"Cooking is like love.It should be entered into with abandon or not at all.”– Harriet Van Horne For me, loving large has always included cooking large, while living slow. Now don’t get me wrong, while I love cooking, I also value time and don’t want to spend...
“Roads were made for journeys, not destinations.” - Confucius. ‘den stora västkustresan’ means ‘the great west coast journey’ in Swedish which accurately describes the three wonderful fun-filled weeks of travel we spent last summer on a road trip from Calgary to...
"The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering" –David Whyte For years now, I have been making my decisions using a formula designed to help me reach the very best conclusion. For most,...
“It is health that is real wealth. And not pieces of gold and silver.” – Gandhi “Closer to the ground” is a mantra we often use when designing systems and supports for our life in the woods. Conversations around how best to live a more natural last chapter, flow...
“What humans do over the next 50 years will determine the fate of all life on the planet” – Sir David Attenborough Many have asked for an update on life with compost toilets, graywater, and rainwater systems. Today is the perfect day as we are busy cleaning our...
"One can never have enough socks" - Dumbledore (Harry Potter) When I was still in my teens, my mom taught me how to knit, which at the time, was not nearly as fashionable as it is now. It was reserved for older women, often grandmothers with enough time on...
“Success is not final; failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” - Winston Churchill While much of what’s been written about our Shirley adventure has been based on the shiny new starts and wonderful fresh discoveries, there have...
"All you need is the plan, the road map,and the courage to press on to your destination" – Earl Nightingale That old adage about bigger being better, may not be so true as we age. Building a new house during our last chapter gave us an opportunity to pause and...
“The cost of a thing is the amount of life which is required to be exchanged for it.” –Henry David Thoreau In 2020, the average life expectancy of a North American woman was 84, and for a man, 80. For teens that must sound like an eternity, for those in middle...
In April, we celebrated one year in our new home. While they say time flies, I have felt more like I am living in slow motion than at warp speed. This is partly due I’m sure to the slow and serene surroundings we now find ourselves in but I also think, at least in...
"Simple living is skillful living" - Satish Kumar For many years, I have strived to live a more simplified life. What does that mean you ask? For me it means having more of what I need and use, and less of what I don’t. It means having space around me, and this...
“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet”- Emily Dickinson “Imagine you are 90” we said to each other, as we began the conversation around designing our new house. Afterall, this was our last home, the final frontier, the place we hoped to...
“Thousands have lived without love, not one without water” – W.H. Auden It may have been a simple and well researched decision, but it was also expensive, time consuming, and challenging. Still, we are confident we made the right one – to install compost toilets. As a...
“Home is where one starts from” – T.S. Eliot It’s been more than a year and a half since we broke ground on our new build. While most of creating a new home involves looking forward, gratitude has had me spending at least some of my time, looking back,...
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in,where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.” – John Muir I was born in a city. I have spent the past six decades in cities and towns and many of my vacations in places like...
Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair —Khalil Gibran It’s been almost eight weeks since we moved into the woods. I am surrounded by dirt, pipes, trenches, building supplies, and tools, but mostly I am...
“The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” – Aristotle “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” – Aristotle First, I want to thank all those who continue to comment on the blog and on the build. I appreciate your...
“I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.” Henry David Thoreau Building our new house has always been about the numbers; square footage, the budget, the orientation to the sun, the property lines, the size of the...
circa 1995 “It came without ribbons! It came without tags! It came without packages, boxes or bags! - Dr. Seuss I can see it now. Everyone gathered together just like we have for the past 25 years, around our long dinner table, on Christmas Eve. I’m in the kitchen...
“Progress is not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be.” Khalil Gibran It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post to update you on the build. What had appeared for ages to be a slow grind, has suddenly gained momentum and we are well...
“Recognizing the need is the primary condition for design.” Charles Eames I have always been more about practical than pretty. When I got my first job as a teen, I remember my mom’s advice was to “buy separate pieces, not dresses, they are far more versatile and...
I have always had the ability to envision, to form a mental picture including size, texture, and colour. It’s been helpful as an event planner to be able to view an empty space and see what’s happening there; the band on stage, fully dressed dining tables, the flow of...
Recently, during a break in the build, and with some time on our hands, we decided to reflect on leaving our home of 25 years; what will we take with us, what will we leave behind, what has this place and home meant to us. I grew up in different houses; my...
“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” Alan Watts For more than two decades, I have been a...
When we married in our late teens, we took ‘till death us do part’ out of the vows we read; we just weren’t comfortable signing off on that level of commitment. Now, nearly 40 years on, we are looking at our final chapter and making plans to support each...
In 1992, having recently had twin boys, we started a conversation around change; how could we raise our children with one parent at home? What might life look like if I gave up my career? And so, after much soul searching and a brief chat with our bank manager, we...
In a former life, and for more than 11 years, I travelled 90 kilometers daily for a job I loved in Toronto. For the most part, I enjoyed the trek, however, through the years, the scenery changed from green to grey with neighbourhood views replaced by concrete sound...
One of the most challenging aspects of our new build has been managing the budget. Don’t get me wrong, I have been managing money for a long time, and I learned its value very young. I grew up in a house where finances were private, an adult arena. I...
One of the most interesting outcomes for me in the process of designing and building a house, has been the learning that there is so much that you don’t see, not only behind the scenes, but underneath them. And what remains unseen, is as important, if not more...
The discussion went something like this “Who wants to take care of us when we’re older, so we can age in place and die at home?” And, the response went something like this, no hands went up. It was Christmas 2016 and we were all together; three grown...