I do believe cavemen (I’m sorry—cavepeople) would have grooved to many of the old houses in Charlottesville. There are windows in most or all the rooms, but they don’t amount to much. Each one contains about as much of a vista as a porthole. To extend the metaphor further, draw the blinds in the middle of the day and you feel like you’ve begun descending to the bottom of the ocean, where only finned creatures equipped with some sort of sonar dare to dwell.
Is the situation really as bad as all that? It is if you have lived with it over time, and have long ceased to care how cozy the house is when winter winds blast the largely unseen trees outside, and have grown increasingly weary of feeling cheated out of a full view of your carefully landscaped/lovingly tended back yard/garden while preparing springtime meals in your kitchen.
I’m talking now of a friend of mine who, in a theoretical partnership with the outside world, theoretically expanded the square footage of her house by making nearly the whole back wall of her kitchen see-through—a glass door between two large windows. Her back yard is now part of the house, the way a dog or a cat is part of a family, and not like a loose appendage that disappears when she goes back inside.
So happy she is with her new arrangement that she looks back upon the construction of it as a kind of pagan (or post-cavepeople) ritual. The Great Sun God must scratch and claw to get in through the measly kitchen window? Then create a pathway so big that He or She or It won’t have to expend any effort at all.
Which, in this case, was done with a sledge-hammer, that blunt instrument that harkens back to hairier days and can’t be improved upon—the process of evolution has been strewn with so many needless excesses. Oh the thrill as she made massive dents in the sheetrock with wild abandon. While being careful not to hit any wires, of course. One can’t abandon civilization altogether, can one? And what could be more civilized than inviting some friends over and enlisting each one to take a ceremonial whack?
But then it was up to her alone to do most of the nasty work of getting the space prepared for its new windows, like using a crowbar (another basic classic) to pull all the studs out, using a reciprocating saw ("Huh?" you can imagine a cavewoman grunting) to cut through the nails, and hauling all the rubble to the dump.
Now it was time to get her budget contractor in to do what she hoped and prayed would be a professional job. Before she could find out, though, she had to endure a slew of unsolicited grousing from the guy. "The whole back wall?.." "The door’s too big, it’s all too big…" "You’re crazy…" "I’m a man, you’re a woman, I’m right…" He didn’t actually say the last one, but he might as well have. "Ah, just shut up and work," she didn’t actually say.
Lo and behold: When the final stage of the ritual was complete, he conceded that the whole idea hadn’t been a grievous error. Yes, through a thick layer of testosterone, and with a healthy layer of sunlight flush on his sweaty brow while he was standing inside the house, he actually said, "I like it."