6 - Open House/Open Hearts

I have been thinking about what it is like to walk through something that isn’t fully built yet.  This two-car garage is echo-y and a bit unglamorous, but it feels like hope. Making Space retreats will be for women who have built full lives and who are at a threshold, ready for space to reflect with both structure and freedom.  This studio will host expressive arts explorations, movement, and yoga.  It really is a blank canvas.

Stairs and thresholds exist in buildings and also in life!  One set of stairs I built up to the entry hall has been the location of many first day of school photos.  Here are the boys heading into first and third grade in 2003.  What hams!

This set of stairs connects the main house to the gathering space at the fire and the view to the orchard and mountains. I love how immersed in nature I feel when I am here.  And these thresholds were important to me to further establish this new context of Making Space.  We all face different thresholds in life, and imagining open-hearted and strong women using these stable stairs during retreat as they are navigating full lives makes me excited for our season to begin in April. 

 I’m so grateful for this crazy partnership with Mark, in life and in renovating this home for our new business!  Our recent division of labor has been me painting and then Mark laying the floor.  Laminate flooring has evolved since he last laid the floor, but his unconventional positions have not.  Thank goodness we go to yoga together multiple times a week.

This image is of yet another shower to replace, but what I want you to notice is the black spray-paint line on the subflooring.  Back in the Fall of 1997 when we put in the foundation and then installed the subfloor, I loosely spray-painted the outlines of the main floor rooms so that we could ‘walk through our house’ together as a family.

The boys were so young, I am not sure how much they really understood, but it was so fun to skip around the decking pretending to eat breakfast, take a shower in the bathroom and then go to bed in their bedroom.  Here we are that very fall standing in the someday to be living room. Such an ambitious little family.  Almost thirty years later, I'm still walking through rooms that aren't built yet, only now I'm imagining the retreats: who will sit by the fire, what we'll make in the studio, how it will feel to climb those stairs!

If you'd like to walk through the space with us, come to our open house on October 24^th 2026. It's still a blank canvas, and I'd love to show you around.

For now, we'll keep making space, one layer at a time, for what's next.

We're so glad you're here.