Slanty

(Cool and damp, 45-ish)

I feel like I’m blogging piecemeal, giving these daily thoughts of life out here in the woods, and without any real context. What do I actually do here? Where do I actually live? What are these treehouses I mention? Yeah, there’s a lot to know, and I’m sorry.

But today I want to tell you about my house, Slanty. It has another, more boring name, but I call it Slanty because 1)Marc came up with the name, 2)It has a slanted roof, and 3)It’s not at all level, meaning if you placed a tennis ball on the floor, it would roll to the kitchen sink. I want to tell you about my house because I’ve been spending a lot of time in here. Carlo and I have been working on fixing the ceiling and putting up the walls somebody never finished. Since it gets dark around 4:30 these days, I’ve also been spending a whole lot of evening time in here. Therefore, dear blog, you should know about it.

Slanty is easy to describe, because it has four rooms: A kitchen, a living room, a hallway, and a bathroom. The kitchen and living room rest on stilts, and look out over a leafless, but mossy, big-leaf maple grove. Farther on, evergreen trees join in. The forest slopes down toward the river, which I could see from my windows if we cut down all the trees. One wall of Slanty is almost entirely windows, and the view is captivating: The fog creeps between the trees, and squirrels leap from branch to branch, and I’m pretty sure there’s a cougar living somewhere close by back there, so it’s a pretty exciting area.

I sleep in a corner of the living room, between two banks of windows. The back windows don’t have any curtains, which makes me nervous at night but gleeful during the day. The gray sunlight wakes me up in the mornings, and I prop myself up on my elbow to look outside. The focal point of the living room is a brick fireplace, with an ancient aerial photo of camp on the mantle. Right now I’ve got the mantle decorated with fir boughs, too. The bathroom is ridiculously large for a cabin this size, but that’s okay. It’s better than being too small.

All of that said, Slanty is kind of a wreck. It was built by someone with limited architectural skills, way back in the day, and some walls go five feet between studs. If you walk below the house, you’ll notice the stilts are resting on little concrete pyramids, some of which are being supported by the septic line. As for the septic, no one knows where it goes. The water line on the way in is leaky, seeping dirt into the line. (One has to hope the septic line is not right next to the water line, but around here, you never know.) The bathroom never got finished, so until today, there weren’t walls, and there’s still bare insulation for a ceiling. Icing that cake is the fact that the insulation was put up upside-down.

A space heater is the only source of heat, and it has a loud, high-pitched fan that goes whenever it’s on. Insulation is limited, and the back door has a big crack, so it never really gets warm unless it’s summer. I have another little space heater, which I use to heat the bathroom before I shower, and my bed during the night. The fireplace draws heat out from the house, but I would never begrudge it, because it’s so lovely.

The outside walls of Slanty are rough, dark, ugly wood, which is molding and cracking in many places. Carlo and I nailed up square patches of unmatched wood to keep out the squirrels. A tree fell on the gutter last year, and took out a corner of the building; we haven’t gotten around to fixing it. The front stoop is made of gravel and railroad ties, and gets dripped on constantly; it’s starting to fall in, and it—combined with the ripped front door—is deeply ugly.

But Slanty is beautiful inside, with her wood paneling and her windows, and since I’ve droned on about my house way too long, I’ll leave it there.