Giant steps

I'm usually on the phone each morning between 8 and 9 with Robert, going over the decisions of the day before and the opportunities of the day to come, comparing notes by way of the pictures here.

The blog is a great tool on a project like this, so when he said the pool steps looked as if they might be too small. . . . Well, snap. Thanks to the net, all he needs to do now is check out my worn-out Croc for an idea of scale.

Before I left for Tennessee, full of trepidation about the pool, I'd been told that they'd shoot just the shell, not the steps.

So much for that.

Now I need to make sure that the Mayan bench edges get a bigger radius -- but getting in touch with the pool guy is about as predictable as storms these days, so I'm flying on faith here.

Not that any of this is a problem, in the sense that people have real problems. It's awfully easy to magnify little things into fetishes, until you stop and think about them.

Maybe that's why the meeting this morning with Ken and George, the HVAC guys, went so well. We took every question one flip-flop at at time -- some solutions were maybes, some nevers, and lots of yes -- and found interesting compromises. As I said in an email to cousin Nita, it was "seeing where we had to make architectural lemonade out of the lemons called ductwork."

I think it will be particularly refreshing lemonade, because Ref, who'd been working at the streetside face-lift with Brantley, broke off that project to walk though with us with his mind clicking to find several brilliant answers to our little puzzles of design, construction and aesthetics.

Very late in the day, long after the HVAC guys and the electricians and Tommy had left, Brantley was working to fix the floor that Pop and the Weasels had screwed up, and Ref and I were doing a walk-through to confirm the day's decisions.

We need a soffit here, we need to change a door a bit, we need to build this wall out. . . .

"The good thing now is that we have a plan," Ref said to sum it up. "Now we just do it."

Mr. B looked at me with a grin and said, "Who's the man?

I grinned back and said, "Say amen!"