Making a List

I started a new journal the first week of September 2003. The first page is full of notes I took while sitting at Powell's Book Store in NW Portland during our tip to see C&J last summer...notes on communal living, farming cooperatives, organic gardening, sustainable living, eco-building, and on. September 2003 was when our idea truly hatched, then jumped out of the egg and began to run like mad.

Life seemed to truly take off then, and I hardly had time to put thought to page in my new journal. Only four pages after my excited scrawls about our new idea last year, I uncapped my pen and began again: September 25, 2004 - I lay awake on the air mattress in one of the tiny upstairs bedrooms of our new yellow farmhouse, looking out the window onto our first misty morning of farm ownership. Only one year and four pages later...it seems unreal.

Jay and Charis described it most eloquently - the views, the smells, the dirt in the fingernails, the excitment, the anticipation...we're all feeling it and are bracing ourselves for a lot of good, hard, satisfying work in the coming months before we call the Colfax farm our full time home.

I started a to-do list of projects, which didn't even fit on one page. But we've begun to cross things off already...progress!...we tore down wood paneling, pulled up turquoise carpeting, brushed fresh paint over the peach colored hack job upstairs, yanked out layers of contact paper in the kitchen cupboards, discovered the "lovely old" behind the ugly '70s "updates"...let the walls, floors and ceilings breathe again after hiding under years of wallpaper, carpet and tile.

We've got some good video and photos of the process so far...will post them on this site as soon as we can get them up. Check back again soon!