Sampler Sunday: Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenter

I've been working on a house for my homesite in Whale Hunting. Wouldn't it be nice if it were as easy to put a house on a real homesite?

We've been IRL house hunting. The neighborhood we selected is not that far from where we live and still walking distance to my commuter lot. It's a pretty neighborhood of about 1000 homes with miles of paved walking trails and graceful common areas, and I've wanted to live there for years. It's about 15 years old, so it benefits from mature plantings and trees, and the houses appear to be in good shape. Except they're not, at least inside, where there's stuff falling off, falling apart, dirty, unworkable, shorted out. There are transparent attempts at concealing deficiencies and coats of paint just slapped on over the grime, and poor patch jobs. And why does it not occur to anyone that we might be opening the refrigerator, the oven, flipping the light switches, sniffing the air for signs of wet basements, mildew and mold, peering into attics and garages and cabinets? So many huge houses, and a lot of them look inside like the houses in ghost towns in the west, where some cataclysm occurred, and people moved out seemingly within minutes, leaving a half-finished meal and dishes on the table. It wouldn't be remarkable if it didn't seem to be most of them! And yet drive or walk through the neighborhood and everything looks just so: neat, manicured, landscaped, decorated, serene.

So in this soft market, we've moved on to new houses, where the builders are adding incentives by the day to move their inventory, so that new pristine houses are much less expensive than used houses. We are considering this model, where they're so far willing to throw in a free finished basement. There is 3,500 feet of space for our offices and hobbies. I'm thinking there might be room for something I've always wanted to buy--an ironing table. An ironing table is bigger than an ironing board and stays up all the time. I love to iron, and it's essential if you sew, which I want to do more of. I dislike the screechy crashing noise of putting up and taking down our present ironing board. The house is pretty, but the neighborhood is not, at least right now. It will take a number of years for there to be the plantings and trees. Developers in this area just bulldoze it all, throw up the houses and move on. I was thinking that if we buy this though, I will embroider a copy of this drawing onto the sampler hill surrounded by blueberry vines that I showed you a couple of weeks ago--the one with not enough stuff around the house. Just like in real life.

Here's the Sunday Sampler. I think the verse is a hoot: "Needles and Pins/Needles and Pins/When a Man Marries/His Troubles Begin/Needles and Pins." Sexist, but still funny, especially since it's a wedding sampler. I like the border and the animals. It's by Theron Traditions and is charted for 36 ct. linen in DMC colors. It'd be a great jokey--but still pretty--gift for the bride and groom with a sense of humor.