It occurred to me today that love is supposed to be messy.

My wife and I, in the late summer of 2009, bought a house built in 1883. Let me tell you how that’s been going, these past eleven years.

On Wednesday night, we decided to rip up some old carpet, because we were wanting to get rid of the old, dingy mess that was in place, and because we were hoping to get at the beautiful hard wood that we believed to be underneath the carpet. We held this belief, that the hard wood was there, because we’d spied it by pulling up some of the corners of the carpet. We looked at each other, realizing that there wasn’t going to be any real discovery without removal, and we set about the work.

* * *

If you’ve ever watched a bit of PBS, especially during the daytime on the weekends, I’ll bet you’ve seen the show. It’s called, This Old House, and it used to be hosted by a couple of guys, Bob Vila and Norm Abrams, back in the beginning of the series. The show usually covered the entire renovation of a single house over the course of multiple episodes, and it was always fun to watch these old, decrepit homes regain their youthful charm and character, at the hands of some truly handy craftsmen.

When I was a kid, I may have wanted to look like David Hasselhoff, and I may have wanted to drive like Bo and Luke Duke, but more than either of these, I wanted to be able to fix things just like Bob Vila. I just checked, and according to Wikipedia, the show’s been on the air for forty-two seasons, which boggles the mind, in and of itself.

There have been many, many times during the course of ownership of this home, over these past eleven years, that I have wished for Bob and Norm to come and help me with all of these problems. Of course, they would swoop in, gather me under their wings, show me how to do a little bit of the work while taking the big responsibilities on their own shoulders. It would be great, and magical, and in the end, I would have solutions to these problems.

Of course, it doesn’t work that way.

In the same way, you can’t be physically fit without the arduous work of exercise. You also can’t be very knowledgeable on something without study and practice. You also can’t be the most talented athlete in the arena without the drill and dedication that puts you among the elite.

Excellence takes work. So does a 137-year-old house.

* * *

So, back to the story of our flooring adventures.

If you’ve never removed carpeting before, there’s really not that much to it. It tends to be held down, at its edges, by tack strips that attach to the sub-flooring at also poke into the carpet above with these little pins. Once you’ve removed the carpet, and the tack strips, you’ll also need to remove the padding, and the staples that were probably used to attach the padding to the sub-flooring.

Did I say there wasn’t much to it?!?!

What we discovered, after the removal of the carpet and the padding could have been worse, but also wasn’t the best. Isn’t that how it always goes? We probably removed about three hundred square feet of carpet, and we discovered that about two-hundred and fifty of those square feet were in pretty decent shape. An eighty-three percent success rate isn’t that bad.

But, we’ve got to figure out some solutions for the other fifty square feet. Ugh.

* * *

It occurred to me, in the midst of all of this; I think love works like this. Love involves discovery, and it is not always the case that the discoveries are good.

Jennie and I have been together for more than a quarter-century, and married for almost two decades. Through those years, I’ve come to discover so many things that I love about her, along with the occasional discovery of something about her that rubs me the wrong way. But, what are you going to do? I’m sure that she didn’t have any idea about some of my least adorable qualities right away, either. But, you commit to the adventure, and for all of the discoveries that come along, most of them end up being enjoyable.

But it’s not just romantic love, either. Think about any person that you have strong feelings of love concerning, and you can probably think of a few things about them that aren’t what you would have them to be. Family members, close friends, they all come with certain drawbacks; love works its way through the negatives because there’s more to love than there is to despise.

Additionally, when it comes down to it, sometimes love means getting messy. But, during those times, when love means rolling up your sleeves and getting dirty, you do it because of the commitment, and because of the value that love has.

On a grander scale, grander than just this one journey involving some hardwood floors and some carpet removal, I’ve been ‘loving’ this house for the past eleven years. Loving, as in enjoying time on the front porch watching the cars goes by, as in laying in my hammock in the back yard, as in sitting around a fire in the fire pit near the bench swing. I love our upstairs bedrooms, and I love our location in town. I could probably continue to go on, but you get the idea. There’s a lot to love, to go along with the issues that need to be addressed and/or tolerated.

Now that I’ve come to think of it, building a love, whether it’s with a lover or a friend or a family member, or whether it’s with a house, is a process by which we work and we get dirty and we have to solve problems, on occasion. But, hopefully more often, we enjoy and we benefit and we find comfort and solace.

I wonder what Bob Vila and Norm Abrams would think of that.