Open to View.

I am having such trouble sleeping at the moment!
My mind goes around in high revving circuits continuously.











I am mentally placing our furniture in our new house, my washing on that clothesline in the meadow.



My concrete chook in that garden.




I remain in a holding pattern, in house limbo.

Reflecting on how I will miss this house, but in my mind I am already gone.





I've been looking back on some of my favourite photos. Favourite memories.
Of each season in the garden, the Christmas my brother rode the kid's scooters up the drive way, flat out as fast as you can with a prosthetic leg,
coming home after 7 weeks at Starship after Callum's first kidney transplant. All those homecomings.











All those first flushes of spring.



















Re-decorating as each child left home, as a kind of compensation package for losing them.









All those tea parties.

And all the faeries I may or may not have found at the bottom of the garden.

Things I made with this house in mind.

The start of so many creative processes. The formulating of "Magpie Chic".

Luckily it is all movable, transformable and re-inventable in a Provencal Farm House kind of way.

Our first open home was on the sunniest day in February, so everyone was doing lots of other stuff and not coming to open homes LOL!

We had two people! But we've had quite a few people through during the week. Early days say the Real Estate ladies. I think this is what's keeping me up at nights reading blogs and watching the living channel, trying to avoid watching Christchurch or hearing about it on the radio. It is so awful I just can't even bear to talk about it.

I feel so lucky that my Mum and sister are no longer living there. I feel so lucky to be thinking about houses in such a way, when the people of Christchurch will be thinking about houses in an entirely different way. There's something about the guilt of the survivor about it.

I just feel so lucky.

I am making things again! I'm sneaking round to use the granny's sewing machine and making a mess at her house. Because you can't have a mess in house limbo.

Here at the Magpie House we are always "open to view".