house # 3 – detecting a pattern

Finally! Finally, we had a day to just dedicate to making this house nicer, prettier, more comfortable, warmer, less mouse-filled and just generally homier.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about what seems to be a bit of a theme in our lives. Hardware stores. More specifically, visiting hardware stores every couple days for months, while making a home. If you’ve been following along here since last summer, you’ve probably picked up on this pattern a bit as well.

12 months ago, we were happily tucked away in our Beloit apartment. We were there for three years and made it into a great space. Nearly every single piece of furniture, we built ourselves, right there, with 40-90 year-old tools and salvaged lumber. We had so much fun making that space personal and filling it with plants, photos, art and a 1000 pounds of kitchen utensils and ingredients. Just a few months later, 36 hours after deciding to buy our boat, we packed up every last bit of that apartment into a u-haul trailer and moved our whole lives. The following 3 months were spent visiting hardware stores and making our small floating apartment into beautiful and comfortable home. We lived in Surkha for a total of 6 months, before hopping on a plane for a “short trip” to Ecuador. Then, surprise! we decided to stay for a year or two and guess what? We needed somewhere to stay.

Now, 3 months after beginning to rehab “the worst living space in the Hacienda” and dozens of trips to the hardware store later, here we are making more fun plant-holders, scrap-wood knife racks and shelves from salvaged crates. It’s all so so similar to the boat and Beloit.. – something that is both strange and very comforting.

So, long story short. We built a ton of stuff today. We created a huge “pantry” from flimsy wooden fruit crates and old flooring, a beautiful plant holder from hose-clamps, salsa jars and some wooden siding from a ancient shepard’s shack, a bar for hanging pots and pans made from a steel gate tubes and bent re-bar, a door-”plug” to keep the mice from entering under our front door, a scrap-wood knife rack for the three sets of knifes that family lent or gifted us and lastly a fantastic “bread station” with storage for my baskets, clothes, peel, razor, etc. (thanks beautiful!). We also cleaned every corner of the house, made another batch of yogurt and organized all our foodstuffs in the new pantry.

Now I am sitting in perfectly organized living room, listening to more French-cafe music, with incredible smells of a huge curry dish in from the kitchen where Caye is perfecting her art of phenomenal curry-making. We are both feeling great, accomplished and a bit more relaxed, with so much less left undone in our living space.