5. The Balance + DIY Kitchen Cabinet Refacing
In the fable “The Tortoise and the Hare”, the moral of the story is “Slow and steady wins the race…” and farming’s rhythm can absolutely be comparable: the winter months are spent planning and in later winter/early spring, seeds are ordered and started; come true spring, the hare begins to take hold as there are so many things to get done, and only so many daylight hours until summer, when, with the beds prepped and planted, we begin the new work of maintaining, then harvesting, cleaning, packaging, and selling, then replanting the harvested beds, and so on, until it’s late fall, and the market slows, giving growers time to reflect on what worked and what didn’t, ostensibly beginning the entire planning to planting process all over again.
Whew!
Here’s the problem, though: with most things, I am no tortoise.
I am a hare without a care, bouncing around, nibbling on all the things, all at once. A steady, sustained effort on one thing feels like it’s a skill I need to hone, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to make progress on the farm when I’m being pulled to get the house in shape (and you know, work my “real” jobs that bring in money).
I get a little done on the farm, and I come into the house to see holes in ceilings, mouse turds gathering in corners, hundreds of carpet staples still waiting to impale any foot that dares into the area, peeling wallpaper, sloping floors, sagging cross-beams, and you know, just general dilapidation.
It frustrates me to not “see” any progress, even though I know progress is (slowly, steadily) being made.
I haven’t kept to the timelines I’ve made for myself on planting. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not still moving forward. It feels like I haven’t made a dent in the house “to-do” list that the Hubs and I made when we moved in at the end of last month.
It’s been three whole weeks, Megan, can you please be more realistic about what you can accomplish in any given time free frame?
No, I cannot. Quiet, you.
But today is another day, and so is tomorrow, and each carries with it an opportunity for a little more progress, another chance to do and be, and to embrace how magical it is that I CAN do and be (and I have to acknowledge here, sorry, that the world is pretty bonkers right now with the global pandemic and all, and my husband is ill, hopefully not with Covid-19, but we don’t know since the State of Indiana refused to test him, and I drove to five different places yesterday to try to find a thermometer, including a Walmart Superstore—no dice, by the way—and the Internet is teeming with so much information that isn’t information, and I’m afraid for the eventual myriad repercussions of this global fallout—social, financial, psychological, cultural, political—because what is coming next will most likely be worse. We live in a system, after all, one which relies on a tenuous and unsustainable illusion of balance, and when one aspect of that system fails, then like the proverbial house of cards…you get the metaphor).
Annnnnnnywho, I’ve been refacing cabinets, and it’s nice to see a little progress there. The kitchen already looks 100% better, since the cabinets were of that 1960’s, overly-lacquered, sticky-no-matter-what, no-right-angles-to-be-found, kind of cabinets. So we took the upper and lower cabinet faces off, sanded the heck out of them (thank you, Bosch Variable Speed Random Orbital Palm Sander!), painted them, installed new hardware, and while not finished, I’m feeling pretty good about the results so far.
Ubiquitous “Before”
Mmm, lacquery…The “after” is the bottom column of eight drawers, in case you couldn’t tell, since “before and after” photos never quite capture the same space.
The “After” That is Never the Same Lighting or Angle
This was supposed to be “Navy” by the way, but we’ll call it 90’s Country Home Blue — I’m looking at you, childhood family room.
So yes, I am doing something, just not at the pace I’d prefer, I guess. Stay tuned for the completed job, I hope, next week. I still have to figure out how to get my truck unstuck from the mud, deliver about 800 pounds of rain-soaked cat-pee carpet refuse to the dump (it’s in the bed of the truck, hence its mud-stuckness), plant and cover that seed list I mentioned in my last post, write a grant to get some start-up funds for the farm, pay the propane bill, grade a bunch of papers (it’s their Spring Break, so I need to use this time to catch up), and put some of the perennials I brought with me from the old house in the ground around the house to spiff up the place: Russian Sage, Black-Eyed Susans, blueberries.
Whew! Okay, it’s time for breakfast, so scoot!