living in the barn | Coin perdu, a mountain home

A home in the barn.

We’ve been staying in our barn for the past five months.

After starting out with the bare essentials and wearing thick skiwear at night to keep warm in front of the wood burning stove, drinking cups of steaming chocolat chaud and cosying up around campfires, we can now say…it is fun! We have a proper home now in our barn with everything we need, NO television, which we don’t miss. We have running water, warm showers, old ladders for our towels, a coffee corner, a fully equipped kitchen where we prepare fresh and simple meals, couches for lounging, lamps for ambiance, books for drowsing, comfy sleeping nooks, privacy by means of romantic linen drops tied with antique lace…hunted down at local brocantes. We need nothing more…except maybe exquisite sunsets.

…welcome in our barn…

When renovating, restoring a house, the concept of “home” changes, even whenstill staying in your home while it is being renovated. It becomes a construction site; the ladders and scaffoldings take the place of comfy couches. The dusty smells of sand and cement take the place of potpourri. The crunching of debris underneath boots make you long for the soft touch of carpet and barefoot. The days are long and hard, dinners become quick and simple, sleep welcome and deep, mornings early and refreshed…or is early and aching?

The upside of renovating is the anticipation. Much like waiting for that last schoolday before summer, last week before Christmas, the night before your birthday … The road to getting your home back is a daring crusade. It is the anticipation that keeps us going, working through the frustrations, stepping over the irritations, redoing the miscalculations, band-aiding the wounds, kneading the aching muscles. So we need that little corner to unwind at the end of the day. That little restplace where you put side the images of ladders and cement mixers and wallow in soft comfort. That place where you keep the anticipation alive with dreams in warm beds.

…a clear view through our barn…

…full of nothingness…

…a first bite and a first night in a barn home…

…always place for some romance…

When Hartman suggested living in the barn while working on the house, my apprehension knew no boundaries. At the time I was snuggly cuddled up in front of the fireplace in our comfortable and lovely home in Touraine, listening to music, sipping a glass of red wine, reading “Dark Star safari by Paul Theroux, while the rain and cold and wind were safely locked outside.

Hearing things like: ” cleaning out the all the hay and tools and owls from the barn…dusting… repairing floorboards… moving in some sort of bed… firing up the wooden stove for a hot meal, fixing the doors, find a solution for bathroom facilities…” well, it simply made my hair stand on end and I felt the cold of wind from outside creeping indoors. I took a big sip of red wine, nesteled my derriére deeper into the cushions and faked enthusiastic listening, all the while lifting my one eyebrow higher and higher.

But here I am. Here we are. The days are long and hard. We’re living in the barn. Cleaned out the hay, fired up the wooden stove. We shower in a tin tub found in the barn. I use the pedometer to measure the distance to the longdrop at the far end of the garden. We eat colourful and healthy dinners by candlelight, while sipping on full bodied red wines.

My husband knows me far too well…once I grab onto an idea, which may sometimes take some time…it’s sailing off into the sunset. I finally got carried away with our camping in the barn and it was like being a little girl again in my growing up years, building and constructing interesting tee pees and tree houses and tenthouses, furnishing them with what I could find around the neighbourhood, always filling up a flass with flowers for my “centre table”. Nothing had changed, except that myconstruction is now a barn and my glass is filled with flowers from our own land.

…something of everything…