The gilded world of the ninth-century Abbasid court – whose capital, Baghdad, rivalled Rome – is evoked in the stories of the Thousand and One Nights. It was held together by the Islamic faith and by Arabic, the language of the Qur’an. In 732, a hundred years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, the Arab conquests had created the greatest empire that the world had yet seen, stretching from central France to the borders of China. Islamic studies, as taught in the west, is a discipline that seeks to explain what the Islamic world has achieved in the past and what the future holds for it. One in five people on this planet are Muslims, so it seems reasonable to try to learn much more about them. And Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world. There are communities of Lebanese Muslims living in Brazil and Gaelic-speaking Pakistanis in north-west Scotland. So our friend who installed the cedar cut similar notches in the cedar crown molding.Islam is practised not only from west to east in a line stretching from Morocco to Indonesia and across every country in between, but also in much of Africa and more recently in Europe and America. The beam doesn’t rest on top of the pillars, it rests inside little notches cut into each pillar. The only problem we ran into was at the top of each pillar where it connected with the porch beam. We used Duckback Superdeck Transparent Stain in Natural. We chose the clearest, most natural stain we could find, and I think the color is beautiful and really highlights the knots and grain of the wood. By the way, they do look really red in some of these pictures, like the one above, but they aren’t that red in real life.
We wanted the pillars to be protected from the weather (cedar goes gray in the sun if you don’t treat it), but we didn’t want them to be that crazy red color a lot of stained cedar gets. You can see a detailed shot in one of the pictures below.
We wanted to keep the project simple, so the corners of the pillars aren’t mitered. The narrower planks are attached to the sides of the pillars, and the wider planks are attached to the front and back so that each pillar is square. We bought 1″ unfinished cedar planks in widths of 7 1/4″ and 9 1/4″. It took a few weeks for him to finish all 19 cedar pillars, but we couldn’t be more thrilled with how they turned out! When I look at photos from before, I feel like the front of the house was unfinished.
After we determined that it would, indeed, be an easy fix, we bought the materials and hired a pro to stain and install the wood. We bought a few cedar planks, took some measurements, and tested a few arrangements. It occurred to us that, unlike most of the other things we wished we’d done differently, this one was actually pretty easy to fix. Sometime last year, my husband and I were talking about how good our house would have looked with cedar pillars on the porch instead of white. And there are the inevitable dark corners that could use some extra light, and rooms that could use another electrical outlet or two.
All of our windows are the standard white-framed windows that pretty much everyone has in their house, but we’d do black-framed windows in a heartbeat if we could go back in time.
The door to the backyard from the basement, for example, is lined up right behind a pillar instead of being between two pillars, which would have made a million times more sense.
There are really very few things we’d change about it if we could do it all over again.īut there are a couple of things we’d do differently, some small and some significant. And that works out wonderfully-if you completely stop reading magazines, browsing the internet, or scrolling through Pinterest after the big day.īut invariably, with either houses or weddings, you’ll see some amazing idea at some point down the road and feel a little pang of disappointment that you didn’t think to incorporate it into your plans. Building a Dream House is a lot like planning a wedding: you read a million magazine articles, spend years collecting inspiration photos, and finally get every detail just the way you want it.