A New Idea of Home

"You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn't really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff that idea of home is gone... And you can never get it back. It's like you get homesick for a place that doesn't exist. I mean it's like this rite of passage, you know. You won't have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it's like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that's all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place." -Garden State

Call it nesting if you want. I've been hopping around houses for the past year, never bothering to really unpack all of my stuff.
I want a place of our own.

The Urban Trailer

I thought Ryan and I were being so brave about this trailer. We'd charge into it with full force and rip up the flooring down the seventy foot length. We'd throw paint on all the walls and lay laminate and all would be well.
Not so, not so.
We did charge into it, actually and ripped up all the flooring from back to front. And then we tore down a couple of walls to make the kitchen more functional. While meticulously picking off the wallpaper in the living room we found.... you guessed it! Mold! So we had to partially rebuild the corner of the trailer, from the outside in. Then, all hell broke loose.
Better check under the raised floor in the laundry room! Rip it out! Better tear down the ceiling, right back to the studs. May as well stop scraping away at this wallpaper and replace the walls. In that case, let's drywall the whole living room and kitchen, walls and ceiling. Hey, there was water damage. You know what we need? A second roof!
....and so on.

But as a take a sip of my rice milk latte (espresso machines make great wedding gifts), I am reminded that all is well. We're being well taken care of.
Examples:
Our families are giving up much of their time to help us. We had a work bee last weekend too and about 20 people came. Tim's a flooring expert and handyman extraordinaire. My dad is an electrician. Ray is doing our plumbing. Josh, Richard and Brenda come every couple of days to help with whatever they can.
We get an employee discount at the building center, even though neither of us work anywhere near it.
Here's my favorite: we're getting a free roof! A roofing company just happens to have a trusses and a metal roof for our size of trailer just laying around and is willing to get rid of it for... $3200. No, wait, they'll give us a deal... $1600 (at this point I would be thrilled). Nah, actually, let's just trade for labor. So we'll just do some rip-outs and lay some laminate and voila! new roof.

So, anyway, this, as you can tell, is all-consuming right now. It's is taking a little longer than we had hoped but we should be moving in at the beginning of october. And when it's been completely gutted, a month isn't so bad.

Now, I should be packing right now. We have to move out of the blue house this weekend. I will miss it terribly. In its honoe, we've even painted our bedroom in the trailer orange.