October, already?

On the 19th, we will have lived here for six months. A half a year has gone by. 

It's a beautiful fall here in Flagstaff. The leaves are changing, the days are getting cool and the nights are getting cold. Tim ran 14 miles up a mountain yesterday and found snow on the peaks. 

We aren't quite there on the house yet. Seems there are always delays in construction, especially when you're a three man crew with a five year old helper. 

We added some details that ate up a day, but will be very worth it once we're done! 

Texture went on yesterday, today we prime and paint. Once the flooring and trim go in, we can move in, although there will still be work to do. I know I've said it before, but we should be moving in mid next week. It really depends on the wood stoves arrival; without them it will be too chilly, and the trailer, although cramped, has heat. Next weekend is going to be cold and rainy, I'm hoping I can spend it cozily, unpacking some things and making my tiny house feel like home. 

Tiny house progress.

Sorry I haven't posted in a while. To be honest, I've been pretty depressed and just haven't had much to give after the house and family and what have you. Homesteading is rewarding, but it's also really really fucking hard, and I let the hard get too much into my head. I'm feeling a little better here recently, though, so. You know. Onward. 

The house is cranking right along. I spent a week stuffing insulation, and I would be so very happy to never have to see the stuff again. 

I still have to crawl under the house and shop and insulate the floors, but I'm trying not to think about that right now. I'm claustrophobic, so it's going to be pretty awful. 

The last sheet rock peices went up day before yesterday. 

We (and by we I mean Tim and Rob) are hard at work filling holes and taping and floating the seams. Spraying texture will be a snap compared to this! Then paint and floors and cabinets and we are move in ready, you guys! We're so close! I'm hoping for mid next week, but we'll see. 

I honestly thought that one of the things I'd be most excited about when moving out of the trailer would be getting a lot of my things back, my creature comforts. Now as the move in day approaches, I'm realizing that I'm actually excited to get into the storage unit and get rid of a lot of stuff, not bring it home. I can't wait to get rid of everything I don't love, that I don't use, that I only have for sentimental reasons. I want to be surrounded by only useful, beautiful, meaningful things. 

Well, useful, beautiful, meaningful things, and at least some of my pretty clothes, because I may be a homesteader now, but I'm still a woman, you know! I will find reasons to wear high heels again, I will. Eventually. 

Construction, even on tiny houses, generates a lot of trash. So much trash. 

It's making me crazy. I can't wait till it's all gone and the land is clean. It feels like the land is suffocating under it all as much as I am. It's not peaceful. It's so much background noise, and I can shut it out. Once we get the cabinets in, that'll be the last of the trash and we'll haul it all away and Serenity Valley and I will both breathe a huge sigh of relief. 

Wanderlust and illness

I don't know what it is about Arizona. Something in the mountain air, I guess, has me aching to explore, to wander, to hike new trails till my feet ache and then cool them in new rivers. I want to learn the songs the trees sing in different forests. 

      Aspens and ferns on Kachina Trail

At the same time, I'm feeling so rooted and at home here in my woods. It's still surreal, that I get to live here, that I get to raise my son among the Ponderosas in the shadow of the San Francisco peaks. How did we manage to pull this off?!  It feels like a dream. It's too beautiful to be real. 

Sunday driving back roads on a Saturday. 

I wonder when the wonder will wear off. When will we start to curse what passes for traffic here, instead of laughing at the absurdity of the contrast to the gridlock of rush hour gridlock in Austin? When will I drive through town without my breath catching in my throat at the sight of the mountains? Will I stop hearing the pines sighing in the breeze? Will I stop stopping to close my eyes and feel that same breeze on my cheek? 

         Horned lizards are everywhere. 

I'm not feeling well today. I've spent the entire day lying in bed listening to the rain, alternating sleeping and feeling sorry for myself. I don't know if I'm coming down with an actual illness or if my body is just worn down from the exhaustion of suddenly working really long really hard days building things, doing my best to run a construction site 1200 miles away, raising a child who came back from a week and a half at Grandmas farm an absolute monster, and trying to run a household from the dirt. It's a lot to handle, and as usual I'm not taking very good care of myself. Hopefully a day of rest and chicken soup will be enough to recharge my batteries, because as it turns out, life doesn't just stop because I feel crappy. 

Onward! And hopefully upward, to an upright position. 

Home sweet homestead

I woke up a few times in the night, restless and a bit irritable, and then I looked out my windows at the moonlight filtering through the trees that stretch till the eye can't distinguish seperate trunks anymore even on the brightest nights. "It's okay, I'm home now", I thought to myself, and settled back into bed with a smile on my face and contentment in my heart.

Rob and I spent a long weekend in Texas this past weekend, and other than a few shining wonderful moments spent with family and friends, it was an incredibly jarring, uncomfortable and often depressing trip. It's weird to be in a place that was home for so long and feel no connection to it at all. It really reinforced to both of us, though, that the move was the right choice. 

Now we're back and hard at work! We've got all four structures floor framed, joists hung, cross bracing in, and sheathing down. It turns out that I am, much to everyone's surprise, quite handy with a chop saw and framing nailer. I did very nearly shoot Rob in the stomach today with said nailer, though. 

Rob heads back to Texas on Friday for his brothers wedding and to pick up the boy from Grandma and Grandpas, so we're holding off on wall framing till Monday. It's really happening, though, and for all my aching muscles I couldn't be happier. We're literally building the lives we've always dreamed of, from the ground up, with the people we love the most. Who could ever want more than that? 

Broken concrete mixers and new friends

I have somehow slipped into being completely slovenly. Every dish is dirty (and in the yard, mind you), but I don't feel like washing them so I'm going to post instead. 

The saga of the access continues. It's now settled as to who owns the road (it's BNSF), now I'm just trying to get them to let me use the damn thing. I have the distinct and uncomfortable feeling that I'll be fighting this fight for a while yet. 

In the meantime, without access we can't permit and without permits we can't build. There are three adults, two dogs, and a boy, all living in a small travel trailer. That is not going to last long before someone snaps. So, after some careful reading of codes and zoning laws and some serious thinking outside the box, we've started construction on four tiny structures. 

Photos by Brooke Biette, who is the best. 

Two tiny houses with lofts, a bath house, and a hand tool shop. 

Rob, who is thankfully a badass with heavy machinery, scraped the sites and dug the piers with a rented bobcat tractor. We foolishly assumed that form tubes would be easy to get, which led to a day's scrambling to every hardware store in town buying a hodge podge of sizes just to have enough! The first concrete mixer... well, let's just say it met with an accident and lost some gear teeth. The second one just sort of stopped working. The third FINALLY worked, and after two days the three of us successfully poured 26 piers without killing each other. 

Meanwhile, I've been having my heart charmed right out of my chest by this tiny amazing person named Brooke who I met on Instagram, of all ridiculous places.  I'm so glad for her sake that we're not insane serial murderers, because this fearless little woman drove several hours to come camp three nights here after only a few weeks of knowing me and never having met me in person. The poor guys, it was just incessant chatter the entire time, and now I am deeply in friend love and she's stuck with me for life. (For LIFE, Brooke!) Some people just... Fit. 

This afternoon, on to floor framing! 

Half memories and heat.

Last week or thereabouts, we went to Anorexic  roof to meet some friends. One guy told me it was nice to see me again, and I don't think much appreciated my blank stare. No memory of him at all (sorry, Tyler!). That led, as it usually does, to explaining about my brain injury and a lot of "I'm sorry"s (I really am sorry). See, our summers here fall squarely into the period of years that disappeared from my memory after the last concussion. There's so much of life and living that fell away into the black period...

                     Prairie Smoke

A few days ago, we drove around through Mountainaire to climb at Mars Roof, and as soon as we parked I was overwhelmed with frustration and irritation and anger. I don't think I could've picked the spot out in a photo line up, because it's almost entirely in the afore mentioned black period. But I still could feel that I hated it there. I'm not sure why. I do know that despite my best efforts to shake it off, those abstract emotions ruined it there for me that day. 

                   Stevie on The Girl

The half memories are the greatest struggle for me here, at the end of the day. I find myself being angry for absolutely no reason, hating everything, and I know it's residual resentment from that hard second summer when I was alone all the time in the dusty meadows with a very unhappy toddler while Tim was out climbing and doing his best to enjoy his time despite my best efforts to make him as miserable as I was. I don't remember much of it, but I wrote some that summer in a private journal, and I recognize how I'm feeling now in those entries. It's hard to snap myself out of it. It doesn't feel like memories, it feels like now and it's taking a lot out of me to get the better of it. It's a constant battle between the present me and the barely remembered me.

It's getting better. One day at a time. I'm trying not to be too hard on myself. Brain injuries aren't easy. 

In other news, it's getting pretty hot during the day. Havoc is in a growth spurt and has taken to napping after lunch, and I join him because, hot. The nights are clear and crisp and absolutely lovely, though, we open all the windows and the breeze drifts through the trailer and it's cool and cozy under the blanket. 

In less important news, I dyed my hair pink and I'm loving it. 

 Because if you can't be punk rock when you're living in the woods, what's the point of anything? Right? Right.

Yesterday was the Solstice. Happy summer! It's all downhill from here, y'all.

Access or bust

The biggest, most important, and thus far most obscenely difficult and frustrating project I've had since we moved is obtaining access to the land. As I think I've mentioned before, the biggest reason we were able to get so much land for so little money was the fact that there is no legal access, as in no roads leading to it that we're legally allowed to travel year round. There are two roads, however, that do lead here. One is a forest road that travels in and out of City of Flagstaff open space, in which the road is closed to all motorized vehicles. The other is a forest road that was closed to the public last year, because it gets frighteningly close to the rail road tracks for a section. I spent a good bit of time working with the city to figure out if there was a loophole in the paperwork that would allow us to drive through the open space (many thanks to DM at the city, he's a super nice guy and worked really hard to help me), to no avail. So I set my sights on the front road. Bah.

       Havoc loves to swing on the gate.

Turns out, neither the forest service nor the rail want to claim this road. That led to weeks of back and forth between myself and the entities, before the forest (thanks Judy!) found a document going all the way back to 1875 showing that the rail owns the road. Well, most of it. All of it but a few dozen yards, which the forest owns. So, I have to get a lease from the rail for the part they own, and then a permit from the forest for the part they own. Oh, and create a HOA to hold both the lease and the permits. OH, and join an existing HOA so I can use the road to get to the road in question. 

             Dinoland, because Havoc.

Here's the real kicker, kids. Until all this paperwork gets filed and all the hoops have been jumped through, I can't get building permits issued. Without building permits issued, I can't get power to the land. At this point, it's a near certainty that none of this will be done before fall, and likely not until winter. Which means no houses until spring. So... It's gonna be a cold winter.

Send firewood. And whiskey.

       Monument Plant, because pretty.