Meaning

We were extending our house.

There was a lot to do in preparation. Deciding what we wanted to build, designing inbuilt furniture, communicating our ideas so they’d be understood, choosing materials.

And then there was our preparation when it was about to start. Packing up furniture, organising a temporary kitchen, sticking the washing machine under the carport, dealing with the builder.

The build itself only took 4 months, which is a relatively short amount of time.

Don’t we sound organised?

Unfortunately, we forgot one big thing.

When it was all finished, and we could relax without builders arriving at six in the morning, we realised we’d made no arrangements for putting our indoors back together again.

If we’d moved house, we would’ve taken a day off or even a week, to unpack those boxes and set up the cupboards and the kitchen and to clean up those leftover building materials. But we were simply building onto our old house, which meant we hadn’t factored in time to reset it. It took just as many months to find everything and put it all back together.

I started feeling bad about myself. I couldn’t find things, and I felt like the house was a mess. I felt like a failure.

Of course, I wasn’t anything of the sort. The real truth was that the house wasn’t finished. It wasn’t a reflection on me, it was just the situation. All of that meaning I put onto it was fabricated in my head. Once I learnt to let it go, I started to feel better, and I organized some time to get those boxes unpacked!