The Honest Courtesan

We’re going to use the small area between the walls of the bathroom and Chekhov’s cottage as a vestibule; eventually there will be coat hooks and a boot brush there (for cleaning mud from boots), plus a few odds and ends of the sort one keeps near outside doors in farmhouses.  I’ve recently finished the paneling in the area, and Jae has a few finishing touches; I also want to divide it visually from the rest of the atrium with a latticework panel, to continue that inside/outside kind of aesthetic.  I should also soon finish the plastic panels in the shower roof and stick my head up into the are above the ceiling of the north porch to see if it can seal off what dripping still remains, but for some reason I find myself avoiding those tasks.  They aren’t the only ones; I’ve also been putting off sealing up the roof on the south-side paddock ramp.  It’s weird how every nearly construction project seems to have a few small tasks that never seem to get finished; every house I’ve lived in has had a couple of such details.  When I was young my father nearly doubled the size of our house by enclosing the carport to make a bedroom for me and one of my sisters, and adding a large den and garage at the back, and yet despite doing all that work practically single-handed there were a couple of minor features that never did get done (at least not before I left home).  And when a dear friend’s family built a new house, one large room on the south side sat completely unfinished for over ten years despite the rest of the house being gorgeous.  I have no explanation for this phenomenon, but at least it makes me realize that I’m not alone in being able to finish some Herculean project, only to repeatedly put off some trifling task that could probably be accomplished in an afternoon or two.