiece.

The only problem is, I wasn’t his wife back then. This was a labor of love for another woman, his first love.

It doesn’t bother me that he was married before. So was I.

It only ever bothers me when it comes time for Spring cleaning.

In the 19 years that he and I have been together, I have yet to be able to bring myself to dung out every nook and cranny. It’s just too much!

Never mind the fact that this house is almost three times the size of any other home I have ever lived in. This house built on love holds many emotional tales, and they are no fairy tales.

This is the first year since 2018 that I’ve even been physically able to attempt a Spring clean. In 2018 I was crippled when a 500-pound calf knocked me over and stood on top of me, fracturing my pelvis, breaking all of the ribs down my right side, and my right shoulder blade.

It took two years to get back to some semblance of comfortable mobility. I was getting around pretty well for a couple of months, but then in 2020, I had a run-in with a goat that tried to rip off my right arm.

My doctor used words like mangled and internal amputation in describing my injuries. There wasn’t a single scratch, but the doctor said that all of the tissue from the base of my neck to my wrist looked like ground meat.

Almost three years later I now have recovered more mobility in my right arm and hand than was ever expected. It still gets painful, but it’s usable now.

So this year I’m diving back into Spring cleaning this monstrosity of a house.

It all comes rushing back. Anger, pain, grief, and sadness are seemingly impossible to scrub away.

The Incomplete Masterpiece

At first blush, you would never know the heartache these walls have witnessed. It’s not until you pull furniture away from the walls, or walk behind the doors kept closed.

Just weeks away from completion, construction on the house came to a grinding halt.

My husband had told his then-wife that it was time to shop for kitchen appliances and start getting ready to move the family into her dream home. She proceeded to drop a soul-crushing bombshell.

When he had started building the house she had taken a job at the local hardware store. Her discount would help save them a little on the construction cost. It seemed like a great idea.

He had never dreamed that she would fall in love with her boss. When it came time to move, she told him that he and their four teenage daughters could move into the house, but she would be going to live with her boss.

He hadn’t seen it coming. He’d been far too busy trying to make their dreams a reality.

Sitting on the very cusp of having all of his dreams come true, his world was shattered.

He and his girls moved into the unfinished house on the hill and his mother moved into the vacated house on the original homestead in the valley. Mother Irene cooked all of their meals since there really wasn’t much of a kitchen in the new house.

It was only a few short years before his daughters grew up and left home. He spent very little time in the house, usually just at night sleeping.

He hired a cleaning lady to come in once a month to dust, do floors, and clean the bathrooms.

We met in 2001 and dated casually for about a year.

He’d been completely honest from the get-go. He’d been burned by a woman once before and would never let it happen again. We could date, but it wouldn’t be anything more than two people having fun.

I was in the middle of an ugly divorce, so casual was perfect for me. Until it wasn’t anymore. I had two kids that needed a dad, doing it on my own was just too much.

I didn’t expect him to give me more. He was 22 years older than me. His kids were grown and had left home years earlier. He could see retirement on the horizon and I certainly didn’t want to saddle him with the responsibility of raising more kids during his golden years.

We remained good friends. I just moved on to trying to build a ‘complete’ family.

One day in early 2004, I showed up on his doorstep in the wee hours of the morning in tears, with my kids in tow. My husband of just eight months had threatened to kill me and I didn’t know where else to go.

He helped me get the kids settled and we talked until he had to leave for work. He said we were welcome to stay as long as we needed and to make myself at home.

I was devastated when he told me that the only reason he’d let me go was that he thought it would be unfair for me to be saddled with looking after an old man once my kids grew up and left home. He loved me and my kids and had been fully prepared to take on the responsibility of raising them.

We have been together since that terrifying night.

Washing These Walls Always Reminds Me…

… of our broken dreams. Spring cleaning forces a flood of memories of the heartache that he and I have both had to endure, before we got together and since. We’ve had more than our fair share.

I’m thankful that we’ve had each other to lean on through the storms we’ve weathered over the last 19 years. There are many that I may not have made it through without him.

Still every time I try to Spring clean anger wells up inside of me. I simply can’t fathom how he would have felt pouring his heart and soul into building this home, even if was for another woman, just to have her walk away without ever having lived one day in it.

This article was originally published at

https://medium.com/bacon-and-beach-days/spring-cleaning-the-house-that-love-built-76e19e7f65bc