Audio Post The great reveal 27 Sept 2012

Tomorrow is, as the home remodeling shows call it, “the great reveal.” Our architect is bringing the initial house plans for us to see. To reach this point, he spent days literally watching us do things like cook and move about the space we are now in. He spent time on our site. He spent time at his desk creating our dream of home for us.

I feel like I am on the Home and Garden, HGTV, channel. We watch too much television. Our default show is “House Hunters.” Houses never fail to entertain us. I should probably not confess this but sometimes on Friday we get a pizza and watch back-to-back episodes for hours.

A month after the fire we were on our very own “house hunters.” We had to find a place to life. We found three. We ruled out one because it was too “Shangri La” and completely across to the other side of the mountains from our old house. We were then left with a choice between a suburban house pleasantly off the golf course and the main (45 mph) highway. The office was great and had wonderful views but the house was low, down by the highway. The third house was the one we ended up in. 6,000 square feet of gold, green and red shag carpet. It is higher up on the mountain. It came fully furnished which we did not want since we were reacquiring some of our old things. It is a delicate juggling act to incorporate our things into a fully furnished house. We have had to find room for the existing things and our growing re-population of own items. Blending our style of stainless steel and antiques with green and gold shag has been an interesting experience.

So now we are on a new HGTV show although this on does not appear on anyone’s schedule. We are now on “The Disaster Home Show.” We actually thought to try to pitch it to HGTV but figured the market was pretty specific. The storyline for this show is to follow people who have lost their homes to tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, fires, and other disasters and see how their housing process is going.

Ours has been a bit of fits and starts. As I wrote earlier, I wanted to get a trailer house and move back two days after the fire. No one thought I should but I wanted to. It made me cry that I could not do it. My spouse chose a temporary house for us. It was a good decision. The nicest thing about it is that we are on the same end of town and our views are pretty similar to our old house. I don’t know what I would I done if I had to live in the main part of town. We lived there once and I loved my tiny little railroad house but that was then and this is now and I don’t to go back to them unless I have to.

So, we spent 1 month in the hotel, 2 months so far in our temporary house and tomorrow as we are entering Month 4, we are heading into the home stretch. We can look ahead and see that there is a road, not just a “road closed ahead due to drought-related disaster” sign. I suppose on that road we will find many less than desirable signs but at the end of that road is our driveway. It is not the end of someone else’s road, it will be our road.

Of course, it will be complete with all the usual road conditions, rain, snow, stop signs, yield, caution and “construction ahead, fines double for speeding.” There will be times when we are shuttle service for the road. Other times we will be tour guides and still others we will be hitchhikers on our own road. But, it is our road.

So after three months, the great reveal is tomorrow. I expect to revel in it. I expect it to fill my waking and sleeping dreams. It is no bother at all for me to live in a dream. Soon I will know what that dream will look like and I will find myself energized living in the dream of our new home. We will dream it into existence. It will be a beautiful dream from which to wake. On that morning we will find ourselves in our new home.