Simmer

Part of why I have not written much down about the Process of my grand(iose) project is that it’s taking a very long time to get all the costs, and as the last required bits have been coming in—to satisfy The Bank that the project I’m proposing is truly viable—I’ve been going back and forth between a sense of YES and a creepy, moldering sense of This is Costing Way Way More Than I Imagined.

I am the frog, being boiled. Little by little the heat is turning up: between the ballooning cost involved to get all the legal/code requirements taken care of and the hoop-jumping for The Bank and keeping up a steady stream of emails with the contractor to keep them engaged. There is definitely a sense of momentum, like a locomotive starting to roll, yet with every exchange of communications, seems like the numbers go up. How much is too much?

I started out naive for sure and—fair play—there was no way to know how much a house-well-septic-foundation-roof-and-there-will-surely-be-more would all cost until the actual builders get into the game. And once they’re in, putting in sincere efforts to respond to rookie questions and send realistic estimates, that starts an obligation loop — they’ve done their part, I need to do mine. Which makes it even harder for me think of backing out with a “Nope, I cannot spend more than $###,### - thanks, guys, but I’ll pass on this.”

No, I will keep moving on this, not for The Bank or The Contractor, and not even to avoid the embarrassment of giving up.

So the frog sits, wiping steam off its glasses as it dreams of the sweet little home, where like Mr Mole, I will sit on the bank

“while the river still chattered on to him, a babbling procession of the best stories in the world, sent from the heart of the earth to be told at last to the insatiable sea.”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

(which now makes me think of how the very very particular place I call my riverbank is, be it ever so humble, solidly a part of The World… more later)