Kitchen Floor 2: Stone Inlay

March 4, 2011

When a house is 110 years old, it is going to sag and get crooked. John leveled the entire house and the kitchen floor was level. He demolished and rebuilt crooked walls and the floor would be straight. But one addition to the house was built crooked to the house. In order to straighten it, he would have had to dismantle the entire addition and rebuild it. The house is sound without doing that. But one consequence is that as the tile floor reached the French doors in the breakfast nook, the tiles would have crossed the threshold of the doors in a diagonal and that would have been unacceptable both to John and to people who walk on the floor.

To straighten that line, John designed and tiled an abstract stone inlay of the trees and wildflowers in our fields and woods. To lay this design within the tiles, each tile had was cut and one piece of the tile was slid away from the other to make room for the inlay. This sliding of a part of each tile realigned the tiles and the floor then appeared straight as it neared and went under the French doors.

March 7, 2011

These photos show a small sequence from the beginning until the end of the creation of the inlay. Stone from here and from John's travels was used. The tree is brownstone from Whiteville, Virginia; pink flowers are Brazilian rose quartz; the green is green crystal beryl from Alstead, NH. He also used art glass for the white and blue from Mammoth Caves in Kentucky. The white center of one flower is an actual marble made of marble, sliced in half, giving the floor another dimension.

March 9, 2011

I still have not photographed the inlay since it has been grouted. You simply have to wait for that!

John is now encouraging me to design the counters of two built in cabinets that he has built (one in the breakfast nook and one in the living room). I had planned on doing tessellations of regular polygons. But after looking at the tile and stone that I have available, I have decided on an abstract pattern featuring local stone from the fields and the granite quarry up the mountain.

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Sights Behind the Dump — Geography

We see so much on our hikes. There are too many photos to post. But I have chosen a selection of photographs that highlight what I learned on the hike, whether it be about the plants, animals or geography of the area we hiked in. You can click on any photo to see it full size in a new window. If you click on a text link you will be taken to my Flickr set for the photograph. All of my hike photos are in my Photowalks & Hikes Collection. I call this hike the Behind the Dump Hike because we walked to the dump and then left it behind as we entered the Mt. Kearsarge State Forest.

Above is a quartz flecked granite boulder on John's property. You can't see it well here but it is studded with garnets. The boulder is in an old abandoned garnet mine here. These small mines stud the country side in New England. Granite, quartz, mica, garnets, feldspar and other minerals were mined by local people.

The photos above and below are of the unnamed brook in the forest that we followed up the hill and back on this hike. There were beautiful falls such as these and quiet flats where the brook quietly burbled.


Above is a stone wall that we suddenly came across near the crest of the hill. There was an old pasture here a couple of hundred years ago. It amazes me how the old people withstood the hardships of life in the hills and mountains long ago. It must have been extremely difficult to pasture your dairy herd up here. Nowadays, these ancient walls create wonderful habitat for all sorts of plants and animals.

In the photo above, if you are familiar with deer roads, you may just see a deer trail going from the left side of the brook, across it to the right side, and then forward towards the camera on the right. This is a well-used trail the deer use for water and fording.

Above is another deer ford across the brook. Another watering spot for them.

Last we see above, the "idyllic" spot where the sad porcupine lives. The brook falls on the left. To the right of the brook you see a whitish boulder with a small pool in front of it. That boulder (white looking because of the sun) is where the porcupine lives. She has a large den underneath with several entrances all around it. In my Sad Porcupine post you will see the up-close photos of the quills, the pool, and of course, the sad porcupine.

Behind the Dump Hike

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The Fells: Split Boulder

In early September, Amelia, John and I hiked in the Fells in Newbury. We actually had to pay for this hike! But there were a few new photographs to take and I had never been to the Fells. Here you see a boulder that has been split, over the eons, by ice. You can see how the two pieces of rock fit together.

The John Hay Forest Ecology Trail Hike

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