What kid does not love a good fort?! What kid has not nagged their parents relentlessly at one point until the parents caved and let their kid(s) sleep in the fort? Forts are fun! On December 20th, 2017, which also happens to be Matt’s birthday, we popped a bottle of champagne, and Matt, Klara, and I moved into a fort. For 493 days, with some interruptions, we slept in the fort. I call it our year of ‘glamping’ (glamorous camping). It was actually quite a bit more than a year, but who’s counting?
Why did we sleep in a fort, you may ask? Find a 5-year-old, if you have one around, and ask them, they’ll tell you 😊! It’s fun and cozy! No, but seriously, why did we sleep in a fort? Well, let me explain…
Matt and I have a habit of eliciting progress by pushing ourselves outside our comfort zone. The idea is that we’ll want to get back to comfort and in order to do so we make progress. It does work, sort of. The problem is that sometimes we find new comfort outside our comfort zone and that defeats the purpose and slows progress, sometimes we are also just busy and progress takes time …
In the summer of 2013, Matt moved in with Klara and me. We had been living with John and Rosa, Klara’s paternal grandparents, since my first husband, John, had died and now things got a little merrier with one more in the house. Matt initially struggled with the idea of living with my first husband’s parents and the fact that his new-found happiness was based upon their loss, but John and Rosa were extremely gracious in accepting him, and we settled in comfortably. It was true comfort - meals were cooked for us, child care was built-in, no rent to pay, why change anything? But being the restless individuals we are, we had plans. In the spring of 2014, we decided to embark on a renovation project of one of the houses I had inherited, the ‘little house’, and it was our plan to move into it at one point. We also talked about getting dogs, huskies, to be specific, which Matt had always dreamed of owning, and that was not an option in our current accommodations.
So we went to work. During the summer and fall of 2014, I spent much of my time gutting the little house, ripping out the kitchen, bathrooms, walls, all the plumbing and wiring, until the house was more or less a bare shell. Dumpster after dumpster was filled. By the time the year was coming to an end, Matt was getting to work putting the house back together. But we had other commitments as well. Matt worked, I had to manage the rental house across the street and I was teaching. The rental house also took up a lot of Matt’s time and skills, since there was always something that needed fixing and/or updating. So progress was slow - really slow. It was time to put some fire under our buts! We decided to get the dogs and in the summer of 2017 we picked them up from a breeder in New Hampshire. In order to be able to bring them home, we had to move out of John and Rosa’s house, but the little house was not quite livable and so we stayed for the summer and fall of 2017 in the upstairs apartment of the rental house. But our seasonal renter, Donny, was eager to move in for Christmas and so we had to get a move on and get our project house to the point where we could actually just about live in it. In the nick of time on December 20th, 2017, that day had finally arrived.
But when I say it was ‘livable’, I do mean just that, it was ‘livable’, just about. Only the first floor, 600 square feet (55 square meters) of the house, was livable. We had a fully functioning kitchen and a small bathroom with a toilet and sink, and a big living room space, there was no bedroom, there was no shower or bath, there was no laundry. To shower and to do laundry we had to walk across the street to the rental house in all weather (it was the middle of winter when we moved) … and to sleep? Well, we had the dogs and they were still young and chewing up everything in sight. I was also adamant that they would NOT be sleeping in our bed with us and so we built a fort under the stairs and we moved in.
The fort was about 6x7 feet with plywood walls and contained Klara’s elevated bed, a fold-out mattress underneath for Matt and me, and some of Klara’s clothes bins. It was very cozy, and I have to honestly say, that I slept very, very well in this fort. However, one of the few drawbacks of the fort was that it was hard to keep clean. After a while, it became affectionately known as ‘the sandbox’, because the gritty dirt that the dogs would bring into the house on their paws would somehow magically build up on the floor of the fort and on our mattress so that moving around and sleeping on it could be at times an abrasive experience. Time for progress!
The first luxury we added to our glamping experience, was a washer and dryer in the spring of 2018. Next, we were hoping for a shower/bath, but we got distracted … We had decided to put the rental house up for sale. The rationale was that selling it would free up time and money to finish up the house we were living in. I had decided to take on the challenge of becoming a real estate agent that summer and try to sell it myself. By September of 2018, it was listed for sale and only about a month later it was under contract. Getting the house ready to sell and ultimately sell it, meant more work for Matt. Final things needed to get fixed, another dumpster filled with old materials and furniture the buyers didn’t want, a fire door needed installing to comply with fire and safety codes, a hot tub needed to be gotten rid of, and the list goes on. So that fall, nothing much got done on our house. In mid-December of 2018 the rental house was sold and we still did not have a shower!! I was brazen enough to still sneak across the street a couple of times to shower in the house we no longer owned … but Matt had scruples. So instead of sneaking across the street, he clad our unfinished shower corner in tick plastic and somehow turned it into a makeshift shower. I never tried it, and he only used it once, a week later we had a shower!
It would be four more months before we finally moved into a livable bedroom on April 27th, 2019. Notice that I never use the word ‘finished’, but only the word ‘livable’. To this day, not a single room in the house is truly ‘finished’. 621 days after leaving the fort behind and moving into an actual bedroom, the three of us are still sleeping in the same room. As a family, none of us ever had any issues with all of us sleeping in the same room. We always remind ourselves that there are large swathes of the world’s population that live in a much smaller space than us and have a much larger families than ours, so it's no big deal. But recently comfort levels have been pushed when Klara stays up longer than Matt and I and giggles in the corner reading her comics, interrupting our sleep. So finally Klara’s room is in the works and it should be only a matter of weeks before the first room in the house may actually truly be finished and Klara gets to move in.
Progress may be slow, but ‘Good things come to those who wait’ has always been one of my favorite slogans and a good motto for life. Why rush when you can take your time, be a kid again and sleep in a fort for a while 😁? It makes for good times and good memories!
Images: Top - The fort under the stairs the day before we moved out - April 26th, 2019
Bottom - The new, spacious bedroom - April 27th, 2019