What have you been putting off all weekend?
I've been putting off starting this blog. I've been putting it off for a bit more than this weekend. I just went back and looked at my friend's original invite to join VOX and it was dated 7/5/06 (almost a full two years - that's pretty impressive procrastination).
First, I said I would get to it; next, I didn't know what I'd write, the latest (and most pathetic), I just could not come up with a name for my blog; finally, I just got started. It seems like a good time. I've been reconnecting with some old friends and I figured this would be a good place to share some of my thoughts, interests and a bit of my life. I have also been encouraging my 6 year old to keep a journal (she has to keep a journal in school and I thought it would be good to keep it going over the summer) and I guess I can use this blog to set a good example.
We were never too enamored with the cabinets that came with our house kit. They are perfectly functional. Oak and plywood, nice hinges, cheap drawer slides, thin doors, but what can you do? They serve the purpose. But they never looked right amongst the stainless and slate. They needed some zip.
Well zippity-doo-da , gimmie a hey and a hoo-ha! After many meetings, confabs, bull-sessions, tete-a-tetes, tea parties and fireside chats we decided on a color. I must admit, the idea came from sister Carrie (not Sister Carrie, my 4th grade French teacher, but my sister-in-law Carrie, of the Brooklyn Carries) who suggested a terra-cotta. Until that point, we were leaning towards green, and sister Bridget (not Saint Bridget, the patron saint of Sweden, although she is ethereal) was lobbying for black--I think she was sniffing turpentine. Anyway, cooler heads prevailed, and we chose a deep red that looks great against the slate counter and adds a sense of depth to the kitchen. A few knobs and pulls later and we were in business.
So we now have this great little house. We are very happy with how it came together: the layout, window placements, functionality. The tile looks great, the kitchen is primo, the floors shine like a waxed turtle (???). Then, we filled it with all of the tag sale cast-off third hand furniture we have acquired over the years. The pull-out couch with the tattered arms. The papasan chair that no one can sit in without going ass over teakettle. The loveseat we received from my sister on moving day (which is actually the nicest thing in here). The knocked-together shop class bookshelves next to the undersized coffee table beside the rickety student desk. We are bringing a whole new meaning to shabby chic.
We do have a few cool things. The old oak dining table is a perfect fit. The wild blue dresser somehow works. Our bed is comfortable. But I do not know what we would do without the modern-day savior of cash-strapped design-on-a-dimers everywhere, the slipcover.
Two tannish slipcovers, one for the couch, one for the loveseat. Just like that, we were back in the game. A couple of colorful pillows, a boldly patterned blanket and a few strong cocktails later, our rooms aren't looking too bad. A good save until we marshall the resources for some new furniture. Of course, the best thing we did was to jettison the papasan. Goodbye, dorm room--hello, showroom!
Ok, it wasn't exactly a pound, it was the Monadnock Humane Society animal shelter. But it was furry, and I'll be damned if I wan't going to somehow make this title work. Anyway, this all points to one thing--actually, two things: cats on the hillside.
We finally got settled enough to go find a couple of cats to make our home even homier. After a few hours of looking, we chose two 1 year old boys, named Finbar and Frodo. How cool is that? We didn't even have to rename them! (truthfully, Finbar was known only as Finn, but we decided to make him a bit more formal and celtic-warrior sounding).
They are hilarious, get along very well, and pretty much beat the stuffing out of each other every waking hour when they are not perched on laps. They are exactly what we were looking for.
OK, a lot has happened since the last post, the major event being our actually living in the littlehouseonthehillside. Yes, it is 'finished', after a fashion, and life is grand.
What is decidedly not too grand is the status of this blog, which is very much like an ambitious vegetable garden. Started in spring with the best of intentions and energy, it showed great promise. Then, you fall a week behind in the weeding. Then another week. Soon, it is a cumulative disaster, and you couldn't possibly ever catch up, so you just sort of walk by the garden with guiltily averted eyes. What was once ordered beauty has become a tangle of dandelions, dead flowers and rotten zucchinni. Yes, my blog has become akin to rotten zucchinni.
It would be futile to pick up where we left off, so I think what I will do is just give you a little update on how things are going right now. Later, I'll try to fill in what happened over the last three months or so in a series of flashbacks, much like the hit TV show 'Lost.' If I'm really good, each entry will end with a cliffhanger, leaving you anxiously awaiting the next entry. Or, when my riveting and hilarious building experiences are converted into a quirky yet poignant independent film that becomes the sleeper hit of next summer, the 'lost journal entries' will become part of the DVD extras, and you can find out what happened that way. Or, just give me a call and I'll just tell you what happened. At any rate, here we are:
There are a bunch of new pictures over in the picture menu on the right. Here are a few highlights:
Once the house gets a bit more organized we'll take some more photos. Until then, thanks for reading.
Did you go to summer camp? Which one? What did you enjoy doing?
Submitted by Something Else.
I didn't - not even day camp!
This is a cautionary tale.
It is a story of mice and men, of fur and plastic and, ultimately, tragedy. It
begins sometime this past spring.
I had been doing a fair bit
of cutting inside the house with the chop saw, creating a sizeable amount of
sawdust. Time to break out the Shop-Vac. We hadn’t used it since last fall, I
think, when we were sucking up water from the basement before we had the roof
on. I dragged it out, , plugged it in, and turned it on. Holy socks, why is it
whining like a jet engine? And what is that burning smell? And where is the
suction? Ah, I forgot to change the settings and filters from wet to dry. No
big deal. So I swap the filters and make the adjustments. Same result. I dink
around with it a little more, become frustrated, and put it in the corner,
resorting to the broom and dustpan.
A few weeks later I had an odd hour or so
left at the end of the day. Wondering what to do, my eye strayed over to the
vacuum. Ok, let’s rock, I thought (how embarrassing that I actually think in
these terms). Over the past few weeks I had dug out the manual and fiddled with
it a bit more, all to no avail. That day, I was determined to make it work.
I started to take it apart, piece by
piece. After removing a few covers and plates which clearly warned ‘DO NOT
REMOVE’, I finally could get a little view of the motor, which to my novice
eye, looked fine. I flipped it over and peered into the intake area, which was
a bit obscured by some protective caging. Hmm, looks like some string or
something is wound up in there. Maybe that is the problem. I get a long drill
bit and start to pull this grayish fluff out from the innards of the vacuum
motor. Man, what is this stuff? It almost looks like…hey, is that a tail? Oh,
crap.
Through some careful extraction and
forensic techniques, I think I can paint an accurate picture of what happened
to the Shop Vac. At some point in late fall, perhaps early winter, a mouse
snuck into the house, looking for a warm place to bed down. It sees a long
tube, crawls up it, and ends up in a cozy den. What a perfect place to sleep
and store food. So he does. All is well until someone decides to turn on the 12
horsepower motor. Then, all is not so well. Frankly, things are decidedly
unwell. But, at least he didn’t have time to ponder what was going on. Based on
the position of the remains, I believe death was swift and humane, and probably
beat being eaten by an owl or fox. Thus ends the tail.
Just don't ask about the snake.
What clothing item do you wish could be banned?
Submitted by Mike E.
thongs...at least ones that you can see - there are too many people wearing them that shouldn't!
Here are some pics from the last few months, to go along with last week's entry.
The list of things left to do is as long as my arm attached to another arm, which in turn is attached to another arm. That’s right, sing it with me now, ‘Hands across America.’ There. I feel better. Don’t you?
I’d feel a lot better if I had written at least one entry in the past month, but circumstances were beyond my control. Late nights on the hillside, Irish music, a great wedding and a lost weekend in the Catskills all add up to a candle burnt at both ends, a low-grade hangover, and , alas, no journal entries. But it’s time to remedy that, so I am going to make like Heinz and do some catchin’-up. I will attempt some type of chronological order but I wouldn’t set my watch by it. However, according to Mr. Einstein, time is relative, so theoretically, it will be impossible for me to write things out of order, since there is no order to begin with. Nice. I’m off the hook.
I am happy to report that the wiring is, for the most part, complete. Rick donated some more time before jet-setting off to Greece for three weeks, and by the end I was pretty confident in my ability to wire switches, outlets, and circuits in general. Anne became extremely proficient at actually hooking up the receptacles, and did probably 95% of the outlets in the house. I approached wiring with a bit of trepidation, but once you get the hang of it, it is not too bad.
Once all of the switches and outlets are in place, the walls can begin to be covered up. In most houses, this would mean drywall. On the hillside, if you haven’t yet noticed, things are a bit different. We are doing a lot of wood sheathing, 1x8 tongue and groove boards. There are a few advantages to using wood over drywall. One is that I already paid for it and it is sitting in a big pile in the future driveway. Two is that it goes up fairly quickly, and is extremely dent/puncture/disgruntled teenager resistant. Three, there is no joint taping involved, which is tedious and messy work. The downside is that all of that wood can become a bit much to look at. So we have decided to do a bit of drywall interspersed with the wood, just to keep things interesting, and to break the monotony. The sheathing is going well, with some random walls in different parts of the house completed.
It is I, Plumbob. That’s how our plumber answers the phone when you call him. It’s also how he greets you when he calls you. Sometimes, he says it when he walks into a room. In a world of grumpy old plumbers with no sense of humor, Plumbob is a very cool anomaly. He came out to the site for his first visit, and proceeded to drill very large holes into our very nice floor. The things we do in the name of hygiene. He spent the day laying out where pipes and drains will go, drilling holes, and convincing me to run radiant heat underneath the entire first floor. He then gave me a list of things I had to do before he came back. One of which was to run the radiant tubing.
I am ecstatic to report that the tubing is done! Anne and I tackled it a few days last week and did a marathon day yesterday to get it done. For the uninitiated, radiant tubing is basically flexible plastic tubes that run underneath the floors. Hot water or antifreeze is pumped through them to produce a warm, even, efficient, dust-free heat throughout the house. Plus, you can walk around barefoot in the winter. The end result is very nice, but the work it takes to get there is not so easy. Anne and I spent hours unrolling tubing, drilling holes, and stapling it into place. Of course, as I have mentioned ad nauseam, we can never do anything too simply on the hillside, so we used an extremely wide (7/8”) tubing for our radiant. That may not sound wide, but no one I talked to around here ever uses it, and the guys at the plumbing store laughed at me when I brought it up. It is not very pliable, so bending it around joists and threading it through holes was what an optimist might call a ‘learning experience.’ After the first disastrous day, which involved kinked tubes and little progress, we decided to unroll the entire length of tube, to get it straight as possible, before running it through the joists. Of course, the tubes are coiled into two hundred foot long rolls, so where to do it posed a challenge. We ended up rolling it out all the way down the driveway, and then slowly snaking it in the bulkhead door into the basement as we needed it. It sounds crazy, but it worked extremely well, and we were able to finish the work by late yesterday.
Why run such thick tubes? Well, I purchased the radiant supplies last year and didn’t know that 7/8ths was extremely thick. As far as I knew, everyone was doing it. Not so. Also, when your tubing is that thick, it carries much more heat a farther distance, so it is in actuality more efficient than running smaller tubing. Not easier, mind you, just more efficient.
But the most significant achievement of the past month has nothing to do with wiring, sheathing or heating. It is all about color. Namely, we have finally chosen a color for the house. After 13 samples, four trips to the paint department, many long and fascinating discussions, and having so many test boards of different hues nailed to the side of the house that it resembled a pack of Zebra Stripe gum, we have made our decision, and actually purchased the stain. I’d tell you what color we chose, but at this point I forgot. But stay tuned, for I am sure you will be seeing it soon right here. Speaking of pics, none for this entry, but hopefully will put up a bunch this week so you all can see what I am talking about.
So, with both shower units in, the wiring done, the plumber on his way back, a color chosen, the radiant tubing installed, a kitchen faucet purchased, some lighting already chosen, and the squeaks in the first floor fixed, that leave sonly 3,895,674 things to attend to before we move in. So close, yet so far.
On a side note, congrats to my brother Mike who just finished the Trek Across Maine to benefit the American Lung Association. He biked over 180 miles across the state of Maine and raised over $1,000. Good job, bro! Of course, he blogged the whole experience.
