I'm sitting on our balcony with a view, at the other side of the house, listening to ItaloDisco on my headphones. Meanwhile, Clare is (likely) sitting in what is now the coziest room of the house, on a sofa in front of our freshly installed wood burning stove.
She actually just popped up, to get the power bank ( that was charging in the sunshine with its fold-able solar panels ). It's a cool little device that we use for electricity in our house. To charge up our phones, laptops, to run a couple of lamps on and/or some others devices ( one bigger machine at a time ). It has 2 usb ports and one for 2 pin electricity plugs.
This house has no functioning electricity and that is a conscious choice. It's something Clare has written about multiple times, in the past and man does it feel good to not be/feel so wired all the time. We are buzzing enough without electricity all around.
The coziest room of the house also doubles as Clare's atelier/sewing room and the reason why she picked up the power bank is that she needs it to run her sewing machine.
Now the stove has been installed, days ago, it isn't much of a punishment to sit in her atelier. Where, up till very recently, she had to make do with hot water bottles and warm clothes. A world of difference!
You can find her latest needlework Monday post - Fire-y Red Coat and Rising out of the Ashes HERE
I almost forgot to mention that we had been without running warm/hot water for a couple of weeks. We had no warm shower and the only way to have a bath was to go through the elaborate process of heating up water, one pan at a time, as described by me in Slow Living - DIY Bath Water Heating
It's fair to say that it took me a while to get over my deeply rooted 'I am not a handyman' trauma, a believe that clashed with Clare's high level DIY skills. She has basically taken care of this huge house, by herself, on shoestring budget, for about 15 years.
We had to go through a bit of a 'battle' of Egos and some serious balancing and fine tuning of masculine and feminine energy.
But look at me now ;<)
The process was far from easy, to say the least, even more as we have been detoxing for almost two weeks now and thus all kinds of physical and emotional discomfort was added to the mix.
More on our detox in Heavy Metal Detox 1 and 2 and in Clare's recent posts.
Anyhow, when we finally figured out that the best place to move to and install our wood burning stove was Clare's atelier, next to our kitchen and after I had picked up the courage to actually start on the job, it was a matter of buying the necessary missing parts ( we did not only have to change our stove pipe, it was also needed to find a way to get the pipe (and smoke) reach the outside of the house without doing too much damage to the house and drawing the attention of/disturbing mostly absent neighbors ).
Aside from that, we have a hot water tank on top of the stove and we had - among other things - to drain the thing, remove and move it, as well as the stove, and then later install new water pipes and find a way to connect them to already existing pipes. This would be my first serious DIY plumbing job too!
I'll spare you all the details but suffice to say that clare's DIY knowledge and -skills, combined with my brute force ( and finding the right balance ), eventually did the job.
Aside from some brief panicky moments ( where things seemed to go wrong ) and us feeling totally exhausted and fed up with it all, most of the process went pretty well. And, Saturday late afternoon, we were able to run our first fire, heat up the sewing room and the kitchen as well as get enough warm water to both have a serious shower, later on.
As an added bonus, we were able to heat up food in the wood burner. It has an oven built in it too.
It's now day 3 in a row with a fire and we are bathing in the long awaited comfort. Even though we are having at least a couple of hours of sunshine, (almost) every single day, April is still pretty frisky and the weather is all-over-the-place. Also, we had to make up on the lack of showering and bathing and we love baked potatoes and other oven made dishes.
And to get back to our detoxing...
Clare seems to have (made) a serious breakthrough in her healing ( I am sure she will share more about that in future posts ), I seem to be doing better and better mentally. The masterpeace remedy does seem to have a significant effect, aside from clearing out nano toxins/heavy metals, it also seems to make us up our diet. Our bodies seem to not want/tolerate alcohol, coffee/caffeine and we are cutting down even more on (processed) sugar and adding more and more foraged food and greens to our meals. Aside from that, our connection and love seems to deepen ( 7 months into our relationship ) day by day. It's a pretty powerful process overall and very much worth the work.
TO BE CONVINUED...