Dreaming of muddy hands

I want our kids, and I want our house. I've wanted to build my own house since I was sixteen. These are my two greatest dreams. I have read and researched and planned and dreamed. I have a green spiral notebook that contains all our house plans and ideas. I have books on cob building, on making natural paints and finishes, on buying land, and other things that are needful to know. Cob is a mixture of clay, sand, straw, and water. It makes buildings that are fireproof (the structure, anyway :P), strong and very earthquake resistant. There are cob buildings in Europe that are centuries old and have been in constant use since they were built. It's very versatile. You can sculpt your building to look however you want, physics willing. You can carve cubby holes, niches, and shelves in your walls. You can build a fireplace with it. You can sculpt benches and arches with it, and you can sculpt decorative elements on your walls. It also makes as good a floor as it does a wall. Best of all, it's cheap to construct and easy to do. It's an incredible building material.

It's continually evolving, but this is our latest house plan:

It needs to be redone again, because I want a sun room/greenhouse on the south side of the house, with a thermal mass wall to soak up the heat in the daytime and release it through the night. But I think the general layout is pretty close to how I want it. I've got a newer sketch that hasn't been scanned in that incorporates a stillroom in the back of the kitchen and partway into where the craft room touches the kitchen wall. That's for my herbs and medicines and the like.

I also have a bunch of those paint sample cards from Lowe's, each one marked for the room it might go in. White in the craft room, sage for the stillroom, yellow for the kitchen, steel blue for a son's room, deep purple for a daughter's room, warm, dark orange for the living room... Everything might change a thousand times before we build, but that's okay. Each revision is an improvement, a step forward.

I also want to construct a prayer room away from the house, just for me. Big glass windows, gauzy drapes, a small cob bookshelf, an altar and a kneeling cushion. A bench with lots of pillows and cushions, and candleholders built into the wall. A poem carved into the wall behind the altar. It'll be my private, quiet space of meditation. 

Cob takes time to build, if you're doing it alone, or with just a few people. You can throw up a poorly constructed house with cheap wood and drywall in a few weeks, but you get what you put into it. While we're building our house, we'll be living close to the building site in a yurt.

Of course, the inside of these ones are much nicer than we will be able to afford, but the yurt itself, depending on the size we get, will probably be somewhere between $5,000 and $7,000. About the price of a nice used car. For however long we need we will have that yurt to live in, and after the house is completed and we move into it, we can either sell it or set it up as a guest house. I'd like to set it up as a guest house, but it depends on how much money we have left after construction. We might need the few thousand dollars selling it would bring, or we might be okay. It's really hard to know at this point.

All of this is several years in the future.. We have to save up money to buy our land, build our house, and furnish it, and money to live off of while we build, because it will be a full-time job. Garret wants to go to cooking school, and I want to take some classes to further my various interests and skills.

Sometimes I wistfully wish for a windfall of money to come our way, or something, but I wouldn't really want to skip straight to the finish, you know? I don't want it to take too long, but skipping the journey altogether would be wrong. There's so much growing to be done along the way. Building our anticipation, our sense of accomplishment, all the learning and the wisdom to be gained. I sure wouldn't mind if my business took off and made me buttloads of money and got us there sooner than we hoped, though. ;)

I want this so much. I see myself there all the time. I dream about sunlight streaming through the windows, laying in bed with Garret, baking bread and making cheese in our kitchen, sculpting details in the children's rooms.. I see us teaching our babies to walk, watching them do their homework at the kitchen table, playing in the living room. I see myself rocking our child back and forth, singing him or her to sleep. I see winter nights warmed by the glow of the fireplace, my family all gathered together. And I see us building it, having mud fights with Garret, fitting the foundation stones in place and building up the walls, smoothing the floors and painting the walls. I see myself planting the garden, and watching our children running through it. I hear laughter and imagine hugs. I want to hear those four little words: "I love you, mama." I want to kiss their boo-boos and read stories to them and rock them to sleep and kiss their foreheads.

We plan on getting married right after we complete the foundation of our home, and we want to get married right on our land. I've got this lovely dream in my head. I know the dress I want:

by isadoraclothing on Etsy.com

and the ring (but in rose gold):

by bandscapes on Etsy.com

and the necklace:

Which I already own :)

and a lot of other things... *blush* There will be a handtying and a hearth blessing ritual (I really wanna do a post about that by itself), I want the guests to camp out, the food will be simple cookout fare, and there will be music and dancing and glass jar lanterns hanging from the trees. The timing is symbolic; as we finish the foundation of our home, we create the foundation of our married life, all our hopes and dreams. It is the beginning of a lot of things very dear and special to us.

And I know all of this is possible. It will take time, determination, fortitude, and planning. But we can do it, and we will. Mine is a simple dream, of hearth and home and husband. Of family and creativity and happiness. We can make this ours. Steadily, we move forward. We'll take baby steps, work hard, and strive for patience. With fire in our souls, hope in our hearts, and love on our lips, we will walk toward this new dawn and bask in the light of the sun.