Summer’s End

Since I’ve been slowing pulling long sleeved clothes out of the brilliantly organized “garbage bag” clothes storage system we have going on in the garage, and I also just ordered some much needed Carhartt bibs, I guess you could say the sun has set on our first summer of official house building.

This time last year I remember saying to MysteryMan, “Next summer is going to be the best summer of our lives.” And he was all, “Have you lost your everloving mind?”

I get that a lot, actually.

The truth is that it went by quicker than I would have expected. I thought we’d have more “sitting in lawn chairs, cooking our dinner on the grill next to our half-built house” episodes… which, in all fairness, we did do a lot of cooking on the grill, but not so much sitting around.

One thing we definitely did was a lot of building…

It actually started with finishing the Station. If you can imagine, back when we started this, we actually spent a couple of hours figuring out the correct way to frame a corner.

There was a lot of mudding…

And finish work…

And there was a time when I thought I might suffocate under the weight of thousands of little glass tiles.

Then there was the donkey shed which we successfully pre-fabbed in the garage, and then assembled in the pasture…

And actually was finished just in time for its new occupants.

And all of that was just the peripheral projects, the big one required a lot of time with paintbrushes…

Power tools…

Demoing…

And learning new tricks…

We also got a lot dirty…

And will probably be spending years digging grit out from under our fingernails.

Let’s not forget about all of that time spend up on ladders, either.

The last two months of our lives have been nothing but ladders.

But even if it meant more endless days of climbing up to the roof and back down, I wouldn’t have minded just a few more weeks of summer.