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“Hi, Mrs. Paulsen. This is Val. I was thinking that if you’re just going to use that space as a catch-all for mix-matched furniture—”
“That’s exactly what we were going to do with it,” Mrs. Paulsen interjected. “It’s what we do with the house we’re in now.”
“Well, it makes sense, then, to partition off some of that space. We could do that without messing with the ceiling vaulting at all. I’d run a wall starting at where the dining room and kitchen door is, so you’d get a wide, but somewhat shallow, office space where that wide window is.”
“And I’d still have all that living area space.”
“Right. And because you’re right next to the kitchen, you’ll still hear everything going on in the family room and if you lean back just so, you can see who’s ringing the doorbell.”
“What would I do with the catch-all space, though? I don’t want such an open, useless room. It’s so close to the front door and everyone will see the mess. I don’t want a formal living area, either. I try to make the kids confine their mess to the family room.”
“Does anyone actually sit in there? The living room, I mean.”
“Sure. Of my four kids, I have one daughter—” Valerie jotted that down. “—and she’s used to having her own room, but she’s wired weirdly. She can’tlivein her room and also sleep in it.”
“Ah. My grandmother is like that.” She’d never been able to read or watch television in bed.
“So you get it. Well, my daughter tends to find some quiet space in the house to make herself a little burrow.”
“How old is she?” Valerie asked with her pen poised over the open folder.
“Twelve.”
“So, she uses it as, what, like a library? Just a room to be in that doesn’t have noise?”
“Exactly! My husband tends to use it for the same, though. He’ll flop onto that one sofa in there on Saturday afternoons after cutting the grass and falls asleep until the boys find him and want to go somewhere.”
“It should be easy enough to build in bookcases and some nooks. Put a large, high table in the center of the room for projects, a couple of armchairs by that window bump-out for reading, and you can push a sofa against the side of the staircase.”
“And all that stuff would lookokayif seen from the front door.”
“And you’d be near…your daughter as you work,” Valerie said, voice going weak.
Jealousy. That’s what that feeling was that Valerie was swallowing down. It was sour and vile, and she was sick of it.
“I’d love that. She’s always been so clingy and I…” There was a catch in Mrs. Paulsen’s voice. “Well, I won’t bore you to death.”
“It’s all right. I wanted to know. It helps me.”
In so many ways.
“So, how much is this customization going to cost us?” Mrs. Paulsen asked.
“Probably not as much as you’d think. We’re not adding space, simply revising what’s already there. And we’re addingmoresupport to the structure, not less, by adding those walls—not counting the three-quarter bath if you want to go that route.”
“I dunno. I kinda like the idea of that mop closet. I don’t want another shower to clean.”
Valerie laughed. “It’s just a matter of getting my bosses to sign off on it. There really isn’t a system in place within Lipton for this sort of thing, so I’ve got to figure out what hoops to jump through to make it happens.”
“Oh! Well, if this is going to be a crapshoot—”
“No, I’m going to make it happen. Houses should be livable by the families who pay to have them built. There isnogood reason you can’t have customizations on a house you’re building from the foundation up…” Valerie turned the page and whistled low. “And especially on a lot like that.”
Apriceylot like that. River view with dock access.
“Huh. You don’t have a back deck,” Valerie mused.
“I was told it didn’t come with that model.”
