Things are never easy, are they?

Well, this is a bit of a roller coaster ride. Yesterday I went up to see Barbara Jones of Amazonails to talk about straw bale building and look at the plot. I felt great about the whole thing; liked Barbara, loved her ideas and attitude, everything just felt positive.

This morning, however, our mortgage guy came back to us saying that although the lender had offered us one amount, on reflection and after careful consideration, they had felt it would be prudent to halve that. Meaning we can still buy the land, but we can’t afford to build anything on it.

Great.

Awesome.

Thanks, guys.

All the freecycled materials and volunteer labour in the world won’t build this house without at least *some* money.

So, commences a flurry of phone calls, internet searches, etc, and we are in discussion with several other lenders about what they could offer. It’s nightmarish for me, because I know big, fat nothing about money, so talking to these people is like an anxiety dream full of questions I didn’t know the answers to and phrases I knew had very specific meanings but I didn’t know what those meanings were. In the end, I seem to have left it for now with our mortgage broker, who at least speaks the language. But it’s illustrative of a concept I’ve been thinking about lately in terms of this house: When faced with a problem you don’t know how to solve, giving up or passively hoping for a solution to magically arrive is *such* an alluring prospect. It’s terrifying, the thought of getting stuck in, learning on the trot, tracking down the people you need to ask, trying to understand their answers, and, most difficult of all, experiencing the anxiety of trying to talk intelligently to people who know 10 times what you know about a subject.

I know I can’t allow myself the comfort of hiding under the duvet and letting/expecting someone to rescue me by handling everything that crops up that’s outside my comfort zone. This whole project is outside my comfort zone, but there’s only one way to make your comfort zone bigger and that’s to take the bull by the horns and try doing stuff you don’t feel all that confident about.

So I guess I’d better get back on that phone.