Maybe It’s Not That Bad

Maybe It’s Not That Bad

I have told myself many times, “maybe it’s not that bad” in my lifetime. Maybe you have too. I think we all do it as a way to cope. But sometimes, we are right. And it’s not that a bad. That can be the case too. Right now, I’m looking at this enormous job of renovating a little house in Italy. And I’m trying to break it down into parts.  I do get overwhelmed every day. And I have to pick a project that I can see some type of progress on. I find that when I do that, I feel better at the end of the day, and I can tackle the next day. And now that I have a real pillow again instead of a sweatshirt with buttons to dig into my face at night, I’m sleeping a little better.

For weeks, I have been putting off cleaning the bathroom here. It’s an odd bathroom with a skinny hallway and barely any room to move. The shower is the smallest I’ve ever seen. And the bidet and toilet take up most of the space. It’s law, we have been told, that at least one bathroom here must have a bidet. I don’t know is this is right, but it’s just something else we have to find out.

But first things first. I asked myself today, is it that bad? Do I just clean the toilet and bidet and be done with it? Or should we get new ones? No decision os easy here. Because every one involves another question if we want to carry it up the 1/3 mile path. And these things are not light.

You may have seen the ruins attached to the house. There was an original house here. And the “new” house was built on to it. It appears to us that they used the old bathroom in the ruins and built a hallway to do so from the new house. Again, something else we have to find out about. But for now, we have an issue.

Rain is coming. Cold weather is coming. And the solar bag shower we have outside is not going to be fun. We found that old water source here…you can watch the video here if you missed it. But we need to get the water into the house now. A temporary fix. We don’t have time to get all the plumbing and lead pipes replaced. So we need to get water into here by running it thru a camping hot water heater and the cistern we carried up here. Then, we can take a shower. Now, we are still trying to locate the septic. We have been using a compost camping toilet. Not fun. We can keep going that for a little while, but we need to get as much replaced as we can. And I’m pretty sure the toilet and bidet should be put in the no pile.

Hmmm. Maybe it’s not that bad. And really, it’s not. Losing Brickle a week after we got here WAS that bad. If I can make it thru that, if I’m strong enough to make it thru that, I can do this too.

-Rachael