September 27, 2006
The Door to Nowhere
Sometimes people do things that seem to make sense, but turn out to be shake-your-head ridiculous. When our front porch was enclosed, someone added a lovely new exterior door on front of the house. Now you say to yourself... of course the front of every house should have a door! Well, not really.
The front porch is a good four feet above the front yard -- and a strange little front yard it is. Though we have five acres in the back and on the sides, the front is just a small, bushy strip with a drainage ditch next to the road. It's set down a few feet from both the road and the driveway, so if you were to park on the driveway in order to enter the front of the house there would be a couple of issues:
1) You would block the driveway for all other incoming cars.
2) You would need to climb down a short-but-steep incline into the front yard.
3) No one built stairs on the Door to Nowhere, so you have to pull yourself up like a gymnast to enter.
4) The front living room door is ancient, with a key that no longer exists. That door will stay as decoration, but the primary entrance is via the kitchen.
The Door to Nowhere is more than just silly, it's going to cause some structural complications when we start putting in the sleepers to level the old sloped (for water runoff) porch floor. In order to level the floor, the sleepers have to go up past the sill of the Door to Nowhere, and it will no longer open. Truly, since it goes nowhere, that's not a problem, but in the interest of making things right, the door will probably have to come out.
Which leads to...
The Door to Nowhere is not spaced in such a way that a window can be put there easily. The Door to Nowhere was centered on the porch. Centering is a wonderful idea in most cases; however, it means that removing the door and putting a window in the spot will create a row of four windows... two spaced evenly, a third centered, then the fourth off to the left. The picture shows it best.
The Door to Nowhere just became the Door to Frustration.