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This isn’t the post that I had planned for today. After dealing with the messed up blog and database situation this morning, I lost my train of thought and decided to just leave the original post for another day. However, today’s excitement suggested another post on a somewhat related theme of chaos and restoring order. Let’s see where this goes….

I consider myself to be a relatively tolerant, relaxed person who can cope with a fairly high degree of chaos without blowing a fuse. Over my lifetime, I guess I’ve had quite a bit of practice at dealing with situations, so I usually take things in stride. Part of my coping strategy has always come down to working off mental turmoil and angst by building things, repairing stuff, or other similar activities. Good friends can probably gauge how much stress I’m dealing with by what I’m doing. The bigger the stress, the bigger the building. You’ll see where this is going in a minute.

The building up at the top of this post was constructed in the mid to late eighties when I was working at quite a horrible job. Yes, this is going to sound kind of insane and out of character, but I used to work in an auto wrecking yard. If you can imagine Chaos on Earth, that’s the place that I worked during those years. It wasn’t a particularly wonderful chapter in my life, but I struggled along. How did I cope? Well, I built the above building. Each day when I came home from my &%#@)*% job, I would mix up a batch or two of mortar cement and put up another small section of cordwood studio building. The act of working with my hands on a project of my own restored order to my life and helped me ignore all of the craziness happening around me.

Fast forward, if you will, to around 1998. My Dad had just been diagnosed with kidney cancer and had to have emergency surgery. It wasn’t a particular happy time for me, as my Dad and I were quite close. In fact, I learned a lot about building and working with tools from my Dad as I was the first kid in the family and grew up watching and helping him build our cottage, renovate our houses, and other similar projects. Anyhow, that summer and autumn, in between trips to the hospital and other related errands, I built the above sun porch onto the back of our house. You can click on it for a larger view — it’s made out of 2 or 3 photos stuck together, so it’s sort of distorted, but it will give you some idea of how it looks from the inside when you’re sitting in it. There are another 3 similar big windows going off to the right, but they aren’t in the photo.

The sun porch project helped me to work off an incredible amount of fury. It seemed better than standing around punching the wall or shaking my fist at the sky. It took me about 2 weeks of spare time to build the porch, and by then, Dad was out of the hospital and recovering at home, and things seemed a little less chaotic — and we now had a new porch on the house.

Now we come to a time that is difficult to describe. After my Dad’s diagnosis for cancer, I learned how to run his small manufacturing business to keep things going during his illness – from which he did not recover. After he died, I kept on going for awhile, doing as he had — drilling and grinding metal, bolting things together. Looking back on that time, I realize that I worked at things as though I was a machine. Again, it was probably my way of creating order out of chaos. But, after awhile, the engine gradually lost its steam as there wasn’t really much need to carry on. I eventually went on to other things, but never with quite the same momentum.

During the years between then and now, I did take on a couple of new projects, but for a long while, I couldn’t seem to rally the same amount of energy I once had. About a year or so after my Dad’s death, I decided to rip the bathroom of our house apart and do it over. Our house is quite small and plain — it was what we could afford back 30 years ago — so it really was a good idea to try to upgrade it a bit. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quite up to the task at the time. I couldn’t seem to put my heart into things quite the way I used to. I tore the room all apart, replaced a small window with a large one, made some other pretty substantial changes (major, actually), but then couldn’t seem to go on. In the midst of it all, I realized I needed to do “something quite else” for awhile, so I took off out to the west to wander around a bit. When I came home, I left things in chaos – in a state of limbo that dragged on and on. Then, one day, I decided to *do something* …. but it was not the thing that one might have expected. Instead of finishing the bathroom, I decided to renovate the kitchen, which was too dark (one small window), and had water damage in the wall below the window (the windows in the house were “not good”). I had found two large sections of birch countertop on sale for a ridiculously reasonable price, so I decided to just tear everything apart, replace the window with one that was much larger, replace the counter tops, install a double sink, and repaint the cupboards. I managed to do all of the deconstruction in a single day – while Don was away at work. I called him late that afternoon with advice to buy a pizza or something for supper if he wanted to eat as I’d torn the kitchen apart (above is a small photo showing how one corner of the the room around the sink looked – click on it for a somewhat larger view).

I have to hand it to Don. He takes things in stride. When he arrived home and saw the incredible mess – for that’s exactly what it was – he didn’t say much, but did ask why I started renovating the kitchen while the bathroom was still torn apart. I had no real explanation except that there seemed to be some bad mojo attached to the whole bathroom project and I just couldn’t pick up and go with it again. He didn’t say much else. He has a lot of faith in me as I’ve built a lot of stuff over the years and the bathroom project was the only blot on my record. However, he was pleased and relieved to find that the kitchen renovation went very quickly. I believe the photo below was taken about 3 days after the horrible little photo up above. In case you’re wondering, the dishwasher is the same as above, but I made a new front for it. At that point, we’d had it almost 30 years as it was a wedding present from my parents. I had repaired, rewired and reglued it enough times that it felt like it was family.

With the kitchen out of the way, after awhile, I felt like I could work on the bathroom project again, and got it finished up quick once I got going. It turned out nice enough.

These aren’t the only projects that happened this way. Our front porch was built after the loss of two much loved dogs in less that 2 months. A year ago last spring, I installed laminate flooring and a big window in our bedroom around the same time that a close friend became very ill. I realize that this may be a rather odd way to cope with things, but it’s my way. Whenever I see an interview with someone who has built something unusual… epic in proportions… maybe a castle out of glass bottles, or a garden that looks more like a park and took years to finish… I have noticed that, many times, that person mentions having done it after the death of someone close, or while dealing with almost intolerable stress. I understand. Boy, do I understand.

Not quite sure what all of the above has to do with the blog being messed up this morning, but something about the look of it reminded me of the photo of the ripped up kitchen. (-:

Bev

Tags: renovation, farm buildings, surviving