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Tuesday, September 19, 2006

Construction

Well, it is later! I mentioned earlier that I was both having fun and busy. Well, the busy part isn’t actually too fun. My husband and I have started finishing the basement. We were very blessed that when we bought our house the basement was unfinished, but had all the framing, wiring, pluming and a full bathroom completely done. Now that we have both the deck done and the fence installed we decided that it was time to move onto the basement. Once it is completely done we will double our square footage, add two more bedrooms and a very large living area with a nook that will hopefully become my craft/library area.

This past weekend we actually had some time off at the same time, so we decided to sheetrock the ceilings in the two bedrooms and the hallway. To make a very long and tiring story short, we only got the ceiling in one bedroom done. Putting the insulation up took a lot longer than we had expected. The job definitely isn’t professional and I know my dad (who used to do this for a living) would just cringe to see it, but it hasn’t fallen down yet! Now that we have actually started I hope we can keep rolling on this. I would love to have the entire basement done by late spring, but would be perfectly happy with having just the bedrooms and hallway done.

I do have to say that there is something very satisfying about making something with your hands, stepping back and saying “I did that.” I think that is part of the reason I knit. I don’t think that I have mentioned it here, but I am an auditor. No, I won’t tell you who I work for, but I will say it isn’t a CPA firm. Back to my point. Being an auditor is a lot of brain work, and after 9 months to a year all you have to show for it is a 10 page report. If you are lucky that is, sometimes they are much shorter, or nothing gets issued at all! When we used to print out our workpapers we could stand back and say, “Look at all those binders, we did a lot of work!” But now everything is in an electronic format. “Look at that file, it is 80 MB!” just doesn’t have the same ring to it!

I turned to knitting for a creative outlet, not much room for creativity in auditing! I can do what I want, how I want it and end up with a finished object that I can point at and say, “See, I did that!” Sometimes I may wonder whether or not the finished object was worth the time, effort or frustration, but there is always some end product that I created. And if halfway through I decide I don’t want to finish, I can stop. Most mistakes can be easily corrected. I think knitting is the one of the few areas in my life where I have that kind of freedom.

1 comment:

  1. I know what you mean - I think that's a big part of the attraction for me, too. Also, there's a specific ending point - when the socks are made, they're done. You can't do any more. Not true with work - there's always more that I could be doing.

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