New Home New State

From My Fantasy Writing Desk in my New Home

I haven’t actually been writing the last couple months. Instead I’ve been house hunting, buying, and now moving/renovating a new home. Utterly disruptive of writing, but a fun adventure.

My husband and I decided in February to move from our Phoenix home where we’ve lived since the early ’80s to Davis, California. We want to be near the family that lives here. Escaping Phoenix’s heat, which is growing steadily worse, seemed wise. We love the feel and style of life in Davis.

A New Town

Davis is perfect for us. A small college town where we can bike or walk to pretty much everything, but only a 20 minute drive from Sacramento, a large city with urban perks. It’s also near the Bay area where we lived when we first met and still have friends. I’m also looking forward to connecting much more with my writer friends scattered around the Northern California area. Get in touch with me if that’s you!

So we have a new home. And we have a new geographical state, and a new state of mind. I particularly love our backyard, which our house’s abundant windows open onto, so its calm beauty is both an indoor and outdoor influence.

A Lot to Do on Our New Home

Our new home was well-built with lots of love and care, but it needs freshening up. So at this moment, my husband is scraping up all the tiles from the floors. They were cracked and popping up. We’re in the midst of choosing hardwood floors to go throughout.

The walls need paint. The outside needs paint. The kitchen and master bath will be gutted and redone sometime in the upcoming months. Probably not on the sooner side because building supplies are so backed up from Covid, etc.

So we will be living in a high degree of chaos and temporariness for quite a while. For example, our clothes washer and dryer, which should have been arriving this week, are now scheduled for late May. I see them perched in a container on the ship stuck in the Suez Canal, but that’s just my imagination. I’ve found a pleasant, very close laundromat. There will be a lot of adapting in the upcoming months. I suspect not so much writing, but I hope to get back to that essential stream of happiness as soon as possible.

A Move in Stages

We arrived with a truck full of kitchen basics, some clothes, our bed, a folding table and chairs, and a lot of the heaviest stuff (interstate movers charge by the pound) like books and cases of wine as the “filler” around the essentials to reduce our moving costs as much as our aged backs could manage. The plan is to have the floors in before the rest of our worldly possessions arrive later in May.

Both my husband and I are homebodies who thrive on having our nest all settled in. So throwing ourselves to these winds of adventure and newness is definitely expanding our emotional horizons. It will be great when all this is done. I’m looking forward to the time in a month or so when the completed floors and our furniture will allow us to have some “done” spaces. Patience will be required for our kitchen and bathroom, but what’s here is certainly functional and fine in the meantime.

Greetings from Davis

So that’s what’s up with me. I do want to hear from any of my friends who live in the Northern California area. I’m looking forward to a brand new “local” network of writing community. Online exchanges with writers are an essential part of my overall writing/editing process, but I do love my “real life” friends. It seems like we can now meet face to face with co-vaccinated friends in limited fashion. Yeah!

Leave a comment below or email me if you live nearish to Davis. Or, for my Phoenix friends, remind me how much we’ll be keeping in touch online–I need you!

Here for a post on one of my last face to face writing get togethers.