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.
Little House on the Fairy Hill 