Home Improvement

The little white house is only the second real house I have lived in. The first was a tiny brown house on Huckleberry Lane in Hampton, New Hampshire where I was born. That house is no longer there. A larger grey house sits there now although I can still see that house in my head there, even though I was only three when we moved out of it. My husband bought the little white house a year before we met each other. He had lived in it for another year by himself before I started visiting regularly, finally moving in after a year of courtship and a year of being engaged. We have been married for five years now and I have lived in the house for six. My name is on the mortgage note, all my stuff is here, but there are still times that it doesn’t feel like it is my house.
The house is small, especially the kitchen, but then two people, a fat cat and a lazy ridgeback don’t need that much room. After two years of planning we are just about to embarque on a journey of destruction and construction. We are going to build on a mudroom, for skis and boots and coats and such. We will move the stairwell, stretch out the kitchen some, rebuild our roof/portico area, reside, and finally, put on a new roof….Wheww!
My hubba has been running around with measuring tape in hand, measuring everything. Once, twice, three times a meeassurre…. Hubba is demolitioning, wiring the electricity, plumbing water and gas pipes, and in general trying hard not freak out. Doing a fair job of that mostly. I try to help with what I can, but I hate being ordered around. The things I want to help with are probably things he doesn’t need help with. For instance he was scraping the old roof tile off the portico roof yesterday. That roof part is pretty small, of maybe 25 feet across and 10 feet back. The roof tiles are old so they came off easily, so he didn’t really need help. But I wanted to climb up the ladder and be on the roof that cold, clear morning. I wanted to see the city under a foggy little cloud, and then turn on the roof and see the mountains poking up through that cloud.
After a five minute tutorial on sweeping and aiming tiles at the garbage can below, ( I never realized that I sweep wrong….) I got to move the old tile across the roof and push them over the edge to the bin with the big push broom. I loved being up there in the frosty air with the juxtaposition of smelling roof tiles, which have the smell of summer rain. Was I of much help? I don’t really know, probably not. But for some reason in the destruction of the roof tiles, the disposal of them, the white house seemed as if it were mine. I am investing my self in the rebuilding of it, and it is becoming mine.