i will never get back the hours i've wasted sitting in my office this week doing absolutely nothing because there is no one here but me and the few odd in and out wanderers... i can't imagine what constructive things i could be doing at home... like reading, with cat in lap and bottle at hand. this is madness...
after all these years of working on my grim old pile of a house, i've discovered that i have a bent for tile work... i undertook replacing the raised hearth with one that is level with the surrounding dining hall floor and reduced the amount it intruded into the room, seeing as how the new dining table is so large that when centered in the room, those seated on the hearth side would bang their chairs into the raised hearth when trying to get in and out of their seats, which was annoying, at best. i shortened it by over a foot and leveled the base and installed these fired tiles that look like bricks and laid them in a herringbone pattern.
i'd never done anything like this before, it's actually quite a bit of fun working with them, especially the math involved in a pattern like this. it still needs to be grouted, probably with a black or very dark gray color grout, i'll tackle that this weekend.
i also had to make some flooring out of red oak to fill the void where the old raised hearth jutted into the room and by using two different color wood stains and some black paste wax, was able to get a good match to the aged existing flooring.
more to come...
now, by degree, the days beging to lengthen... be noble, do the right thing...
once it was the wolves in the night that we feared. now it is the coming of the day, for who knows what it brings? wolves, at least bared their teeth...
