Making Old Things New Again...

            …is how I bought a church that is now my home ~

            …is how I start a barn, that someday will soon be someone else's...

            Nothing inspires me more than taking something old and creating something totally new out of it. I’m especially fond of finding something that once served one very useful, soulful purpose, that today, could take on a whole new life and meaning, if only someone would spearhead the project to “re-purposed” things for a whole new endeavor….

            Such is how I spent my holiday weekend.

            Pulling ticks off of me (literally as I write… as of this moment…this sentence, we’re at 8) the rest of my day, was MY kind of holiday. (Ok. Scratch 8.  Now 9.)

         Nothing thrills me more than sorting through a heap of past history (read: scrap heap to most, but to some, ”a life” all the while envisioning what could be created from the remnants of what someone else, in their day, spent their life crafting/saving/salvaging /collecting…
         I honor the energies of those whose lives were spent dreaming…be it barn-building, wood-working,  window-claiming, loft-attaching…a scrap to some is a blueprint to others…It's as if we spend our whole life accumulating (and resisting the urge to let anything go), only to eventually have some total stranger marveling at the way in which you took the time to tongue-in-groove a barn floor. (Must've been a neat and thoughtful guy. I was told he did it all by himself with no one there to help.)

            So as of this day, let the barn begin-- to be crafted from an old one being torn down as I write. (First step of this journey—finding such a barn. (Ok. Tick count now in double digits.) Second step (clearly, buy more "Off").

Though it was a tick-infested, spider-conscientious kinda day, the barn vision in my head and magazine pics plastered to a poster board behind my bathroom door were more than enough to pull me through the picky and sticky parts. The thought of my “barn-to-be" coming from woods once likewise visioned by a person starting his barn, some 60 years ago…well, not only was it a weathered look we were looking for, but more important, it was precisely the kind of energy I wanted to surround myself and my critters with going forward. (If you were blessed enough to grow up playing in barn lofts and swinging from tires tethered by a rope tossed across an oak branch,  you know what I'm talking about.)

            Tick diseases aside (Ok. 12…Please God, let this be all. The poison ivy has me itching enough already), this day was an amazing array of old woods, new dreams and a team of folks who (thank God) seriously knew what they were doing (once we stopped pulling ticks off each other like monkeys in a zoo)…

            Thanks to my real estate friend who made this day happen, I signed on to clear a lot, falling down barns and all…with remnants of wood and tin for my project in exchange for the work on another's. Yes, I wanted old, old wood (the older the better). (Tick count 13.) But at the end of the day, as I’m nearing the moment when my head hits a pillow, I have to say, it was a good one all in all, even though where it leads us, is a journey no one can anticipate at this point...(Anymore, I'm not so certain this isn't the best way to approach life.)         

               

             Should make for good pictures if nothing else.
             (I promise not to photograph the whelps.) 

              As they say in the biz...

             "Stay tuned."