We don’t post much when there isn’t tangible physical progress being made. We are STILL waiting for the webbing pieces to arrive for our ICF’s, and so the work happening around here is on the phone, in the planning, the figuring, the nail-biting about how QUICKLY time is passing, and how SLOWLY the project moves.

We have had a request for a description of how it is to be living like this, so a little emotional/descriptive post for you all today:

Yes, we are still up in the air. Yes, that is costing us $50/day. The whole house rocks when someone as much as turns over in bed. The crazy narrow plank we have to walk to get in and out of our house is bouncy and feels like it should only ever have one person on it at a time. We are super over the romance of the Honey Bucket. Winter is coming.

Morgan is feeling the pressure of the coming change in the weather. We have had an unusually long and warm summer here, for which we are grateful, but the nights are cooling off and the rains will come again. For now, traipsing down the bouncy ramp at 3am to the Honey Bucket is… fine. It will continue to be fine, but less and less comfortable as the weather cools and the moisture falls. The handrails are there to give us balance, but won’t really save us if we slip. That’s a thing.

Another thing is that while we have water coming in to the house, we have to catch the water under the kitchen sink and shower in giant bins and then use a sump pump and a hose to move it to the sewer. Every day. I have washed my hair a lot less this summer because at the end of the day I just don’t want to go down under the house and fool around with the pump to get that extra room in the bucket. We were taking “navy showers” for a while, but now are luxuriating in the constant flow, as long as the showers are short and sweet.

Right now I have a series of extremely unstable ramps I have to navigate in order to get to our laundry machines, which are out in the weather back by the shop. There are concrete forms surrounding them, so a lot of up and down and projectiles in between me and clean clothes. That will change after the concrete gets poured, and I’m pretty stoked that I still have my own machines and haven’t had to hit the laundromat yet.

Last week, Morgan and I talked about the very real possibility that we will have to live somewhere else for a time this winter. We have a cute little 18′ trailer for just this purpose, which is one solution. We have a friend who has offered her spare room in her big house, and another whose mother has an apartment that sits unused during the winter… we have options. I think Morgan feels very guilty that we might be inconvenienced, but I reminded him that I signed up for this process with full knowledge of the impending discomfort, and that I actually lived in a house with no heat for 8 years in my 20’s. It’s temporary, and will be worth it, but I get why he’s anxious.

Someone asked him last weekend how he was doing, how he was feeling about the project. He said, “The first word that comes up is ‘humility’,” which is about right. This is an enormous project. Everyone always says remodeling will take longer and cost more than you hope or think, and that is true, and the truth is humbling, even if you had that in mind going in.

Huck has been totally fine with all of this. Of course he hates the Honey Bucket, but really, who doesn’t? He doesn’t understand why we would want to do this to our perfectly functional house, but he also doesn’t seem to be phased by the crazy disruptions of a house under construction. He did bail out to Grandma’s a couple of times this summer when there was no power in his room or the like, but again, who can blame him?

I should add, in case you didn’t know, that in the middle of this I have also had to move my office for the first time in 21 years. That challenge was distinctly unwelcome, but I have moved and I have survived, and all is well. My resilience and adaptability muscles are growing strong! We are all gaining strength in this way, which is good, it really is.