A Weekend of Solitude!

A few weeks ago I had one of those weeks.   Everyone cancelled on me.  You think I'm exaggerating but I'm not.  Literally every single one of my plans every day all week got cancelled.   And not by me.   So on Thursday night when Rod came home and told me he was heading to the lake alone that night to help his brother take out the boat the next day I'd had enough.   I got mad, frustrated, annoyed.  All the feelings.

I had literally had the lake written on our calendar for that weekend for two months.  It had been a while since we'd been there to check on my baby, yes our lake cottage is my 6th baby-my 3 girls, then my 2 dogs, then our cottage.  I wanted to just check in as we'd had a few renters this fall and being me I had bags of things to bring up and lots of little to do projects I just wanted done up there.   The weekend had already been cut short by Rod and H needing to come home for a hockey game Saturday at 4:00 (why oh why are sports ALWAYS smack dab in the middle of weekends?!)  I had expressed to Rod that I didn't want to drive up separately since it was only for one day and the girls didn't really want to go anyway.   Spring and fall are not as fun for the kids.   It usually means work weekends or quiet weekends at the lake as there is no swimming or boating or skiing and skating.  Rod and I love those kinds of weekends but the kids not so much.   He left Thursday and I'd come to terms with the fact that the girls and I were staying home.   But I was cranky about it all day Friday, really cranky.

I was the only one that had even wanted to go to the lake and then my plans all got turned upside down because my husband doesn't plan ahead.   He's a last minute guy and I'm a planner and it is probably the thing that drives us craziest about each other!  So I was working out Friday afternoon and sulking about not being able to go to the lake when I realized I could go, by myself, for 3 nights!  And better yet I didn't need to come home till Monday in time to pick up the kids from school.   I could not have been happier to have decided on this!  All my plans had been cancelled that week and I was suddenly so happy to be heading to the lake for more alone time!   Three days and nights of it!!    I happily packed up a bag, grabbed a few groceries from the fridge and a pumpkin spice latte with coconut milk from Starbucks and I hit the road. I didn't even bring the dogs!

Most people don't like to spend time alone.  I'm an extroverted introvert.   Or maybe it's vice versa.  I enjoy solitude.  I enjoy time alone walking in the woods listening to my own inner voice.  I enjoy planning and having nothing get in the way of my plans.   I enjoy quiet.   And I definitely enjoy time to do projects.   When plans with friends that week get cancelled I was starting to get cranky though and I was feeling a little whoa is me that week.   Funny how planned solitude feels very different than forced solitude.   And a lot less lonely!  I found this quote and it reigns true to me.  "There is a difference between loneliness and solitude, one will empty you and one will fill you.  You have the power to choose."

As I was driving to the lake I decided that I wanted to read a book, do yoga, watch movies, maybe work on a puzzle a little bit and get a few projects checked off my to do list.   I stopped at Target in Keene for a new book, a purple yoga mat and a few groceries for my minimalist meals I'd planned for myself for the weekend.

The trees were turning into beautiful shades of red orange and yellow, the sky was bright blue, it was a crisp fall afternoon and I was looking forward to my weekend ahead!  I got to the lake just before dark and unloaded the car like a mule.  With 36 steps between the car and the cottage I tend to try to take all the bags down in one fell swoop.   I made myself shrimp and pepper quesadillas and settled in with a glass of wine to unpack and watch a movie.

Saturday I woke up and drank my coffee while just watching the world go by.  I can stare out at the lake for hours.  We tend to entertain a lot at the lake so I don't always take the opportunity to do just that.   There is something so peaceful to me about woods and water.  It is truly my happy place.  After coffee I ended up doing projects most of the day Saturday.   Reorganizing shelves in the living room, bathroom and totally rehabbing the kitchen.  Literally moved everything around.   Since we bought the house furnished we had kept things the way the previous owners had organized it.  I suddenly decided it didn't work for our family.  Plus we had far too many things in this small kitchen, some we had literally never used in the 4 years we've owned the cottage.   Time for the excess to go and make room for more space!  With renters using our cottage we often come back to disorganized cabinets.   The less I have to reorganize the better.   I don't mind.  It's kind of like a treasure hunt for me to figure out what is out of place and put it back where it belongs.   I'm a little type A.   I did some laundry and cleaned a bit too.  When I realized it was getting near the end of the day I turned on my new reading light and started the fire and began my new book.  I realized I hadn't even fit in any relaxing yet! I read till dinner where I cooked up some beef we had in the freezer and made myself a hamburger nourish bowl with rice, kale, tomatoes and hamburger.   I settled in for a night of watching tv and flipping through magazines.  My happy place!

Sunday I vowed to relax first.  I did yoga and read my book until I finished it.  Then I tackled the owners closet.  When you have a space to store stuff you tend to keep too much.  I cleared everything out of the tiny closet (Rod doesn't fit in here so organizing this space always falls to me).   I was feeling a bit claustrophobic but quite accomplished.   The stuff that filled that closet

literally filled our entire bathroom.  And that bathroom is huge compared to any other bathroom we have.  The kids tend to hang out in there with their friends after skating and when cold because there is a heat lamp in there.  They call it our sauna room.  We have surely fit 9 kids in there.  Probably more!  I cleared out blankets, towels we had kept, just in case, and all the projects we had thought we might do when we first got the cottage...a lot of the stuff could be donated or moved to the barn and did not need to be kept in this tiny very inaccessible closet in our house.   It felt so good to clear out 2 large trash bags of donations and several large boxes of things to donate or move elsewhere.   I didn't take any pictures because after I had unloaded everything from the owners closet into the bathroom I realized I was trapped in there without my phone until my job was done.  I was very motivated to get it done!   Over the course of the weekend I also kept a list of things we needed around the cottage and headed to Walmart to pick up some of the larger items that are harder to pack in the car with all of us, our luggage, our cooler and our dogs like paper towels, toilet paper, etc.   I even got the dogs adorable new Halloween hats while I was out.   Can't beat Walmart's price of 1.98 per hat!



I got back before dark and whipped up another solo dinner.   I thought to myself at no time that weekend did I feel lonely.   Just productive, content and like I was just where I needed to be.  Sometimes if the timing works out it is not selfish to take some time for yourself but necessary.   I always feel like I put everyone else's needs and to do's first and this weekend I put myself first.  I came back refreshed, happy and feeling accomplished.  After a weekend of solitude I also felt a lot less lonely.  And I got to go check in on my baby.   It was just what Duckhead and I needed.   A little fall refresh!

Outdoor Living

One of the many reasons we moved up the street to this "new" house 14 years ago was because we loved the size of the yard.   Our first house had a huge front yard that was really unusable and a tiny back yard that we would cram all our friends and family into for back yard parties.   We even had to buy the smallest play structure available at the time from Rainbow to fit the small footprint of our back yard.  This house has a huge square yard with the house situated closer to the road and the driveway/neighbors yard/plot line which meant this house had a huge side yard and a back yard that was just as big.   At the time the back yard was overgrown and unusable but we could see from our survey that it had lots of potential.

The first thing we did when we moved in was add a fence.   Being so close to a busy road the most important thing to us was that our children were safely inside our yard.  I think we put the fence in within two weeks of moving in.

Here are a few before and after photos.  It's fun to see how much of a stamp we've put on this house.  While we've kept the same color of the house for all these years we may have to change it soon as it's starting to fade in some spots.  It is currently BM Gloucester Sage.  People literally stop and ring our doorbell to find out the color of our house.    While we love the color our feeling is that if you're going to pay all that money to have the house painted you might as well be able to tell!  We're thinking gray.   We fix up our house for ourselves first, for curb appeal second, and to create outdoor living spaces that our family enjoys using.

Front of house Before

Front of house After

While these pictures don't look all that different except that one is at night and one is during the day there were quite a few changes that have happened over the years    We had both chimneys removed down to the roofline and completely rebuilt.   We took down everything on the front porch except for the roof and Rod rebuilt it with new footings, new decking and new columns.    We tore out the old overgrown front gardens except for the most beautiful rhododendron on the right hand side and planted new period specific gardens that won't hide the porch as much.  (We did this before we fixed the porch-note to others wanting to undergo a similar project- fix the porch and then the gardens!!) We jackhammered out the old concrete walkway and rebuilt it ourselves with bricks in a herring bone pattern. We had the side steps rebuilt and added our own stone walkway to them.  We added a new mailbox and granite post.  Since we've owned the house the front doors went from black, to a cranberry color to the current purple color.  A lot of pictures get taken in front of those doors.  Back to school every September, Halloween pictures, prom, and dance photos and just our girls own photoshoots.   I guess our double front purple doors are 214's own "social media moment".   We love several things about our front porch:  that it is a covered front porch, the robins love it and nest here several times a season, we have a porch swing, the windows go basically floor to ceiling in the front of the house so our dogs can watch us come and go, and of course our purple doors with that beautiful antique glass.  

Our side yard was really our only yard when we first moved in.   Our back yard was very small and very overgrown.  In order to access the yard we had to either go out the front door or out the garage door, into the garage and out another door into the back yard.   Not ideal with two small children and another one on the way.  When we did the kitchen renovation we quickly rectified this issue with back doors off the kitchen.  At a later date we also did a side porch project that involved taking the old side closed screened porch and making it into an open side porch similar to our front porch and thus adding a door from our living room out onto the porch and into the yard.  We had this gorgeous 200 year old or older twisted maple in our side yard that really made the yard.  It was a giant shade tree on sunny days, and a huge umbrella on rainy days.  We could stay outside in the rain for hours under that tree without even getting wet.  It was our tire swing tree and the site of many fun family pictures and memories.  Over the years we lost branches in microbursts and in other stormy weather.   One morning our youngest daughter heard a huge boom and looked out into the yard to see this massive branch filling our yard.    We already lost sleep on windy nights with her hovering over our house.   If she was losing massive branches at 7:00 in the morning without any wind we knew it was time for this old beauty to come down.  We love our side porch for hanging out with coffee and the paper and to sip wine on sunny nights when we want a little shade.   The side yard is massive and was the perfect place for our yearly skating rink each winter.   This past year we realized how well it fit a 20 by 40 tent for our daughter's graduation party with room to spare for outdoor games.  

Side porch Before

Side Porch After

 

Yard before above with tree with massive branch down and
after without it.  It feels like a completely different yard! 

Skating rink turned swimming pool come spring.  

When we added our kitchen addition we basically filled in the hole that was in the back of our house between our living room and garage.  This allowed us to have a much bigger kitchen, easier access to our living room and two doors out to our back yard.   We put in long back steps to access the back yard and when we realized how hard it was to grow grass back there in the shade with constant use we added a patio.  And then expanded it.   Then we added a hot tub and a had our friend that is a mason build us a sitting wall for our existing patio.   Rome wasn't built in a day and neither was our back yard.     We also added a crushed stone and rock path where the dogs constantly ran and wrecked the grass that connected our extended patio to our side porch.  We tore out tons and tons of forsythia and cleared out a bunch of small trees to regain our backyard which had become very overgrown.  We gained space for a tree house (which since came down in a hurricane), our swing set and used playground mulch to keep the weeds and grass at bay underneath it.  We also added another garden.  We have since taken out a few more trees and added a raised bed in our playground area.  Our kids have outgrown the play structure so we added swing seats to it and will eventually take it down and hope to make that part of our yard into a raised bed garden area.   We also got a trampoline (every spring I buy something to add to the yard to get the kids outside and playing again....anything to keep kids young and playing!)  And the hot tub was a great addition with teens and preteens.  It has been worth every penny for the amount of time we spend in it.  We use it constantly for family time and the girls host team parties and birthday parties year round with a hot tub theme! We've even been known to be out there in a blizzard!   And we got string lights and hung them above the patio to enjoy year round.   We love them in the snow and the last picture is from Halloween night.

Back of the house Before

Back of house After (in middle of 2nd patio project)

Gardens: For some reason in the over 200 years that this house had been lived in there had never been a gardener that lived here.   We basically started from scratch with donations of trees and perennials from friends and family and a few plants we moved from our old house.  I love gardening and getting my hands dirty and Rod's been known to dig up free bushes in the middle of the night (although he says never again it has happened quite a few times).  Thank you Rod!  And I love the benefits I reap from all this work. Fresh flowers from trees, bushes and gardens that get us from early spring till late fall.  Dried flowers for winter and I even have evergreens to fill my winter planters and window boxes.   I've been known to make my own boxwood wreaths from bushes we planted in the yard as well.  These gardens have truly been the gifts that keep on giving.   My advise to anyone moving into a new house is to plant flowering bushes and perennials early on.  The sooner you do it the more years of flowers you have in your future!  

The garage before:  We had the same exact car but this was the previous owners car in the garage.  A friend had heard we were moving and had seen "our" car in the driveway and wondered why we would ever sell a house that was so "us".  Turns out we were moving to that house!    We realized during the kitchen addition when the garage was closed off to us that if we didn't use the garage in the winter with 3 kids under the age of 5 that we didn't really need it.  We used it for a few years but eventually turned it into a game room complete with air hockey table, darts and sometimes a popcorn maker.   (Which was a big hit at Kelsey's graduation party!)  

Garage Before with their car

Garage now as game room decorated for Halloween