What Do YOU Believe In?

As we return to our continuing saga of The House, we find that there’s ‘stuff’ all over the place around but is ever changing and, magically, there’s more actual HOUSE forming.

I need to unpack my ‘stuff’ and find one of my magic wands. I collect them, and use them in the classroom. It’s a visual aid and allows me “teaching moments” when the children decide that I can work miracles for them. As with all belief systems, sometimes I can and sometimes I can’t. The wands just prove my point—sometimes I CAN make homework disappear, sometimes the homework just keeps on piling up.

And so it is with The House. Small miracles appear from out of nowhere, but most times, it just sits there and drags its foundation and mocks me.

I need one of my wands to move this project along. If I could do it by sheer willpower, it would’ve been done 7 months ago. We seem to be stuck at an eternal ‘4-6 weeks’ before it will be done. The wand may have one miracle left in it and I’d really like it to use it on The House.

Alas, the wands are all in storage. And I made the trip to CO this weekend to get the rest of my ‘stuff’ that I had to leave behind until circumstances allowed for me to have a place to put it all.

I have about 6 times the square footage of TTC in storage space down in town. One is lightly packed with furniture, a second is packed roof to floor and wall-to-wall with books and the third has pieces and parts for The House, as well as ‘stuff’ I used while living in a small house before TTC appeared in my life.

More than 1,000 miles, and maybe six times that in mass weight of ‘stuff’ moved out, loaded up, unloaded and soon to be unpacked is what my three day weekend was all about.

The past week saw me signing my life away AGAIN on a three month extension of the construction loan, and then submitting for a credit recovery process since what was once golden (my credit rating) has been shot to hell thanks to the ineptitude that pervades our service industries. I get to suffer the consequences for being considered guilty by association.

WTF! Who cares anymore?

BUT isn’t that what THEY want the masses to succumb to? I’ll perk up and get feisty again soon.

The crew has been begged to be PLEASE be done by the end of September.

C ‘n N came to me this morning with a Master Plan. They will finish the Master bedroom, bath and closet so I can move into it ASAP. I can cook in TTC, but I can bathe with more than six gallons of hot water, splash around in the tub and stay out of the way of the high winds. I’m glad for this attempt to save my life and sanity, but I really wish the whole build would be finito bandito. I’m tired of it. I’m tired of watching it. I’m not enjoying the day-to-day creeping progress

Don’t get me wrong, Y’all—it’s looking wonderful as one room after another’s walls are getting mudded. I just…am…so…tired…of…it.


The Powder Monkey bathroom, Master bed and bath and guest bath have all got their cement stucco layer done. The finish layer in each of those rooms will be a lime based ‘mud’ for waterproofing reasons or deep color consideration in the case of the Master bedroom walls.

The studio and small guest room are all mudded with adobe and awaiting nothing more than radiant heat tubing and floor installation (and light fixtures, switches, thermostat wiring. OK, so it’s not THAT close to being done.) The large guest bedroom has three walls mudded and the 4th would’ve been done this week except for the Master Plannus Interruptus. It’s all good.

Niggling little details are still creeping up and around. Lighting in the living room was screwed up by the electrician, but a quick-fix retrofit was created by Norbert and I on Friday. A new paint color for the upper portion of the clerestory is awaiting application since the initial color I chose made it look like a bordello in there. Not that I mind it looking like a bordello, but the crew thought I should keep that proclivity to myself. Not a good thing to be sharing, I guess.

Less bills and more money is what I’m aiming for the closing phase of this gig. It’s stumbling in that direction, anyway.

And, I gotta tell y’all: When I walked into the studio at the end of the day the room had been mudded, there was such a calming, essential and visceral response in me when I found myself surrounded by the true earthiness of the scent of wet clay and sand that now lay upon the walls of my sanctuary. I couldn’t get enough of it. Still can’t.

And don’t go freaking out and thinking its gonna smell that way all the time; it won’t. It’s drying well and crack-free. And the natural color of the clay, untouched by pigments, is so deep and warm that even though I’m not fond of the brown section of the color wheel, there’s something so elemental about having native dirt in my house that I’m deciding that browns are now o-tay with me.

I won’t talk too much about how many flies C ‘n N told me came to light upon the freshly mudded walls as they were applying the adobe. But if there’s an impression of some buglike being in a wall when any of you are here visiting, please know it was just a fly, not some wicked, evil beast fossilized from five million years ago. It was just fresh fly. ‘k?

Muchos gracias, y muchos mananas, y’all!