Showing My Baby Part II

It’s cool! It’s working. 

I’ve created the “place” and ways to have privacy and also happily rub shoulders when they want. TJ keeps standing in front of the chimney and new upper cabinet, saying, “ This is just what it should look like. I keep forgetting it hasn’t always been here.” 

As we show the place to potential housemates,they smile as they walk through the house. Some have actually expressed that they can feel how I’m aware of their needs. (And our own, too actually, but they don’t know see that as much.) Places are “sweet,"  and special to them- like the little laundry room. And the upper deck that they can sit in even when it rains. “Oooh, can I do a veggie garden in pots up here?!” she asks. “Yes, it’s wonderfully sunny and veggies will love it up here.” I reply. 

They’re putting themselves into it.

The laundry room has an ironing board and folding area, and we hung a clothes rack right over the heating vent for "air drying." 

My Choices

Our baby’s on the market.

and not at all surprisingly, all my initial fears that she won’t be good enough have resurfaced. 

My ideas, my reworks. 

Will I succeed in attracting the people who share my attitudes? 

Is it the right story?  

I’ve toured the rooms,  and while my head knows they’re looking at it from their needs, I’m feeling emotional about it.

Do they see us?

Where IS that Tape Measure?

During that first big weekend of phase1, I had created all the work areas in the house. I  hired two grunts ( thanks Matt and Joe) to move all the furniture pieces against the walls in the big space in the back. We emptied contents and they moved the pieces where I directed. With their strappin' young muscles, it was done in 40 minutes.

That left the center of the great room as “staging” for all work. It was hard to make snap decisions about where to stack every little thing I needed to temporarily move, but in the end, the house felt mostly organized. Every choice had a reason, and the work areas for all of phase I felt prepared and set-up.

But now, tools have crept back into almost every room…like dust bunnies. They just rolled into corners and on top of fridges. And as they moved, my sense of temporary order melted with it. Now clutter, even important clutter feels everywhere, but I don’t know where that is…and I spend too much energy trying to find things.  Being in the middle of the project managing and running around keeping the schedule tight so those rooms are ready for mid- January, means I can’t take another day to re-organize. Besides, the octopusian reach of my general contractor means it will happen again, as terrific as he is.

Uuugh!!!!! I’ve just got to fold that “finding task” into my job description. It’s wearying. 

If you can, no matter if you're doing the work or hiring it: Be a containment nazi about where things are. Restrict places for  tools- have someone- you , or a work person - grab stuff at lunchtime and again at day’s end and put them back where YOU want it to be. My work team swept and left the place totally clean each day, but they didn’t re-center their tools. Part of it was because they offered us their tools for our tasks- hanging pictures for example goes much faster with a cordless drill. But part of it was that their level of happy meant their tools only needed to be  mostly organized in heaps, somewhere. Just be aware that you can ask for the level or organization you need, if you’re living there while they work.

I am the Perfect Crash Test Dummy - Part 2

To be as accurate as possible, I realized I needed to include the other side of how I experience sharing life and space with other people.

 I do need my own space, literally and figuratively. But when being around other people is a choice, rather than a requirement, I can enjoy it. I grew up with five brothers and sisters, and sometimes I miss the feeling of a house overflowing with people and activity and conversations. When a musical band I’m in is clicking, it doubles or triples the excitement of performing over playing by myself. When I was a writer and living in Seattle—and they had finally invented laptops—I often would take my computer to a coffee house and write. I enjoy the feeling of having life flowing around me, without having to interact unless I choose.

I can also enjoy what Loni and I call having people “flow through” our space. When I lived in Moenkopi, we had a constant stream of people coming to stay with us at the mission. It was part of our role as a voluntary service unit to host the people from all over the world who were using the “Mennonite Your Way” network to travel across the country cheaply and, in our case, see the Hopi and the Grand Canyon.

Back before the Internet, we never exactly knew who would turn up next, or when. And often as not, they weren’t people with whom I would have chosen to spend time. But there were enough people who were interesting, or who asked in-depth questions about our work in the village or the Hopi, to make having new arrivals be something like opening an unknown present at Christmas. I became good friends with several of our return visitors as we got past surface impressions and got to share and know each others’ lives.

It seems for me it’s a combination of having the right to choose whether to share time/space with people, and who the people are. I know that no one usually has a pure choice about this; I’ve spent lots of time being polite with travelers and others because it would be rude to just leave. But being at home should mean being relaxed and more yourself, so for me to feel ‘at home’ around others means I have some level of choice about sharing.

I don’t yet see how all this can happen in our 1908 Victorian. Having seen Loni’s gift for space planning, and her sensitivity to what people need, I believe that if anyone can figure it out, she will.

But this is my life and our lives and our home, and I’ll have to live with this however it turns out. So sometimes this project does really feel like being a crash test dummy…

Hinting at Story, Hinting at Period

Since I do not have hundreds of thousands for a total remodel and repair of this old house, there's just no point attempting to make this disjointed house tell a consistent, lovely story. Plus, I do want to experience the discipline of not having a "design budget." This is the reality of most budgets. So what to do?

Even as the story translates to juicy design elements throughout the house, I’m cutting it back. ... and cutting it back even more. Erasing most: I am NOT doing the picture railing throughout the public areas. I’m not repainting the existing trim that wonderful green, nor the walls the rich champagne. It's money and time I don't need to use up. It hurts- some, since the designer me can see how elegant it would look! No, instead, I'm understanding that I need just need a few hints.

To satisfy my design urge, I'm putting up beadboard to 76"  in two places: The hideous little hallway entrance to the kitchen - our S curve that you saw in my November 28 post, "Searching for an Affordable Honest Man", and the small hallway leading to the half bath. Ultimately the bathroom will get the new palette and beadboard as well. That palette will be bright white on the beadboard, champagne accent and on the high bit of wall remaining above the wainscoting, this wonderful dark heritage blue I found. That way the S-Curve will hint at Country when people enter, and also be brighter and way nicer. The palette reappears in the bathroom hallway as another hint of period and then may become my palette when I finish the master bathroom in the former laundry room. I'd love to have a beadboard and rich blue bathroom!

Another trick I may want to do - since the pretty green I was going to do as the common area trim is not happening now, is bring the white, the blue AND a more mellow green into the kitchen in "Florida Cracker" style, which really speaks to me and about me:

architect, Jim Strickland of Historical Concepts

The cabinets will be white generally, but there will be "surprises" of green and accents of the same dark blue in strategic places. 

Hmmm what color the island?!

I am the perfect Crash Test Dummy, Part 1

I’m TJ. And while I happen to be Loni’s partner in life, it turns out I’m also the perfect crash test dummy for this project. So I’ll be sharing my experiences as an active passenger, as we go from plans to remodeling to adding housemates.

I started calling myself the crash test dummy when we first were seriously considering this project. Why?

Because, compared to most other people I’ve known, I have a very high need for physical and personal privacy. Due in part to how I grew up—large family, no private spaces, no respect for boundaries, my father’s profession requiring me to be a public person and under social scrutiny all the time. And in part due to my nature—I’m an introvert in most circumstances, and an empath who more often feels drained rather than energized being around other people. And I’m also a musician with sensitive hearing whose sleep is disturbed by noises.

My de facto solution has been to have as much private physical space around me as possible. Whenever possible as an adult, I’ve had a bedroom to myself as a creative studio and personal lair. When there was no bedroom available, I improvised: to escape living in a triple dorm room in college I moved myself down into the furnace room of the off-campus house. When I lived in the Hopi village of Lower Moenkopi, Arizona, I moved into the unheated upper floor of a stone barn to have space to myself. We were only eighty miles from the Grand Canyon, so at night it was colder than Hades. And I’m not joking. But it was a respite from the constant social flow in the main building of the old Mennonite mission.

(You could also say that by moving onto the reservation, and down inside a desert wash, I was trying to put as much private physical space around me as possible. Once you left the lower village, if you didn’t go up to Tuba City, you could drive your car or ride your horse for hours and not see buildings or other people. When my Hopi friend Lyle was still alive, he would sometimes loan me a horse, and I would ride all day by myself, soaking up the solitude and feeling my way through the seemingly endless desert .)

So, our thinking goes that if Loni, with input from me, can do space planning that adds two or three new people to our existing house AND gives me enough experience of privacy to be comfortable-- well, you’ve got some good crash test results.

Anniversary Meditation

December 15th is a Saturday this year.

The harvest table stands waiting for me face down on the tarp. It' a quiet winter day.

It would've been my 33rd anniversary had my husband lived.

TJ and I drag the tarp and table into the light in the center of the room, we gather brushes, paint, and rags. Then together we tape newspaper around the finished tabletop.

Kneeling low and focusing on small tasks feels just right today.

When I mix up the first batch of milk paint, I expect it to smell pretty acrid, having lye. But instead, the smell is earthy and organic. Dash is fascinated. Having researched the how-to aspects of this project, I recall someone saying the paint smelled like a country barn... like cut grass and healthy animals. I understand. It smells alive.

We each take a leg diagonally opposite - TJ and I, that is - and begin to brush on the paint. It is thin, but easy to work with, and even though we did no prep to the raw wood, it rolls on smoothly. TJ and I work in parallel for a while, until he heads to the kitchen to make dinner.

I am alone.

I like pushing the brush along an area of wood and watching the raw wood disappear under my hand. I hope the terribly bright green dries darker. There's no battle with drips, no streakiness. So there's no hassle. It just covers more, and then more wood. Stroking on the bit-too-bright color satisfies.

The task moves forward in quiet. I sink into the rhythm of that progression. Still on my knees. Still aware that ten days ahead is another anniversary...the 18th since his accident, and his death.

Coat one dries quickly and I return to my starting point. Yet this time when I return, as then, it is different. The color looks yet richer. I appreciate the small steps I take to move the job forward, even as I remember other years.

The next day, Sunday, I apply the wax stain to the legs. My brightly painted legs are transformed into antiqued, dark green appendages that speak of an earlier time.


Together the table, and I, are fresh today but with remembrances of a past.

Prospect & Privacy

It’s intriguing to think I can use the qualities of light to offer refuge to others here as well as ourselves.

How much will different light, especially natural light, make for separate space? 

I like the notion that I can use it to create  a sense of separateness to anyone we  invite in be it a weekend, or a few months, or maybe a more permanent sharing.

Phototropic

I’m like a houseplant turning toward the light. 

Light alerts me, and brings me around. After 18 years in the Pacific Northwest, where darkness falls before 4 during the winter, it’s no wonder. I hunger for brightness in my eyes every three days throughout the year or so down here. It’s sunlight I crave, not the heat.

At night however it becomes a problem. I don’t know if it’s my very pale eyes, but since I’ve been eleven, I’ve had to shut out light in order to sleep. Never mind the chapter about the Nazgul Blackriders sniffing out Frodo I’d just read. It had to be scary dark for me to fall asleep.

So it just so happens that we have Skytubes in our family-room turned bedroom. The lenses that cover these 16" circles on our ceiling make the light sparkle. When it was a family room, it was wonderful! But now as our “lair,” uhm, no. 

So we’ve covered them with upturned large flower pots on the roof which happens to be flat. Now that we’ve moved the bed down to one end, and we’re giving TJ the other side of the bookshelf/divider for his studio, we uncovered the one immediately over his studio area behind our high headboard. 

My intention was to make dark fabric covers to Velcro on or off from the inside (We won’t have easy roof access when we rent out the master suite upstairs.), but I haven’t gotten to it yet. So we’ve been sleeping and letting the morning light intrude.

I’m surprised. 

When I don’t have to rise to an alarm clock, the growing light seeps gently around the 6-foot high bookshelf/headboard while I sleep. Like Vermeer paintings, it feels soft and humble. It has been lovely to wake up to, and it doesn’t intrude before I’m ready. That one Skytube can be quite bright when I get out of bed and tussle with the puppy to say good morning. 

Light gives us such a strong sense of place,…and also a “separation from.” Think of a pool of light over a table in an otherwise darkened room.My friends and I used to frequent the Cork & Board, a wine and cheese place near my University back when. We had to let our eyes adjust to the low light for the first few seconds after we stepped through the entry door, but could already hear quite a bit of chatter, laughter and wine glasses tinkling at the tables. The large wooden tables were big enough for game boards and food, and closely spaced. But once my friends and I were seated under the hanging lamp that spilled light over our own table, the joyous noise of people around us fell away, and felt ..away.

Or have you’ve ever stood inside thick adobe, rammed earth or strawbale walled homes? The light coming through the deep windows framed by the thick walls has a removed quality. Rather than streaming into a hot spot on the floor like most modern homes, it hits the deep broad sill  and frame and bounces softly, spraying indirect light into the room. The pathos plant in me likes the feeling.

What I believe I’m experiencing now in the mornings is also like that. Light beyond or behind adds to one’s sense of refuge, making it feel a protected place to sleep. Nice.

I found our table

...well, actually, I made our harvest table! It comes next Wednesday. And it really feels like mine.

I picked the table top and the legs - well TJ had a say and more than agreed to what I wanted. It's a 7-foot long wooden door from an old factory made of Siberian pine, with an unknown history in a few repaired patches. You just want to run your hands over the dark stained boards. To make it into a true harvest table top, they encase the door with perpendicular "breadboard ends."

I read somewhere that Siberian Pine wood has excellent resonance qualities and is used to make pianos, harps and guitars. Fits our family!

I told the store, which happened to be closing for good the next weekend, where I wanted the legs placed so we had the right amount of overhang (to look like our vision of a harvest table ), and still offer enough leg room at the ends. We pulled 3 ladder-back chairs up to another similar sized table and slid three chairs between the leg placement we measured. They will easily slide underneath. Eight people would fit around our table comfortably.

A silverware drawer in the skirt would've been just perfect, but we are getting a custom assembled table to my specifications using the inventory still left. At less than half price, I can't really complain. In fact, it feels very much like the best part of when I redesigned old broken homes: I used the essential good bones that were there, but made it into something fresh and wonderful.

We paid, set a delivery date and headed back to our car in the heavy rain, excitedly talking about our table. Just as he started the engine, I told TJ to wait, and ran back to the store. "Don't finish the legs or skirt," I told them. " I'll do that." I'd seen many wonderful, distressed milk paint tables while doing my farm table research. 

I don't need another task in all this project planning,shopping and designing, and I have no idea what I'm getting myself into figuring out how to use lye-based milk paint. But now that I've had a direct hand in creating this focal point to our new way of living, I just need this table to be really ours. I want my hand in the table's history too.