Project People

Every friend in our lives brings their own unique personality and story with them. Enter our friends Mitzi and Foy Mills. You may have read about Mitzi in a previous issue of our magazine. She and Foy moved here six years ago when he took a job teaching at Sam Houston State University. Mitzi was a contractor out in Abilene, and she adores fixing up houses, living in them a while, and then usually selling them. They are living in like their 30th house in 34 years of marriage. And no, I’m not exaggerating. Wes and I have been married for 25 years and have lived in the house we built for almost 24 of those years. Let’s just say we are opposites in this area of life.

Mitzi and Foy are what Wes and I call, “Project People.” They always have a project in the works on the place they are living in or about to live in or, well, you get the idea. However, because they never live anywhere that’s “old,” for the past five years, Mitzi has been working on me to remodel and update our house. I kept telling her I’d think about it. Somewhere during the great Black Friday deals on appliances at the local Sears, Wes and I bought appliances for the kitchen remodel…and that began “the project.”

I feel like I should call it “The Great Project” kind of like The Great Depression, because it’s really big. In spite of only having bought appliances, you can’t just remodel the kitchen. When you take down that old wallpaper and paint, the next room has to be painted, and the next and…you know. As I write this, snug in my home office, right outside the door there is a wet paint sign, all the furnishings are shoved to one side of the room, and boxes stacked to the ceiling out in our game room with every dish and pantry item we own. Our bedroom holds the rest. There are no counters in the kitchen, but there are freshly painted cabinets. And walls. And closets nearby. And there’s more to come. Our bedroom and yes, even my office is getting a makeover.

Another friend dropped by yesterday and said, “How are you living like this?” I hadn’t really thought about it. We just are. Every day, we get our marching orders from Mitzi about what we need to have done by tomorrow. She certainly knows how to keep a project moving! We’ve finally realized that she has figured out we’ll never do another project, so she’d better make sure we do plenty of them now. Foy just grins and says, “If you give a mouse a cookie…”

So for now, we are enjoying cereal for supper. I’m sure there will come a day when we’ll laugh about the days we did all this…maybe. Until then, if you see us looking like we don’t know where anything is – it’s because we don’t.

Until next time, ~ Karen