Daydream Believer

So there's this thing happening: we're buying a house. Yep, I know we're getting really boring about this now, but you'll have to cope. It really is the most exciting and terrifying thing ever, and my poor brain can't stop to think about anything else.

I day dream. I night dream. I have never pondered insulation so much in my life, and that's really saying something. My logic is, it's OK to dream if you actually end up doing the thing you're dreaming about. Actually it's OK to dream anyway, but if you actually do the thing, you get to enjoy the dreaming and then enjoy the achieving, and that's at least 3 times as awesome*.

So this is what I've been dreaming about. Actually, this is only one of my crazy dreams, but I'll ease you in gently by leaving the rest for another post.

So this morning I woke up obsessed with green roofs (again). I love them. I used to live in a field, and now I live in a city, and I just miss all the green. Greenness makes my eyes feel all relaxed and happy, and it is oh-so-lacking in the view from the back of our new place. We will en-green-en the garden, but that is not enough for me; I think we need to en-green-en the house too.

The bathroom extension on the lower ground floor of our new abode needs re-roofing, as it has been creatively (AKA badly) roofed in the past. We could just slap on a concrete tile roof, such as adorns it now. We could. Or y'know, we could be all awesome and cover it in plants. I was so excited by this idea this morning, that the very thought of it was keeping me awake. I wanted - no, needed - to know just how amazing it would be, so I turned to Photoshop to make my dreams come true.

And lo, gentle reader, here is what it would look like. On the left is how it looks currently, on a particularly grim Swansea day, and on the right is the small, but not insignificant, patch of greenery (and purplery, and reddery) that we could be adding.

Not bad for the limited Photoshop skills of a sleepy woman at 7am

I can hear some of you, being all pragmatic and stuff. Stop it now! Yes, it would be cheaper to just slap a concrete roof on. Yes, that would probably be less ambitious for a bunch of people with very little building experience. Yes, I have yet to convince the rest of the co-op that it's a great plan. But no, I will not stop dreaming that we can go beyond average to awesome.

This is for why. When the daft scheme to set up a housing co-op was first mooted, I honestly thought we'd never do it. I went along with it just in case we did ever get it together, however unlikely that seemed. Then this thing happened where for two years we kept dreaming. We dreamt little and often. We sometimes woke up with a start, faced reality for a bit, and then went back to our dreaming. But the point is, we never stopped thinking that dreaming was a good idea, because there was that slim chance that one day, somehow, we might actually do it.

And here we are, more than two years later, and something we dreamed of is coming true. This is so very definitely NOT the time to stop dreaming. It is the time to dream even bigger because we know that dreams can be believed in.

- Hannah

*awesome is bigger than the sum of it's parts.