Furniture, furniture

Oh goody! I have a rare hour or so of isolation while Steve goes to a physical therapist to learn some exercises for his shoulder, which has been afflicted with bursitis because of some of the heavier-than-usual lifting we've both been doing in the past couple of months. I'm interested in whatever routines he's sent home with, because I've had the same problem, just not to the extent he has. With all the walking I've done all my life, my lower body is in fine shape. But I've neglected maintenance of the scaffolding and infrastructure above the waist, and it shows. I guess carrying occasional heavy grocery and trash bags does represent a minimum of upkeep, but I could use more....

Today should interesting. We've been looking at (and buying) some of the furniture the new house is going to need: a couple of love seats for the great room, tables, dressers, pictures, etc. I've mentioned before that the main TV, a 48-inch flat screen, is going to be in the great room in this house. It's an arrangement neither of us is fond of--we don't like making a huge TV screen the focal point of an area meant for conversation--but it's what the space configuration of the house permits. (In the old place, we converted the basement to a media room, problem solved. No basement here.) The solution is an armoire that will stand alone as a piece of furniture when we are having people over, hiding the TV screen while at the same time allowing access to other techie components, such as a good mp3 player. Armoires for today's huge screens, however, are hard to find in most furniture showrooms.

We know North Carolina is renowned for its furniture industry, and have been contemplating a foray to the furniture outlets in the western part of the state to see what we can find. But such an outing has seemed daunting, frankly. We can both get overwhelemed by too much choice, and what we've learned about these furniture outlets is that they are basically a series of airplane-hangar sized buidlings crammed with every style of furnture imaginable. My first impulse upon entering such a place would be to run back out, screaming. Enter Creswell Furniture.

Creswell is a little town about 30 minutes south of us. The furniture store there had an inventory sale last fall which we decided to check out. We were delighted to find beautiful stuff at good prices, and ended up buying almost everything there, thus making the awful trip out west less necessary. Needless to say, we and our furniture dollars have become "best friends" with the manager there, and we mentioned our armoire conundrum to her. It turns out she had exactly the same problem, for the same aesthetic reasons, when she built her house a few years ago, and she found a cabinet maker who happens to live right in Hertford, where we're building. She praised his craftsmanship, as well as his reasonable prices, so we gave him a call. Lo and behold, it turns out he's actually building a house right across the creek from us. All we need to do is bring him a picture of the type of piece we want, and he can make it, adding the custom touches that we'll need. We'll be meeting him today--he'll even be able to come to our house and actually see the space the armoire will occupy.

An armoire is a massive piece of furniture any way you slice it, and it should be fun to play with design details. It will be placed in the part of the room that is under the highest part of the vaulted ceiling, thus making the big size appropriate. We've never had that kind of space to play with, so we're looking forward to what we can do with it. Don't worry, pics will be forthcoming when it all becomes a reality!

We're expecting another major storm this weekend--thank you, El Niño, for creating storms that make mudslides in California and then travel our way to create huge nor'easters. All the rain we've been having is starting to interfere with our house construction. Rain makes mud--too much of it for a heavy machine to be able to dig the 50-foot trench for the main drainpipe that will carry waste from the house to the septic tank. No drain means no water hookup; no water hookup means no installation of indoor faucets, showers, toilets, etc. Now is the time all that should be happening, and it can't. Other interior work is continuing, and Gary is still talking about an end-of-February occupancy. He's been known to have a rabbit hidden under his hat in the past--we're hoping he does now!