Marty’s photo of the day #4416: Deb and I built our house in the mountains of Montana back in 1996. Deb designed it, with a little input from me here and there. All these years later we still love our house, and even though it’s more than quadrupled in value, we wouldn’t sell it for five times that amount.
Sure, our house has a few quirky features, such as two hard-wired smoke detectors that are four feet apart, due to a change of plans in the midst of the building process, but there are also things we hadn’t anticipated that turned out really cool.
We built offices in the daylight basement, which got a lot of use when I had my phone company, Essen Communications Corporation, but the room where I now spend the majority of time is just above those offices. For that room, I had a knotty pine ceiling and walls put in, to give it a “cabin feel.” That room has a stunning view of Gash Peak and is now my three-seasons writing room.
But my favorite surprise of our house is the covered front porch. I move my office out there every summer, and we are far enough away from the nearest neighbor that I can have music playing while I work and write without bothering anyone. That long front porch has also become Nellie’s playpen.
Nellie loves her playpen, because she can alternate between sleeping on my lap and keeping track of all the squirrels, chipmunks, deer, moose, wild turkeys, and foxes in her territory. I put a baby gate (in white in the photo) on each end of the porch, so I don’t have to worry about Nellie heading out on a self-guided tour of the Bitterroot Mountains while I’m deep in concentration on whatever book I’m writing.
And as Nellie demonstrates in this photo, somehow, twenty-seven years ago, we had the porch built with the exact specifications of her head in mind. If the railing slats were even an inch closer, Nellie couldn’t fit her head through them to announce to whatever animal is passing by, “Hey! The black dog is on duty, and you are to vacate the premises immediately!”