The window in the laundry room is no more! It is now a solid wall in what will soon be my laundry room/pantry. Some day it will be covered with narrow shelves holding canned goods. Note the line where the siding stops under the kitchen window. That will be the edge of the french doors:
I have been trying to not think about the remodeling project incessantly. Good idea, huh? Because when I think too much I worry about every possible thing that could go wrong. When I don't think too much, I do things like find myself sitting at the kitchen table looking out the window with my chin on the sill, admiring my new laundry room wall. Then pretty soon I'm all zoned out staring at the oak and listening to the birds and not thinking at all. Which is what I found myself doing about an hour ago.
This is a big deal because I have a very hard time not thinking these days. Ever since I moved to Texas my life has been all about figuring out how to live in Texas, how to be a librarian (sort of), how to live 2,000 miles away from my family, and how to own a house. Now I know how to live in Texas (walk slower in the heat, eat lots of tacos, go swimming in Barton Springs, and take road trips to weird, cool little towns), and sort of know how to be a librarian (I know what words like metadata, MARC, collation, accession, and authority mean, and use them with gusto), and, well, I'll never learn how to live far away from my family, but that's OK. As for the house, I've spent the most time worrying about that, because I've thought every day about how it's being suffocated by its siding, and what other horrible things could be going on under there, and how I'm being suffocated by the dark screens, peeling windows, ugly colors, and lack of doorways that guide one smoothly into the natural world, and how vulnerable I feel without a private back yard that is free of imaginary prowler and offers me a quiet place to read, commune with the butterflies, and watch plants grow.
When I regained consciousness after gazing at my oak for a long while I realized that pretty soon I'll be looking out a big glass door at the tree, or better yet, sitting on the deck underneath it looking up at the sky. I felt very relaxed and lucky.
The irony is that of course the last 2 weeks have been incredibly stressful! Several days I have woken up at 4 am and been unable to get back to sleep. When I get really anxious my throat closes up tight gets scratchy like I'm having an allergic reaction. It has been like that almost constantly since the project started, until finally yesterday I realized that I can't worry about what is happening with the house. The Kiwis know what they are doing, and I have to just let them do it! In the first three days or so I pretty much asked them about every little mini-project I needed to make sure they would do. And I gave them each a copy of a really neurotic list of everything I can possibly imagine they need to remember. So really, at this point, I'm useless except when it comes to moving things out of the way and, well, staying out of the way.
So when, today, I watched the skies open up outside my office window, and started picturing the rain pouring down on my exposed (but Tyvek-covered) walls, and my throat started to close up, I stopped myself and thought, is it really going to do me any good to worry about what the rain will do to the house? No. Everything will be fine. People have sided houses for a long time, and rain has fallen for a long time, and these two things have happened at the same time, many times. And pretty soon, rain or shine, my house will be my home!
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