This weekend I finally got to finish moving back in. If you read this post you will remember that we basically gave Huck our closet, which we were able to do because I was keeping a room at Buphalo’s and all my stuff was there. We were making lemonade out of an otherwise tough situation.

When I came home with all my stuff in March, I had to pack the non-essentials into bins in our loose insulation-filled attic because I no longer had a closet. The house was built in 1924, when people were less clothing-endowed and the closet in our room fits only Morgan’s things.

The plan is that once our living room moves down into the new space, the current living room becomes a bedroom. We made what was once our entry porch into a closet. (It often confuses people who try to leave through what was once our front door.) That closet had been unfinished and holding all kinds of things we didn’t want in our living space. Now it has been insulated, drywalled, painted, and filled with clothes. Nice to be able to access all my fun clothing again, just in time for summer!

Clothes closet!

See the original siding still there? That was the outside of the house but had been enclosed by an entry porch before Morgan moved in.

When I met Morgan he was living in this house. He had at some point obtained an old cedar hot tub from somewhere and patched it up enough to function with a propane heater and a few jets. It leaked a bit and routinely ran out of fuel while we were in it but it was fun to fire it up and it felt great when we did. When Huck was a little baby, it finally started to leak way too much to justify the trouble so we emptied it and it sat there for awhile.

Morgan and Baby Huck in the cedar tub, 2005.

Then Buphalo needed a place to stay while he rebuilt the gutted house he had just bought, so the Hut Tub was born. A little shack built on the deck around and over the old hot tub, with a little pot-bellied stove in the tub and a bed on one side. He lived there for maybe six months? Maybe longer, I don’t know, but it was pretty cute and it did the job.

The Hut Tub had to go for our big project, as there will be an extension built onto the garage for storage. It includes a deck and some stairs going down the side of the house and needed some foundational support that had to be done when we were moving earth and pouring concrete at that level. Here’s one image of the plan:

This shows the existing garage on the left, with the new deck and shed attachment concept. The back door of the house is just off screen to the right, with stairs in between going down to the yard.

We have plans to incorporate a hot tub into that deck someday. In the meantime, Morgan’s body isn’t getting younger, especially since he is single-handedly building this house, and it felt like he might actually need a hot tub to make it to the end of this project. We found a “free” tub on Craigslist a few months ago and Morgan has been fixing it up and replacing parts. We made a temporary pad for it near its future home, and got it up and running this week.

I suppose we can build around it when it comes time. And perhaps Morgan’s body will make it to that stage of the project now!

It’s done! We are insulated, drywalled, painted, and hooked back into our plumbing. That’s still all temporary, which is why it is outside the walls, but the permanent plumbing is tucked into the walls and just waiting for fixtures.

I think Morgan is touching up paint and doing detail work today like putting in the trim around our recessed lighting to finish them. Probably hooking up some light switches and outlets, cleaning up, etc.

The next big push has to wait for a client’s railing to get built, but then it’s time for cabinets!!!!

In the meantime I get to spend the next few days cleaning dust off of everything and getting our kitchen moved back in from the trailer. Then I can clean the trailer. Lots of cleaning, but it’s really nice to be doing it after living with the dust for three weeks.

It’s happening! Drywall is happening! This feels at once amazing and hard- we are so close to a really new and different way of living in our home, and our current situation is less than optimal.

Aside from the considerable dust (think Burning Man in your home), we have had to disconnect the water and sewer from our old bathroom and kitchen fixtures because those lines don’t exist in the future. The new kitchen is downstairs, and the old kitchen becomes a bathroom with a different configuration. Thankfully, the toilet is still functional because it is where it will be– that’s why it has been in our kitchen for a few years. Additionally, the outlets don’t work and the oven and stove have been disconnected.

We have parked our trailer, given to us many years ago for just this purpose (shout out to LoLo and Grover!! You’re the best!), at the end of our driveway and are cooking and cleaning out there, taking showers in the tiny trailer shower.

We have had to pull our storage items into our living spaces because we are drywalling the closets and we gave Huck our closet-bed when I moved out.

It’s just a big crazy mess.

But! On the other side of this mess is a brand new kitchen, all waiting in Morgan’s shop for installation. We bought our paint (thanks to Aly for the guidance) and are ready to go when they are done mudding and taping. We can move our living room down there once the kitchen is built, and start living in our giant room. This is going to be soooooooo great!!

It’s not the end of our project by any means, we still have to build that new bathroom upstairs and the laundry room that goes in the hallway, plus a shed/deck addition to the shop… but moving into the downstairs will be the realization of a big part of this dream. We are really really excited.

Here are some images from the yard, a lush sanctuary from the madness:

This past weekend we managed to get a group of helpers over to move a couple of big heavy things. I will save the hot tub images for when we have it up and running but we moved this big painted steel sculpture* out of the bushes in the lower yard and into a place of prominence right up front. It functions as a visual stop between the public driveway and our “private” patio. Though still very visible, there is at least a sense that you are entering our personal space. And we now have a clear pathway under that plum tree down in the yard!

*originally made for the Bellevue Art Museum outdoor sculpture park when Huck was a baby? Or maybe I was pregnant? It was a long time ago. At any rate, Morgan made it for that exhibition and then it lived outside a bank for a year or so, and then maybe Jordan’s front yard? Then ours. Now here!

When I got home yesterday the house was insulated. Since the insulation is still exposed (we did cellulose and spray foam, with a little batting in the closet) for now, sound just dives into the walls and gets lost. It’s a very weird feeling when one is used to the hyper-echo of stud walls and plywood.

This development means we could turn the radiant heat in in the slab up downstairs without spending a fortune, but now it’s spring and we don’t need to 🤪. Somewhere I have a photo of the balcony in the snow showing exactly where we were uninsulated and losing the heat before. I’ll track it down.

Next up, drywall in a couple of weeks!

I didn’t make a special post about it, but we passed our electrical inspection a few weeks ago, yay! Then we got hung up on our structural inspection because we had changed something on the fly with our architect and structural engineer but not officially with our permits. Oops! It has taken several weeks to track down our engineer again and things are moving in the right direction, with insulation scheduled for April 4. Hopefully everything goes as planned.

In the meantime, we had our buddy Pat come over to put a finish layer of gravel on our new driveway and a long-term temporary layer on our new patio. We will eventually finish with pavers, but for the foreseeable future this gravel will do.

To prep for that we did a little spring cleaning.

And oh yeah, by the way, our missing cat was found and Morgan and I moved full time back into the house together. Again, yay!

Looking forward to even more substantial growth and change around here as we move into the light of long days and lovely evenings in our new outdoor living space.

Morgan holds the plumbing test plug known as the “donkey dick”

Oh hey! We passed our rough plumbing inspection last week! This is huge!

Morgan spent a whole bunch of time jumping through bureaucratic hoops to get our building permits renewed and today they approved our electrical permit (again). It’s a tedious story involving a new building permit website, spreadsheets, and multiple phone calls looping in circles, but now we can call for our rough electrical inspection.

If we pass that, insulation is next!!! Considering the snow we got this morning, insulation would be very welcome. We have not been truly heating the uninsulated space because we can’t afford to do that, so it’s about 50 degrees down there. Not for long!

Despite a *rocky end, we did have a pretty amazing year. We went on two exotic vacations, first to Hawaii to visit Chris and Carol, then to Mexico to celebrate the wedding of Dan and Aly. We spent some good times at Ben’s cabin, though this will be our last year there, as he has now sold it to some other lucky soul.

Huck turned 14, achieved his Brown Belt in Kung Fu and started high school at Summit Sierra, a charter school in the International District. He is no longer our boy but our young man, weathering the recent stresses of our relationship with grace, emotional intelligence, and a report card that is the best one he has ever received- all A’s and one B+. His current obsession with the WW1 German military (pre-Nazi, folks, important to remember) has him teaching himself the German language in addition to the Spanish he has to learn at school. He is snowboarding with Morgan as I write this, having apparently reached a new level of skill and ease on the slopes. All of this makes up for the absolutely typical teenage attitude we get treated to with regularity, monosyllabic responses and all.

Though I have not posted about house progress recently, progress is being made. Morgan has been working on wiring, installing light fixtures and switches, and as of December 30th, doorbells for front and back doors! “Ringing in the new year”, get it?

*Last year Morgan and I took a series of classes with Sarah MacLean Bicknell, four workshops, one for each of the cardinal directions, as a way of walking the path of intention. The best way I can describe it is to say that sometimes our linear thinking gets in the way of actual growth and progress, and that these workshops were an opportunity to drop into a deeper sense of self in relationship to the soul’s journey. For me it was a way to develop larger listening skills, get out of my own way, become more present so I can do what I am here to do and not just bide my life-time. I don’t know what specifically Morgan was hoping to get from it, but what we both got was movement in places that were terribly stuck, and when the pressure from those stuck places released, chaos ensued. Chaos is a place of huge learning– difficult, exhausting, ultimately rewarding if you can receive the learning and integrate it. At present the chaos has subsided and now we work to integrate, to cultivate “beginners mind”, to move where movement is needed, all with a deep and abiding love and appreciation for the humanity of the other.

As we say goodbye to 2018, I am filled with gratitude. I am grateful for the love and support of friends and family, for heat in our home and a flushing toilet, for meaningful work, clean water, healthy food, for an unlimited capacity to grow and learn. I look forward to whatever the new year will bring with an eye to staying adaptable and resilient, to connecting with people I love, and a sincere hope for some positive change for the planet. Love to you all!