The View Over the Fire Garden

This isn't a brilliant picture but I took it for the record just one year after the fire which left us with this view. We had a solid wood fence which followed the line of the new hog wire one. Depressing as the view was, we much preferred the open vista it afforded. It was just a couple of days after we decided this that the house above was literally dropped by a giant crane on the foundation which had been standing there for three years. The house behind it is across the street and is being built to replace one that burned down. The old house was behind shrubs and couldn't be seen from anywhere, but not any more. It is the first rebuild in the neighborhood and we're happy to see it.

Some of the trees in the field next to us are clearly dead, but some of them are struggling to survive and showing some signs of life, including the biggish one closest to our fence. None of them are on our property, so we don't have anything to say about what happens to them. We're quite friendly with the owners but haven't seen them in ages so we don't really know what their plans are. She is worse at answering phone, texts or email than John is...

David, our contractor/friend came today and finished painting the door casings. He thinks the bathtub should be here soon but doesn't want to start on the bathroom projects until he has everything. He has ordered a new closet door for the guest bedroom and a sliding barn door for the office. It will double as a place where I can hang quilts in progress and still get into the closet where all the fabric is stored without disrupting anything. This meant more moving reorganizing and dusting. I guess when you never dust, you can't complain about corners where there is still ash....

We still don't know what to do with the rug that was in the office. We moved it out when we started doing Pilates classes in there and shoved it in the guest room closet. No wonder the door wouldn't close properly. Now it's shoved under the bed. Still not ideal but I think that rug might be destined to occupy several more spaces before we decide what to do with it.