Out-a-money can be harrowing if you have many bills to pay. That's not our case. We are stuck without funds to finish our house, but at least we have moved in and set up home.
From my fireside perch, I look around at the drywall issues, the few boxes yet to be opened and sorted through, the missing baseboard. Even the fireplace mantel that had to be moved up four inches to prevent a fire hazard, leaving four inches of gap between the slate we had installed and the bottom of the mantel doesn't worry me.
We may have a lawsuit pending, and we may be forced to start one. Maybe this is the calm before the storm, but maybe it is the eye of the hurricane.
I read my first book in eight months yesterday because I found I had nothing to do with no workmen coming round. But, today I begin to write. Today I need to retrace these steps mostly to document the goodness of God and also to remind myself that he's been in this project from before day one, and he will see it through.
There is a right way and a wrong way to build a house. The wrong way seems to hug the landscape like a garden of slugs hung the roots of the tomato plants. Tract home suburbs.
I think the right way was planted in my mind way back in first and second grade, living in the suburbs of Philly, in the gate house of an estate complete with a mansion, a pool, several other homes and a hundred foot tall and round beech tree.
Looking at the house I lived in between ages 6 and 9, from the gate you would have seen the lower exterior of stone with clapboard siding above. Two mulberry bushes hugged either side of the walkway towards the entry.
Inside, a foyer gave several options via the solid oak staircase to the bedrooms upstairs, or to the right, where we ate formal dinners with many guests, or to the left, which was a playground of a living room where we built many forts out of turned over chairs, blankets and couch cushions. Leaded glass windows on either side of the fireplace and above the twin bookcases seemed regale to my childish apprehension.
Going back to the entry, if you ventured forward, you would notice the built in burnished desk off –center, hiding in the bend of the last three well-worn oak stairs.
The hall closet suited the space directly under the stairs, and on the other side of the closet was the in ignoble entry into the kitchen. I really can't say that kitchen was the best way to build a kitchen. They say food is not the most important thing in the hospitality industry, but in a home whether cooking and serving a family or for entertainment, the making and the serving of the food is a highly detailed, technical function of the home, and therefore the kitchen should be designed with much better care than I recall that scullery having.
Many things about kitchens have been upgraded these days, from linoleum to trash compactors. Some of them are genius, others are worthless, and many simply suit what's new in architectural magazines. What I liked about our kitchen was the triple header choice of going through a back opening into a side door to the dining room or of rather escaping through to the back door to the outside grassy courtyard, or thirdly, of sneaking up the private smaller staircase to just outside my bedroom door. This small set of stairs turned at the landing and went up again another flight of stairs to the attic playroom where we set up a puppet theater and a sand bag toss and hosted our best friends from across the street when they came to play.
On the second floor were the bedrooms and enormously white bathroom surrounding the staircase. Between my parent's room and my little sisters' room was a large bay styled window sitting area, that may be considered wasted space in today's tract home industry, but it was a place to sit and read or set up the ironing board, or color in your coloring books on the floor, or sit and look out over the front yard and the street, and also to watch the trees change seasons. It was useful to me.
When I reminisce about that house, it is no wonder that I grieved it for two years after moving to a brand new suburb of Denver in a state called Colorful Colorado, which neither qualified as the Wild West, nor swept me away with the scents of exotic spring flowers nor allowed a child to pile up fallen Autumn leaves and jump into them. After moving to the tract house in Arvada, I walked alone to school on brand new sidewalks, through a park made of dust and brand new steel park toys, over wide expanses of sod and under open sky to the steel and glass modern doors of the brand new neighborhood school named after the indigenous tree they had to cut down in order to build it. Later, much later, it would finally break through to me how beautiful the Colorado sky truly is, but at the time, all I saw was the abysmal lack of trees, shrubs and large mysterious homes with creeping ivy covering the fences, hiding the history of the people who had lived and loved and fought and died there.