Construction: Week 2

This process is getting smoother as it goes along. It took me almost a whole week before I managed a report on Week 1 and here is the Week 2 update after just a couple of days. 

On Monday, last week, my amazing friend and another amazing friend of ours came to spread several tons of Class C and Class A gravel to extend the pad around the foundation. We had to hustle because the crew was coming to build the form at 2pm. So, hustle we did and we got 'er done in time. 

The pad at the beginning of the form's construction.

The form had to be meticulously measured to make sure it was a rectangle and not a parallelogram. I was proud to see that our measurements were very close to the pros'. As the form was built, it had to be leveled, too. A couple of our corners were a few inches lower than the others, but it was nothing that a little crushed rock couldn't fix.

No fair! They had a rock "slinger" and filled the form with gravel in a fraction of the time that it took us to spread gravel for the pad!

Three-inch thick and 2-foot wide foam insulation was placed around the edges on the inside of the form. The centre was then filled with gravel up to the edges of the insulation.

On Tuesday, the plumber came to install the under-slab plumbing. It was an unbelievably hot day for late September in Nova Scotia. Actually, it was an unusually hot day for Nova Scotia – period. To reduce the risk of my plumber passing out from heat exhaustion, I pitched in to help dig channels in the gravel to place the pipes and then helped fill in around them. Even sharing the work, we had to take several breaks for water and popsicles.

It's a small job – one 3-piece bathroom and a kitchen sink, but it's still a lot of pipes...

Once the under-slab plumbing was done and inspected, the slab contractors had to come back to do the next steps.

Stakes and pieces of 2x4 bolster the sides of the form, so it won't fall apart when the concrete is poured.

Insulation is fitted over top of the gravel and pipes.

Rebar and wire mesh are added to reinforce the concrete.

Surprise! The plumber needed a wooden box to put around the shower drain to keep it free of concrete and allow him some wiggle room to place the drain correctly under the shower pan. I had no idea this would be necessary, but fortunately, my builder was able to build the box on short notice and the slab contractors cut the angle to fit the slope of the insulation.

To recap, the following steps were completed during Week 2:

1. Excavation
2. Construction of the form
3. Under-slab plumbing
4. Under-slab plumbing inspection
5. Insulation and wire mesh

I felt much more steady during Week 2 than I did during Week 1. Working with friends the first week gave me the safety to meltdown and be supported in my doubts and fears. Now that things have moved into the hands of strangers, I'm rising to the to occasion and pulling myself together a bit more. It helps that I feel like I am developing a better handle on this process. Learning what to expect and what I can do to help facilitate things is helping me maintain a more positive and relaxed attitude.

It helps that the contractors working with me (and their crews) have been stellar, fitting this project into their schedules with virtually no delays. It feels like a complicated process to weave all of these inter-dependent tasks, but so far, it's been almost seamless, and that is helping to build my confidence. 

I'm optimistic about Week 3. If things continue in the same vein, the slab should be poured by the end of this week! (knock wood)

Construction: Week 1

Mumma, for why all these changes?

Well, after months of planning, designing, stressing, worrying and lining up contractors and estimates and quotes, the ball finally started rolling last week. 

I had found a contractor to pour the slab for my foundation, but I couldn't find anyone who was available to do the excavation. It feels like the entire south shore of Nova Scotia is madly building, trying to get things done before the snow flies and contractors are busy, busy, busy! I feel lucky to have found the great bunch of contractors who've agreed to work on this project, but I struck out trying to find a excavation contractor who was available, affordable and with whom I felt comfortable. And without the excavation work, nothing could move forward.

Luckily for me, my friend of the amazing chainsaw skills has myriad other skills and offered to do the excavation work I needed to have done. Not that he's not extremely busy, too, but he made the time so that work at my place wouldn't be held up – a tremendous and generous gift to me.

The first task was "scrubbing off" the organic matter, dead and alive.

It was a perfect opportunity to take logs that had been cut over the past year and a half to make way for the driveway and power lines and load them on the trailer to go off to be milled into useful lumber.

One of the limbs had to be removed from old Father Maple so that the big trucks would be able to back right up to the form. He remains a stately, if somewhat less crooked, presence. 

We had to have a couple of loads of shale delivered.

And my friend brought tons of gravel in his truck and trailer, too... 

...much of which we spread by hand using shovels, rakes and buckets.

I got to drive the excavator when the right-rear wheel of the truck went over the edge of the driveway and the truck had to be assisted back onto solid ground.

The awesome slab contractor loaned us his transit level so we could check how level the pad was as we spread the gravel. 

A DEEP trench had to be dug for the well line to go out from the house. You never think how deep 4 feet is, but it's deep enough when you're trying to dig through rocky South Shore Nova Scotian soil! 

I'm not going to lie to you, I melted down more than once last week. I felt so overwhelmed. I wished that I had never had the temerity to think that I could organize having a small cabin built for myself.

Days were spent leveling ground, moving logs and getting gravel in place. Despite being worn out by the work, I did not sleep well, waking up in the middle of the night with anxious thoughts like, "What am I doing?" and "Why did I decide to do this?"

There were some shaky, miserable hours. Fortunately, a number of people close to me provided moral support and tangible help, often exactly when it was needed most.

And there were some exiting moments, too. I invested in a chain saw and used it for the first time ever! And I drove the excavator. And I worked: healthy, outdoor, physical labour.

As the work progressed, I started to feel better. Excavation was hard – it felt like we were ripping the land to pieces. Fortunately, after ripping it apart, we started to put it back together again. And for me, as that happened "Why am I doing this?" and "What am I doing?" transformed into "I am doing this."

The definiteness of that is a lot more comfortable than sitting in the unknown of doubts and second guesses.

And since I am doing this, I want to embrace the process. After several wobbly weeks, I've come to understand that if I want this house to be built wholeheartedly, by people who are kind and easy through the process, that means that I have to find kindness and ease in my heart, too.

Otherwise, there is no point.

This construction project requires Salinger to be vigilant and alert. On Friday, when all the machines had gone away for a bit, he had to have some serious naps to recover from all of the excitement.

Shame and vulnerability

A dear friend recently sent me a link to watch this long-format (90-minute) interview with Dr. Brené Brown:

http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/2015/09/brene-brown-rising-strong/

I've been a fan of Dr. Brown and her work for a number of years. She's a researcher-storyteller who studies human connection, shame, vulnerability and wholeheartedness. I've written about her on my blog before because her work was the inspiration for me giving my tiny house its name: Wholehearted House.

I've mostly come in contact with Dr. Brown's work on-line, in the form of TED talks and podcasts, but watching the long-form interview with Chase Jarvis inspired me dig deeper into her work by reading the books she has written. So, I put in requests for all four of them at the library.

Her books, in order of publication, are 1. I Thought It Was Just Me (But It Isn't), 2. The Gifts of Imperfection, 3. Daring Greatly and 4. Rising Strong. The first book is about shame, the second about vulnerability, the third about courage and connection and the fourth is about the process of using shame resilience strategies to work through shame triggers and build greater connection.

My personal journey with shame

I grew up with a legacy of shame in my family that came down from my very staunchly Victorian, Methodist great-great-grandparents on one side and equally staunch Roman Catholic great-great-grandparents on the other side (all of whom were no doubt only bringing their beliefs forward from their parents and they from theirs, etc.) Expectations were high in my family – for intelligence, achievement, post-secondary education, morality, etc. And the punishment for failing to always conform to those high ideals (i.e. being human), was often shame.

I'm not pointing any fingers here. I don't think the shame in my family was malicious in its intent, it was just the way things were, the way they have been for generations. As Brené Brown points out, shame is a universal phenomenon, experienced by every human who isn't a sociopath. In North American culture, I would say that shame has grown to be a basic operating principle in a majority of contexts. I have definitely worked in offices/for clients and had friendships and intimate relationships that functioned predominantly in a culture of shame.

Shame is a fear of disconnection, of not being worthy of love and belonging, and as such it strikes at the core of us. Love and belonging are two of our most basic human needs.

The cultures of shame I have experienced have included messages and feelings like the following.

You're no good/not good enough and therefore:

• this is all your fault, or 
• you should feel ashamed of making this mistake, or
• I am better/more important/more powerful/more entitled than you are, or
• you're not getting a raise/not worth the same salary as your equivalent colleagues, or 
• I'm not going to talk to you anymore, or 
• I'm going to say bad things about you behind your back, or 
• I am telling you on your Facebook wall that I despise you/your beliefs, or
• I am withholding love/sex/connection from you.

Shame tends to get around.

Sometimes I have been the one shaming (I include judging and feeling contemptuous here) other people and sometimes other people have been the ones shaming me.

I have often found myself in "shame loops" – where my shame has gotten stirred up and my response is self-righteousness or judgment which I hope will trigger someone else's shame and protect me from my own. The loop part happens when the other person in the dynamic turns around and shames me right back. And so on. And so on.

Shame – and the vulnerability it stirs up – are deeply painful and difficult to bear. Because of this, they are highly transferable. Too painful to accept and process, we tend to act them out and try to get them off our plates – like hot potatoes. It seems easier to pass shame on than to work shame and vulnerability through.

When I am not successful passing shame and vulnerability on, I tend to armour up against them in an attempt to wall them off. Brené Brown outlines three main forms of armour that people put on to protect against the vulnerability of shame: foreboding joy, perfectionism and numbing.

The booby prize of perfectionism

For roughly the first three-quarters of my life, I lived very deep in the realm of perfectionism. For me, the thinking was: only perfect people are worthy of love and connection. Of course, I knew I wasn't perfect, but I sure was trying. (Very trying, as we sometimes joke in my family). I wanted to be worthy of love and connection – and I thought that being perfect was the only way to achieve that.

After a whole lot of therapy, at some point in my thirties I was able to gradually let go of trying to be perfect, most of the time. I learned how to cut myself some slack, but I think I simultaneously gave up on the hope that I would ever be worthy of love and belonging. I changed my behaviour, but I didn't change my thinking. I still believed that only perfect people are worthy of love and belonging. And since I finally understood that perfection is impossible, that I was not perfect and never would be, I did not deserve love and belonging. Plain and simple.

With that kind of thinking at my core, it is no surprise that the relationship I had been in for a many years collapsed. Looking back now through this lens of Dr. Brown's shame research, I can see how that relationship fell apart largely because of shaming and blaming. Brené has a great line: "If blame is driving, shame is riding shotgun." (Daring Greatly, p. 195) I can see how I wasn't happy and couldn't accept that that was my own responsibility. I needed to work through my own vulnerability and make my own peace with myself and my life. I needed to believe that I was worthy of love and belonging. And I believe my partner needed to figure out similar things for himself. Because we weren't yet able to work through the things we needed to, we resorted to passing shame back and forth between us, stomping on one other's vulnerability, and getting angry and frustrated with each other for not being able to solve/remove each others' difficult feelings. Shame and blame were fundamental to the way we related to ourselves and to one another. And that dynamic went from uncomfortable to intolerable to impossible.

The difference between shame and guilt

Perfectionism is a both an armour against feeling shame and a major re-enforcer of shame. The thinking runs like this: If I am not perfect, I am a flawed/bad person. This is where Dr. Brown's distinction between shame and guilt – between one's essence and one's behaviour – comes in. Brené Brown distinguishes shame from guilt by explaining that shame is experienced as I AM bad in contrast to guilt which is experienced as I DID something bad.

Guilt holds the possibility of change, hope, agency. If I have done something bad, I can make amends, seek forgiveness and strive not to do that bad thing again.

Shame, on the other hand, robs us of agency. If I am a bad person, there is no point in trying to make amends and seek forgiveness. I am simply doomed to a life of being bad, and therefore unacceptable,  unworthy of love and connection.

Framing an incident as I DID a bad thing and am still WORTHY of love and belonging creates a very different experience from I AM a bad person and am fundamentally UNWORTHY of love and belonging. (In the language of perfectionism, this can translate to I MADE A MISTAKE and am still WORTHY of love and belonging versus I AM A MISTAKE and am fundamentally UNWORTHY of love and belonging.)

When people frame their experiences through the lens of guilt, there is hope for a positive outcome. An experience can be turned around.  Something "bad" that threatened disconnection can transform into closer connection.

When people frame their experiences through the lens of shame, the opportunity to transform disconnection to connection is lost. Shame is highly correlated with addiction, depression, eating disorders, and a number of other behaviours that can cause a great deal of damage to individuals and their connections with others. It seems to me that these are essentially manifestations of the main armour tactics Brené Brown lays out: foreboding joy, perfectionism and numbing.

Shame resilience

Since shame is a universal experience, it is not something that can be eliminated or "cured". However, what we can do is develop shame resilience – ways of using courage, critical awareness, reality-checking and vulnerability to work with the shame we experience and move through it more smoothly. We can transform shame from a weapon we use against ourselves and others to a tool/educator that we use to grow into greater connection with ourselves and others.

Dr. Brown lays out a number of tools for building shame resilience that she has identified through her research. These are ways in which people go from thinking I am flawed and therefore unworthy of love and connection to I am flawed and also worthy of love and connection — and not worthy despite being flawed, but because of being flawed and because of finding the courage to accept being flawed and the vulnerability that comes with that.

In our culture of blaming and shaming, we are all faced with the struggle of shame and "shame hangovers". We can deflect, we can wallow, we can resist. Or we can lean in with our vulnerability, accept ourselves, learn how to be ourselves and to have more grace around our humanness and our shame.

I am not going to try to explain Dr. Brown's tools for shame resilience here. I couldn't possibly do them justice in a blog post. If you are interested in knowing more, I urge you to read Daring Greatly. After getting this book from the library, I've decided that I want to own a copy so I can have it on hand while I continue to do work developing greater shame resilience (I feel the need to give a shout-out here to my awesome local booksellers at Lexicon Books – thank you for ordering a copy of Daring Greatly for me to buy).

A postcript about parenting:

I am not a parent, but I have been parented. And so while I hesitate to put this forward because I fear that some people might tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about and that this is none of my business, I'm going to put this forward anyway: I think Dr. Brown's writing about parenting is amazing. She doesn't give specific advice about how to parent – she describes a path to becoming an engaged and vulnerable parent raising children in a family that is committed to creating shame resilience in every member of the family. Even if shame is not a major issue inside a given family, it is so prevalent in North American culture that it is very often an issue from a very young age in schools, on sports teams and on playgrounds (manifesting as bullying, clique-y-ness, shaming power trips – yes, with that last I am thinking of one of my junior high school gym teachers). With this in mind, having an eye to shame-resilience as a parent strikes me as a very valuable thing for children, parents and our culture as a whole. If you want a quick sample to see if Brené Brown's approach to parenting appeals to you, check this out: http://brenebrown.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/DaringGreatly-ParentingManifesto-dark-8x10.pdf

The Move: Part 2 (in which I shovel snow and name my house)

Well, we couldn't move the house yesterday.

It didn't get cold enough on Monday night to freeze the driveway solid and we weren't prepared to attempt it if there wasn't a reasonable prospect of success.

It's a tricky thing: a single lane of long, curvy driveway where there are only two options: make it to the top to deliver the trailer and turn the truck around in the field or get stuck and back the whole way down. With a 35-foot trailer hitched behind an 18-foot-long truck.

Not for the faint of heart.

But I really, really, really want to get her in place. The fellow who's agreed to tow her for me is going away in a couple of weeks, and it's not going to get any drier or more solid up there until after the spring when we can get some work done on that stretch of driveway.

So, yesterday afternoon, some friends and I got together to shovel all the snow and ice we could out of the path, in the hopes that frozen dirt will be more solid than a mix of frozen snow and ice and dirt.

It's minus 5 degrees (Celsius) now and has been most of the night (and yes, it is 4 in the morning, I couldn't sleep) so hopefully there is something resembling a good solid road on that hill.

If you pray, please say a little prayer for us. If you're a sender of good vibes, please send them our way.

Uncertainty can be stressful

Meanwhile, I've been feeling a little stressed. It's hard to live in a state of the unknown, especially when the unknown outcome is close to one's heart. It stirs up a lot of vulnerability for me.

I've been trying to stay calm and happy. I know she'll get up there one way or another, now or in the spring. Knowing that doesn't always help, though.

So, rather than trying to pretend that I wasn't having any feelings, I put some energy into thinking about vulnerability and uncertainty, and since I know that I love the way Brené Brown talks about those things, I looked up this TED talk and watched it again. I hope you have 20 minutes, because I would like to share it with you. It seems to me to contain a simple recipe for how to live a good life, a whole-hearted life in the face of uncertainty and vulnerability (which, let's face it, crop up for a lot of us, often):

This is part of what this tiny home is about for me – shaking off the numbness of being stressed out by debt and feeling weighed down by my stuff – to take a calm, reasonable approach to living, to find a bit of discipline in a simpler life and to become more fully alive – through working harder for my necessities and being responsible: to the earth, to my heart and to my peace of mind.

This period of struggle has given my house a name

My friend, Danette (brilliant creativity coach at The Radical Creative Sanctuary), asked me yesterday if I ever name my dwellings. I never have before. I've lived in houses with names, back in my uni residence and Campus Co-op days: McCaul House, Lowther House, Savage House, and a house we called Six-Twelve.

Through the process of the past couple of days, my thoughts on Brené Brown's research and Danette's insightful question, I'm moved to name my house and I think I've found the perfect name for her: Wholehearted House.