Saturday, October 12, 2013

Door in my cellar

My stone cellar finally has a stout wooden door at its southern end.


One of these days, I'll build a staircase up to the ground level, where my lawnmower is parked. But there's no urgency. The immediate purpose of this doorway is to keep out the winter cold. A craftsman in Pont-en-Royans built me this tailor-made door for a quite reasonable price, and he installed it firmly in the opening by means of long screws sunk into the stone. But it's up to me now to use concrete to seal the gaps between the wooden frame and the stone wall of the cellar. As you can see from the following photo, these gaps are quite irregular in width and form:


That photo also reveals that the oval form of the stone at the top of the opening is totally asymmetrical, meaning that the door, too, has to correspond to this asymmetrical shape. That's Gamone! Everything here is out of alignment... as if the fact that the property is located on mountain slopes meant that the builders were no longer capable of getting anything straight. But I've come to take asymmetry for granted. I think of it as the normal state of affairs. I would surely be terribly anguished to live in a house where all the flat surfaces were perfectly horizontal, all the walls were perfectly vertical, and all the angles were right angles. Happily, Gamone is considerably more topsy-turvy.

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