Some people do DIY. We do Domestic Bliss. Very, very slowly, our big shed (The Great Hall) gets closer to completion. Being incomplete doesn't mean it's not habitable, it simply means that on sleety days like today, progress can be made on fiddly finishing jobs. Planks of wood lurking up in the loft can be brought down, measured up, sawn, drilled and hammered, all of which is deeply satisfying, indeed blissful.
To add to the bliss, woodwork and joinery has its own, delicious lexicon, as resinous and evocative as the scent of sawdust. Today saw the completion of the ingos and the architraves (for those that have the same understanding of these terms that I had until a few months ago, these are the wooden surrounds for windows and doors etc - ingos are the bits that go in perpendicular to the wall up to the window frame, and architraves are the overlay onto the wall to hide the joins).
So now the last two windows and all the doors have handsome wooden surrounds. They're Douglas Fir, grown in Scotland, and are currently a rather magical pale pink against the honey-coloured pine window frames. They'll darken to a deeper copper colour in time.
It is one of the perpetual pleasures of hut-life that home is built of trees. Wood smells good, it looks lovely and I know of few deeds more satisfying than sawing up bits of wood and nailing them together into something useful. I get the same, profound sense of good-job-well-done from making a basket, but today woodwork is the business.
And miraculously, neither of injured ourselves at all today - no cuts, no hammered thumbs, no aching backs.
Pure bliss.
No comments:
Post a Comment