BE-COMING HOME: true colors

There is some of the same fitness in a man’s building his own house that there is in a bird’s building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter?”
[Walden, Henry David Thoreau]

Ah, sweet October.  The windows and doors went in,

more ducting appeared,

the hole in the wall started looking like a return air vent,

overhead sprinklers were placed,

and the concrete guys prepped the carport area.

We stopped by to confer with our electrician mid-month,

and discovered, to our delight, the front posts were up!

By the third week of October, the carport was highly tread-able,

we had a trench for the future water pipe,

and, most wondrous of all, the siding started showing off our chosen exterior colors!

Colors are a personal thing.  The ones we’ve chosen for the exterior are not everyone’s cup of tea (“really dark,” some say with a hint of “omg” subtext), but we couldn’t be more pleased.

We arrived at these colors first by zeroing n on 3 infinitesimally different browns for the body and astoundingly-similar rock-grays for the trim, any of which would content Roy.  In the end, I needed to purchase 13 pints of paint, apply each tint to pieces of Hardie plank and bits of fir, test the samples in all their permutations against the house, the hill, and our choice of tile, and then solicit outside opinions on at least ½ of the combinations before I made up my mind.  And though I settled on colors I dearly loved, I wasn’t at all sure I’d love them on a grand scale.

So it wasn’t simply pleasure; it was relief to see how handsome the  house looked in the taupe-trimmed brown coat(s) painter par excellence Jim Horn had given her.

That’s true colors on the top half of the house, primer below.  Right around this time, we dropped in to see Margrit and Reiner.  While chatting in their living room, Roy noted that a corner of our house was just visible through the trees.  The effect was exactly what we’d been hoping for – the house merged with its surroundings, melting into the foliage, subtle and organic, as if it were an part of the hillside.

During this exciting month, table took up a central command post in the dining room,

thereby missing a real thrill.  I almost missed it myself.  I came in through the mud-room that day, head down, some house-query on my mind… and suddenly, looking down on our entry from the upstairs east-office, THIS caught my eye.

The portico roof – masterpiece, yes?

So much happening, inside and out, at that point, we still dared hope for a Yuletide return to our home on the hill.