When I wake up it's either the light coming through the window, or the accumulation of baa-ing, bleeting, grunting animals who've quickly worked out that we've moved, it's morning and if they carry on enough they might get breakfast early.
There's the lingering joy of stretching out on a king size mattress (the bed beneath is still at pre-manufacture stage)before going for an early morning wee. And it's 'whoa wee'... it's only just around the corner, no need to go outside anymore. The room is warm, no risk of icy condensation dripping down the back of your neck. Washing my hands afterwards - no need to turn on a pump first. And the bowl... well it's beautiful, the old one had spent fifty years under someone's house and was a sickly shade of stained yellow. This is first of many moments of gratification. The bathroom, well I keep saying it's a luxury model. It's clean, spare, almost zen, the whole house is actually. After five years of roughing it in a 6 X 3 metre shed, a small bathroom add on and a 23 foot caravan and squeezing all our meagre belongings in it... it's heaven. I love observing how the light falls on every surface on a 24 hour basis. A moonlight night doing a circuit of all the rooms is just as rewarding.
Unpacking the unnecessary things like decorative carvings, lamps and pots - they all finally see the daylight. It's been so long I'd forgotten some of them.
We're not finished, Trev's tiling the bathroom still, I've just finished repatching mud work and re liming some pf the walls, I'm yet to re-oil all the window frames and deck. Trev has the skirtings to complete, there are only two internal doors in the whole house, beading needs to happen on the ceiling lining, and the kitchen benchs have yet to be built. But none of that matters. We're living in the house where the temperature is generally always 20 -22 degrees regardless of what's happening outside. It's all come together and the wait has been worth every last windy day of, 'is the shed going to blow away?' bit of it. Our mortgage falls into the range we had anticipated, but the house is better than.
We're on a bit of a high and constant self-congratulations is starting to get a bit old - it's been a long haul... the hard part is over. Maybe one day soon I'll even convince Trev that his uniform of patched, stained and altogether too grubby overalls can help fill the rag bag. But I suspect not.
Photos to come...
4 comments:
Scraping men out of their old clothes is difficult :) My grandma burnt an old blazer and pretended it was lost on one notable occasion. My mother finally handed my dad a darning needle and told him to deal with it (an old jersey) and he cut off the sleeves and sewed them up and wore it sailing forever :) I can't remember how many times I've darned certain jerseys round here - I might have to take a leaf out of their books. I do admit to hiding a horrible orange thing at the bottom of a rubbish bag.(youngest son wouldn't part with it. I suppose he still thinks he lost it somewhere).
Good luck with that in other words,
viv in nz
Congratulations to you guys! It's been wonderful - equal parts educational, inspiring and fascinating - following your build on this blog. They say it's the journey that matters but damn, it can be nice to reach the destination!!
Congratulations from here too. We've only done remos on a tiny scale but boy, it's more than 'just' the 'end' that 'makes it'.
:)
Yay! well done, great achievement! I can only look forward to that feeling when our house is finished someday (we are just past our one year milestone, few to go...)
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