Happy Adventureversary, indeed.
A year after first seeing the house, almost halfway through our first winter here.
A winter that began with an evacuation — “race for the hills! no, leave the goldfish!” — our mad dash out of a camper whose metal walls had begun to radiate cold with a fierce foreboding.
Into an unfinished space — a space that we’d hammered and sculpted and wrestled into minimal near-readiness: bare sheetrock, much of it not even mudded, plywood floors, our household goods stacked about in moving boxes we hadn’t seen for months. Our wallets depleted, we flung ourselves across a kind of finish-line of our own making — knowing that there was no such thing as “finish-line.” And so it has gone.
To celebrate, here are some approximate before-‘n’-afters. The pictures that come first in each pair were taken January 13, 2014. The man in the second shot was the real estate agent, who seemed thoroughly non-plussed that we had even shown up, especially after having warned us off over the phone with dire accounts of how remote and rural it is here. Music to our ears, if he’d only known.
The “Wall” dividing the porch from the main house:
Each end of the porch:
Looking from porch through to the kitchen:
The main room on the first level (currently our bedroom, eventually to be a living room):
View from outside:
And finally, the shot for which there is no “before,” because by the time I got out back last January 13, my iPhone had frozen in my pocket and died. But this pano from today is pretty close to what I saw then, and what captured my imagination — the dynamism and variety of the land, the creek cutting through the low spot, the hill of bracken.
We’re here. And the real adventure — life, with its thrills and speedbumps — continues.