Home renovations: Hemorrhaging money and loving every minute of it

This is our new 23-foot Trex deck when it was completed and before we started putting stuff on it.

We are the midst of a series of home renovation projects, all of which involve us hiring various contractors to complete projects around our property that, had I been born with the Handy Gene, I might have done myself.

Alas, though, I was not, and therefore we have a choice either to shell out thousands of dollars to these professionals or watch our house fall down around us.

Like many other homeowners before us, we have chosen to deplete our savings account.

It all started last fall when a basement flood forced us to replace all of the trim and various doors in our basement. We hired a contractor to perform the repairs, and he turned out to be...less than satisfactory. His replacement, recommended by our daughter Elissa, was the complete opposite: Fast, competent, skilled, and a great communicator.

He completed the job in a matter of a couple of weeks.

So we hired him to replace our battered old wooden deck. It's beautiful.

We would love for him to do even more work for us, because I've discovered that a good contractor is worth his weight in gold.

We're still looking to remodel our nearly-30-year-old kitchen this year, and we need a lot of interior painting done.

With each job and each batch of building materials and supplies, our bank account gets lighter. Sometimes by frightening leaps and bounds.

Yet we grin and bear it, because the end result of each job is so nice.

Nice enough to justify huge depletions of our rainy fund?

Well...I don't know. I can tell you the Trex deck is amazing, though, for what that's worth.