It’s wonderful to see a subtle pattern emerge from the stone – one row of large stones, two layers of smaller rocks…

The finished wall!! I love it so much! It is truly a Thing of Beauty.

Beauty is truth, and truth beauty. What can be more true, more honest, than a stone wall? My first poetry mentor was also a stone mason: setting two words next to each other and seeing if they find balance.

This is truly hard work! We breathe, eat, and think dust and dirt – there’s a layer of fine grit on everything in the house, including our skin, our tongues, and surprisingly even between our teeth and in our ears! Thank goodness we can shower at our airbnb just 10 minutes away. My hair (above) actually has little pebbles in it.

Usually we’re pleasantly surprised by what we discover in our new home BUT… Unfortunately, the right-hand 1/3 of the living room wall was made at a different time and in a different way than the rest – the stones are smaller and there seems to be no pattern or logic. Now and again the rocks fell out as we were removing the cement. Not good!

In the coming days we plan to watch Youtube videos about how Victorian era French stone masons created the sandy beige/white color of their cement and achieved an overall white wash effect on the stones as well as the cement. Our medieval tower has this harmonious subtle look and we love it. The living room wall is exactly opposite the moat tower, so it’ll be great to see them rhyme one another.

So we re-built the weak spots and hopefully that will be enough TLC. We don’t want to be overzealous, since we know that old homes need to breathe and expand and contract – we want to let the house live in harmony with the earth and the seasons but we want to make the stones as snug as possible.

A double exposure – this is hopefully how our new couch will look against the stone wall…

My free multiple exposure app (Ultimate Photo Mixer) is so helpful with envisioning what our rooms will look like – it does most of the heavy lifting for us.