Complete Chaos

Welcome to our disastrous abode!

This is how we've been living for over a month, now. We're redoing one end of our house... while still living in it. Consequently, about 3/4 of our belongings -- the contents of the library, office, 2 bedrooms, and the attic -- is in the living room and dining room. Alarmed face.

It's pretty alarming.

How much stuff we have!!!!

It's pretty frustrating to live this way; there's no room for some necessary jobs like threshing our oats (that's a basket of harvested but un-threshed oats in the middle of the photo on the right), there's no room to dry the laundry when it's not dry enough outside (and unfortunately the weather has not been cooperating), there's no place to sit and eat dinner together, so we're just eating on the porch until dinner, when it's a bit too wet and chilly, at which point we huddle around the bare corner of our box-covered table, and try not to spill on the living room floor. And things get lost. You put something down, and invariably that means you put it somewhere on the pile of other stuff -- and you will never see it again! Like the hairbrush. That was lost for three days.

So -- just to document for ourselves, and to share with friends and family who might think we're exaggerating a bit... here are some photos.

The view from what normally would be the dining room! All the piles of wood are our dismantled beds, storage unites, shelves, etc. On the right you can see the free corner of the stored dining table with some stacked chairs beside it. In the evening we unstack them (but then it's impossible to get to the other side of the house) in order to eat dinner.

Part of the problem is that this little project has gone on long enough that the stored belongings are now getting waded and dug through, as the kids want to find things they supposedly need. (Bah!!)

But here is the silver lining -- or the plywood lining, I should say! Our attic now is lined with plywood (it used to be just rotting insulation and torn vapour-barrier) and it beginning to have some of the things put back into it! What you see below it is the partially-finished new office, with the lovely french doors going outside, which will now bring some beautiful light into our house from the west!

And here's our bedroom! Same shape and size, but the bed and closet have switched sides, and the rotten/moldy wall and floor have been replaced.

Now some spackle -- and then the fun begins when we we get to decorate it!!