I moved to California and I tiled a kitchen floor.

Because I’ve lived in intentional communities of various kinds for the past three years, moving into a former convent with six other theology students sounded ideal. The house, called Shabbat House, is big and old and feels pretty much like a convent would feel if you turned it into a normal home. A TV sits in the old chapel, and each of our bedrooms comes equipped with its own sink.

But because it’s old, the house has its fair share of repairs that need to be undertaken. And when we as a house received a donation from an “anonymous benefactor,” we decided that replacing our kitchen floor would be the perfect task. It was yellow linoleum, the kind of pattern that probably seemed bright and vibrant in 1972 but had faded to a dingy, faded remnant of its former glory.

We exchanged e-mails about the floor, ones that now seem almost heartbreakingly naïve: “We’ll just knock it out in a weekend and be done with it!” was the general consensus. I pictured two days of happily working in the kitchen with my housemates, removing linoleum and laying down tile and singing along to the Temptations or Aretha Franklin or the like.

A weekend quickly turned into 10 days of laying a subfloor, learning to mortar, and only eating what we could eat raw or microwave. Our refrigerator hummed in our dining room, and the stove sat lonely and unplugged. Dishes sat in stacks on our dining room table. As we lay tile, we realized our new floor – the color was called “Caribbean Sunrise” – clashed with our kitchen’s yellow countertops and periwinkle blue paint. And so painting was added to our list of renovations, and two more days of painting and cleaning everything that had gotten covered in cement dust were set before us.

Kitchens, for me, have always been a kind of sacred space. I believe that making and sharing a meal with other people is a sacramental act: that we are not only nourishing our bodies but our spirits, and our relationships with one another. In the communities I’ve lived in, the kitchen has been where we gather to talk about our day, laugh, cry, and use cooking as a form of procrastination or stress relief. To not have that touchstone available the first two weeks I lived in the Shabbat House made me feel disoriented and a little stressed.

But last Sunday, we finished sealing the tile, painting the cabinets a lovely buttercream color, cleaning appliances, and setting the stove and the refrigerator in their rightful places. Our dining room seemed disconcertingly empty; our kitchen felt like new.

That night, my housemate Susan and I came downstairs after one of my first days of orientation and opened up a bottle of wine. We grabbed the wine, a bag of chips and some salsa, and sat down on our new tile floor. We talked about my excitement for grad school, her past experiences, and ate and drank and enjoyed our functional kitchen. In those few minutes of sharing food and conversation, I felt things click into place in a way they hadn’t quite yet. I’m learning to call a new place “home,” and now it feels a little more like one.

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