Busy Hands Homestead

Time is rushing past.   The windows are down, my hair tangling in the wind, as I sing along to the radio, and my hand rests on the stick shift, flying down the highway in fifth gear. I have twenty minutes of, what feels like open time, on my way to pick up the kids from horseback riding camp. They have enjoyed a week of horses, ponies, baby goats, tiny bunnies. I’ve endured a week of begging to bring tiny, furry, undeniably cute creatures home.    They almost convinced me. ALMOST. The default answer is: “not until the house is done.” Time is rushing past and it is hard to stop and take a moment to pause, and even harder to look back and reflect on where we have been. We move from day to day, week to week, month to month while also tackling project after project. It is hard to prioritize. It is hard to focus. Sometimes it feels like we are moving in circles.  It is suddenly summer, and not just summer but the middle of summer, almost the end of summer...

I climb up and down a ladder moving it across the room as I place lights,  connect and then secure wires.  The smell of paint wafts up the stair case from below, where Adam is staining pine tongue and groove boards for the soffit. The roof is dried in, but not yet roofed. The windows and doors are in.  In spite of reservations and the looming lists of things yet to be done, we commit to our annual river trip. "The kids would never forgive us", we say to each other after bed time. Sylvan paddles his kayak,  Ivory rides with a friend, Adam pushes a canoe with all our gear and I stand a top my new paddle board as we move down river to our over night camping spot.  photo credit:  Joe Nickell I leave my phone in the car. I allow myself the space to not think about anything at all.  I still need to wash towels, and pack away our life jackets and camping things.  The plumbing and wiring is almost complete.  I am waiting on the pho...

I brush a cobweb from my hair and bag up remnants of old insulation bats.  They are damp from a week of rain and no roof.  I pull the trash bag behind me, through the shallow space, under what is left of the original house.  A giant spider scurries up a wooden post.  I pause to watch. Last Picture of the Old House!  After the frantic final boxing up of everything we own, the roof came off and the walls came down (courtesy of Heritage Timber ), and we relocated into 200 square feet (?) of a school bus.  It seems sudden, but years of planning and saving might just be reality. Decon in Process There is no going back now. We are a month and a half into our remodel/rebuild and the walls are going back up.  I dance around the a space that looked good on paper, and feels even better. The walls of the Laundry Room, open space of the dining room, viewed from the kitchen.   I'm wishing I had remembered to put on sunscreen. The t...

Our house looks pretty much like it always has. A drab white exterior, peeling paint on the windows and trim. Over a year of home ownership has passed and we are the only ones that know that things are changing ever so slowly. It is a constant balance of doing those things that need to be done and doing projects that are temporary but increase the immediate functionality of our house . While Adam had in his possession a borrowed sawzall, which he was using to cut through the old steal sewer plumbing under the house, I casually suggested that this might be the perfect time to cut away the wall of our closet. The opening into our bedroom closet was less than twenty inches and those clothes that hung in a neat row in it's confines simply stayed hanging.  It was too much of a pain to retrieve anything. The ceiling panel was a mysterious few inches lower than the rest of the ceiling and I had long decided it all had to go. The wall went, the ceiling panel went, the old layer of f...

A dark ring is left behind in the tub. The bathroom sink is spattered with mud. The kitchen counter is lined with 10 quart jars of peaches, 6 pint jars of cucumber chips, 4 half pint jars of peach jam of fresh out of the oven bread.  Seven jars of dilly beans and 5 pint jars of honeyed bread and butter pickles have already been stashed away on the shelf.  Trays of dehydrated kale and basil are still in the dehydrator needing to be packed away. This isn't exactly how I imagined our Labor Day Weekend. I was hoping for lazing by a river or walking in the woods, but instead I spent most of three days in the kitchen while Adam crawled around in the space below my feet. "You want some coffee?" I shout down at him. "No.  I will just have to come up and pee." A little while later I hear from below me: "Sure, I will take some coffee. I shift a few pots around and put the kettle on. The water is back on after Adam had rerouted all the plumbing to...

At this moment Adam is driving across town with a door strapped to the top of our tiny car. We bought this door at Home ReSource a while ago, but as my house plan has been developing, it turns out that the door handle is on the wrong side and opens out rather than in...  oh. the details. This is the wrong door..  the new door has identical carving except that the holes for the door handle and lock are on the opposite edge.   This door is intended to be our entry door someday.   But while were were digging through the stacks of doors, I found an identical door.  Well, it is almost identical - except for one important feature: It has an opposite swing and is therefore more ideal in the grand scheme of what our house will become. The new door as a few more dings and scratches so we are exchanging it for the door as well as handles and a dead bolt.  Great trade, right? Our stockpile is up to: 9 windows 4 doors (with some hardware pieced together...

"Hugh.  That Heavy!" Sylvan sighs and steps out of my path. He follows me, barely a step behind, from the stack of cinder blocks to the freshly leveled earth underneath the maple tree. "Hugh.  That Heavy!" I grab a second block. "Hugh.  That Heavy!" With each block I lift, he sighs, and walks directly behind me, following my steps. "One More?" "Hugh.  That Heavy." Our house came with piles of stuff - not junk exactly - just stuff: bricks, cinder blocks, landscaping rock, pine boards, steel rods, 5 gallon buckets..... "Hugh.  That Heavy." Adam's birthday is on Friday. I finally thought of a birthday present. Sure, he has a long list of tools he wants/needs, but I don't dare pick those out for him...  not to mention that the tools remaining on his wish list are pricey.  Those purchases can not be clandestine operations. But, he also keeps mentioning that he wishes he had a place to burn his piec...

This week we have awoken to beautiful skies, a bright sun, and a day full of possibilities. It is Spring Break. We are taking a break too.  We are avoiding our usual routine, and all the places filled with crowds of people - well - on their spring breaks.  We are avoiding the YMCA, the Children's Museum, the library.  We are home.  We are outside. We are in the sunshine.   The garlic I planted last fall is greening the brown surface of the garden bed.   Still invisible rows of radish, spinach, and calendula are nestled in between the green.  Today I dug my hoe across the surface of my giant "raised bed".  It really is a filled in foundation of a shed. ( Visible in the old picture I found of our house .)  I am thinking, planning, dreaming and sketching out the succession of plants I hope to grow this year.  I pounded stakes into the ground and strung yarn from post to post, marking a path.   Last y...