“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,” designer William Morris famously said.
Over the years, we had accumulated a lot of things that we thought were both. But as I have said, there was not enough space for all of them in our new home. Do I really need a pizza stone for baking bread? (no). Do I really need a pasta machine? (yes). We made a lot of choices over a short period of time, and sometimes we realized that we had been too hasty or ruthless about giving away or selling things. I missed my tools most of all, because although I had retained some hand tools and a cordless drill, I sold all the rest, which made installing drapery rods and towel bars and the like more challenging. I found myself one afternoon using the railing of our back porch as a workbench for hacksawing a towel bar and missed my old workbench, vise, and power tools.
We were fortunate to have a good contractor to help us, a young man who had installed a shower stall in our other house who had actually lived in our neighborhood at one time. (He remembered me once giving him a ride to school, which I had no memory of at all.) Whatever we asked Josh, the answer was always “Yes.” (Can we have another electrical outlet here, and here? No problem.) The first change we made was to remove the wall between the kitchen and dining area, which a previous owner had for some reason thought was a good idea. That's where the breakfast bar we salvaged would go.
The second biggest project Josh tackled was enlarging a storage closet by the back door into the rear bedroom and installing a stacked washer and dryer. Those appliances ended up moving from here to there, always in the way, until the installation was finally completed after an electrical sub-panel had been added and plumbing lines run under the floor.
We had already arranged for new carpet in the bedrooms by a company we had used in our other house. The owner's dad had actually installed carpet there 43 years ago and he remembered tagging along with him when he was a child. It is good to have reliable professionals to call on, and as someone who has done much of the work on our own house, I appreciate skilled workers.
But even before all of this work had been done, we did some work of our own, the first steps in calling this new place “home.” We hung stained glass windows that had hung high above the balcony of our other home in the front room. Things we believed to be beautiful.
And Martha put some planters on the back porch and a small patio tomato plant, and planted a clematis by the front door. We moved our St. Francis and stone lantern to the small area on our side of the sidewalk, our new “garden.”
Day after day, we carried boxes of books back and forth, moved furniture, hung drapes and curtains. It was rewarding work, but physically exhausting, and my running dropped to as little as one mile during one hectic week. But I knew that when we had finally settled in, running and walking and hiking would be right outside the front door. We could hike up Sunset Mountain anytime we liked, walk to Town, walk to the Saturday market where my fellow runners still meet on Saturday mornings.
It will be nice to finally be up here. In Highlands.
