constance | (11) living in a house with doors

It's not that I don't like open floor plans, because I do. I love when rooms conflate into one another, a single space for multiple purposes, used as a single space or divided into multiple implied subspaces. But I also love a house that separates its activities and keeps its secrets, each space divided from its nearest neighbor by walls, and passthroughs that become walls with the press of a hand.

So that, for an example, when one keeps a dog who can't be trusted to respect one's belongings, one may place that dog in a room emptied of as many belongings as possible (or at least practical), when one is forced to leave dogs alone in the house.

So that, for another example, when the aforementioned dog somehow worms her way through one of the doors (possibly by using her own sideways-flung body as a battering ram, which one knows to have happened before, but possibly by means of a simple push, assuming one didn't close it quite firmly enough) and chews her way into a box containing equipment cables and then into the equipment cables themselves -- thereby leaving one to wonder what the fuck is so appealing about flexible-plastic-encased twisted wire, and also leaving one in such a state of gasping incoherent fury that separation is not only desirable but necessary if violence is to be avoided -- when that happens, the separation can be effected easily.

So here I am in the study typing this, and both the dogs are sitting outside the French doors staring at me, and every time I move, their heads lift -- oh, thank God, she's coming out, no wait she's not coming out after all -- but they're not in the same room with me and won't be, since not even Gilly would dare ram herself through a door with me on the other side of it, and that is a good thing. An excellent thing, in a good-fences-make kind of way.