It’s been several weeks of cleaning, sorting, moving, purging, purchasing, and figuring out what goes where, but we are honing in on the next intermediate resting space of our construction process. We are using our big new downstairs room as our communal living area, at long last!

The weirdness of all the new movement patterns is starting to wear off and we are finding our grooves.

I love our new kitchen, which includes the first dishwasher any of us has ever lived with in our lives.

Nibble loves the new downstairs. Morgan in his “office”.

Morgan has an office for the first time that isn’t just his computer on the metal shop table or our dining room table; it includes places for the printer and the office supplies that otherwise were just stuffed into cupboards where we could find space.

We have brought the sewing machine and serger out of the attic and made a cabinet for the creative projects we used to get into before the house took all of that energy. We will begin to get crafty again as inspiration hits and time permits.

Our design includes some passive solar gain, so on these cold fall days when the sun comes in to hit our big concrete slab it warms up and then releases heat throughout the night. With our new insulation this means that despite literally freezing temperatures outside we have not yet had to turn on the heat and we are warm and cozy.

We have a lot more to do to finish the project and close out the permit, I will save that list for another post. There are just a couple of things down here that need doing to feel like we can settle in for awhile- we need curtains before the leaves drop so we don’t become a fishbowl for the neighborhood, and a bar counter on our peninsula would be pretty cool.

In the meantime we will start getting art up on the walls and have already begun enjoying all of our new space. It feels great!