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Life With Liz: A living room and a reminder

One of the great things about being married to Steve was that he was a hands-on, do-it-himself kind of guy. There was very little that he couldn’t fix, or at least rig together until we could get a professional to actually fix it. Steve hated paying someone else to do something that he knew full well he could do, if he had the time to do it. We spent a lot of the time that we dated working on house rehabilitation projects that he had going on, and it’s one of the reasons that I was sure that our marriage would work: because we survived working together on those projects.

Steve did most of the heavy lifting, with me as his gopher, and I did most of the finish work. We made a good team.

When we moved up to the farm, we were looking forward to finally putting our skills to good use on our forever home. We made a lot of progress in three years, but we were nowhere near finished. We started and stopped working on the two large rooms that we wanted to turn into our central family living space several times. The more we lived there, the more we had different ideas about how the space should be used. We considered moving walls, putting on an addition, knocking out a floor, and on and on. While we stewed on that, we finished our bedrooms, and did some fix up work on the kitchen and dining room.

Having those corners available for retreat came in handy during the isolation of the pandemic when we were with each other 24/7, and we ended up camping out on lawn chairs in the living room when we came together to watch a movie or play a board game.

When Steve died, I was faced with two problems: Half of our fixer upper team (the one with the good skill set) was gone, and I no longer wanted the kids retreating to their corners and isolating themselves from what was left of our family. I knew I had to take on turning those rooms into “living rooms.”

There have been some things that it’s been easy to say, “I’m going to do this or that because it’s what Steve would have wanted.” In this case, we had never really been able to decide what we wanted. Letting go of that possibility was a huge step for me and dealing with the reality of “how will this space best suit our family now” gave me something to focus on when I felt like I was losing control of everything else.

As I started pulling up carpet, and getting my mind wrapped around how to best carry out this project, which was mostly cosmetic, I realized that without my partner, there was no joy in home renovations for me. I’m not a handy person, and although I appreciate mindless, repetitive tasks a lot more right now, I knew if I tried to attack these rooms with a paint brush, it wasn’t going to end well.

In the end, I decided to bring in professionals to do most of the work. While I lost the satisfaction of doing it myself, or ourselves, I tried to focus on the satisfaction of moving forward in a new direction, and getting the job done, one way or the other.

I also knew that while I wanted these rooms to symbolize our ability to move on and accomplish projects, I also wanted to keep Steve’s memory an integral part of the project. Enter his taxidermy. Not long after we started dating, Steve called me and was adamant and excited that I come over immediately; he had just picked up his first deer mount from the taxidermist and couldn’t wait for me to see it. It was the first Pope and Young buck that he’d gotten, and he couldn’t wait to hang it up. (If you’re a hunter that means something to you, if you’re not, let’s just say, it’s a big deer.) I don’t quite think I mustered up all the enthusiasm he had hoped I would, but I was starting to realize that loving the man meant loving his dead animals, too, and that deer and I were just starting our journey together.

When we bought our first house, I fell in love with the built-in bookshelves. Steve fell in love with how great all his mounts were going to look with the high ceilings. When we moved into the farmhouse, Steve just haphazardly put them on the wall to keep them out of the way and safe from any construction damage going on around them. When I started the renovation project, I took them all down and packed them away. I wasn’t sure that I’d ever bring them out again.

As I started to work on the furniture design and color scheme, I kept coming back to earthy tones, mostly greens and browns. I realized I was trying to bring the outdoors in, and what goes better in inside outdoors than a whole bunch of animal mounts? Whether I meant to or not, I created a space that just screamed for a few deer heads, bobcats, turkeys, and the very last animal he ever got: our newly mounted fisher.

Once the furniture was all in place, a friend helped me place all the mounts, and the kids came home that night to a warm, welcoming place that was brand-new, but also full of memories. As they each crashed on a couch or a chair and relaxed into the day’s end, I caught them looking fondly at their old friends. Whether it was the memory of their Dad, or our old house, or all the times together with both, I don’t know, but I do know that for the first time in a long time, I felt that we were all starting to move forward in a new direction, while still being able to hold on to the most important parts of the past.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.