Things we did right, Part 3 — adding the living room
It wasn’t like we needed another room, but the space just begged for it. It was originally a small front entry porch, with a bathroom inexplicably off of it. Well, any bathroom which required leaving the house to enter definitely had to go. Also, the space looked out over the glorious view. So, we knocked down the bathroom and enclosed the space, extending it from what is now the dining area just off the kitchen. The view is visible from all three rooms: kitchen, dining, and living room, where we spend most of our waking hours.
Building this room from scratch allowed us to put in the kind of windows we like — big, many-paned ones, and a French entry door, facing out respectively onto the view and a small grove of trees in the outer patio. On the wall opposite the view, another set of windows looks into the small interior patio. Now there was light. We covered the floor with local river rock (it was free, a major consideration by that point).
Living room windows
The effect of this room turned out to be quite magical and defines the spirit of the house. It not only provides a view of the surrounding environment, it creates a sensation of actually being one with it. Standing in the tree-filtered light, on stones gathered from a nearby riverbed, the boundary between indoors and outdoors is rendered indistinct, almost irrelevant. The room is made of the stuff of the mountain; the mountain is an ever-changing presence in the room.
Passerby