Making space for home

It's been quiet on the updates recently, because it has been anything but quiet in our daily activities.  After two months in the Toolshed, four months since we packed up and left our Treehouse home in Oregon, the end of the four-month move arrived in a big burst.  We've been moving. And moving again, and again and....it's a bit complicated. 

It was a bit of a Rubic's cube of a puzzle; our office rental and storage unit rentals in town expired at the end of October, but the cottage was not quite ready for us on the first of November.  So things from the office got stacked temporarily in the chicken coop, while most things from the toolshed moved to the house...then office things into the toolshed, storage unit boxes (containing a lot of our office books and Noah's prints and art materials) went into, well, first several piles on the lawn.  Then split between goat shed, chicken coop, and corners of toolshed.  Luckily none of the animals for which these spaces are named are actually in their locations yet! 

Finally, late last week we started to move into the little cottage house, wtih great delight at things like warm running water and a sink for dishwashing.  We haven't been this clean in months.  The place is small, efficien, and very bright; we're excited to have such a sweet little house.  As soon as we started moving in, though, we realized a few challenges and a lot of work lay ahead. 

The bedroom is in a daylight basement, the base of the house, and had a very cold, hard, and hard-to-clean cement floor, so project #1 was laying a new bamboo floor.  Then painting the white walls a warm yellow.  It also, um, had no closet.  In fact, after moving in boxes and bags of books and clothing, we looked around this sweet little place and realized we had no place to put any of those things!  So the last week has been a craze of building:  long bookshelves for the living room, a bread-baking station to extend the skimpy counter space of the kitchen, a table to feed the cats on, save from Malaya, clothes storage, shoe shelves for the entryway....and a closet rod/ shelf for the bedroom.  There's still a lot more to do, but with books unpacked, a couch to sit on, bed to sleep on, and food stocked in the kitchen, we are at least starting to feel a bit, well, at home. 

More photos to come as we clear out the last boxes and truly settle in, but a few for now.....a glimpse of how we have been making home:

Noah hard at work putting together the butcher-block 'bread baking station.'  A good place to knead bread is a key part of our home kitchen.  In the background is the cottage where we, finally, are living!

The final product--the bread station!  (Never mind the chaos of still-full boxes in the background.) This is all reclaimed lumber:  a maple top and some reclaimed 2x6 timbers from Home ReSource, our local building materials recycling center, and barn boards from the sides from a stock piled in the barn here on the property.  Working with these materials makes design and sometimes leveling and alignment a bit challenging, but the results have been great.