Well, well, well, it’s been quite a while since I’ve written. As it turns out…uprooting your entire life during a global pandemic and moving your studio halfway across the country isn’t a great recipe for consistency.
2020 has been quite the rollercoaster. I’m sure that statement won’t shock any readers…it’s been that way for just about everyone. When COVID really hit the US, we were in Breckenridge, Colorado, where we spend every winter. Flights were grounded, the town was shut down, and there we were, sitting in place for months…just waiting and watching. We were under contract for a lovely house with an attached studio, and had to walk away from it due to the financial uncertainty that COVID threatened. It was a hard time, being far from family and friends, far from my studio, in an empty town, with the endless news cycle and feeling of impending doom keeping us up at night.
Three weeks later, our real estate agent called and we were back in the game. A little one bedroom cabin, three miles from town, nestled on 3 1/2 acres of woods on a mountaintop had just come on the market…and no one could go look at it because of COVID. She did a video walkthrough with us, we put an offer in, and before we knew it we were the proud owners of a Breckenridge cabin (immediately dubbed “The Spruce House”).
That was the easy part. There was still a 3 bedroom house in Philadelphia where we had lived for almost 10 years. We left it in January with no intention of packing up and moving. Arriving back to the East Coast in June, we had a few panic attacks and then dove into the unbelievably daunting task of packing up a life, two businesses, and somehow getting it all safely across the country.
Let’s fast forward a little…through the staging of the house (ugh), the 25 showings in 3 days (yay), the anxious waiting for inspection to go smoothly (ugh), the months of delicate negotiation with the buyers (ugh), tears shed at the drop of a hat, a 30 year flood that brought water into the basement for the first time ever….emptying out closets, shelves, and a storage unit, shipping my beloved jeep off on a truck, packing everything into two storage cubes, watching them leave with everything we owned, more tears, champagne on the last night, and finally, finally, saying good bye and locking the door.
The day we left to head back to Colorado was bittersweet, but by the time we hit the highway, I could have screamed with relief. Maybe I did, come to think of it.
That timeline puts us back here, at The Spruce House, September 1st, in the middle of a construction site. Work that was supposed to start in mid-July had just begun. No bathroom, no laundry, no stove…floors sticky with glue after they ripped up the cheap vinyl flooring…it’s rough. Not great for an artist anxious to get back to work in time for the Christmas rush.
We’ve been living in our RV in the driveway for 2 months now. Sometimes I get a day where there are no workers, and I go inside to design pieces for future finishing. Some days it’s constant construction management and there are tears over endless frustrations. My studio is packed in a storage cube in Denver, waiting for a day when there won’t be a giant trench running the length of the garage (my future shop). Every day, the temperatures creep closer to winter, when the snow will pile 20 feet high on either side of our little dirt road.
Just like the rest of the world, there isn’t much to do but wait…wait for 2020 to end, wait for the tide of this pandemic to turn…wait for our home to be finished. Until then, I’ll be dreaming up ideas, writing them on scraps of paper, and using my creative energy for photography, writing, cooking, and planning. The most important thing is to keep on making, whatever that looks like day to day.
