My contractor thinks I am crazy for building a standalone fireplace in my backyard. He thinks the slate slabs I am going to use to make the patio are impractical, and that hanging a giant iron chandelier from the trees installed on an elaborate set of pulleys and lit with LED candlesticks is too much. My contractor thinks that sourcing the bricks for my fireplace from a soon-to-be torn down ice house is just buying trouble, and that provenance is a waste of time. My contractor thinks that building trellises along the fence line and double-planting them with Wisteria and grape vines is impractical, and that ripping out all the Yews along the house and replacing them with Lilacs, positioned to catch the lake breeze and carry the smell of them through every open window is a waste of time and money.
My contractor thinks I should just use scrap pieces of wood to cobble together a chicken coop because chickens don’t care what their house looks like, and he thinks I am crazy for drawing up plans for a coop that looks exactly like a minuature of my house. My contractor thinks that I should make the kitchen garden a third of the size I want it to be, and he thinks I will have too many tomato plants, and he also thinks I shouldn’t plant fruit trees on the side yard. My contractor says my kitchen garden will feed an army and I hope he is right. My contractor thinks I am crazy for only planting blue, black, and white flowers in all of my gardens, and my contractor thinks I am crazy for using Sage and Rosemary as greenery in my planters and borders, for the smell.
My contractor thinks that ripping the legs off of an antique iron double bed, drilling deep sink hooks through each corner, and suspending the whole thing from a concrete-footed trellis covered in climbing tea roses and strings of Edison lights is impractical and foolish and oh, yes, crazy. “Pretty fancy hammock!” he grumbled. “You can buy a porch swing, you know,” he said. My contractor thinks replacing the entire lawn with low-growing Thyme is ridiculous, even though I explained to him that when you walk across it, the smell is incredible, and what I didn’t tell him is that cartwheeling across it, so that your hands release the fragrance just as your face is a foot from the plants, a heady experience, over in a second but memorable for a lifetime, because, let’s face it, he thinks this is crazy enough.
My contractor thinks my plan to instal a tiny house in the back corner of the yard and use it as my home office is so ridiculous he couldn’t even say the words. Just harrumphed, and kept walking. He didn’t even want to hear my idea to put a teeny tiny little patio in front of it, with child-sized seating, and then plant only miniature versions of flowers around it in tiny pots. He was done. With me. He was done with me.
My contractor says he doesn’t even know how to draw up an estimate for all my crazy, and my contractor says it’s going to take him at least a month to figure it out on paper, and my contractor says this all seems like a giant waste of money, and my contractor says there are more pressing structural issues he should be attending to, first, on this old farmhouse of mine, and my contractor says he doesn’t get it, what is the point of all this, and I tell him, the point is that it will be astonishingly beautiful and peaceful and wild and romantic, and my contractor says, but you are single, and I say yes, but it’s okay to live an astonishingly beautiful and romantic life when you are alone, and its okay to read yourself Neruda while swinging with your dog in your floating bed under an arbor of roses, enjoying the lake breeze on your skin and watching the fire in your fireplace burn down to embers. It’s okay. It’s really okay.
My contractor says he can build it all. So that’s what he and I will do.
dailybridgerton
2087
jacobvanloon
dededos
theartofmadeline
origamiaround
