We fell in love with the location

We fell in love with the location, the water views, the potential of restoring an old house to a charm and glory it may not have ever seen before. We fell in love, and now we’re here, and in my romanticizing, I hadn’t thought about practical matters like storage, or furniture arrangements, or what to do with all your stuff when you are moving to a house just over half the size. Of course we have had construction creep. We started by pulling off one row of cabinets in the kitchen, and tiling the wall with subway tile. I had a vision of open shelves, our white plates and bowls piled high. My husband went away, and said, don’t do anything else, Jane. Let’s just move in and live with it for a while. I kept looking at the newly-tiled wall, how fantastic it looked, how it immediately updated the somewhat dated kitchen, and made the rest of the kitchen look even worse by comparison; it seemed obvious to keep going. More cabinets came off. More tiles were bought. One wall has turned into an entire kitchen. Bookshelves have been swiftly built, but not nearly enough. Boxes and boxes of books, and decorative accessories, and stuff, are piled up, with nowhere to go. There are swarms of people helping, and I keep walking round and round, looking at the boxes, desperate to unpack, but I can’t until the shelves are painted. Patience has never been my strong point. Half our furniture is missing, off to be re-upholstered in beachy blues and whites, and the living room is filled with disparate furniture that doesn’t belong. Every time I have moved in the past, the house has looked like a home within two days. This one will take a while longer, and the magnitude of what we have to do is so overwhelming, I am slightly paralyzed. Thank God for waking up every morning to the gorgeous views, to the fact that as I sit here now, at my desk, in my office, I am glancing out the window to see the sun glinting off Long Island Sound. It makes me happy to be here, willing to look beyond the chaos to the calm. Look out for before and after photos of the kitchen, coming as soon as I have unpacked. Grateful for all of it. So grateful.