a guest post by Jo Canham of Blarney Books
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How We Came to Be: Part 2
Part 1 can be found here…
So here I am, sitting next to the baptismal font in an unrenovated hall, looking at the metres and metres of industrial grey carpet in front of me, and I burst into tears. (Remember, please, I am 20 weeks pregnant at this point – that, and I hate grey carpet!) The job ahead of us looks impossible. It’s late October. I have a baby due in March. In between time, I have set myself the goal of setting up a whole new business in a town where we don’t know, for all intents and purposes, anyone. My partner has made some work-related contacts, and we have met the real estate people, but that’s all.
We sleep for our first night on a mattress on the floor, in absolute exhaustion. And we haven’t yet begun! The trucks are to arrive, after an overnight stop in Warrnambool (a town 20 minutes away), first thing in the morning.
So it all starts the following morning. They arrive a little after first light, and the unloading begins for the men, the unpacking for me. The hall has a tiny apartment attached to it, where we are lodging until we renovate. The entire apartment is roughly the size of the kitchen in our previous house. It has three ‘bedrooms’, though only one of these can contain a double bed (forget about a queen!), and even that would create problems with opening the doors of the built-in ‘wardrobe’. Naturally enough, we have a king bed. We decide to move into the hall proper. Out of the gradually emptying cardboard boxes, we construct a temporary bedroom, on the raised platform, across from the built-in baptismal font. The boxes are quite useful – positioned appropriately, these box walls double as storage, and from them we managed to fashion some pretty effective shelving for our clothes.