Oh, it is so glorious when the light dawns!

“Dark night of the soul” is too serious a term for this week’s mini-crisis. That’s an expression to reserve for the big bad moments (or years) in life. But this week fell at least into a momentary twilight of the creative soul.

Then … light!

—–

Tuesday the Wandering Monk and I found all that awfulness as we began the Great House Foundation Project.

Not unexpected. Dismal nevertheless. The Monk immediately began kludging together a plan for jacking up the house even with very little of the house left to jack. His plan was creative. And intelligent. And it removed some of the dangers of working with a crumbling cake of a foundation. But no doubt about it, it was kludgy and neither one of us was looking forward to implementing it. Not at all.

Tuesday night I didn’t sleep for worrying. Worrying about safety, primarily. But also about increased cost and difficulty. And I was depressed that the ugly project had turned so very much uglier. A job that already seemed hard now looked (in the words of Commentariat member R.L. Wurdack) excruciating.

I awoke Wednesday morning groggy, grouchy, and brain dead. We were supposed to get our first 70+ day after seven months of cold gloom, but a persistent overcast dampened the morning and my mood. When The Monk attempted to get me to think, it was a lost cause.

I thought my inability to perform brainwork was solely from tiredness. What it really was was … resistance.

—–

Every creative person knows how that is. Heck, probably everybody who’s ever come out on the other side of a thorny thicket of life issues probably knows. You beat your head on a problem and it’s like beating your head against wet cement. No solutions. No progress. Just glop, glop, glop. At some point you can’t even bear to think about it any more.

Then … light.

It usually comes after you walk away for a while, and that’s what happened here. The Monk went off to see another client. I sat down for lunch. When he returned he had a Plan B and a Plan A.14(c). Both were simply refinements of his original kludge, but they were better. We sat or walked around the outside walls, peering and poking and discussing.

Then I said, “Let me throw out a Plan C. Now, I know this is crazy and off the wall. And you’ll probably roll your eyes at yet another client who’s changing the whole concept smack in the middle of things. So let me say it is just an idea. It might not even be workable. The final decision on which plan to go with is yours. But see if you think this even has a remote possibility: We preserve the roof and brace it up, but we cut off the last six feet of the bedroom, chopping away all that rot. Then we turn what used to be the back of the bedroom into a screen porch.”

You might recognize that as a refinement of a random idea I dropped into a comment yesterday. But as I described it, it came into clarity and — I hoped — do-ability. We’d leave the bathroom where and as it is; just chop a little more than 1/3 off the bedroom to create something I’ve been wanting anyhow, that screen porch. We’d keep the bedroom window and move it into a newly constructed wall, adding a beautiful glass exterior door I’ve been saving. The door would open onto the porch, which would in turn have its own screen door to the (future) back patio. You know, the lovely spot where, with your contributions, we carved away the bottom of the hill and built a retaining wall last year.

Instead of rejecting such a radical change, The Monk immediately began moving around the exterior describing how the new plan would work. “I’d put a brace here and here … I have a saw that would do a great job cutting through this wall right here … It would make it way, way easier to get new beams under the northeast (bathroom) side there … I wouldn’t have to shimmy under … all that rot would be gone … No need to dig a channel to put the jacks in … no need to sister joists … It would be a lot easier to … I could even give you a removable bedroom wall if you wanted so you could open the whole room onto the screen porch …”

—–

As he talked, both of us realized that Plan C was a godsend that would not only eliminate a host of ugly problems, but would suddenly turn a dreary, dangerous, unsatisfying chore into a creative, fun project.

For me, it would create beauty. Although it shrinks the bedroom, it still leaves a 10×12 space (plus separate room for a decent-sized closet), which is sufficient. And I love screen porches — which are rare around here but are perfect for this climate, where it’s often mild enough to sit outdoors, but usually raining so you don’t want to. Cutting away half the existing back wall also solves another issue too boring to describe. But it eliminates a small but irritating future project that should never have been needed — and now won’t be.

For the Monk … well, he was just thrilled that the Gordian knot of foundation difficulties was cut and he could get on doing something creative and pleasant, as well as having an easier way to perform the foundation repairs.

Of course this change will present problems of its own. It’s a remodeling project. Remodels will always spring something on you.

Doing it the Plan C way will undoubtedly entail steeper labor costs, though possibly lower materials costs. But the value for the money and the effort spent will be incalculably higher. And oh my, will the Monk and I both be much more enthusiastic.

So my earlier fog-brainedness wasn’t just weariness and the product of depression and a gray day. It was my unconscious mind’s refusal to accept that a clever kludge was the best we could do. It was my inner self knowing we could come up with a much better solution than that.

And you know, as The Monk and I babbled on about the advantages of the new plan … not only did the light dawn in our hearts and minds. But the light upstairs finally dawned, too. The overcast dissipated. We got that 70+ day we’d been promised. Then, as the lumberyard delivery truck pulled into the driveway and The Monk and the yard guy unloaded things too heavy for me to handle, Ava and I walked down to the waterfront and sat in the glorious, glorious sunshine.

—–

I’ll try to have some drawings of the Plan C changes later. I know it’s hard to picture from a mere description. If I don’t get to the drawings, I’ll be sure to share abundant photos as we go.

I also want to thank Arthur Murray for offering an idea I rejected and S. for offering both money and ideas that I also turned down. By reminding me at a deep gut level about what I absolutely didn’t want and would not do, you helped lead me to a creative solution that will yield more than I ever hoped to get.