Dreaming of next

I try to thank Dave, our builder, every day. He's amazing, astonishing, all manner of good things. Today I said, "Dave, thank you thank you thank you for doing all this work for us."

He shrugged, Davelike. "It's just my job."

"It's not just a job, Dave, it's the creating of a wonderful place for us to live."

"Aww, it's just another house and I'm just another builder," he said, classically kiwi.

"You're my dream builder, Dave--and this is my dream house," I told him. And I think that both things are literally true.

We will move into the new house soon. Each day I try to calculate how many more days, notice the Last-Time-In-This-House things. Did we change our sheets for the last time in this house this week? Surely this is the last time we’ll fill up the LPG gas tanks for the gas hob. Do you think this was the last bread I’ll bake here? And so on.

And, along with the lasts, I get lost in the upcoming firsts. I walk through the new house in my mind, unrolling rugs, placing furniture, unpacking boxes into as-yet-undesigned wardrobes. As we were working on the design, I moved into the possible designs in my head and lived life there. Looking at blueprints, I imagined living in the finished spaces, saw parties there on hot summer days, tea with Melissa on cold winter afternoons. I watched the movement patterns when Aidan was zooming through the house like a maniac, saw where I’d need to go to wash the sheets and comfort children during a stomach flu. Because we weren’t utterly pleased with the architectural design help we got, it was really important for me to sweat the details.

And now the details are coming to life. The Keith room upstairs—which requires the dropped ceiling in the kitchen—is magnificent, the dropped ceiling a feature rather than a utilitarian blemish. The lofts in the kids rooms turned out to be both very expensive and also extremely cool. The house feels airy and lovely with the soaring high ceilings which Dave has plastered and topped with lovely cove moulding.

Each day brings another set of joys, another set of disappointments. The bathtub is the wrong size—too short for me to stretch out in. The heart remu doors are so beautiful I can hardly believe they’re newly made from recovered wood. The windows are wrong in several different ways. The lighting looks like it’ll be spectacular. And so on. And so on.

Is this my dream house? In this house each detail is mine, each step familiar. By the time we sleep our first night in the house, I’ll have lived there in my mind for nearly a year. The first time I grope for the light switch in the middle of the night I’ll find it just where I think it ought to go—because I put designed it there. But is that really good? As I was rounding the house last night, coming from the working back door towards the front of the house (where the front door—still undelivered—is boarded up), I was tallying the mistakes in the windows for the conversation with the window guy in the morning. I was thinking about laying tile and how we’ll ever ever afford even a hint of a front deck (we paid more than expected for the piles to hold up the deck and now can’t afford the wood to put on the piles!). And my heart did not soar as it used to when I reached the space where the sheltered back of the house gives way to the sweeping vistas and drumming sound of the roaring sea. I stopped at the front of my driveway and watched the full moon reflect on the big beach and wondered how I could ever get so lost in detail that I could miss this view, the very reason for the house purchase in the first place. I thought about my grandmother who didn’t believe anyone should live together before marriage--not so much for religious reasons as because it took all the fun out of those first few months of married life. My new dream house is, in some ways, my pre-loved spouse. I’ve seen her early on the morning and looking at her worst. I know her warts and imperfections, and I have paid dearly for each flaw.

So, as I continue the countdown (how many more blogs do I write in this house?) I wonder what it will be like in our new house, whether it will really be wonderfully worth all of the angst (and cash) it took to get us there. In 12 or so days when we lie down in our new bedrooms for the first nights sleep, will it feel like the beginning of a honeymoon or just a ho-hum continuation of a sometimes-flawed relationship? I think it’s a good sign that my heart beats faster just contemplating the question. Dream house, here I come!

(pictures today are of one periwinkle wall glimpsed from the beach, the view out of the bathroom to the sea, the LAST glimpse of the old windows in the bedroom, and the full moon reflected in the glassy sand)