Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.
[Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit]
After the foundation and sub-floor framing were in place, Jere and Martín could get going on the first floor. At this point, it suddenly dawned on me that our levels were going up European-style, in that our first floor is not our ground floor. First floor is up a full flight of stairs from the mudroom, a ½-flight from the foyer.
For this part of the job, Jere also brought in Larry, to haul rocks and help with the heavy lifting. Here, I was trying to get all 3 guys through the mud-room window, but they wouldn’t cooperate. They kept moving around, working on house-stuff. The nerve.
Roy’s sister Mona and cousin Joya came to town on July 15th. Naturally, we had to show them around. (That’s them in the foyer, getting the low-down from Roy.) The guys were not nonplussed about a tour group descending on them in the middle of the work-day.
I’d have imagined maneuvering the joists into place would require many hands, but Martín did these all on his lonesome.
July 18th. Gorgeous, right?
And check out the bay window off the living room.
With the joists in, Jere could move on to sub-floor plumbing and heating. After that, a quick sub-floor inspection, and he’d be laying the first floor and closing off the crawl-space. If I was going smudge the foundation, it had to be now. Not that I felt the foundation needed smudging – every bit of work emanated good qi — but I’d told Tony I would, and I like to think I’m as good as my word.
On the full moon 20 July, in the late afternoon, I went widdershins around the house with a smoking bundle of dried sage,
then went in and smudged the mudroom.
It was big fun, but the biggest fun was crawling around under the joists and popping up between them like a groundhog popping up in a field.
Magic worked, we took a moment to relish the always-lovely, soon-to-be-blocked view from the back yard.
this is so triply, phoenix rising from the ashes!!
Goedenavond, Margreet! A mud room is a second, not fancy entry that opens into an place where you can remove and store your wet and muddy footwear and rain gear and clothes and such. In our case, our mud room is the basement, which will also serve as our laundry room and workshop.
Hi, Eleanor! Yes, exactly. I adopted the phoenix as my totem way back in January, no fool I. ;)
Goedemorgen.
Hi risa,
Very nice to see in what your views look like.
Lovely. And what is a mudroom? Love Margreet