This week is I have been trying and failing at patience. The carpenter and the heat pump installers are …almost… done. Everything was theoretically going to be done by today, and now we are looking at Friday instead. But, here are some of the beautiful results.
This is not the best photo ever, but our French doors from the kitchen to the deck are installed–we just need still to get the keyed entry put in, since this will be our regular entry door. It was a cloudy day today when I took the picture, but this is a south facing window, and brings a lot of light into the house, and links us to the back yard.
The door on the right is the one that opens, pivoting from the center–in our research we learned that it is more energy efficient to have just one side moveable, and we can swing it totally around to rest on the other side, with a sliding screen for those days we want a breeze. It will also give us a 32″ wide pathway directly into the kitchen, for wheelchair access, when we install a ramp up to the deck. In permaculture design they call it “stacking functions,” when one item fulfills multiple functions–so this one has entry and exit, beauty, access, energy efficiency, light, ventilation, and the cats will likely be sitting there looking out at the back yard, too.
We also installed French doors from the hallway to the office–once again, for access and for light. The opening they create will provide a better turning radius for a wheelchair to get into the bathroom across the hall, and if either of us do ever need to use a wheelchair ourselves, the office can be converted to an accessible bedroom. Saturday, when we met with the carpenter, the bottom of the doors were not aligned when closed–but he fixed them so they align perfectly now.
Finally, here is one heat pump, sitting up in the corner of the back bedroom. Two are installed, and a lot of the wiring is finished, but they still have two more units to install inside, plus the outside unit. You can’t really see it here, but the walls around the window have also been spackled and painted where they were messed up from the window installation.
And if you are still reading all the way down, today our realtor did a second showing with a couple that had seen our old house last Friday. This is the other place where patience is a challenge. Now that the house is on the market, and we’ve de-cluttered and cleaned, and our realtor hosted an open house, all we can really do is wait. But it felt very hopeful to hear the level of interest and inspection that they were engaged in.
To be in this process is such a vulnerable transition. Perhaps anyone who had done a big move knows this feeling. So much is at stake, and this time of year isn’t the best for selling a house, but it is the time of year in which our own journey has unfolded. So all we can do is enter the process as fully as we can, do what we can do, and then wait. It is very hard to have patience for all of these processes to unfold. After feeling a lot of anxiety earlier in the day, for some inexplicable reason, I relaxed as we were driving home after visiting the new house. I entered a space of trust in the unfolding of the universe. Is that grace?
We don’t have any touch up paint for this room’s color (the sellers left some paint cans from other rooms in the basement.) So does this mean, really, that we’ll have to repaint the entire room?
In our 
Mother Earth, we human beings have destroyed so much. You would be justified in wiping us off your body. But still–we can sing, and write poems to celebrate your beauty. We are your children, we are so intricately made. There are those among us who are heroes of love and compassion. How creative are the artists, and the stories we humans tell! Let us find a way to live into the future. Help us to grow into our maturity as a species, and not to destroy ourselves and so many others of your children.
Despite the setbacks we’ve experienced, we are still feeling good about this small house with the lovely yard we’ve found in Portland. Today we did something fun–we talked to a carpenter about some renovations we want to do. We need to convert a one-car garage into a two-car garage–and it turns out it’s fairly easy. The garage is wide enough, we just need to add a wider door. We want to put in a French Door from the kitchen to the backyard, in place of the door and window in the picture. With such a great backyard, we want to have a better connection between the interior and the exterior. Plus, a French Door will make the entrance wide enough for wheelchair access when we need it.
Finding Our Way Home 