Ups and Downs
I was chatting with Emily yesterday and she pointed out that I haven’t checked into this space for a minute or two. She’s right, of course - I’ve been all sorts of places doing all sorts of things, but I haven’t been sitting in front of my computer with my fingers flying as I try to translate shifting thought to written word. But, today, I’m making it happen - so this one’s for you Emily!
The past three weeks have been a flurry of change. The windows went in, of course, and then the stripped down outer walls of our humble abode were wrapped in an extra layer of foam insulation. You could see the place from space, the reflective silver of the foam making us look like some gargantuan Airstream trailer parked out on the prairie, and the reflection was so extreme it felt like you were getting a good sunburn just standing next to the south side. But oh, on the inside! We’ve been hot, sure, because it is summer - but SO much less hot than before the extra insulation. Between it and the new windows, we don’t feel the heat like we did before and we don’t hear the WIND like we did before. These shifts alone have made this whole project worth it.
And that’s even before I get started on the interior spaces.
On a morning like any other morning (except that it was THE morning when everything changed), everyone arrived early and thoroughly shook these walls down to their studs. Our kitchen was demoed and the wall between the dining room and the third bedroom (that we were using as a living room) was pulled down to open everything up. In a day, this house went from being a closed collection of little boxes to a bright, open space full of potential.
All of our stuff, when we someday move it back in, is going to seem very small in these new spaces. For years we’ve collected compact furnishings, amassing an eclectic family of odds and ends that easily snuggle themselves into tight and oddly shaped spaces. Which is to say that the next few years will probably see these rooms looking a little bit sparse as we make the shift towards open plan living. But that’s how it goes. It takes time to find pieces that make rooms flow.
Having no real kitchen has been…an interesting experience. While seeing the house transform into something new, Eric and I have felt a little like we’re back in our first apartment, many Augusts ago. We cook a LOT (or, rather, Eric cooks a lot and I eat a lot) so going back to mostly toaster oven and microwave cooking has been a challenge. Smoothie dinner has become a regular, rather fun and novel, thing for us - but I think that we’ll both be pretty ok with having everything put back together again. As it stands now, electricians are headed our way tomorrow - which means cabinets will follow and appliances will finally go land in their new homes and the sink will once again be hooked up…aka, we’re getting there. Just a few more weeks.
Now all of this has been happening around us, separate from us even though we’re living, somehow, in the midst of it all. We’ve been largely in the eye of the storm, if you will. But we also help where we can.
Upstairs, most days, I’ve been doing my best to chip in with what I call “unskilled labor” jobs. That is, jobs I can do with my limited house-fixing skills so the guys can focus on tasks that require actual experience. In the beginning, that meant a whole lot of unwrapping windows and general cleanup and double (triple!) checking that the dogs didn’t leave any landmines in the potential paths of busy work boots. I’ll take all of these over the job that Eric is slowly and bravely tackling - scraping popcorn ceiling.
The past week and a half, though, I’ve been tackling a more critical and time-sensitive job - spackling and caulking and painting the soffits.
This has meant being tucked up under the eaves for as many hours as I could manage every day - sometimes wearing my respirator, stolen from the studio, when the smoke blown in from distant fires made the air too thick (for reference - Denver, which is an hour south, took the number one spot for worst air quality in the WORLD this last weekend). The painting needed to be finished before the siding could be put up, so I’ve been absolutely racing to stay ahead of the crew.
It’s been sweaty, challenging work, requiring me to balance atop scaffolds and ladders to reach the peaks (and everywhere in between). The action of stretching up and back to paint is the opposite of the usual down and forwards I utilize to smith and knit and draw etc., so I’ve been using all the unused muscles and coming in at night sore and shaky. But with a start at 6.30 this morning and some much-appreciated help from my mama, the last little bits got their final brushstrokes today.
And just in time! Because it looks like the rest of our siding will be up by the end of the day tomorrow. We chose a corrugated corten steel for the next chapter in this house’s story - a little bit agricultural for me, a little modern for Eric. Right now, it’s a dark grey…but just wait till it gets wet. Corten is meant to rust, turning any number of shades between russet and pumpkin and fall-foliage-orange as it goes. A couple panels got sprinkled on by a passing storm while waiting to go up and have already started to shift (which I find endlessly exciting).
We could have pre-rusted everything, starting with orange from the get-go, but then we thought it might be cool to just see how the weather patterns weather the steel. This means it will be uneven in color, but also that it will help to tell the story of the land. And I bet you can guess how I feel about that.
Downstairs, when I can get there, I’ve been continuing my explorations into lapidary work. There’s a lot to learn - preforming and dopping and grinding and polishing. It makes my head spin a little and has given me a new appreciation for the work that has gone into the stones I’ve bought and used in my work.
My strategy thus far has just been to just cut a lot of stones, from non-precious slabs, to discover what works and what doesn’t. Armed with knowledge garnered from a select few Youtube videos, I’ve just jumped right in and am having some good success (which is exciting!) - but that’s not really the point, in my mind. Right now the most important thing is getting a feel for the machines, the process. While I can already tell that that I won’t be doing lapidary on a large scale (as in, cutting and selling stones for a living), I have some very specific goals and ideas for my jewelry work that will require me to know how to manipulate stone - and this is the first step towards bringing those ideas from my headspace into my workspace.
Summer is always a hard season for me, but this one has had a different feeling to it. Less pointless struggle, more metamorphosis. I’m going to come through it as changed as the house, as changed as the rocks I’m cutting. I feel like this trajectory has me moving through the question of “what needs to die today?” and honing in more clearly on “what needs to LIVE today?”