Yesterday at work I ran around like a chicken with my head cut off. It's my fault as we had people working at three different houses. In fact, yesterday evening after dinner, a slice of pie, and a movie, I did my usual and fell asleep on the couch which led me of course to wake up when it's still dark outside. This isn't a bad thing, sometimes my soul needs some quiet and my fingers need to write.
So being awake at butt crack dawn early, I have already used gold paint, my Silly, spray adhesive, my hot glue gun, and started a second cup of coffee. AND, this is why my keyboard is sometimes sticky and has gold paint on it. I am however extremely motivated and ready to tell you about our latest project which is called fondly by the volunteers as either the Red House or Dan's house. Sometime back in the summer at
Habitat we got a phone call letting us know someone wanted to sell us this burnt out house on Pritchard. We get a lot of phone calls asking to donate land, sell us a house that is on it's last legs, or even give us a vehicle. We're down with that.
The project hit our radar screen at just the right time. We had just begun work on rehabbing a house we had built six years prior and our volunteers were all a little depressed. Although we hope for a happy ending with each house we build, sometimes life gets in the way. So, when we visited, this house with it's pink rose growing outside, it made us happy even though it was completely gutted, had a huge hole in the back from a fire and was built in the 1920's. The Habitat girls might be a little sentimental themselves....
The Red House has a nice story. The owner's brother wanted to volunteer and knew every inch of the house. Dan had grown up in the house and his sister wanted her good friend (who had applied for home ownership) to live there. To say this little red house is sentimental project is an understatement, which has turned out to be both a blessing and slightly a curse.
For the most part, we're sticking with the layout. We're leaving the cedar shakes and even going to order a door that looks similar down to the mail slot. This is a sleepy neighborhood and everyone is being patient with our dust and mess. It's also a happy house as we are slowly rebirthing it from the fire that gutted it two years ago. Some changes we're making are for the best. We opened up a wall between the kitchen and dining room, we're adding a french door and took down the massive chimney to enlarge the world's smallest power room. We are currently disagreeing over the placement of the cellar door and whether we should add a window in the kitchen as we took one out so we'd have room for the stove. It's really all just semantics really. Just windows and doors.
Soon our new homeowner will hear the sound of mail landing on her floor and the sound of little feet running up and down the steps. She won't be asked a trillion questions like what kind of lighting she wants in the living room. She also won't be working each Saturday on various sweat equity jobs. All in all, it will be over soon and we'll be on to the next one. We'll have a new address, but the homeowner won't.
Writing about mail & life for Memorandum Monday &
Sian over at From High in the Sky.
