Watching things take shape

It is a testimony to the thinking abilities human beings have been endowed with that we can imagine a room so completely in the abstract, and then proceed to build it as we imagine it.

I think I've mentioned before that I was helping my brother in law build kitchen cabinets out of old barn board, planed down to look like new. Well, we more or less finished the cabinets a couple of weeks ago. This weekend, we tore apart his kitchen, rewired the electrical outlets, and started drywalling. After we had a few walls done, we hoisted a few of the cabinets up, so we could get a look at them. They look just like that picture he drew in his mind, back in the winter.

The lucky people who have done a major construction or landscaping project share a secret others don't seem to understand: redoing a room well is like the great art of a painter. There are all the same subtleties at hand - the way the light bounces out of a window, or the way the tint of a wood selected is brought out by the colour of tiles you use on the floor.

Perhaps everything is art. It makes sense in a world created by the greatest Master Artist of all!