A colleague of mine wrote about waiting for a big running race he has this weekend:
I’m always a bit uneasy and fidgety in the week leading up to a race.
Four More Days of Waiting – Jon Penland
Replace ‘a race’ with ‘moving into a new home’ and I would say uneasy and fidgety are great adjectives to use. The unease is seeing how much is left to be completed by the builders and all the little details I want to point out. At this point they have built an amazing structure that is solid, well insulated, and magnificent. Now its just the million little details of finish work that need to be done.
The fidgeting is due to anticipation and expectation. Kate and I last lived in a real house over 7 years ago. Since then we have been in a 280 square foot trailer and currently a 300 square foot cabin. Having full size bathrooms and a full size kitchen is going to be revelatory compared to the cramped quarters we are used to. Being able to have more than one person in the kitchen at the same time seems otherworldly, but we can see it coming.
We had coffee and cherry tarts in the new kitchen this morning. Sure there is a mess of dirt on the windows and paint buckets in the corners but the countertop is glorious, and gigantic compared to what we have lived with for so many years. It is already amazing and will be even better when we don’t have to walk over from the cabin to experience it.
Our expectations have had to be recalibrated a number of times. At the start of the project the builder said we would be moving in by mid September. Kate and I had a feeling that that timeline was a bit unrealistic and never really expected to be moved in by then. So when the move in date slipped to October we were not surprised. Then it slipped to early November. Which, if you are keeping score, was last weekend.
A few weeks ago I was not managing my expectations very well. Mentally I was already building the theater room and my office. I started getting lazy with my workouts in the small cabin thinking that soon I would be working out in the theater room. I was already living in the house even though we were not yet living in the house. This is also known as delusion and generally is not a good mindset to have.
As I mentioned a few days ago we started riding our bikes in the morning again and that helped a lot. I also made the leap from thinking about moving into the house to living in the house. What I mean by that is that we are planning on being in this house for the rest of our lives. Thats a long time, so what is a few weeks of waiting to move? Once I started thinking on a longer timeline my anticipation calmed a lot.
Already this week the builders have made amazing progress. The handrails for the upstairs loft are done. The showers are done and the electricians are here today to finish up and pass inspection. We are so close its awesome. In the meantime I have to remember to keep living and know that we will move in soon.
Leave a Reply