Happy Halloween

The scariest 12 pounds in Alamance county. More about the house tomorrow.

mOMENts

There is a moment in any endeavor, whether it's raising a child or a house, where you just get a feel for how it's going to turn out. Hopefully that moment is not going to be like the one when Gregory Peck figures out that his son Damien has some interesting genealogy to go along with that odd tattoo on his head.

Hopefully, the moment will be more like "AHHHH, yes, this is just the way I hoped it would be."

We hit that moment yesterday when the roof of the bedroom wing was framed in. The house looks a lot less like a plywood mobile home, and more like a Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian. The bones and flesh are there, the rest is just cosmetics so to speak.

Fear

This is where the end of the carport steel locks into the steel post.

Pat, the 57 year old boy, horsing around on our carport's skeleton.Carport skeleton on the left, Tom, Elspeth and Pat in the middle.

Trellis skeleton on the right.

At what point does a handwritten note from the bank cease to scare?

It was just an invitation to a real estate investment seminar, whereas we're gambling big time that this house is going to all work out.

The steel was delivered yesterday; because we're terrified of what COULD happen. This steel is the stuff that will hopefully keep our cantilevered carport from crashing down into the ground, our picture windows in place and the trellises on the ends of the wings fly without fail.

The original Rosenbaum house in Florence, Alabama didn't have steel structural support and it leaked like a sieve. The 800K renovation corrected that problem. I hope this house doesn't cost that amount. I'm pretty sure then a handwritten note from the bank WOULD be bad news.

Happy Birthday PV

Come again another day

Rain all week according to the N&O. We shall see what gets accomplished. The only deadline we're sort of dealing with is we have to be dried in sufficiently to receive our Sears appliances as well as the Ikea cabinets the second week of December. And this week is Halloween so time is flying by.

We had dinner with a young fellow who had never heard of Frank Lloyd Wright so we mentioned the Ken Burns documentary, which is an excellent introduction.

Here's a taste of it. Apparently PBS has such tight reins on their shows, you can't access them on the web unless it is on their site.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G8k3qTpk7g

Here are a couple of negative responses to the show.

http://www.franklloydwrightinfo.com/burns.html

Fibber McGee

We are attacking our hall closet today. It could be scary.

There are things under the stairway, where the closet is located, that I don't want in the new house, because obviously, I wouldn't have stuck them back behind Mom's blue winter coat I still wear. But, I don't want to get rid of them yet. So, I guess we'll put them in the basement of the biz building and let the girls make decisions about pictures of people they never knew.

On another note, there was an article in the Raleigh N&O about a house with the same "poliwog" design (as Mr. Frank called it.) Only to mind my, they had no privacy. The whole point of the L shape is that the inside of the L faces the woods so you have a semi-courtyard. If the L is open to the road, no matter how far back it is from the street, you have no privacy.

The bedroom wing's clerestory windows have been framed. We're thinking we may eliminate ONE window which would enable us to put some Ikea closets in there, AND, the big concern, is that my IKEA bathroom cabinet will not fit in the place we have designated for it. We even measured twice. (You know the rule, measure twice, cut once.)

Time and Tide, Time and Tide

This has been a week of waiting AND activity. Our contractor had to take advantage of the clear skies to finish drying in another job and so instead of framing our house completely, he chose to do the steps instead. This is a job that also required dry weather, and so we now have steps to go from the lower level great room to the bedroom wing, which has just about finished with the framing. And, the framing is a bit more beefy due to the stress that will be imposed by the steel girders which will support the cantilevered carport as well as the fact of all those windows.

The steps look very retro, It is supposed to start raining again this afternoon, we we'll see what we can get accomplished this morning.

Patience, I must remind myself constantly, is a virtue.

Just as, "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in a possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife," so to it is a truth universally acknowledged that Frank Lloyd Wright was a jackass.

Okay, that was a very awkward way to get Jane Austen in this blog. But I had to do it.

But, it is true, and you don't have to take my word for it, just read his book THE NATURAL HOUSE. His arrogance shines through in sentences like "if there were no casement windows, I would have invented them." His judgemental attitude is writ clear when he calls the very common, double hung windows "guilliotine" windows.

However, as we were discussing at church yesterday, Mozart and Beethoven probably weren't all that easygoing either. Along with the singlemindeness of genius comes a certain tunnel vision that disregards other people's feelings and ideas.

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Again thanks to Wikipedia for these images.