I’d like to share with you a secret; 90% of our house looks like this:

In general, we have been coping very well with the chaos. Having running water helps, and sleeping in the car is a nice escape.
However, our newest bringer of joy is the kitchen. It is by no means finished, but it is now a place to BE, to SIT, to COOK, and to LIVE.

If you look closely in Where’s Waldo fashion, you can locate honey and a bagel (READ: FOOD NOW LOCATED IN A DUST-FREE AREA), and a laptop on the clean floor (READ: A FUNCTIONAL PLACE TO PLUG IN A COMPUTER). In fact, I am sitting in this exact spot right now as I type this (and eat the aforementioned honey-raisin bagel). Glory, glory, thank you for this clean spot in the house.
In fact, I can barely even correlate the abovementioned photograph of this seemingly normal kitchen to the memory of what once was.
Let me remind us all of the kitchen when we moved in.


Lots of potential, but lots of decay, too.


And the floors had been eaten away by beetles and had to be replaced from the ground up.


Lots and lots and lots of work later…

…and now we have this pristine corner in which I am currently sitting.

There’s still quite a lot of finishing work left to do in the kitchen (including mountains of original trim to sand-sand-sand-sand-sand and prime-prime-prime-prime and paint-paint-paint), but when I look at these photographs I am amazed at what we have done. (I know that I always write that, but, still, I can’t help but feel it!). We still don’t have a sink or cabinets or a counter or anything, but still, this room makes me grin.
From now on this room will be my destination when I need to huddle into a clean corner and whisper, “Serenity Now” when the chaos deems it necessary.