Little House on the Fairy Hill

The (Not So) Little House on the Fairy Hill

November rolled in with it’s typical chill, but it has been a relatively mild fall here at Sithean. We are still getting a few raspberries on the canes, but otherwise the garden – not that there was much this year – is done.

And so is our construction, 14 months after breaking ground, years and years after we started planning.

It’s not really done, because it’s been challenging in a lot of ways, but a week ago when the electrician left for the final time, we could finally bring it to closure, and the things we need to do around the house other than finish unpacking and setting up around the house are all things that can sit until next spring. The 225 days without a kitchen? Done. The people in our house all the time? Done. The debates and arguments with the builder? Done. The beautiful peaceful spaces? Done.

Despite the challenges, we’re so profoundly blessed. Our home is gorgeous, and every bit of it was hand-selected by us, which is a gift we still pinch ourselves about.

In 14 months, we went from 1972 square feet of chopped up, uninsulated living space to 3443, with storage, closets, and extra bathrooms – from 2 to 4.5. We have new windows in most of the spaces, we have walk in closets instead of tiny little 20” x 4’ spaces, we have a gorgeous soapstone wood stove that can heat the better part of the bottom floor, and a brand new kitchen that opens up into a family room and dining area with glass slider doors covering about 16’ of the back. I have an office. We have a little in-law suite that is currently my daughter’s bedroom. And we have an amazing MC Escher-esque double staircase with handcrafted gooseneck banisters.

And a master bedroom suite with ceilings that go to the roof. We added ceiling fans to multiple spaces, including the porch, which now wraps around. We repaired the falling apart driveway. And we replaced our old oil heating furnace and failing hot water heaters with a new heating and cooling system run on propane, which apparently went live just in time for us to go to war in the middle east

The builder was difficult – he went broke, and everything became a fight. He wouldn’t admit he was out of money, so he gaslighted us and called us difficult. He stripped things from scope without telling us. He lied to us regularly. What was supposed to be a dream experience at points became a true nightmare, like when he stopped paying the HVAC team in the middle of winter and they stopped installing for us. Did I mention we were still living in the house?

And so much that we thought was core to our plans never happened. Water abatement in the basement, a core component of our infrastructure upgrades – nope. We have a sump pump, but we need french drains. Later. No landscaping. We still find small things that are not what they should be. Our attic windows were de-scoped. So many things, and still, we kept paying them for things because even worse than what was happening was if work would have stopped mid-construction, and we were stuck with an unfinished house and most of the money gone.

We finally settled with them, with us giving up some things, and them coming down on the final payment, and they have come through on the last remediation items.

They left us a lot to do and because of endless cost overruns and a $50k new septic, not a lot of means to do it with, but they also left us beauty. And more came over time. Slowly we cleaned up and organized. Grass grew back and the grounds of our property looked less wounded.

So the good, the bad, and the outcome of living in your house while someone takes the back off of it, replaces almost all the infrastructure and that organization goes broke in the meantime?

Let’s start with the bad. The first couple months were disruptive and crazy, but okay. The builder demoed our kitchen way before they had to, which was an early warning that things were a mess, and we could never reconcile versions of the scope document no matter how hard we tried, but at that point we were $256,000.00 in, locked into a construction loan for much of the remainder, which only pays out when milestones are finished, and with a giant hole dug where the addition foundation was to be.

We didn’t have another round of funds to start over, so we were in for a penny, in for a pound. Somehow, we had to keep going.

Then the town we live in did a major 180 degree turn on us in September, just as we were about to break ground and told us we needed to put in a new septic, something they had been telling us all along we probably didn’t have to do. That was a $50k surprise that used up a lot of our budget overrun dollars.

And there were normal construction things, and some not so normal, like finding a water main running through our property just where the foundation was going. And then the foundation needed to go higher than they planned (because, as you will see, the planning was crap) that was a $14500 all in set of changes. Built ins? Trim? Patio and retaining wall for the back? Bye.

But around late November, things started to get really messy.

Many of the subcontractors were really great. Our framer was honest and honorable. So were most of the people on the ground were lovely, a few of them coming back to finish even though they hadn’t been paid because they didn’t want their good names blemished by unfinished work.

Some were far less honorable.

We spent 12 weeks this winter pouring diesel into a barrel to heat the front of the house because the builder hadn’t paid the HVAC team, and the HVAC company decided, instead of trying to do something, anything so we were warm and safe, held us hostage for it. Of course, we didn’t know that until long after the fact, so while we did move out for a couple weeks, we would have moved out longer. If you live on the North Shore of Massachusetts and you want the name of the company to avoid here, please do ping me, because they deserve never to have another customer.

That story ends with them trying to extort $7k from us to finish the HVAC in a historic heatwave. Are they maybe good people who made bad choices to try to prove a point? Possibly, but they harmed my family and they would likely do the same to you. So that one – happy to share so that they never do harm to others.

The builder lied, a lot. They removed scope, like the fragile old attic windows and bathroom windows. They shrank scope, swapping out our back door sliders for an inferior version, probably because they couldn’t afford to pay for them.

I should add that we kept paying, and sometimes over our milestone just to keep the work going. At the point we figured out that these weren’t just normal construction delays and something was really, really wrong, we were in so deep, with a frame and bare wood walls that we were afraid to stop.

Now some good.

Somehow, miraculously the work finished. Now, is it all done? No, no, and some of the rework means we have touchups and finish that should never have been on us to do.

But do we live in a house that I generally love and we can finish over time? I do. It’s gorgeous, spacious, and delightful

Each component of this house is for the most part – that other part being when the builder changed scope on us without communicating – our design. We have a gorgeous soapstone wood stove in our great room/family room/dining room that can heat a chunk of the downstairs. This winter we spent $465 on a fully delivered full cord of seasoned firewood that should last us, and we can keep the fire burning all day. We still have the other small wood stove that heats the old living room as well.

That HVAC system heats and cools us, and runs on propane, which is currently about $2.99/gallon rather than on home heating oil, which is what much of the northeast US uses. With oil prices where they are, and unlikely to come down for a while, this is a huge blessing right now. I worry for folks this winter, a lot.

I have an absolutely beautiful home. The kitchen, with the long island that can seat 6 or 7 people, is literally a joy to behold, the beautiful french stove that I bought years ago and stored in anticipation of this renovation works wonderfully, and our bathrooms are, other than the one we used during construction, completely renovated or brand new altogether.

Our family is no longer crammed into small, nonworking spaces. We have full-sized closets, enough bathrooms for everyone and then some, and our space is built for our evolving family. The little in-law suite that is my daughter’s room can house family if needed or be held for children who need to move home in the long haul. We’ll have a guest room upstairs for similar purposes, and I finally, finally have an office of my own.

And we have prepared to age in place. Our laundry is on the first floor, up from the steep stairs of the basement. Our new porch steps have hand rails. For the new part of the first floor, there are no thresholds in the event one of us needs a walker or a cane. There’s the ability to add a ramp.

And then there’s just the beautiful stuff. The handcrafted mosaic that sits behind my stove from Etsy, and was so reasonably priced it’s almost stunning. The downstairs powder/laundry room is a work of art, with beautiful molding and wallpaper. We wanted the bathrooms to mostly look, in our 1850-built home, like they were added in the 1920s or 30s, when indoor plumbing became more common, and I think we were successful. The mudroom fits my grandmother’s breakfront perfectly, as if it was made for it.

And the house looks like it was always this way, which is perhaps the greatest achievement. When I first moved here, that first winter, I sat at my kitchen table and watched snow fall out the window, and daydreamed about a 4-season room that opened to the back yard filled with light and glass, and it’s here. Did the builder cut corners by not giving me the double-double sliders we picked out? Yes, and they lied about it, which was worse.

But is it still amazing? It is.

It’s taken us a while not to feel tightness between our shoulders when we think of our construction. I’m still working on it. Being lied to, misled and gaslighted for a year by someone we were completely dependent on to finish was probably one of the most stressful experiences we ever had. And the sheer volume of things they didn’t do that they should have is really overwhelming when I look at it directly so I try not to very often.

It’s very much like a wound that’s healing but still hurts if you poke at it. And then there is the things that are not the builder’s fault, but happened at the same time, like the massive tax bill we’re still dealing with, and a surprise $14k in medical expenses. There was a point in time, when these things started rolling in and the builder had managed to jack up our electric bill in a single month to almost $1000, that I just wanted to crawl into bed and come out when it was finished.

But of course I couldn’t, because I had to be up, showered, dressed and ready to greet people walking through my home by 7 am every day including some Saturdays for a year solid.

Still it’s amazing to have an insulated home as we go into hotter summers and weirder winters with climate change hitting us from all angles. And to have space, even a basic thing like a linen closet.

There’s so much more I could say about the good and the bad, but as I sit here at my kitchen island on a quiet Sunday morning looking out at the fallen leaves covering the back yard, I don’t want to think about construction any more.

Every weekend we tidy and set up a few more things. We have little time during the week between kid activities and my daughter’s college application process, and on the weekends there’s errands and house work. But every week we try to make some progress – hang a picture, unpack a box, tidy a corner, decide the permanent, for-as-long-as-we’re-here home for things.

And of course there’s the food. It was a chilly-ish day last Sunday, so we lit a fire in the woodstove this morning and it’s been going all day. We made a pumpkin soup at my daughter’s request and let me just say that this needs no improvement from it’s origins in 1615 France. To go with it, we made Rhubarb and Lavender’s Robber Steak kebabs with Paprika and Garlic Cream, which was just so good. And we threw some asparagus with tossed with olive oil and everything bagel seasoning in the oven, and my husband made croutons.

Our pantry and freezers are full. We made some Harvest Moon Kale Ceasar Salad from the other night, which is a keeper of a salad, and I think gets better after a couple of days. To go with it we had chicken soup with rice, which truly is yummy once and yummy twice, as Maurice Sendak indicated.

This week we have all the things for Chicken Parmesan, and we’re making soups almost every night. Friday our winter share started up, and we still have gobs of bulk veggies my sister sent from upstate NY. I’ve been watching and rewatching Budget Eats videos as well, because I really enjoy June Xie’s creative cooking.

Mostly it’s just wonderful to have our space, and to finally be able to unpack and move into it. I’m grateful for it, that we’re through it, and I’m delighted to plan our holidays and the garden next year.

More will come, but for now it’s nice to see you here again at my not-so-little-house.

Reimagining Sithean – Clean Spots

Reimagining Sithean: Clean Spots

When I’m tidying in the house, I’m not above going around proudly announcing that I’ve made a clean spot. It’s not that our house isn’t clean – it generally is, or was, prior to the endless dustathon that is renovating – but we’ve been so smushed into our space for so long that the clutter has become ubiquitous.

Similarly, our land was covered in snow for so long I almost forgot what it looks like. The house has been under construction for nearly half a year, and with that people walking through our home from the wee hours of the morning. What it’s like not to have noise and sawdust and construction materials everywhere. We’re coming to the end of the interior work in a little over a month, and it can’t come soon enough.

Every day it’s something here, and then the weekends we try to clean and make the house liveable for a couple of days so that we get some respite before doing it all over again.

It’s been over 170 days with a temporary kitchen, minus the delightful 10 days we spent in a rental up the road while insulation was being blown in. We’ve lived through a freezing cold home addition due to the heating system swap taking 4x the time estimated, endless dirt and dust, spiking utility bills, unexpected expenses and some pretty big disagreements with our builder.

While we like many of the folks that come with our homebuilding project, it can’t be over too soon. And we’ve had some challenges with the General Contractor management – they do good work, but they aren’t the easiest to work with, and they have changed scope without telling us. Their subcontractors and our foreman are great, and thankfully we don’t see the others every day.

I am startled every day by the kindness and thoughtfulness of these people. They clearly worry for us, want the best for us, and we trust them implicitly. If Alan and Dana, our plumbers recommend a thing, or Brandon & Larry, our electricians, we do it. Because we know that they are exactly right.

Conversely, I am also repeatedly shocked by the unchecked misogyny that I experience, mostly in the higher ups. I call it out because it’s almost…new to me? I work in a male-dominated industry, but also one with lots of HR training. Talking to the trades, it’s clear what happens when that stuff doesn’t exist. Being me, I call it out, call it what it is, and call for it to stop. But it’s also exhausting. It’s literally in my house, and I can’t escape it.

Thankfully not for much longer.

The house is warmer, but still chaos now that the finish work has begun.

The interior walls are finished and painting is underway, the windows are in and siding has begun, and tiling has started.

Our kitchen may be once again delayed due to challenges with the cabinet maker.

So here’s the thing. We’re profoundly grateful we were able to turn our home into a space we can age in, welcome guests to, that holds our dream kitchen and a zillion hand-chosen touches, and are hopeful it will stand another 176 years.

But would we do this again? No, no we wouldn’t.

Are we going to be glad we did in the end, after everyone is gone? Yes.

The reality is that the house will be about 80% finished, and it’s going to be a lot of our hard work to get it the rest of the way on a very tight budget for a while. Still, we see the path forward, and it’s a worthwhile gamble.

We’ve learned a lot. We are older, wiser and definitely broke-er than when we started, but we’re near the finish line of this first phase, and we know that this too shall pass.

So every week we try to do some things to make this process not just hard, but special. We signed the walls and the kids put notes in little glass bottles between the drywall and the framing. My husband put some of his art on the kitchen floor under the new floorboards.

We started watching The Hunger Games movies together as a family in the living room with cozy woodstove fires. I buy little treats for the kids, and make sure there’s plenty of coffee at all times.

And we eat very well. While we were at our rental, we cooked and baked, and then froze some things like Butternut Squash Lasagna, Eli’s enchiladas, meatballs, cookies and soup. Many of these went in part into the freezer and they have been very helpful.

But we also cook from scratch or with just some supplements. We had to give up salad ingredients for bagged salads because it just became a challenge to manage. We’ve become adept at using the tools that we have, and while we’re facing about another month without a usable kitchen, we’re getting along. Tonight I’ll make chicken massaman curry for Eli and I on the hot plate. Tomorrow we’ll make chicken panini with a roaster chicken we bought at Costco, and i’ll turn that into broth overnight for chicken soup with rice on Monday, our busy day.

And while we stocked up at Costco to the tune of $372 Friday night because we needed some things, and grocery and gas prices are rising again, it’s time to really eat down the pantry and freezers. We’ll shop in a very limited manner for the next month or so to try to winnow through our stockpiles. And Costco will last us weeks. Many of the things we use were on sale, like our favorite coffee beans, so we bought 3 bags.

So what are we eating this week?

Saturday: Just Eli and I, chicken massaman curry over rice, salad

Sunday: Costco roaster chicken becomes chicken panini, with roasted broccoli and tater tots

Monday: Chicken soup with rice, with the veggies chopped on Sunday

Tuesday: Just Eli and I, bowl food

Wednesday: Dinner with Mom

Thursday: Just Eli and I, tbd

Friday: Air fryer chicken parmesan, salad, pasta

New Year’s Abundance

New Year’s Abundance

3 days into my just-before-Christmas bout with the flu, I woke up with something resembling inner peace.

I hadn’t slept much – being able to breathe out of both sides of my nose is typically a component of sleep for me – but I was ok. It’s not that I was completely ready for Christmas, quite the contrary. I had tons of presents left to wrap, and we hadn’t even really decorated.

It also wasn’t that we were financially in great shape. Renovation has stretched our finances so tightly that even small-dollar purchases have to be considered. I mean we knew this was going to happen, but it’s still pretty scary.

It was something else. A change of mindset, a reminder that I needed to have some real gratitude for where we are.

When I bought Sithean, I was in my early 40s, recently separated, with 2 little kids, and we were moving 1500 miles to return home to Massachusetts.

I fell in love with this place. It was small, on an acre and a quarter, and in need of updating for almost everything.

I didn’t care. Set back from the road, and looking like a fairy tale house, It had a climbing tree in the back yard, space for a playset and a garden, and it was next to Greenbelt land, only separated by a stone wall and an access road for the town’s water tower. The kids were small – 4 and 6 going on 7 – and it was just us.

It stretched our finances to the bone just to be here, and there were more than a few times where there was more month than money. Sensible, this was not. But it was home.

Still, as the kids got older, and we added Eli, a dog, chickens and a bunny named Marshmallow, it became clear that while we loved this place, love was not enough. It was poorly insulated and the the heating system was old and kept some rooms too warm while others were freezing in the winter.

We were crammed in, despite getting rid of things as much as possible there was just no closets and no room to put anything. My daughter’s room literally had no closet, just an improvised clothes-hanging system. And the house was not suited to aging in place – if something happened that limited our mobility, we would have to leave.

We replaced the roof after a tree fell on the house. We replaced the pipe stack, the appliances, and painted and worked to make it cozy, but the house was chopped up, not working, and every fall the field mice just moved right into the holes in the foundation walls, despite spending literally thousands of dollars to deal with them. My office space was 3.5 feet across, and I couldn’t have a keyboard, a breakfast plate and a mug on the desk at the same time without something falling.

At a point a few years ago, we admitted that despite our love for this place we were completely stressed out trying to make it work, freshened up the house and tried to sell, but anything that worked for us was out of our budget and we hated even the idea of leaving. But every quote we got for renovation and an addition was also out of our means.

Finally when I closed down the business line for my prior job last year I was incentivized to stay on, and we were able to pull together the deposits we needed, and borrow the rest.

We still weren’t able to do everything, but here’s what we chose to do.

Replace the on-the-edge-of-failing heating system, and add cooling
Replace all the windows in the existing and new house, preserving the old hand-blown ones for future stained glass projects
Insulate, insulate, insulate
Renovate the kitchen completely
Renovate the upstairs bathroom, one of 2 in the house
Add a great room off the back of the kitchen with sliding glass across a span of it so that we could look outside. One of my greatest enjoyments when I lived in Florida was that sense of outdoors and indoors merging, and I wanted that here
Added an in-law suite with its own full bath with a curbless shower, entrance and closet – between our kids, extended family – we have space for those who need it or single-floor living for us as we age. For now, it’s intended to be my daughter’s room
Added a master bedroom with it’s own bathroom and closets – we’re crammed into what was once the dining room and it isn’t working
Added an office for me
Added a powder room and a mud room, allowing us to move the laundry to the first floor and out of the basement, helpful for aging in place
Full paint of all but one of the the addition rooms, the existing hallways, and the exterior of the house.
Replace the crumbling end of the driveway
Added a soapstone woodstove to the new great room to supplement our new heating system
Replaced the porch decking with no-maintenance TimberTech and added 3 wet-rated ceiling fans to the now extended porch so that we can sit out there in the heat with some relief. I love our porch quite a lot in the warm weather but it gets meltingly hot quickly

This isn’t everything by a long shot. We’ll do all the patching and painting of the existing spaces, add a patio and walkways and pull out the soon-to-be-defunct baseboard heating in the front of the house over time. We’ll also do all the landscaping and paint my daughter’s new room as well as all built-ins – we couldn’t afford to add any during construction. We didn’t manage to add wood storage either, something we both regret but is easily remedied.

And we did manage to add some quality of life items and luxuries. In almost all of the new spaces we’ll have ceiling fans, which are long term investments in frugal cooling. While we couldn’t afford a fancy gas wall fireplace in the master bedroom, we did find a 5’ long electric fireplace – basically a very long heater – for about $200 and built a space for it.

In order to manage what we have, we’ve once again stretched our finances to the edge and between that, life that is busy beyond belief, and construction delays, I’ve been a ball of stress for months now.

But I woke up, even though I felt like complete garbage, somewhat less stressed. It was Christmas week. We are blessed with warmth (as long as no one spends too much time in the uninsulated addition shell) plenty of food, a loving family, and generally, our health, except this flu that ran through the house.

Fast forward to the first day of the new year. While the stress returned, it didn’t linger. We had an amazing Christmas in one of the new spaces in the house after our site foreman/lead carpenter Ryan took it upon himself to seal off what will be our bedroom with zipper walls, hang heaters and add lights that we are fairly sure he bought himself. Magic exists, and so do Santa’s elves. I’ve met one, and he’s a carpenter by trade.

Last week I ordered toiletries to keep us for a while, and we got a half of a cord of firewood delivered. Wood heating is an integral part of our plan for surviving the last few weeks until insulation and interior walls are up in the house with our existing wood stove in the living room, and then soon enough in the new space, our gorgeous, bought-the-floor-model-at-a-huge-discount-on-tax-free-weekend soapstone woodstove will go in, and supplement heating the new addition for years to come

This should keep us in wood until sometime next winter.

January is our Uber Frugal Month, where we eat down the pantry and freezers, and I expect to keep that going well into the spring. We’ll also eat healthier after the indulgences of the holiday season, and while I won’t have a completely dry January, it will be just a wee bit damp. When the weather is good we’ll start mowing down the raspberry canes and the trench bed and maybe even start a few seeds.

But today it’s snowing, we have everything we need, and no one has to do anything in particular. New years day is, and should be a day of rest, although I will at least get a run in.

Every day I just remind myself to breathe. This is the home stretch of the worst of it, financially and otherwise. While our budget will be so tight it squeaks for some time to come, we’ll also have immense quality of life.
My word for the year is Abundance, and I feel that life is just that right now. Each Christmas is better than the last. Our kids just get more amazing. We’re blessed in so many ways. And I believe 2026 will bring all the joy, love and growth we need.

Happy New Year to you and yours.

Cooking and Housekeeping In a Construction Zone

It helps if you trick yourself into thinking you are camping, I’m not gonna lie.

We are trickling into our 12th week with no kitchen, our 13th week of construction, which is long enough that when we borrowed a friend’s house in New Hampshire for a weekend in back in October, I brought all the supplies to make meatballs because I was just so excited at the idea of a sink, a stove and counter space, all in the same place.

Luxury.

Going into this process, we were told we would be 10-12 weeks without a kitchen. In reality, it’s going to be about 20 weeks all in. Straight through the holidays, which is heartbreaking to me. But here we are, and the only way out is through.

The framing is done, the roof is on, and while it is still a shell of a house on the back with zipper walls to keep the front living quarters warm, we are making so much progress.

The construction, excited though we are, is moving along but also is definitely grinding a little on us. For weeks now the driveway and surrounds to the house have just been mud, mud mud.

And we’ve been writing checks, a lot of checks. It’s pretty overwhelming.

Everything everywhere all at once, that’s what this is. Still, we chose this, and we knew that we were going to be walking a line financially to get all of this done.

With some more time to go before chaos of the house being pulled apart ends,and the house starts to be slowly put back together, we’re in it for the long haul because at this point, there’s nothing we can do about it.

We’re trying to just breathe through it every day.

One thing we haven’t done much of is eat out, or switch to paper plates. So far our system of washing things in the bathroom sink and cooking in is working pretty well. While we packed up our crock pot, and it’s pretty good and buried in our storage space, I found an early Black Friday deal at Kohl’s for $17 for a 5 quart crock pot, which is coming in handy as it starts to get colder. While I hate to spend money for a thing we already have, it’s worth it if it means we get through this part without a ton of take out.

My husband has been carrying most of the load of cooking during the week, and I do much of the meal planning and weekend cooking, We’ve’ve been eating pretty well. A lot of one pan meals or food on the grill, of course, and certainly there are some things that are easier than others to do, but so far, so good.

Like Instant Pot Beef Bourguignon – this is a household favorite, and while beef prices are omg high, it makes quite a few meals, and we can freeze a portion or two for later. It’s a cozy treat, and I’ll slice, saute and freeze the leftover mushrooms for a later meal. We had that about 2 weeks ago and it was delicious.

We’ve been trying to carve back on our grocery spending, but it is hard when we’re having to flex our plans for so long.

My sister brought us tons of potatoes, onions, spaghetti and butternut squash and sweet potatoes from upstate NY, so we are incorporating those into our meals. Every now and again I stock up at Costco as well, and add to that the regular grocery shops, our winter share – there’s 2 more distributions – and our meat share, and we’re doing pretty great.

Here’s what we have to cook with right now:

A 2 burner hot plate loaned by a friend. This is a great tool that we use on the daily
A small older microwave that we’re hoping doesn’t die before we get a kitchen back
Grill with a single burner, so if we need something to cook faster or hotter than the hot plate we use that. Downside – on the porch, and it’s November in New England
A rice cooker – this thing is 20 years old, sees use multiple times a week and has for years, and is just absolutely the best kitchen tool. We buy rice in 15-lb bags and eat through it several times a year.
An Ooni pizza oven, a gift to Eli some years ago. While it’s a bit of setup and work, the option to have homemade pizza is lovely.
The coffee pot, without which we would not function.
An electric tea kettle. We love it and use it constantly.
An instant pot. Ours died 2 weeks after our kitchen was demolished and my neighbor gifted us hers for free.
A crock pot – we accidentally packed ours up and can’t find it in storage, so we replaced it with a $17 5-quart version last week

So look, we’re not short of options. While it’s not ideal to be prepping in the living room and washing plates in the bathroom sink, we’re eating pretty well and everything is staying pretty clean. I mean, we’re in a construction zone, so the floors outside of our living spaces, ugh, but otherwise we’re in good shape. I vacuum every day, we try to wipe down surfaces and the 1 sink all the time, and every couple weeks the bathroom gets deep cleaned. The floors get wiped down a lot as well, but keeping them clean is the hardest part. I took some pictures of the living room/pantry/prep area/dining area as well as the bathroom to help show what we’re doing.

So what are we eating this week in our little construction zone?

Use up: Grapes, Tomatoes, Cucumber, Cabbage, leftovers

Sunday: Skillet Ravioli Lasagna & Fattoush Salad

Monday: Our busiest day, Eli Cooks
Tuesday: TBD, just us

Wednesday: Slow Cooker Sausage and Potato Soup (it calls for kale but we’re out so I’ll add spinach at the end)

Thursday: Rachael Travels, Eli Cooks
Friday: Rachael brings home dinner from NYC’s Chinatown – Mei Lei Wah’s famous Pineapple Pork Buns and some other good stuff. I’ll also bring home some bagels.
Saturday: The forecast says some weather is coming, so of course, soup. Probably chicken tortilla soup in the crock pot – everyone likes it, and add some rice and croutons and it’s a comforting and delicious meal for a cold night
Sunday: Eli CooksMonday: Chili and Eli’s Corn Bread

Reimagining Sithean Part 2 – Transformation

It’s a quiet Sunday morning in the back half of October, the beginning of week 6 of construction. Other than a couple of quiet weekends our life has been moving at double-time for months now, and we really don’t stop until November. This weekend has been errand-heavy, and today we’ve got to get the house tidier in between commitments. The fair is over in our town, and the weather is starting to get chillier at night.

The back half of the house has been gutted for over a month, the vast majority of the excavation is done, and part of the foundation walls are up. We’re about 2 weeks away from new windows and replacement of our current furnace with a new hydro heating/cooling system. Our existing windows, the ones with the handblown mullions, will be saved aside and likely turned into stained glass over the next several years.

Our living room is kitchen, dining room, pantry and living room combined, and we have one functioning sink and shower for the whole house. When they gutted the upstairs bathroom they left us the toilet so we have that at least. Eli’s studio and our bedroom are filled with clutter and clothes, because there’s not enough places to put things.

I don’t like clutter, so it’s a lot sometimes, but we’re dealing with it.

The kids rooms are generally intact, and the zipper walls keep out most of the dust on our side of the house, at least for now. While it’s weird, it’s surprisingly not awful. An inconvenience, rather than a problem, living in a construction zone.

And it’s fascinating to watch the transformation up close. We have an amazing team, too. Our excavator, Jacob, who is magically turning a dirt pile into a house shape. Our lead carpenter, Ryan who keeps everything moving. Colin, who patiently explains the construction as it happens. The foundation guys, whose names we don’t know because they are quiet and refuse our efforts to bring them cold drinks, walking atop 9 foot tall foundation forms like they are stilts. Alan, the master plumber and Dana, his assistant. We get the sense that they are as committed to this project as we are.

Artisans, all of them. I have endless respect for people who can build things, can take a drawing and turn it into reality. It’s one of the things that drew me to Eli.

Throughout the process, the folks who have worked with us to painstakingly make every choice have been wonderful, from the supply folks who took us through faucets and shower heads, and then found less-expensive versions when necessary, to the flooring folks who pressured us not at all and instead showed us flooring that we immediately fell in love with. We have been so blessed to really like these folks, and we can’t wait to invite them all back when we’re finished so they can see what their hard work has wrought.

So far we’ve had over $19k in extra infrastructure costs, from burial of the propane tank to having to move a water line and pour one wall of the foundation higher than planned. I’m guessing there’s a little more out there – none of it the ‘fun’ stuff, but all of it things that will make the house what it needs to be.

The unknowns financially scare us, but we’re rolling with them one at a time, and rolling with this whole crazy ride one day at a time. There’s nothing else we can do – the kitchen is gutted, the things for the house are ordered, there’s a giant pit in our backyard – this is happening, and we’ll figure it out. Every time I get freaked out I remind myself that we have a 100% success rate of figuring it out in our lives so far. That’s not bad.

We are renting 2 storage spaces for all the things, but we’re hoping to consolidate to 1 by mid-December when the stove gets moved to our kitchen. Very early on we made the decision to have everything we needed to buy – light fixtures, cabinet handles, fittings – in storage and staged so that when the time came to install there was no mad rush to stores. By and large, we’ve done that, with just one light fixture, chosen but left to buy, as we are cash flowing our purchases.

Similarly, we’re almost done picking paint colors, several months in advance. In most cases we’ve gone with soft creams, but with bursts of color – deep green with dark grey trim and a slightly lighter green ceiling in the hallway and mudroom, my office ceiling will be Benjamin Moore’s Tapestry Gold, a rich yellow that reminds me of autumn leaves, paired with softer walls in Benjamin Moore’s Rich Cream. The kitchen cabinets are Farrow and Ball’s Down Pipe, a dark grey that has both green and blue undertones.

And we’ve bought richly colored wallpapers for the powder room, the upstairs hall bathroom and the master bath. A particularly fun find for the upstairs hallway was Mind the Gap’s The Station View wallpaper, which makes me delighted every time I think about it. Another fun find was Claret & Key, wallpaper in which you get to pick the ‘season’ color scheme – there are 4 for every pattern, and then the background color, of which there are over 35.

The only room we truly had design help with was the kitchen, so we’ve been mentally putting all our choices together, but I think we’ve done a pretty good job.

We’re cooking in 99% of the time, between instant pot, air fryer, grill, and hot plate. The crock pot got packed in the mad dash to get the kitchen emptied when it was demolished a week ahead of schedule, so we’ll probably not see that until we move back in. We’ve spent more on groceries than I had originally planned to, but I think we’ll see that temper itself shortly.

While dinners are not frequently fancy, they occasionally are. Eli has taken our camp cooking situation as a challenge and has turned out some truly amazing meals. The salsa, salsa verde, jam and various and assorted items we preserved in the freezer, like pesto, peaches, shredded zucchini and raspberries this summer are coming in handy.

The other night I came home from a work trip to homemade black bean soup and cornbread cooked on the grill. Last night we cooked some hamburger with onion combined that with pumpkin ravioli, pesto, toasted almonds and parmesan.

We’re hardly suffering.

These are the golden hours, watching the home we dreamed about be created. Every piece and part, every color, every fitting will have been chosen by us. While it’s not our hands doing most of the building, it’s our creation – from my inspiration to build out in an L-shape, to Eli manifesting that in a 3-D model, the changes we worked through of that model due to budget constraints – everything in this house will be made for us. That’s an astounding thought, and sometimes to me, it feels like too much – that I’m too fortunate, that no one should be this lucky.

I remember our first day here, after days of traveling – both filled with adventure and exhaustion. My Mom took the trip with us, and I will be grateful for her presence for the rest of my days.

That first morning, the kids found their way straight to – and we named – Oona, the eminently climbable mother-tree in the backyard before even eating breakfast. My son’s melt down when the promised playset arrived in pieces and boxes in the pouring rain because I couldn’t build it right then and there, and them pulling up their chairs and watching their father put it together, because we both agreed despite our divorce that our childen needed home. I remember watching the magical landscape change, and that June watching flowers drift across the driveway from the Honey Locust that is our fairy tree, home to the fairies that Sithean, The Fairy Hill, is named for. Eli’s first visits, and eventually permanent arrival, our missing piece.

It hasn’t all been delightful – a 70 foot pine tree fell on the house our first autumn here, I lost a job, we lost people we love, and animals we love. We’ve had financial challenges, mental health challenges, all of it, but we’ve come out the other side, every time.

And life is changing now. The kids are growing up, life is busier and more complicated. Never again will they crawl across the snow after a storm, pretending to be foxes. We are slowly packing away their childhoods while we pack away the house for the renovations. It’s a little sad at times, but also delightful to watch them grow up.

But it’s still magic. I feel like my life has been an endless series of transformations, and here we are in another chrysalis of change. And my children will carry the magic of this place with them always, no matter how they evolve.

I can’t wait to see what’s next.

An Autumn to Remember

The weather is still warm, but we’ve started to roll into Autumn. The leaves are turning, and lovely, and the nights are cooler. The transformation of the trees never ceases to amaze me.

So too is Sithean transforming. We are heading into our 3rd week of renovation, with about 27 or so weeks to go – to date only demolition and a lot of time with our truly lovely work crew.

Our living room has become our pantry, kitchen and living room. The porch, intact for now, holds our grill, which is used almost nonstop these days, especially the burner on the side – we have a hot plate, but if we really need to cook something stovetop style, that’s our best bet. The good news is that we have a lot of appliances – our rice cooker and instant pot, already in heavy rotation with a kitchen, now are used nearly daily without.

It’s like camping. The downstairs bathroom, the only one that will not be renovated, is the sink for all things water.

And we’re still packing things up. This weekend it was the hall closet – the new flooring will go into it, so it has to be emptied- as well as our son’s closet and bedroom, which we are simultaneously working on as he has begun to seriously outgrow his bunk bed.

Yesterday I grocery shopped at Hmart, Costco and Whole Foods, because this Friday starts off the fair in our town, and other than getting milk or a few things here and there, we’re basically locked in through mid-month. We have been dedicatedly eating down the pantry and freezers, but that had to slow so that we can plan on a couple of weekends with limited access beyond our home.

We love the fair, and that family gathers with us for opening night, it’s truly an event for us. This year our home is not really conducive to family gatherings, but by next year it will be. Other than a few paint colors left to pick and a single light fixture left to purchase, there’s not much left to choose – at this point, we are just in a waiting game to see what it looks like in real life. While the decision fatigue has been sometimes real, and at times construction planning was a second full time job, that work is almost done.

We are still packing things up and moving them around, but that too, should be done in a few weeks. Which is not to say that when we wrap that up it won’t be the end of a long, exhausting marathon, but we have to empty and clean these spaces anyway. And of course, once we’re done there will be more cleaning and moving things around and moving them back in, but that’s ok. One day at a time right now.

In general, it’s not terrible. Cluttered and dusty? Sure. But we have a small table set up in the living room we can eat at, and our meals are good so far. We like camping, and this is like that.

Last night I cobbled together a pound of chicken, sauteed onions, garlic and poblano peppers, a pint of salsa verde, a cup of chicken broth and some seasonings and put them in the instant pot for 20 minutes, then added a little parmesan, mexican cheese, and cream cheese to make a variation on Chicken Chili Verde, and it was downright delicious. Tonight I’ll make Instant Pot Beef Bourguignon.

Our kitchen limitations are causing us to be more intentional, but we’re still eating off of regular plates and using cloth napkins. At the end our budget will be very tight, but that’s nothing new either. And we’ll have a lot of finish work to do ourselves, but that’s ok.

And in the meantime we still have an abundance of raspberries to pick in the backyard, 3 more weeks of our summer CSA, and the simple pleasures of home – there is really something satisfying about curling up on the couch after a long day of paid work or house things and eating a delicious meal that we magicked out of our temporary kitchen.

So what are we eating this week through this long race?

Sunday: Instant Pot Beef Bourguignon & salad

Monday: Eli will make grilled chicken pita pockets, broccoli from our CSA

Tuesday: It’s just Eli and I on Tuesdays, so we make simple things in bowls. We have some wax beans to eat from our CSA, so we’ll make those our veggies.

Wednesday: Tortellini, spinach and chicken soup made with the roaster chicken I bought at Costco.

Thursday: Burgers, tater tots and broccoli

Friday: Pizza with Family

Saturday: Chicken soup with rice

Maybe by week 20 we’ll be completely over this, but for now, life feels pretty good.

The First of the Sunflowers

It’s August. While everything is still green and lovely, the prolonged stretches between rains mean that slowly that is changing although we did get a soaking, all-day rain a couple of days ago.

Last week we brought home eggplants and tomatoes from our farm share, along with the greens that have been so prevalent until now. We are officially moving into late summer.
We also brought home 5 gorgeous sunflowers picked by my lovely daughter. I love sunflowers – they are so magical.

We are having waves of heat interspersed with cooler days, with temperature swings of 50s and low 60s overnight to ramping up to the mid-90s occasionally. It’s been an odd summer, but aren’t they all now? One day it was so hot we could barely move, the next I had to change into sweatpants because it was downright chilly.

As weird as it is, we’re enjoying it.

We’re enjoying summer food, too – last Friday night it was too hot to cook so we made a salad and a charcuterie board. Detailed meal plans that make sure we have hot, home-cooked food during the school year begin to degrade at the beginning of summer, and by this point in time we are full-on winging it. The kids can spend extended days at their Dad’s, mealtimes become focused around when they woke up. For my daughter, now 16, this is likely her last summer of idleness before jobs and college prep consume her time. She’s bored now, actually, so that may come sooner than later.

The world seems to be descending into a kind of darkness we haven’t seen in a long time – Gazans are literally starving, the world’s efforts to make a whole people disappear. The war in Ukraine lingers with uncertain (or possibly terribly certain) outcomes ahead, and our own country has built a secret police that takes people away in broad daylight from their homes, cars and gardens. Cuts to food programs have a horribleness I can’t understand – in the wealthiest country in the world, in the wealthiest point in history, it’s shameful.

It has oddly reversed roles for Eli and I – normally I’m the political one but the more things worse, the more he monitors, his protection instincts firing on all cylinders, while I want to close in the walls of our sanctuary here at Sithean, just to keep us all safe. Which, of course, I can’t, that requires engagement.

And I do delight in our sanctuary while I worry. Sitting on the porch watching dragonflies and bees just doing their thing is one of my favorite weekend afternoon activities.

We’re just a couple weeks away from breaking ground in our endless efforts to make our dreams and reality the same for this place. It’s happening, and it’s going to be amazing. But a lot of stress to get there, for sure. Once we break ground, we’re off to 30-week odyssey that includes about 10 or 12 of those weeks without a kitchen. So we’re eating down the pantry and freezers as quickly as I can, as we have about 8 weeks left until we convert to grill, instant pot, rice cooker, air fryer and crockpot. I’m content we’ll figure it all out.

Mostly. I am stressed about it too, but the only way out is through.

Last week we added a second storage space down the road – we think we’ll need 3 by the time this is all said and done, but one thing at a time.. We’re just about done picking everything other than paint colors, with my daughter’s bathroom still the one room that’s forming up. If all goes well, we’ll close and pull the permits this coming week, and start in mid-August.

Our weekends are buried in preparation, planning, sketching every room and every floor. It’s very much fun and also mentally tiring, but in the end our art project of a home will come to life. And we’re ready, after all the long years of hoping, planning and thinking, it’s here.

Last weekend we finally took a day off and rested from the house planning We took the kids to the movies. It’s some of the last expensive fun we’ll have for a while.

And as we eat down the pantry and the freezers, I imagine meals will get more creative, but that will be fun.

So what are we eating this week?

Use up: lettuce, mangoes, peaches, cucumbers

Monday: Dinner out, a small celebration

Tuesday: Just Eli and I, so we made Jose Pizarro’s zucchini gazpacho – pretty good, I added ½ an onion. Liked it, probably won’t make it again. https://www.theguardian.com/food/2025/jul/08/courgette-almond-gazpacho-recipe-jose-pizarro

Wednesday: Garlic chicken, rice pilaf, salad

Thursday: Chicken Kebabs, rice, roasted broccoli

Friday: Just E and I, so bowl food

Saturday: Just E and I, tbd
Sunday: E’s enchiladas, refried beans, salad, mango and regular salsa

Monday: Chili & macaroni salad

I expect it to be a delicious week, busy in preparation, but also one of the last few of quiet before the transformation begins. Happy August!

Reimagining Sithean Part 1: The Economics

Mama Turkey Protecting Her Babies Outside Our Kitchen Window – June 2025

Many of you know I work in the mortgage industry, but I don’t really get involved with the originations side. That said, I have been a customer multiple times, but never in this way.

In order to renovate and add on to Sithean, we had to borrow money. A good bit actually. And to do that, after evaluating all of the options, we went for a construction loan. Heartbreakingly, we are giving up our 2.25% mortgage that was almost halfway paid off to do it, but it’s worth it in the long haul.

Sithean as it exists today is 1794 square feet, but very chopped up, with few closets, old windows, and very little, if any, insulation. It’s been moved twice, so there are old cut off chimneys in the basement, half of which is dirt and bedrock – one thing about Massachusetts, rocks are inevitable, and large shelves of stone part of the challenge to digging basements.

We’ve been putting money into the house since I moved in, and more since Eli joined us in 2019, but it quickly became clear that we were dropping pebbles in a Grand Canyon of needs. And as our family grew and the kids got older, we needed space, and if we intend to age in place, which we do, the existing configuration made that highly impractical, if not impossible. And we have nowhere for guests, children who rebound home, or any other scenario I see as reasonably likely in the future.

We spent years, and lots of money with a local architect and just never got to a point where we had a design that worked. We parted ways, frustrated, poorer, but much wiser and took from it the lesson that we needed to be better advocates for ourselves out of the gate, and we have. We had ceded control to the ‘experts’ but the experts aren’t us, and they don’t have to live here.

So that’s lesson #1, and if you ever do decide to renovate, make sure that you don’t get your needs lost in anyone else’s ideas.

We were so at a loss on where to go next after that we even put the house on the market after that, but circumstances and love of this place overrode the idea of leaving, and so here we have stayed. We belong here, that’s clear to us. But renovating and adding on continued to elude us because of the cost. No matter how hard we saved up, escalating costs for renovations and high interest rates outpaced us.

Finally we hit a point where renovating has become a real possibility. It’s going to cost far more than we ever dreamed, and we’ll still have some finish work to do ourselves – more on those projects later – but in the end we’ll have a home with space, storage, modern heating and cooling, the kitchen we’ve been designing for years, and a wall of doors to the backyard from our new Great Room.

We’ve finalized the budget with our builder, put deposits down with them and the kitchen cabinetry people, and started holding slabs of stone for countertops. It took a while to get to a budget that was manageable for us and got us most of the things we prioritized, so long that we lost a rate lock with the bank. But this time, getting it right is our priority, and figuring out a way to do it is job one.

One thing that shocked even us was the sheer amount of money, in cash, that is required of you in a construction loan. Plan for all the initial deposits to be you, to have a 10% reserve (although equity is sometimes permissible) of the full cost of construction, that every light fixture and piece of cabinet hardware was us we knew, but not so many other of the costs – if we wanted something we found on Etsy, our kitchen backsplash for example – it was on us. All the appliances. And so on.

Even with borrowing most of the money, our table stakes will end up being well into 6 figures.

And, I reiterate, we are borrowing most of the cost to boot.

Somewhere along the line the construction and renovation business has become a high net worth game, and the average homeowner is locked out of anything over and above either a % of their equity, or smaller dollar home repair loans, or signing on to a builder special.

Which I find interesting, because the median age of the US housing inventory is 40 years old, with half of the homes being built before 1980, and 35% built before 1970. The average age of a US home is between 42 and 51 years old, according to Statista, a statistics gathering site.

That means the houses are old, and in need of upgrades, serious ones.

And I’m not talking about marble bathtubs. I’m talking about heating, cooling, insulating, sealing out rodents, and ensuring that roofs and stoves and other items are up to code, of which we have learned, is based on 2015 standards, so it’s already 10 years old.

But who can afford to do something like what we are? Not a lot of people. And who can afford even to bring their house up to standard? Even less. It’s hard to tell how many people are considered ‘cost-burdened’ by their mortgage, but the statistics say it’s a lot, and here’s what I observe anecdotally in my area. Since 2020, a conservative estimate says that housing prices in Essex County, MA where I live have risen over 42%. That means a house that was $400k in 2020 is now $568k. But in practice, at least in my area, it’s quite a bit more than that. Our home alone has increased in value by a whopping 60%.

I would not be shocked to learn that a huge chunk of Massachusetts homeowners under the age of 50 would be considered house poor. Overall in the US, it’s estimated that 27.4% of homeowners are cost-burdened but in April of this year the data suggested well over 34% of Massachusetts homeowners are cost-burdened. That’s over ⅓ of every household in the state I live in that has an overwhelming mortgage or rent payment.

So back to the aging home inventory – if you can’t afford to tap your home equity because of the payments, assuming you didn’t buy near the height of the market and really have any equity at all, and you don’t have the cash that is required to start a construction loan…you can’t do much.

Add to that for those of us who already owned our homes the increased value has given us a great deal of equity, but the corresponding rises in taxes has done a fair bit to offset that on a monthly basis. Insurance rates are higher too, relating to both value and the volume of natural disasters that are occuring on an annual basis. Just in our own situation, since I refinanced in 2021, my monthly escrow payments have driven my house payment up over $1000 per month without making a single capital improvement.

No, that’s not a joke.

Add all those things together, and you start to notice things – even amongst the pristinely maintained houses of upper middle class and wealthier communities, you start to see things like houses that need a paint job, or roofs that have a lot of wear, or fence sections that need to be replaced just sitting empty or leaning over or drooping porches. You still see renovations and builds, but you also start to see that cars are just a little older than they used to be too.

Because all that extra tax, insurance and inflation money comes from somewhere. And even amongst the well-heeled, the weeds are starting to show. Don’t get me started on what that means for everyone else while we’re hacking away at the limited social safety net that exists here in the US.

So the economics of the housing market – especially for an armchair economist like myself are pretty fascinating, and it really is the rise in overall wealth that is keeping a lot of things moving, which is kind of worrisome in itself. Because that too, raises the price, and the bar for the rest of us.

For example, our builder, who is pretty chill, initially told us that we should plan on $90k per bathroom.

Hard no.

But what that comment tells us in simple terms is that those who are building are spending that kind of cash. Those numbers don’t just come out of nowhere. And I would guess that the sheer amount of money required just to come to the table deters quite a lot of people.
Not enough for the system to change yet though.

It is fascinating, and I’m going to keep coming back to the economics of this. Because I think we’re teetering on the edge of something breaking pretty hard. Which makes it intimidating to take this on, but we’ve waited and waited and saved and planned and it’s just time. So we’re taking deep breaths and taking the plunge.

Somewhere around late April of next year, the vast majority of the work should be done. And in some cases, our work will be just beginning.

A Hazy Shade of the Future

It’s lovely here, all green and lush with everything in bloom. Which is due to the near-endless rain this spring. Actually it’s raining again as I write this, I think the 13th Saturday in a row. And it’s only just started warming up – it has been cold too. But summer is starting to roll in despite itself, and maybe that means that the chill is waning.

Sithean in the spring is a wonder to behold. Everything seems to bloom all at once, and stark and mud becomes pink and white and flowering and it’s hard to believe that anything will go wrong.

I mean, as long as I don’t read any news.

I’ve been gone a while, not because I lost interest in blogging but because I’ve just had so much going on in real life there’s been no time or room to write. I’ve been doing my best just to stay afloat, to keep the house clean, groceries bought, food cooked, laundry done, and kids where they need to be. Some of that is burnout. I’ve never been so tired in my life other than when my kids were sleepless babies, but this time the tired was me unable to think one more thought, remember what I was trying to accomplish, or figure out what I was supposed to make for dinner.

On that last, a combination of instant pot, helpful husband who makes great meals and a lot fewer ‘recipe’ meals and a lot more of ‘here’s these things I put in a pot that are cooked’ meals. Generally these were things i wouldn’t advertise on my blog as being meals, per se, but it’s normal mom stuff. A carb, a protein, a sauce or thing to hold it together, some vegetables.

No one starved although my son did grow so, so tall and is still growing.

But as the garden springs back to life, so do I. Or at least, I’m trying, the burnout seems to be waning, although it’s not completely gone. I’m still not totally on point yet, but I’m going to fake it til I make it.

After nearly 9 months of winding down a business line, which was both an experience I wouldn’t trade and really, really challenging and emotionally exhausting, I finally was able to start a new job, a new thing, and be back to building things.

We are all healthy, and we are finally moving forward with our renovation and addition – we’re still in the planning stage, but we think we’ll be able to break ground in late July. It’s likely over the next year that this blog focuses more on our renovation and addition, because that will be the thing that will take up all of our time and money.

So, so much more money than I had hoped, but we finally aren’t waiting any more, just rolling the dice. It’s a terrifying leap off of a cliff, but I also think it’s more than time. While we’re not getting everything we wanted, we are getting most of it, and it’s exciting. Also exhausting to look at infinity variations of design, but that’s exciting too, make no mistake.

It’s been an eventful 6 months, and it looks to be a more eventful 2025 and 2026, but that’s ok. May specifically gets filled with kid activities, shows and performances, and lots of end-of-year related items. Early summer, where we are now, with everyone having finished school yesterday, and me being surprisingly emotional as my son graduated from elementary school and I realized that chapter of our lives was done. The next few weeks are filled with chilling out, camp and this year, for my daughter her first overseas trip sans parents with a leadership organization for 10 days. We’re nervous, it’s coming fast, but we’re excited for her too.

And we’re excited for us.

November Stockpile

About 5 minutes after I published my last post, our schedule changed. I had managed to prep the refried beans and made some hard boiled eggs, but I didn’t get to the cookies, and we punted on the Onion Pakoda, as badly as I wanted them, because we ran out of steam, substituting some samosa from the freezer instead.

And then the kids schedule changed around as well as their Dad had to delay time with them. The good news is that we were able to shift our plans and still cook in. Well. One night we caved and bought pizza dough and cheese because we had no plan whatsoever, but we managed otherwise.

I wrote last time about spending an astounding amount on food this month. Every November, our food spending skyrockets. My total for the last post was $805, but if I subtract the non-food items, it was more like $645. But then it went a higher still. Our Walden Local Meat share was delivered, we project to spend about $18 on milk for the rest of the month (a little over a gallon a week is what we use most of the time), we’ll need a few more groceries – and then there’s the Thanksgiving cheese.

All in, our current tab was $939, and I expect to close the month out over $1500.

Zoinks. Not going to lie, that gives me the shakes.

But. Reasons.

First – a disclaimer. We are blessed as heck and able to invest in our bellies, not everyone is. My endless gratitude for our ability to stock up every November.

Second – a disclaimer. This is food we will eat for quite some time, not just this month. But the deals are now, so into the pantry and freezer it goes.

Also, this includes some more expensive event food. I’m on for a bunch of items for a 30+ person Thanksgiving dinner. And at this time next week, we’ll have every piece of our Christmas dinner other than greens and potatoes. Turkey, cranberries, stuffing, you name it – in the cabinets or the freezer, because we are having a turkey dinner, and the time to buy that stuff is now.

I do not shop like this all the time.

For the first 3 months of each year Eli and I cut back pretty hard – pantry eat down, and only buying what we need for the week. I expect my grocery bill for January-March, including our meat share, to run $1800 or less for the 3 months, or an average of $600/month, loaded towards the back. I will caveat that by saying we may pre-pay for our Walden Local share this year, which affords us a discount overall, which would be $1800 up front. That’s a full year, and it would reduce our meat bill by over $600 for the year.

Third – a disclaimer. I didn’t do a great job of tracking our costs or using things up in 2024. We started 2024 with Eli gravely ill, me juggling work, kids, house and animals and we ended it with me juggling the equivalent of 2.5 full time jobs as the division I work in got sold, and I have been overseeing the transition, a 537-person team, and my day job. Add to that our house and 2 busy kids, family, friends, the fact that both our refrigerator in the house and the one in the garage died this year and had to be replaced, and I feel lucky this year to have a handle on anything.

Despite that, we’ve done better this year on food management than in several of the past years.

In 2025, I’m going to track my food costs by category rather than overall to see if that helps get our costs down. We’ll have a few savings, in that it’s our neighbor’s turn to pay for the summer CSA ($675 annually spread over 2 families and 20 weeks, which works out to $16.88 per family per week for tons of produce and flowers). For example, I put the dog’s food and treats in our grocery budget right now, but not chicken feed or bunny food and treats. So I’ll carve that out.

I also want to know what we really spend and use.

We have reason to believe that we’ll finally be renovating in 2025, which we’ve postponed for 4 years because of a) a pandemic b) a monstrous tax bill from closing down my business that blew a hole in all of our plans for almost 2 years and c) some real job instability on my part and that meant I would much rather postpone than be in a bad financial position.

That means that we’ll need to eat down literally everything in the house, something that makes my ‘a stocked pantry is an emergency fund you can eat‘ wiring get a little anxious. So planning our grocery bill for next year is a little wonky in that I know we’ll spend less, I’m just not sure exactly how it’s going to play out. I literally hate running out of food, but I’m going to have to learn to live with it.

Oddly, eating things down initially puts more stuff in the freezer than it takes out. An example is those refried beans I made last week. While it did get rid of 2 mason jars of dried beans on the counter and give me 5+ meals worth of refried beans, it added them to the freezer, which got much more full as a result. Similarly, I periodically batch roast, skin and freeze acorn and butternut squashes so they don’t go bad, but that too is freezer space.

So, with all that said, why November for a stockpile?
1. Our winter share typically has 4 pickups starting in November and the volumes are pretty high for veggies. Some of the items last until early spring. Also, while this year we got our farm stock up in late September, most years we go around now. So we are inundated with winter veggies such as squashes, sweet potatoes, beets, carrots and onions.
2. Food prices are often rock bottom for the holidays. This is the time to buy sugar, flour, and other baking ingredients. I buy stuffing mix and other Christmas turkey dinner accompaniments now, because the discount won’t be as good in December when I need these things.
3. I’m a squirrel. There’s something about November that makes me want to tuck food into cabinets like nobody’s business

So we go into the winter like the pioneers of old, with a larder stocked with all the things, and then eat it down. Unlike them, if I run out of wine or coffee, or II lack something, I can go get it. I live in the country but there’s really good sushi about 1.5 miles away. Deprived, we are not.

But then it’s time to eat it all, and eating things down through the winter feels good. I delight in it, actually. It’s fun to work our way through that 50-lb bag of onions. It’s fun to meal plan starting with ‘Ok, so what do we have?‘. It’s marvelous to pull pesto out of the freezer to top our homemade pizza, and smell summer, knowing it will come again.

Some people shop and cook weekly and that really works for them, or even shopping and cooking more often. Others cook once and eat all week. We’ve tried both methods, and neither works really well for us – we just are always on the move, and because of that, having a very stocked house helps.

As the day wound down, I had prepped bulgogi for the freezer, made a double batch of turkey meatballs for Monday’s, our Sunday dinner, and taken the mushrooms I didn’t use and sliced and sauteed them. Once that was done I popped them in the freezer for later use.

A note about those sauteed mushrooms. I used to never use up mushrooms fast enough and ended up composting one too many of them. Then I started buying frozen sauteed mushrooms because I didn’t want to waste any fresh ones, but there are some recipes that previously frozen or dried mushrooms won’t work for. Then one day I was looking at some unused mushrooms and had an aha moment. Now this is how I deal with excess mushrooms.

So what are we eating this week?

Use up: cantaloupe, strawberries, beets, a random rutabaga I have, salad veggies
Lunches: LEFTOVERS, baby. All the way.

Sunday: Instant Pot Beef Bourguignon, a house favorite, warm naan, and salad with lettuce that miraculously came with our winter share. I almost left out the potatoes, but at the last minute I remembered. Whoops.

Note how I cleverly crammed the potatoes in the over-full pot.

Monday: Spaghetti and turkey meatballs, homemade bread, roasted broccoli

Tuesday: Kids are with their Dad, Eli and I have what we affectionately refer to as Bowl Food, usually a piece of salmon over a salad, or couscous, or cauliflower rice with some veggies mixed in. I love, love bowl food.

Wednesday: We have a lot of Thanksgiving food prep, so Eli will cook something simple. Could be as simple as Trader Joe’s Orange Chicken and rice, we’ll see.

Thursday: Thanksgiving. ALL the foods. All of them.

Friday: Recovery from all the foods, the kids are with Dad and Eli and I often go out on a date rather than cook. Possibly my pants still fit me, possibly not.

Saturday: Roasted beets and maybe bowl food again. Or soup.

Sunday: Chicken Souvlaki Bowls and probably I’ll start baking cookies. I bake a lot of cookies in December.

And then it will be Monday again. And so it goes.