Stately Manor Homes in Distant Climes

I did follow that long, long way to the house I built a long time ago, which was in fact quite a long way away. I got blown up halfway there but survived; got mildly lost and then found my way on across much of the sea to the old homestead. It was an okay house but hey, it turns out that Thomas Wolfe was right after all: you can’t go home again. I didn’t feel like modernizing my old house or doing much of anything, actually, except getting the hell out of there - sort of how you feel on Christmas break from college when you have to stay with your parents. Therefore, the next morning I made my excuses and split to the South, heading for adventure. Or at least another homesite. Or some lapis. Or something.

Woods. Oceans. Mountains. Sand. Lots of clay, which I duly gathered. Things looked okay but not exactly what I was looking for. No waterfalls, and I like waterfalls. Yeah, okay, I can make my own waterfalls and I was about to settle for that when I came around a corner and found not just one but two waterfalls. They were gorgeous and I thought, okay, I’m building another house right here. First, though, I will check out what is on the other side of this mountain.

The other side of the mountain, as is so often the case in folklore and song, was even better. Not only were there two more waterfalls, there was a big expanse of what I like to call parkland – fields of stone interspersed with bits of dirt, just like Washington Square. This, I thought, this is the place for a gracious neo Georgian edifice of brick. A home. An elegant, four room home.

So I built one. Naturally, I ran out of brick and had to use some sandstone and had to keep gathering sand and so on, all the challenges faced by a contractor in today’s world, but I remembered to build the fireplace first and eventually it was done. Not finished, but good enough to move into. This house even had an attic right there under its peaked roof – I was considering putting some chests up there just to make it more atticy, even - but after a night or two I decided that a vaulted roof with a chandelier was more what I wanted for my study, so that morning I started to take out the ceiling.

Whoops.

Learn from my example: you need to light your attics. I removed a couple of ceiling blocks, la la, I’m renovating - and two creepers and a skeleton fell on top of me. Fortunately, they got all tangled up in their fall and ended up killing each other while I escaped, with, admittedly, quite a bit of damage and a sudden pressing need for new clothes. As in the punchline to the old pirate joke: bring me my brown pants! And fresh armor while you’re at it. I also needed more brick and glass, because they took out half the back wall, but all in all it was not anywhere near as bad as it could have been.

I repaired that damage and did a whole bunch of landscaping, taking out a couple of hills and a lot of trees so my view of the waterfalls was perfect, built a portico on the house, ventured into a cave, dug down until I found one measly block of lapis, put in fabulous carpet and paintings and then, lo, I was done again and we are now up to date. It’s time to build a path to spawn, even though I don’t much want to travel so far, neither do I want to lose this house, which is the ne plus ultra of houses so far. Every house just gets better – although I grant you there have been an awful lot of houses. It occurs to me that I am slow to learn and that it is probably a good thing I never became a contractor in the real world.

Now I am huddled in a shelter in a wintry biome. There are a lot of cattle here and some sheep and it’s noisy. Perhaps they’ll keep the creepers away, because I don’t want to deal with creepers in the morning. I just want to build my road across the ice instead of the ocean: building bridges across the ocean is a big pain in the ass, which is why, even in this day and age, we cannot drive to London from New York.