Maintenance

Every now and then I take my house for granted. I forget to appreciate the actual aesthetic beauty that it is. I forget to remember the glass mosaic tile that is in our bathroom shower. I forget to appreciate the house for what it looks like now vs what it used to look like when we bought it. 

I said to my husband recently, “Our house is in much better condition now than it was when we bought it.” His reply was: Oh, definitely. 

Now our house isn’t newer than it was when we bought it. It has aged another almost eight years since we took over ownership. And our house is entering its fourth decade since being built. The previous owners also only lived in the house for a mere four years. So how is it that it looks and feels so much newer than it did? 

Well, the easy answer is we renovated. We painted. Replaced flooring. Changed out tile. Smashed bathtubs. Removed cabinets. And made it look the way we wanted to. The hard answer? We took care of it. 

Regardless of how the house looks, care and maintenance is crucial. Without care and maintenance, a magazine-worthy house can turn gruesome in a very short amount of time. The kitchen is one of the hardest places to keep clean. Every time you cook, grease splatters, water spills, little bits of food fall out of the pan. It’s inevitable that your counters, stovetop, and probably your kitchen sink are going to need a good cleaning every so often. Growing up, we papered the back of our stove. It prevented grease splatters from staining the backsplash. I continue this tradition now and have repurposed years and years worth of brown packing paper. 

 

This is what our stove usually looks like. Brown paper on the back, dirty pots (only when I cook!) on the stove and some splatters here and there. The brown paper gets really messy after a few months and I do change it out regularly. That’s when the magic happens. 

When I remove the brown paper thats’ stained with splashed grease oil, and overall yuck, once again, it reveals the beautiful clean backsplash being protected behind it. 

If my kitchen looked like this all the time, we'd be starving because in order to keep it this clean, I'd never be able to cook.

Whenever I see the kitchen clean and uncovered, it reminds me why I put up the paper for the majority of time. I know I can’t enjoy all the backsplash behind the stove, but realistically, if I didn't put up the brown paper, the backsplash wouldn't look like this without it. I am preserving it for the next owners. I have no idea who they might be. It might be my children. It might be a complete stranger. But either way, they won’t see the remnants of life stories we lived in our house through fat, oil, and grease.