By Ashlee Gadd
@ashleegadd

It started out innocently enough. 

“Don’t you think a bathroom vanity would be pretty easy to swap out?” I ask my husband, my voice ripe with optimism. I’m scrolling target.com looking for a mirror to add to my budget-in-progress spreadsheet. With the Miracle Method website open in a separate tab, I silently wonder how much it’ll cost to reglaze our discolored 50-year-old shower.

This is not a bathroom remodel, I tell a friend over coffee. A bathroom “refresh” is more accurate. Just a few small cosmetic upgrades—you know, a vanity with drawers you can open and close without grunting, a sink that isn’t peeling away at the faucet. Nothing too intense, nothing too expensive. We’ll be done in a single weekend … probably.

Is it just me, or do Chip and Joanna make this stuff look easy? They’re always like: Let’s buy this dilapidated house for $150,000 and walk through it with a glass-half-full, can-do attitude, and before you know it, everything will be brand new! I am fully aware they have an actual crew of contractors and designers and plumbers and electricians at the helm, but I still think they make it look too simple.

Fixer uppers are slippery slopes and two years into owning one, my husband and I should have known a bathroom “refresh” would turn into more. 

We should have known the toilet had been leaking for years. We should have guessed there were electrical wires knotted and shoved into the walls. We should have assumed things were not as they should be, not safe, not up to code. We should have known the insulation behind the shower had completely disintegrated, because of course it had. 

We should have known there wasn’t a shortcut for this.

Two years into a never-ending list of projects, we’re learning short-term fixes are easier, and more affordable, and might buy us some time, but they won’t last. The shallow, cosmetic improvements are nicer to look at, sure, but it only takes opening up the wall to see the fire hazards, the mold, the rotting wood, the dead rats. 

The long-term solutions cost more money (a lot more money) and take more time (a lot more time), but in the long run, will always serve us better. With every single problem we encounter in this house, we have to ask ourselves: can we get by with a short-term fix, or do we need to invest in a long-term solution? 

You only have to discover a soaked subfloor once to know you made the right choice. 

***

A few weeks ago, I went hunting for some photos of my oldest child’s first birthday. The pictures were buried on an old external hard drive, which I finally found, along with some of the first professional sessions I did for clients when I launched my photography business. 

I was slightly horrified by most of the images—not necessarily by the composition or lighting, but by how overly edited they appeared. Each picture looked like it had been through dozens of rounds of processing, like I had waltzed through a Photoshop buffet and put a little bit of everything on my plate. 

I can clearly see now what I couldn’t see then: my own desperate attempts to “fix” a bad picture. If a photo was overexposed, I cranked up the highlights. If a photo was out of focus, I sharpened the heck out of it. I masked every error and mistake with an editing bandaid instead of seeking out a real disinfectant—learning how to take better pictures. 

Thankfully, for me and my clients, my photography improved with time and practice, not to mention copious amounts of trial and error. I know now what I didn’t know then: editing is meant to enhance photos, not save photos. Photoshop is not meant to be a shortcut to the hours and hours and hours it takes to master the art of using a camera. 

These days I am quick to share this epiphany with budding photographers: you have to take a lot of bad pictures to learn how to take good ones.

***

A fellow writer and friend recently texted, “Do you ever struggle with all the work we do in obscurity? I’ve been working so hard for so long … I know good things are coming, but right now, life is unglamorous and nothing is coming to fruition. I feel like I’ve been laboring for ages with nothing to show for it.”

I nodded along as I texted back, Yes, I struggle with all the work I do in obscurity. I remind her the whole “find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” mantra is simply … not true. I know this because I have a job I wholeheartedly love, but I “work” every single day. I don’t love every nitty-gritty aspect of my job, nor do I fawn over each individual task on my to-do list, but I also know all of those hours of emailing and paying bills and managing spreadsheets and writing terrible drafts is part of the gig. About 2% of the work I do is glamorous and shiny. The other 98%—not so much. 

But that work we do in obscurity? It matters.

If you want to be a great photographer, you have to start by taking thousands of imperfect pictures. If you want to be a great writer, you have to write thousands and thousands of words and not all of them will be good. This is a long game—all of it—marriage and parenting, creativity and faith, friendship and fixer-uppers.

There is no shortcut here, no easy button, just thousands of hours of unseen work. And it is work—the millions of minutes we spend disciplining in quiet corners, writing words that will never be seen, initiating hard conversations with our spouse, pouring into our friends, whispering midnight prayers from the rocking chair when we’re so tired we could cry.  

Over and over, round and round, here we go again into the deep, slow, sometimes-grueling but always-meaningful work of living a life. And, sure, sometimes we can get by with just painting the cabinets, shrugging “I’m fine” at dinner, or throwing an iPad at the toddler, but it’s safe to say: anything you want to invest in long-term is going to cost you. Sometimes it’s going to cost you money, but it will always cost you time. 

I don’t know about you, but I forget this, all the time.

So often I’m tempted to skip ahead to the end, to the finish line, to the point where I accept the trophy for reaching the end-goal, whatever it is. I want that 2% glamorous part to arrive, right now please, so I can get out of this 98% of obscurity, even though I know that’s not how life works. 

Come to think of it: don’t we grow the most during the 98% of obscurity?

My five-year-old has been drawing almost every single day for the past year. In that time his body of work has transformed from indistinguishable shapes to stick figures, and then to little lopsided bodies with freakishly giant hands, and finally to real, clear, obvious portraits of our family. It took, literally, hundreds of sheets of paper tossed in the recycling bin to get from the shapes to the portraits, but surely that work was not done in vain. Those hundreds of sheets of paper represent progress. Growth. Development. Breakthroughs.

We live in a world that celebrates the finish line, but I’m not sure that’s the only part worth celebrating. 

I recently learned that during an Ironman competition, if you do not finish in 17 hours, it doesn’t count. So long as you finish in time, there’s a big hoopla involved—they ring a bell, announce your name, people applaud and shout as you cross under the glowing lights. But if you finish mere seconds later, it doesn’t count. You are not an ironman. You get a DNF next to your name: Did Not Finish. 

Can you imagine swimming 2.4 miles, and then biking 112 miles, and then running 26.2 miles, only to cross that finish line without any kind of fanfare before you are publicly declared a failure? 

I mean, I get it. Sort of. The Ironman triathlon is not a participation sport, but still. It kind of makes you want to camp out at the finish line and hug every person who misses the mark, doesn’t it? That’s a lot of obscurity to not experience the win.

I’m not an athlete, and don’t pretend to be. My greatest accomplishment in this vein is a 10k race and that was years ago. But I’ll tell you this—I learned a lot about myself during the training. I learned about grit and perseverance and discipline, the beauty of showing up, day after day, to the rhythmic sound of my own shoes pounding pavement. 

I know the running metaphor is overdone, but isn’t that just like life? The 98% of obscurity is our training; it’s where we put into motion the beauty of showing up. It’s there, in the quiet and invisible hours, where opportunities abound.

When I lose my temper, is it not a chance to practice repentance? When I send an e-mail or pay a bill, is it not a chance to be grateful for the fact that I work for myself? That God has entrusted so much responsibility to me? When I whisper a prayer over my child who is crying after a nightmare, is that not a worthwhile opportunity to model faith? 

These moments are abundant, and they all count.

I’m tempted to beg for a shortcut, all the time. This world wants us to be better and faster and to get where we’re going as soon as possible, but truth be told: I don’t want a life of bandaids. I want more than duct tape and filters and shortcuts. I want a life filled to the brim with hours and hours of inglorious work because—in my own experience—that’s where God seems to move the most.

***

My boys are in the backyard chiseling away at a single rock like tiny archeologists. They’re both wearing goggles and taking turns pounding the rock with a hammer, encouraging each other every so often with a “Whoa, that was a good hit!”

A few feet from where they’re playing sits a collection of debris from the bathroom renovation: our old vanity, chunks of drywall, a lone toilet. The kids don’t even seem to notice it anymore, but I do. The bathroom was supposed to be finished weeks ago. 

I watch them through the window squatting over a big piece of cardboard and squealing with delight at the glitter rock dust flying all around. Their clothes and faces are covered in filth while they work side by side. 

At one point I go out to check on them and Everett, my oldest, holds up the rock to reveal about a quarter inch of a plastic dinosaur peeking through. 

“Mommy, look! We almost got it!” he tells me. 

I smile at him, wondering if I should strip the kids in the backyard before giving them a bath so I can dump their chalky clothes straight into the washing machine. 

“Looks good, babe,” I tell him, “You better keep going.” 

A little sigh escapes his mouth, “Yeah … it’s taking a really long time, though.” 

He squats back down next to his brother and lifts the hammer again, pounding away.

I wonder if he remembers they have a plastic bin in their room full of little toy dinosaurs just like the one he’s uncovering. 

I wonder how much more special this one will be.