“Butches Old Place”

“Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I built my life”

J.K. Rowling

Well here goes nothing, I’m starting a blog. In the past few months I have been told a couple times I should look into it and so I did. That led me to thinking about it more and thinking about it more led to starting one. And to be honest, it really wasn’t as hard as I thought it was going to be.

You see I’m an addict, which you mar or may not have known by now. More importantly I’m an addict in recovery and not in active addiction. Plan to keep it that way too. But without getting to deep into my bottom and addiction right off the bat one of the things that keeps my brain off of drugs these days is remodeling my apartment. I landed it purely by being in the right place at the right time.
“Butch’s Old Place” is what the guys in the shop call it. You see the “apartment” which is really an overstatement is located in the same building my work is. It’s a shop in downtown Baltimore called Chesapeake Woodworking.

No one really knows exactly what happened to Butch. The key just showed up in the office one morning in and envelope with “Apartment A Key” written on the front. Some young lady was said to have dropped it off, the guess was maybe his daughter? If I had to guess though it had something to do with mental illness and he was taken to some sort of health facility for monitored care or inpatient treatment. The place was an absolute disaster…still kind of is!

        For starters the smell was absolutely awful which made sense because all anyone really knew was that he had a handful of animals he never let outside. Which was true, so you can imagine the stench. Everything in the house under approximately 3 ft. was ruined due to animals doing there business wherever they could. I’ve never seen anything like it. The bottom hinges on all the base cabinets and doors were so corroded with rust they were unrecognizable. So it goes without saying every room had to be gutted, stripped down, and bleached. Only then caould the fun stuff begin.

So back to the reasoning behind all of this. Let’s go back to about when I snapped the photo just above. Something resonated with me upon entry to this place. It needed a complete makeover, kind of like my life I thought. Both this apartment and myself needed to be cleaned out and built back up to a better version. So that’s what I aimed to, wait AIM to do, wait AM doing! Lol…wait, are you suppose to use LOL when writing like this? Oh well, it’s my damn blog. I’ll cuss if I want too, that’s right.

Anyway after a little progress I became proud of myself and honestly wanted to show my efforts to other addicts or anyone else who is struggling in hopes of inspiring them to better themselves. Hell, even if it is only one person. My goal here is to show people that hard work pays off and you can make anything beautiful again if you put in that work. This is only the start of my story though and I hope you stay tuned for more in the coming days.

Am I suppose to sign when I’m done or something?

Just in case.

Bobby