Well before my unfortunate performance on ice, a happy accident began.
Over the summer, I claimed part of the second floor of our house for my ‘studio’. Because we originally planned to bury the roof (along with the rest of our house) the unburied upstairs has always been a bonus space with a big but (even before I moved up there). That but is that, while it does make a capital guest room, the only way to heat it is to open the door from the lower portion of the house and let physics send the woodstove warmth (our only source of heat) up.
Heating the buried part of our house with one woodstove is a snap and a crackle, but I knew heating the upstairs on a daily basis would be labor and wood-intensive and started scouting locations I could co-opt. Fourteen-Year-Old Thing1 had solidified his claim on our third bedroom, relegating my former office – a windowless room behind the kitchen originally designed for photograpy – to our indoor laundry drying area. Knowing the laundry dries well there because of the room’s proximity to the wood stove, the solution for the winter was obvious: the laundry and the working mom would trade rooms.
The upstairs is big and airy and good for drying with only one caveat that only my unfortunate performance would reveal. It’s upstairs.
So the laundry that was hung would wait to be folded until impending Christmas company prompted a family laundry-mat day. Thing1 and Thing2 got valuable life lessons (why we have quarters,why mom turns red when you ask at 9pm if she can wash one shirt for tomorrow at 9pm), and we had a bit of giggling.
A month later my Grandma’s fold-down desk and a bunk-bed turned day-bed have turned what could have been a prison cell into MomCave 2.0. A little laundry gets done here and there, hung on drying racks, but it finally knows its place. I’d say the whole thing qualifies as a happy accident.
