Some people have too much energy. People like Jocelyn and Steve Gerard, for instance, who rehab their own homes in their spare time—and then blog about it.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
“I started to feel kind of isolated,” she continues. “Everybody was feeling sorry for me, and I was all excited: look what I did! Nobody related to it. When I started blogging, I didn’t feel so weird.”
In other respects the two are pretty normal. Jocelyn is the administrative director for Maya Romanoff, a wallpaper company in Skokie, and Steve works from home in marketing communications. They had their first date in 2001—taking Jocelyn’s dog for a walk—after seeing each other several times around the neighborhood. They married in December 2007 in Las Vegas, an event described in a blog post. He’s the perfectionist, she plays good cop with their tenants. Their conversation is symphonic: they talk over each other, fill in each other’s blanks, and can argue and make peace within a minute or two.
When I ask about the worst tasks they’ve tackled, they look at each other: there’ve been so many. Jocelyn reminds Steve about the radiators. He decided to strip the small ones himself, using a stripping agent that emitted heavy-duty fumes. “You set the radiator in a tub in the backyard,” Steve says. “Then you paint it with the stripper, wait half an hour, and spray it off with a hose. Then you get a wire brush and try to scrub off all the paint—crud, goop, sludge, we called it. And it doesn’t just come off: it takes like 20 applications.
“I’m lucky,” says Steve. “This work has to be done, and she’s willing to do it. Not everyone would be.”v
