Here I Am: Everything but the Kitchen Sink . . .

. . . is what we still have to buy for Our Orcas Home. It's true--we don't have to buy everything we're going to be putting into our island idyll forever home, but this sink--this gorgeous, hand-made copper farmhouse sink that we stumbled upon for a screaming deal at Handcrafted Metal--is the first purchase we've made EXCLUSIVELY for our dream home.

It was terribly exciting to complete this purchase at 11:00pm on a recent Saturday, after a long, monsoony-freeway day of visiting showrooms and ordering fireplaces and looking at window options and hardwoods and being generally overwhelmed by all the decisions we still have to make in the next 18 months or so. It took us a couple minutes, late at night, to realize what we'd done after hitting "pay now", and then we both squealed and bounced like little kids. But boy oh boy, there is still a lot of work to do before we can fall into our blessedly comfortable bed and bask in our quiet view out over West Sound, Shaw, and the Olympic Mountains. I'm sure the view will be visible in daylight when we finally hit our pillows, because I'm planning to put the bed together first and fall into in, profoundly knackered, the moment the movers have shut the front door behind themselves.

I was telling a cousin recently that for the upcoming year-and-some-months, I am working, essentially, 2 1/2 full-time jobs--not including standard day-to-day living and housewifery. I have my ongoing cancer job, which is at a relatively low ebb right now as far as needing my attention, although it does have the effect of tiring me out before I'd like it to. I also have the virtually full-time job of readying our current house for sale early in 2015, plus the virtually full-time job of building a house from scratch on an island (plus I've managed to wedge in 5 weeks of travel in Lusophone countries between now and mid-September) .

We do have a builder/general contractor for Orcas, but I am the main point person for him and all other members of the team not associated directly with putting in nails or pouring cement--the architect, the permit coordinator, and various sales people for various items: floors, windows and doors, fixtures, septic water paintcolors hardwaretilegroutknobsetc. It's difficult to represent in writing the maelstrom of details whirling through my mind.

But, now we have a drain around which those details can circle and flow away as we complete them; a figurative knob to twist to bring our project into focus; a center from which to observe the scattered elements settling into place.

After all, the kitchen sink really IS the most important fixture in a home.

We love ours!