10th Anniversary

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the establishment of my chapel! In some ways it seems like the blink of an eye; in others, it's been a lifetime. I adopted my Rule of Life one year before my husband created the chapel for me.

In the beginning, the chapel was just a couple of out-buildings.

It became a playroom for our daughter for a while, and then it doubled as a shelter for our kittens.

The kittens soon became cats who didn't really need their own room, and our daughter never did use the playhouse too much. One day as my husband and I were surveying our domain, I commented that it would make a nice chapel. 

My husband loves a good project, and in short order he had made the conversion.

The first chapel was in just one of the two buildings; it's actually a trailer of some sort. The other building remained a garden shed for another year. The garden shed was quite a bit larger than the trailer, and I thought it would be nice to expand. My husband, good sport that he is, jumped right in.

The shed had a dirt floor and unfinished walls and a broken window, along with lots of junk and trash...

 And old hornets' nests:

 But we just carted out all the stuff and swept up as best we could:

Ta da!

Then he finished the walls (I helped!), and we painted:

...and cut a doorway between the two buildings:

 

...and added some nice floor linoleum and molding:

And in the end, it was beautiful!

The interior has gone through several changes, and I documented in another post the re-painting project we undertook a couple of years ago, as well as the addition of a real tabernacle. 

We have done a lot of landscaping over the years, too. This is an early photo, before we planted trees around it.

In 2011, I mentioned to my husband that the chapel wasn't symmetrical, and could use an extension, which I could use as a little sacristy...well, by now you should know that my husband loves these projects! So:

           

And for years we had a problem with the roof leaking. We put a tarp over the whole thing, finally, and that worked for a while, except that the wind constantly tried to tear the tarp off (and sometimes succeeded), and the tarp eventually weathered and rotted to some extent. So we re-roofed, of course!

  

Here are some other views of changes in the landscaping:

Before trees and flowers.

The year I grew sunflowers! Here they were still small.

Those are the trees growing up on posts on the left.

About a year later, those trees were already doing their job.

In the winter...obviously...

...and in the summer!

It's been quite a journey, both physically and spiritually!

Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.