8/5/2007

For the past eighteen years, we've lived in the same 150-year-old farmhouse, a nice rambling old house and the first we've ever owned. It was pretty much a dump when we bought it, though I was too blinded by the romance of it to see that, and didn't understand my practical husband's objections when he thought it would be too much work to fix up. I figured we'd paint it and it would be as good as new. Naive me. Many tens of thousands of dollars later, spent on new foundations, septic tanks and fields, insulation, sheetrock and other unglamorous items, I do understand, and I will never buy an old house again. But. This is now a comfortable, attractive old house, transformed by our love and care. Over the time we've lived  here we've planted perennial beds, apple trees, pine trees, all of which are now huge. I love the house. Our friends and family have stood around our kitchen, eaten at our table, slept in our beds. We brought our infant son home to this house when we adopted him at two weeks. My beautiful mother, terminally ill, sat in the rocker in our kitchen, her eyes the same blue as the kitchen walls (coincidental?)

Okay, you've got the picture. I'm attached to the house. And yet, and yet...we are outgrowing it. Japanese stencil dyeing takes an enormous amount of space: space for pasting, for dyeing, for sewing, for stored dyes, fabrics, and inventory.  I work mostly in the kitchen, but fabric gets laid our all over the dining room, table and floor, and in our sunporch, too. It stays there for days. I soak my huge stencils in our tub upstairs:  the family often has to beg me to remove them so they can take showers. Stencils dry next to our bed and are stored under our bed. I have a section of a downstairs room that is sort of a workroom - racks of dyed shirts hang from the ceiling over the sewing machine. More fabric and dyed clothing is stored upstairs in my husband's "office" - did I mention that he works at home, too? - and my dyes and equipment are all over the laundry room. And that's just me. My 13-year-old son, whose room is aproximately 8 x 8 feet, has four guitars now - one acoustic, two electric, and one bass. And 2 amps.  

Over the past year or two we've toyed with the idea of renovating our barn - a nice old structure, but It would take well over $100,000  to lift it, pour a foundation, replace rotting posts, insulate it, provide electricity, water,  etc - we had two estimates done last year. A few months ago, when I broached the topic again of fixing up the barn, my husband planted a seed. "Why not," he said, "look for a place that already has room for a studio?"  The line I've been maintaining is that I don't want to leave here. But, since my husband said that, almost against my will, a creeping flexibility entered my head.  I started combing the classifieds, occasionally finding something with some appeal but never anything that seemed just right. Until this past weekend.