Patience...not my strongest virtue.

As I mentioned, this is a project that has been long in the planning, so when we finally decided to put pencil to graph paper and finalize our floor plan, we had very strong ideas about what we wanted. We decided to have the whole thing drawn up by a "real" architect though, so as to minimize our grief when we submit it at the planning office. She came over last Thursday, and (I'm so pleased) announced that there was "nothing" she would change about our plans. Yay!! It's so gratifying to get validation from professionals.

She took our home drawn plans, which were to scale and neatly labeled with all sorts of measurements, capped off with cute little arrows, just like I learned in Jr. High Drafting class, and said that she had "way more" information than she needed, and that she could have the plans back to us "very soon." This was Thursday. Now it's Monday. The first thing I said to Eli upon waking this morning was "Do you think we should call the architect?" He laughed.

Sigh.

So we continue the preparation phase of building remodeling.

When we first moved into the house I was sort of seduced by the idea that all this space (bigger than any apartment I'd ever rented) belonged to me, and I could therefore fill it with whatever I wanted. Eli does not have the garbage picking gene, but I think that even he went a little mad those first few years. When we decided to get serious about remodeling...you know, two years ago, the first thing we had to do was sort through our belongings and decide what was worth keeping and what we (okay, I) should never have picked up off of the neighbor's curbsides in the first place. Not surprisingly we found that much of the clutter in our house was actually (gasp) garbage.

And I thought we'd done a pretty tremendous job, so imagine my shock when I found that many of the treasured items that had managed to survive the first three or four cullings were actually very get ridable. In fact, the bulk of our remaining household goods fit into a stack of plastic storage totes that fit very nicely in one half of the living room. See?And actually that's sort of misleading because that garbage bag is full of old blankets that are waiting to be cut up to cushion the smaller and more delicate items.

The problem is, that even though we own no fine china, and that our book collection fits into two medium sized suitcases, several of the items which are left fall squarely into the awkward and difficult to store category. Take for instance the painting in the background of the picture. It's 8 feet tall, and a little over 6 feet wide. Not too heavy, but where the hell are we supposed to store it while we're tearing the house down? We thought about leaving it there, after all what could be more appropriate than a larger than life portrait of Kali the destroyer? Unfortunately I'm rather fond, and the probability of her surviving is slight. Luckily we have sympathetic friends with large basements.

Forgive the blurry picture.

When all was said and done the paintings, and boxes of sculptures made up the bulk of the items that were saved. Post renovation we are going to have a very minimal house, with few pieces of furniture, a bare minimum of dishes and kitchen equipment, but very full walls.

Our worldly possessions, in a friends basement, where they will stay until the house is ready to receive them. This is also rather misleading, since there's a washing machine, a large dresser and several foot lockers in this picture that belong to the basement, and the friend. I will probably try to claim the cut out of Einstein when we move it all back, but he's not ours either.

Reading over what I've just written, I have to in honesty confess that while the number of items mentally labeled "things to go in the house" is very small, the number of items which are mentally labeled "things to go to the studio since they are inherently creative and therefore worth saving" is growing by the minute. While we have donated and or hauled to the scrap yard many items of furniture that are no longer useful to us, I actually had to buy two more sets of library shelves for the studio to accommodate yarn, unspun wool, spinning wheels, and countless other items that got transferred over from the house. So I guess I'm not quite as virtuous as I thought. My inner child is saying "Yeah, but Eli's got the garage crammed full of tools and stuff. That's like my tools and stuff. yeah."

But the important thing is that the house is practically empty, and the weather is finally cooperating.

I was planning a post detailing all of the really awful parts of our house, but when I started thinking of what should go in it, I decided that seeing them all together would be too shocking, so instead I'm going to include them randomly at the end of regular posts. This is the stairway to our basement.

Shudder.

I wonder if tomorrow will be too soon to call the architect?