Gittin' 'er done

I don't have many words today. We did a lot of work over the weekend. Here are some images of what we got done:

We purchased a kitchen table and chairs at the Antique Mall in Barnesville. Yay! I wanted a pedestal table real bad, and we found one...

John put up the pot rack in the kitchen and changed some of the wacky light switch placements while he was at it. Thank you, John!

I washed down the old sliding barn doors that we use on the bathrooms and polyurethaned them so that they won't flake paint everywhere (John did the second coat).

John put together my grandma's wardrobe in the bedroom so that I can get to Narnia when I need to.

And while we're in the bedroom, here are some more recent views...Clarabelle in a familiar pose:

New use for an old planter:

Mmm, yellow beads in a turquoise dish:

Whoops! Time to wake up! The latest addition to the infamous collection of all things rooster:

Here We Are...

...in the new house!

We are feeling exhausted from the marathon of activity, but this morning we enjoyed coffee at this table, watching the sky change outside the huge windows:

You know, back when we moved here in the summer it was one of the hottest, muggiest days of the year. For our move down here, there was a steady rain all day which equals mud-city. We know how to time it, don't we?

There is still sooo much to do. The cabin is a wreck--there is mud tracked all over the place. And everything down here at the new house is the definition of make-shift (we have to wait a week for the upstairs floor to cure before putting furniture on it). But it is so comfortable, warm, spacious, light-filled! I love it!

Right now, I am listening to the quiet swish of my new washing machine doing its job upstairs. Is it possible to be in love with an appliance? I smile everytime I look at my stacking washer and dryer.

And the kitties--LeRoy luvs the place! He walks across the beam that connects the two lofts upstairs and also walks the lower railing, balancing like a pro. Clare ran back up to the cabin as soon as she had the chance and stayed up there until I dragged her back down here. She is now sleeping on the bed with LeRoy and seems to be in a state of acceptance. (I couldn't get the two of them in the frame, and LeRoy is just so photogenic...)

John spent the day working at his real job at the temporary office set-up we put together. The wireless is working seamlessly. No more worrying about whether the barn door is open or not to get reception.

I'm resting my weary bones and muscles until heading up to the cabin for yet another trip to get stuff. It might have to wait til tomorrow, though. I'm plain tuckered out. I think it might be time for a cold beer in front of the warm fireplace. Ahhh, there's no place like home.

Grateful All The Same

Drear. According to Wiktionary, that is the obsolete form of the adjective, dreary. But, to me, leaving off the "y" makes it sound more dread. Dread and drear. And that is what the weather is like today--rain with temperatures in the 40s. My least favorite kind of weather. Unfortunate, because that is what winter is often like in Ohio. Oh well, we make up for it with spring, summer and fall.

John and I are in the homestretch of getting ourselves into the new house and out of the cabin, and it is going to involve some tricky logistics (so what else is new?). We will be juggling the following over Thanksgiving weekend: polyurethaning the staircase; driving to my sister's for the holiday; sanding, staining and polyurethaning the upstairs floors; winterizing the cabin (turning off water, flushing pipes, mouse-proofing, etc.); oh, and throwing all of our stuff into boxes and hauling it through the mud down to the new house where we will put it on the floor in said boxes and live out of those boxes until...until...we put it on folding tables for awhile. Sounds fun, huh? But, you know what? I'm still looking forward to it.

On her most recent visit, my three-year-old granddaughter Maria, walked out of the kitchen on a Sunday morning after two nights here in the cabin and said, "We need a couch." It is something that I have said more than once since moving in June. John and I browsed a furniture store the other night and the fact that we are that close to getting a couch again makes me all warm inside. When we do have it, I'm going to make Maria close her eyes, and I will carry her inside the house, stand her in front of the new couch and say, "Okay, you can open them!" And then I'm going to cuddle up with her on it and read some books. I can't wait.

But first, I've got some work to do. Obviously, posting could be light the next week or so.

Have a great Thanksgiving everyone. I'll close with some pictures of the sky last week before the Great Drear set in.

Look What We Did

We applied a water-based polyurethane to the beautiful tongue & groove ash floorboards in the downstairs of our new house!

Looking this way:

Looking that way:

It is becoming real--this moving in thing. Counting down to about three, maybe four more weeks. I won't have kitchen cabinets right away, but at this point, I care not. Just want to get in there and start to feel what it is like to live in the place down the hill from my cabin.

Happy Monday, all.

The Current Moment

I'll close out history week by taking us up to the moment on the progress of the new house. Here is the view of it that I get all the time, walking from the cabin...You'll notice the lounge chairs on the star-gazing deck. I climbed up there and read my book yesterday evening, looking out on the future garden, imagining the best routes for pathways and placement of beds. Instead of a ladder, I was able to use the NEW STAIRS to get to the second storey.John will work his magic on the wood, sanding and staining until the lustre of the oak is restored to a rich, chocolatey hue. This is the same wood that he used for the front of the gift shop at Franklin Park Conservatory, a picture of which I will shamelessly post here. This was just after installation. It looks even better with all the earthy, organic merchandise they place around it.

And here is our bedroom--notice the floor almost done.

And here is the study--will I be able to concentrate with the doors to the deck right there, beckoning?

Who knows when we'll get in. I hope before the really cold weather hits. My friends at Living the Rural Dream have got me thinking about cozying up to the fire. I would love to have the choice of doing so at the new place. Having this stout little cabin for shelter, though, is a comforting thought.

Happy weekend everyone!

House Update

Construction on the new house is speeding right along, as fast as three guys, one with bad knees, can make it go. I can hardly wait to get in there and start decorating. I have a little while to wait yet, but when you consider that it has taken three years to get here, a few more months is nothing. It is so close I can taste it, and my saliva glands are working overtime.

The story of our new house goes something like this:
John found a dismantled barn for sale in the newspaper about five years ago. He called on it and arranged to meet the guy who owned it at a barn in Pickerington where it was stored. The guy had dreams of putting it back up again someday, but he ran out of time. The people who owned the barn where it was stored wanted to move and they needed it out of there. The guy had marked each beam and photographed each step of the process. It was just what you wanted to find in a dismantled barn. In addition to the 24x36’ structure, he had a 16x16’ building available, too. John took them both plus some oak flooring and other “vintage” lumber. We thought we would use the bigger one for the horse barn and the smaller one for John’s workshop. We’d buy another dismantled barn later and turn it into a house. (la di da!)

Now all we (John) had to do was move it. Getting a dismantled barn loaded into the back of your truck is one of those “easier said than done” things. All I remember about it is that one snowy Easter weekend, John and Jack used a canoe dolly to move several thousand pounds of barn lumber in a rented U-Haul. There was a huge snowstorm going on while they drove along back roads in the dark. Once they arrived at our farm, they had the pleasure of lifting all the beams one more time to load them into our old barn for storage. Good times, good times.

John had the idea for a while that he would put the barn back up himself, perhaps with the help of some Amish people for the main beams. Hoo boy, to think of that now makes me laugh. Or shudder. As it turned out, he asked around at the local lumber company for someone who could put up an old barn. Yes, there was an Amish man he could try, but there was another name that kept coming up: Tom Shingary.

We met Tom at the farm one weekend to discuss the project. He drove up in his maroon and cream conversion van and got out to meet us. He had a ball cap on covering his thick white hair, large blue eyes lined with black lashes, and a round nose. He had a friendly gruff voice, like a grandpa you are a little bit afraid of, but who you know will soften and give you whatever you want if you ask for it politely. After we looked at the beams stacked in our barn and talked at length about what we were planning, Tom asked if we wanted to take a drive and look at some of the other barns he had reassembled—some to work as barns again, and some to work as houses. After that tour, we were convinced that Tom was our man. A year later, he started work with the help of his brothers who own an excavation company, his son who owns a gravel company, a few workers who have changed over the years, and his teenaged grandson from time to time.

The original plan of making it the horse barn changed when we saw what a bulldozer does to the land. John and I were stunned when we came out to the farm one weekend and saw our little hilltop that the barn was supposed to sit on gone. They ran into some limestone rocks while trying to level the site and so it went deeper and deeper until the site was downhill rather than uphill. We cried when we saw it and felt so guilty. We learned a good lesson: go slowly and think it through, because you can’t put it back once you bulldoze it.

To quote John’s famous saying, though, “it couldn’t have worked out any better.” Because we realized that we should make it into our house. The site was perfect—it was the right distance from the cabin, it had a fantastic view, the major upheaval of the land was already done, and who wanted to find another dismantled barn and move it again for our house? We could build something smaller for the horses later. And so our new house was conceived. It has been gestating for a few years, and now it is almost arrived.

“The boys,” as we affectionately call them, arrive every morning, Monday through Saturday, around 7:30 a.m. and work until 3:00 p.m. I hear them laughing and guffawing in-between saw cuts. I hear the radio playing oldies rock some days. They love Cassie, our old coonhound, who ambles down there several times a day to beg food. “We know it’s lunchtime when she comes down here!” They like the house they are building for us, and take pride in doing a good job. I clean up their cigarette butts and pop cans after they leave. I took fresh baked cookies down one day (after Cassie stole one of their lunches). I suppose I’ll miss the boys a little bit when they don’t show up every day in Tom’s white work truck. But, I think I’ll live.

Here are some pictures of what it looks like now…

The view that you get when walking to the house from the cabin (That's going to be the screened in porch below and the star-gazing deck above)

And the other side of the house, facing the road. That is the cedar siding going up on the bottom half. We're going to just let it turn gray over time. Mmm, patina.And the front of the house with the awesome dormers

And there is Tom in the white shirt. The other two have sinced moved on--the fella in the cap became ill with cancer, and the other guy, I'm not sure. They did not want their picture taken. Can you tell? This was taken several years ago, as evidenced by the post and beam still visible on the left. Tom has trimmed down since, after a scare with heart surgery. He's looking good, though he is the one with the bad knees I mentioned. He gets the young guys to climb the ladders.

And here is John's tidy little workshop completed in the same cedar siding as the house. Add the almond windows and a red door and some landscaping to it and you'll know what the finished house will look like.

As a final note on this fifteenth of August, Happy Birthday to John! We'll be celebrating tomorrow with Mary and Jon and the kids and Jackson, too. Pictures forthcoming!

Let There Be Light

The windows came for the new house! I knew they were going to be big, but man, are they big! I love them. They are my new friends. Aluminum clad on the outside, wood on the inside, casements, no grids, color: almond. The new place is going to be full of light and if it had an American Indian name, it would be A Breeze Runs Through It.

When the house first went up—the barn, I should say—it was the embodiment of promise. The simple post and beam structure was handsome and elegant. The skeleton of it rose into the air with grace and yearning, like a yoga posture, if buildings are capable of such a thing. It was the ruins of an older life rebuilt, transformed, modified, retrofitted, made to work beautifully again. Part of me was loathe to do anything more to it. I wanted to leave it open to the birds and the wind. I wanted to sit in it, climb on it and dream and pretend.

Work proceeded however, and we got the concrete floor poured and a layer of painted plywood on before letting it sit for a few years until we sold the Columbus house. And now good old 1055 Glendale is giving back—work is progressing steadily. I think it is never going to be done, because I am impatient. And, we keep adding on to it. We are building a bump-out so that we can use a remote-system composting toilet—it has to have a direct drop, and will do so into a bin in the “basement,” which is a concrete holding tank with a door cut into it. And now I think I’ve talked John into adding the mudroom onto the other side at the same time. (“You know, to make it uniform on the outside—while we’ve got Tom here—we really could use a mudroom—I’m just sayin’…”)

I’ve been learning lots of lessons through the process of building a house from scratch—with no fancy architects, no drawings, no clear idea of what I’m agreeing to or not. I am not good at envisioning three dimensional spaces. I have big ideas and I flag pages in magazines of things I’d like to have in my house, but transforming ideas into reality and adjusting my expectations as we do that, has been a challenge.

One of the main lessons is that there is no such thing as perfection. I often comforted myself with the thought: in the new house things will be perfect! But, here I am, at the “in the new house” stage and guess what? Not only is it not perfect, it is sometimes the epitome of messy, jerry-rigged, patched up craziness. At one point, while the guys were digging trenches all over the place getting the water situation handled the thought occurred to me that the whole human world is jerry-rigged. Even in the suburbs where things look tidy and orderly on the surface, underneath is a tangle of wires and pipes and “oops, we don’t need that—just bury it there.”

So…out here in the country, I’m trying to let go of my obsession with perfection. It helps to have the cabin porch to sit on and the woods to trompse through. Nothing works better at bringing me into the present moment. A light breeze across my face, the sky changing subtly as the clouds move in slow motion towards the east…my brain settles down and my heart takes over and then everything is a different kind of perfect. The kind of perfect I could really come to love.