More Office Progress

There’s something about a closed-in space that’s special.

After finishing up the other door in the office – and by ‘finishing up’, I mean just barely enough that the door will stay shut – I had to stand inside the office with the doors shut and just listen to the silence. And breathe.

The basement is normally a very noisy place. The furnace is down here. The ductwork is down here. The aluminum pipes carry sound up and down and all around the house, so sometimes you can hear conversations from the bedrooms while sitting at the computer. You can definitely hear when people are moving about upstairs, plonking or shuffling or stomping their feet. Sometimes you can hear the children singing (either in the shower, or in their bedroom).

But here, now, with the doors closed and the insulation in the walls, it is quiet and comtemplative, and I can look around the room and imagine what it will look like when the office is complete and the drywall is up and the furniture is in place and my wife is sitting happily at her vast, expansive desk with the bookshelves behind her, doing our taxes or studying for her Bible lessons or clucking over all the money I spent at Radio Shack or trying to figure out how we’re going to put four kids through college. It will be nice to have at least one portion of the basement done.

The insulation still needs to be put up between the joists above, and the drop ceiling still needs to be hung, and the flooring needs to be laid down, and then there’s all that drywall to be taped and mudded and painted. But for just a moment, I’m going to stand here and marvel at the fact that this room is becoming a room.