Our gloating over our timing of selling our previous house at the giddy peak of a hot market soon darkened when we realized two nationwide tides were running against us as we tried to move ahead in our current dwelling. One was the soaring price of construction materials. The other, as inflation kicked in, was the erosion of the purchasing power of our working nest egg.
If it were only me here, I could pretty much survive quite nicely in two rooms. One of them was what I came to call my dorm, the quarters where I slept in one half and wrote in the other. The second chamber was the kitchen. That left our north parlor, with the video screen and two sofas, and the south parlor, as a guest room and storage.
When it's been two of us, the space situation became more problematic, especially with just one small bathroom.
We still didn't need the upstairs for much, except when others visited. We certainly didn't want to pack in too much storage until the new roofing and reframing were done. Everybody we approached about the overhead project was booked out a year or two ahead, and most of them declined to commit to another. One who promised to the job then backed off for a season, so we waited, only to be ghosted in the end.
Whether it was just me here or maybe four of us fulltime, the overhead work and much more needed to be done. It couldn't be put off forever.
In the absence of a dependable contractor, we did inch ahead on a few fronts.
One was a large garden shed that cost us half-again as much as it would have a few months earlier. I can joke that it's my new barn, though it's not red and is much, much smaller than the namesake for this blog. Still, it's surprising what a difference it makes – almost like a garage without parking for a vehicle or two.
Another concern was a classic wood-burning cookstove that occupied the heart of the kitchen and was an inefficient supplemental heat source. Besides being a major weight on our sinking floors, it had a stovepipe feeding downward into our surviving chimney, which was also used by the furnace, a violation of current building codes. I saw the stove as a both fire and health hazard. It had to go. Distinctive it was, both as a liquor cabinet/bar and as a fun place to stash junk food and other treats for visiting family to raid, I'm glad it did find a new home, as I explained in Chief Doe-Wah-Jack's Pride and Joy, June 10, 2022.
And then, as you may have followed here last year, we went ahead with some raised garden beds. I do wish you could have tasted some of the harvest, and I'm happy to repeat that the ravenous deer around here did not penetrate our improvised barriers, unlike the previous summer at the community garden.
Living in these conditions has carried a sense of camping. You know, as in not quite permanent. I haven't even described our makeshift kitchen setup or the rain dripping inside windows or the cramped, windowless bathroom.
All the same, I can say I've never felt as much at home as I have here. Maybe that has something to do with the abundant natural light in the first-floor rooms. Or maybe with my life in general. Or maybe the lingering good vibes of Anna M. Baskerville. Or more likely, all three.
But that couldn't go on forever. Repairs and renovation needed to be done, if only we could find an available superman. I mean, this is my fourth winter in this place and I wasn't the only one aging. I could sense it in the walls, too.
Hope I'm not sounding whiny.
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