House work

Does it happen to you that when you need a haircut, your hair looks worse and worse every day—until the day when you have the appointment, and then it looks fantastic? I have found that scheduling a haircut is the best way to guarantee a good hair day.

Today is a good house day. The papers for the sale and purchase of the house on the hill came today, and Michael and I spent the day working like mad to make our current house livable (Rob helped last night before catching an early ferry to the South Island this morning for a few days holiday). Finally we’ve found a furniture arrangement for the lounge and for the new room (that used to be the garage—Rob calls it the solarium, I often forget and call it the garage and we try to settle on “gararium” or “solarage”). We’ve washed the mildew out of the curtains that were here when we arrived, and unpleated them so that we can put up only half and still have the heat-retaining features that Keith assures us we’ll need as the winter progresses (the people who lived here before invested in enough curtain fabric to finance a small country). And so now, I’m sitting in the solarage on the purple chaise, which almost is a nice room (will be tomorrow once we get curtain rods to cover up the storage and laundry which are also in here). And I could just as easily be sitting in the lounge, which we’ve made into a lovely room that doesn’t feel too crowded AND has a woodburner.

The woodburner is fantastic. It changes the whole feel of the house. Look out because I bet there’s a whole blog coming on the wonders of the wood fire. It’s the first I’ve ever had in my whole life in my own house, and it makes the most astonishing smell and is lovely to look at and has transformed the feel of that central room. This house is so much more wonderful than it has been. What a joy!

Even as I feel myself more and more loving this house, we're closer to moving. Not yet—not even soon—but hopefully by December (remember, that’s next summer, a great time to move into a new house at the beach). We talked with H (the fantastic tenant, who currently lives in the house and whose music you can listen to here ) and she feels good about finding a new house. And B, who owns the house, is still moving right along (to buy H a new house to rent, as it turns out). And so M and I walk on the beach together and try to figure out whether to invest the extra money in going up into the attic and we try to imagine a better location for a house (nope) and we dream about what we’ll plant in the garden (a lemon tree for me, a fig tree for Naomi). This is, all and all, a pretty happy mixture—happy here for now, and happy to be moving there. Even the kids are pleased about it now (although they weren’t so pleased at first—sea views don’t mean that much to kids, as it turns out).

Today was quite a good day for happiness, generally. At the soccer game this morning, Naomi was picked as “player of the week” for really going after the ball (and though they lost 2-0, they walked home talking about how they had won because they played well, they had fun, and they all tried their best). Michael and I sat on the sidelines and talked with the other parents and, unlike most of these autumn games by the sea, I peeled back the layers I was wearing until I was in shirtsleeves, watching the kids play hard and the sea move softly. And then a day of making this house beautiful as the whole world seemed to join in on our improvement project—including the two tuis who sat in the tree just outside the gararium and sang and sang. The sky was cloudless and nearly cobalt; the sea was glass turning into liquid at the wave crests (how I love having the sound of waves as I rearrange furniture!). When we had gotten things settled enough, we took Aidan and his friend to the beach where they took turns riding Aidan's bike in the sand. Perry chased balls, and Michael and I sat in the warm sun and waved at the many folks who wandered past on the crowded beach—the man whose little dog jumped down from the high track to play with Perry (who ignored him, alas), the grandmother assisting a little blonde toddler who wanted to drag a piece of driftwood three times bigger than he was, a Māori fisherman, a middle-aged lesbian couple, and an elderly couple—in their 80s or 90s—slowly walking up the beach and inexplicably kicking a soccer ball at the sea wall.

So it’s a day for celebration, for settling, for dreaming. A day when we feel delighted to be here and hope that those of you who are far away right now are making plans to come and stay. The only thing missing here, as it turns out, is you.

The pictures today have a house-on-the-hill theme. Tomorrow I'll try to take pictures of this house so you can see where we actually live now. The picture on the beach is the whole family at sunset last night--Aidan who is a star on his bike, Naomi and Rob playing soccer, Michael and Perry playing fetch, and the house on the hill to the upper left (see, Patsy, it's not THAT high on the hill). There is a picture from the kitchen window out the back to the hills, and another from the back deck (also to the hills), and one of the front of the house with its needs-to-be-replaced fake rock cladding and the brick patio B built from the bricks of one of the house's original chimneys. I hope you have a magnificent Saturday, too, wherever you are.