Grey House Pt. 1

Settling in to write this morning at 5:53 am feels like returning to an old friend. The quiet darkness before the dawn is a salve to my busy mind. I can take a deep breath and reunite with putting written words to this season of life.

Gavin and I took a vacation to Florida earlier this month. Every day was a new adventure, just me and him: a long awaited honeymoon or a one year anniversary trip, I can’t decide what name to give it, but I’d like to capture each moment of sand and sun and carefree smiles and hold them close to my heart forever.

We returned on a Tuesday, and three days later we were diving into a new project, feeling refreshed from our time away.

That was three weeks ago now and we’ve kept up with it nearly every day after work in the evening and all day on the weekends. I’ll just say lying down at night in bed feels like heaven.

While we have a running list of projects going on, it’s time to introduce the grey house. And let me first side note that I have no idea why I prefer an ‘e’ rather than an ‘a’ for grey but I do.

So, the story of this building on the property goes back a few decades. It was a Sears kit house that my grandparents purchased for Irene. This sweet woman was my grandma’s step-mother and they hoped to care for her while she lived there. Unfortunately while my grandpa was in the process of constructing it, her dementia worsened and she was placed in a nursing home. The house was never finished after that happened. If you were to look inside, the walls are framed out, some insulation has been put up and wires have been run but it’s completely uninhabitable.

My grandparents used it for storage later on, but unfortunately animals have found a home inside and have turned it to ruins. My mom, cousin David and I worked last year on cleaning it out.

Down below is where Gavin and I are currently working. There is a two car garage with a concrete pad that extends out under an overhang. This is where we began.

Life is a funny thing. One minute we’re on the beach relaxing and a couple days later we’re hauling wheelbarrows of raccoon feces into a dumpster. And it all started with some old, single pane windows that blew over in the wind and shattered on the cement. After Gavin cleaned up the glass in order to get the mower out, it was decided that, “We can’t live like this anymore!”

An array of items stacked as high as the overhang glared back at us. It took a couple 10 hour days to sort and clean through this area. At one point, we resigned to lying under the oak tree nearby to rest a minute. I allowed the whole weight of my body to sink into the grass and stared up at the leaves above me, studying them and perhaps really seeing them for the first time. I noticed how the stem connects daintily to a small twig which anchors to a larger branch and so on until it finally reaches the trunk, of which grows straight and strong and sturdy. Everything in life is connected, I thought to myself, just like those leaves.

We completed the outside portion eventually but cleaning that part out just meant we were then able to get to the inside of the garage. Gavin pushed the crooked blue door up, it went sliding cockeyed in its bent track. Sunlight crept in only as far as the overhang would allow. We stood and peered into the darkness. Cold, musty dampness filled our noses. Wall to wall and floor to ceiling, the barrage of items crowded on top of one another fighting for space in a tangled web. Who knows what we’d find.

To be continued . . .