Today we started creating my workroom. I have been deliberate in calling it my workroom because if I’ve learned nothing else these past few years, it’s that words are important, your choice of words is important, how you frame things is important. Words have power. All my crafting and creating and mending and fixing stuff has always been labelled as “Junk” or, if I was feeling slightly more positive about it, “Stuff”. It had no real positive value. It didn’t contribute fiscally. It was a drain, and the only way it contributed was to clutter everywhere up with half finished abandoned projects that had consumed me for a few weeks (or if I was lucky, a few months).

But. For the first time ever, I have been encouraged, cajoled, pushed, to design the workspace that might actually work for me. Not just cobbling together all the stuff that nobody else wants or that doesn’t fit anywhere else. Not letting anyone else decide for me what it is that I need. Allowing myself to indulge in patterns and symmetry, as well as the colours and designs that please my own eye.

I did help build it. Technically. Mostly I curled up in a ball on the sofa, watching. But I did put the shelves in.

Tomorrow I shall start to fill it. And hopefully start to make a dent in some of the rest of the boxes that have been unopened in over four years.

And then we’ll order the bits to create my desk.

It’s going to be HUGE AND I AM SO EXCITED!

Bonus, which I feel like I should mention, is that the kids, the older two particularly, are kinda by extension, getting their own desks/workspaces. Charley has sort of claimed my beautiful old writing bureau as his chemistry cabinet, so that (and a table) will be going out to one side of the upstairs living room. Ben is getting the superhero desk back again, with its drawers, for his electronics table, and that will go on the other side of the upstairs living room. (I put my foot down at having a chemistry lab set up right next to an electronics table.) Erika feels a bit put out but I’m not really sure we can fit a training dummy in the middle there. She might need to wait until renovations are finished for that.

Speaking of renovations, I nearly spiralled yesterday when the bank replied saying they needed much more concrete (hah) plans than the ones we’d given them before they could work out the best way of helping us finance the renovations. Today, having slept on it, it doesn’t seem so unachievable after all. I’ve found my old-but-latest Ikea kitchen planner design (which, thankfully, I still mostly like), and have done a bit of research into new central heating furnaces (it had not occurred to me that they might actually be things of such beauty these days!), and together we’ve put together a list of things to do to get the answers the bank needs.

And then evening came. And Charley and Erika bumped heads in one of those awfully perfectly timed moments where two separate and individual action sequences collide. Charley’s bump triggered all the sad and bad memories and nightmares to come flooding back to try to engulf him; and Erika’s empathy levels went through the roof and she didn’t know what to DO with all the sadness, as well as her own pain from the bump.

Eventually Charley settled, and eventually Erika took herself away.

Tomorrow is a new day. And Erika got to help make pancake batter so she’s cheered up.

I keep reading how a sprinkling of nettle seeds is supposed to give you an energy boost. It’s getting close to me actually trying it. It’s not like we have a shortage of nettles here or anything. But there is a definite shortage of energy…