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Sure thing. Glad to hear you're coming back.
I'm a compulsive baker, and yes I know it's way too hot down here to bake, but one
morning when I decided to make some muffins there was no muffin pan. Maybe you could
invest in one for your next weirdo guests.
Delighted.
This was the kind of feedback we wanted, needed, welcomed. Our goal, after all, was
making a stay at our house as pleasant as possible.
☼ ☼ ☼
The third morning of our visit I woke up early, grabbed the keys to the lower floor and
made my way down the side stairs and around the driveway (remember, there was no stair-
case connecting the floors at that point).
Having more or less finished re-doing the upstairs, I was excited at the prospect of gut-
ting and rebuilding the lower level. But once I swung open the door and switched on the
single overhead light, the magnitude of the project socked me in the gut.
It was a dump—an even bigger, more disgusting dump than I remembered from previ-
ous trips.
Of course we had already given the project lots of thought. We had walked through the
derelict rooms many times the past few months. We had even hired a crew to scrape away
the top layer of crud and to haul off smashed cabinets and rusty appliances. Having meas-
ured all the existing rooms, we'd given a lot of thought to how we'd like the whole thing
reconfigured.
But the planning phase was over—now it was time for action.
I flipped through some drawings we'd made a few months earlier and tried to imagine
what the space would look like when these spidery lines were translated into concrete
walls.
From the beginning our main goal was to take advantage of the view which, admittedly
wasn't as dramatic as the panorama from the floor above, but was a knock-out all the same.
We were still puzzled and amazed by the fact that many of the locals, the former inhabit-
ants of our house included, didn't seem to value the ocean view as much as we did. Or at
all.
In fact the second floor faced inward, as if deliberately shunning the view. The L-
shaped living room stretched straight across the middle section of the space, from the
breezeway on one side to the garden on the other, with the kitchen in the short leg of the L
at the far end.
The only windows faced the garden or, even worse, the carport.
Spaced like jail cells along the front of the house (the ocean-facing façade) were two
tiny bedrooms with miniscule windows and a bathroom in between. To people born on the
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