Three weeks. After that, headed back to live in this tiny, crazy cabin. It's a small cabin on Moon and Stars Farm where our dear friend Holly lives- a farm that's been operating on the homestead scale for about 15 years but is now looking, kind of tentatively, at some expansion. That's where we come in, an extra couple of hands, learning from Holly, helping her out, and seeing what we can create.
I aspire to get it a little organized feeling in cabin, hopefully streamlining all (or most) of our food prep and storage processes to an outdoor kitchen space which we'll be building. You can kind of see the food prep area on the far right of the frame of this photo- the hint is the apple-shaped cutting board designed by a friend of mine for Crate & Barrell. Ooh la la. Also, the tahini bucket with harmonicas on top if it is our "fridge" (bucket on porch in winter.) We will probably want to keep a few little basic food items in the cabin: coffee, tea, breakfast and snacks. Maybe mini-frige level, apples, hummus. I think an ideal use of this small space (about 300 sq feet) that my partner and I share would mean a majority of food processing/elaborate meal prep elsewhere. We have a well spigot outside and the cabin has full electricity. Doing dishes outdoors is the biggest obstacle for meal prep here, but I guess that would be easier in summer. We also have an electric kettle and a hot plate in here, on a blue desk on the right.
Other clutter decreasers will be getting all the stringed instruments hung on the wall, likely in some sort of artful and spacesaving gallery wall configuration. Maybe we'll transition some of our bucket-storage system (kind of a guy thing, I guess?) to outside while adding some normal indoor-storage in here. I want to build a proper desk with hairpin legs... the desklike structure on the left is an odd end table that my parents pulled out of a dumpster on the night they got engaged to share a bottle of champagne over. Sigh.
I'm thinking of slapping a fresh coat of paint on two bookshelves (not pictured) and that ladder. I do wish I had a photograph of the space before we painted the walls, but the dark-stained wood walls let very little light in and it was really difficult to take a photo. We painted them "desert fortress" starting with a friend's leftover gallon but we had to buy more too. It's actually a pretty dark beige but it looks like white compared to our dark wood.
As an aside- I have to laugh at any reading I do on the interwebs about restoring buildings, updating/organizing/decorating interior spaces. Those folks are operating at a pretty different level of budget and waste and stuff than I can really fathom. It's a major factor inspiring me to share our processes of figuring things out.
Other exciting prospects are replacing the front door (it's kind of falling apart and really colorfully painted with like a zombie doll and some words, I can't remember) building beds for our little kitchen garden here by the cabin- probably lots of simple medicinals, edible flowers, and salad and things we can eat without much prep. The outdoor kitchen will be inside the larger garden-Holly's garden- and we'll grow more hard-core stuff up there. Also up that way is a garden shed which I plan to unearth, organize, and turn into a more usable space. It's in the inevitable garden shed state of chaos and storage- so it happens when a person is so dedicated to a garden- the shed falls away from the center of focus. But I plan to get the shed whipped into shape- to best serve the garden. In that way, it will also serve the homestead dwellers- perhaps even as a place of quiet solitude for the 2 noisy people sharing the small cabin (us!)
The biggest task of all will be helping Holly and Marc design and build an outdoor kitchen, with a centerpiece cob oven. It's also the most exciting and most badass project....All culminating in September when all this new infrastructure will be dedicated and christened at Holly and Marc's wedding.
We. Can't. Wait!
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