The Thing About Our Future Orcas Island Home That I Am Most Excited About Right Now

This may end up being a somewhat serial post, as there are a billion Things about our future Orcas Island Home, and a billion moments until we've moved in; and whimsy and circumstance mix together to create different yearnings at different times. But right now, what I am most excited about is the Mud Room. 

I've been weeding in the Seattle yard this afternoon (it's a gloriously sunny and springy day today), and when I weed, I tend to wallow (long before I learned to weed, in fact, I would wallow in garden dirt; often just after ripping off my clothes. We'll see if Orcas offers enough privacy for a return to that behavior.). I have a pair of Swedish Blåkläder pants that come with insertable knee pads, but even with the pads the knees get tired, and then I just flip over and sit on my bum. We've been getting a lot of rain recently, and the soil is rich and dark and wet and sticky. By the time I've finished the job (or my interest has waned, which I'm learning to listen to), my knees and my bum are covered with damp clods of earth. 

Our current home has 3 entry doors: one leading into my office, one leading into the kitchen, and one leading almost directly onto our Persian carpet. I generally choose the kitchen door, but the moment I bend to take off my shoes and my fancy pants, clods of dirt leap off my bum and fly around the kitchen, ready to get tracked through and ground into the floors of the house. 

On Orcas, two of our three main floor entrances--the front door and the kitchen door--have air locks. And at the kitchen door, that airlock is a dedicated mud room where we can strip off all the filth and leave it behind, without tracking dirt all over and blurring the line between indoors and out. I'm already planning out a box for slippers, and a hook for the lounge pants I'll change into as I reenter civilization. 

Mud Room!