19 posts tagged “remodeling”

How many houses have you lived in? How is where you live now different from where you grew up?

A lot.  A lot lot lot.  Which is why I am now going to write a novel about it.

1. I came home from the hospital to a little house in Bethany, Oklahoma, where the streets were and still are dirt.
2. When I was a year old, we moved to another tiny house on Polk Street in my "hometown" of Hugoton.
3. A year later we moved to a big old house on 10th Street, which had been cut into two apartments at some point.  Because I wasn't in school yet, I stayed home with my mother and my grandad, while they remodeled it back into a single house.  I remember quite vividly the day after they built an interior staircase, and I stood at the open doorway to what had been the exterior staircase, watching them rip the stairs off the side of the house.  Can you guess where I got my home remodeling urge?  At age three, my main toys were various sized nails and screws, a hammer and pliers, and some scraps of wood.
4. I'm going to count my grandparents' house, too, over on Harrison, just two blocks from the train tracks and the grain elevators.  It was my real childhood home, where I was always a child, spoiled and doted on.
   
5. After my parents got married, they decided to build a new house, but in the interim, we moved to a house on Trindle, which was much smaller than the 10th Street house.
6. Then the landlord on Trindle sold the house and we had to move again, because the new house wasn't finished yet.  We moved to the horrid little Blue House, where everything was blue.  The carpet, the paint, the kitchen, the bathroom, everything.  Also, it was only two bedrooms, and with seven of us, it was like hell on earth.  On top of each other all the time.  Also, the air conditioner didn't work for shit.  Also, the hot water heater didn't work at all.  Also, you couldn't run the drier and anything else at once.  Also, did I mention that everything was blue?  I hate blue.  That house was so bad I would have been ashamed to invite my friends over, if I'd had any friends.
7. At last, the new house was done.  Mom's new house.  It would never be our new house, because Mom had designed it and picked out everything in it.  All the carpet was the same, all the furniture the same, so that all the bedrooms looked the same.  It was like living in a motel.  Salmon carpet, ivory walls, and freaky faux-Danish furniture.  Oh, except in the kitchen where the floor was tiled in brown and the counter tops were orange.  Fucking 80's.
8. Then I left for college and lived in a dorm room for a while, which I don't really count.  My junior year, I moved in with Allen, my football buddy, and two architecture types: Ken and Jen from Colorado.  It was the first time in my entire life that I had my own room.  At 19, my first room.  It was about 9 x 10, with a sloping ceiling in the attic.  I had enough room for a twin bed, a small dresser and a milk crate for a night stand.  It was lovely.
9. After two years of that, I moved into my very own apartment: part of a huge Victorian, where my bedroom was the formal dining room, complete with chandelier, and my bathroom was the butler's pantry.  That's where I also had the cat ghost.
10. I made the mistake many college co-eds make.  I agreed to move in with my boyfriend.  He picked the house and it was a dump.  I'd moved out in about six months, and so I only count it as representative of why you should never trust someone else to pick out your living space.  It was located in the flood plain of the '51 flood and it flooded.  We didn't get water in the house, but we got it right up to the underside of the floor boards.  Mosquito central, nasty filthy place, and then we got a dog--which boyfriend also picked out without any consideration for my opinion.  Spastic little dog.  Nice enough, but never destined to be my dog.  Then, my cat got shot by some hillbilly neighbor.  I was done.
11. After that, I moved into one of my favorite homes: an apartment in the old Wareham Hotel.  Elevator.  Restaurant and bar downstairs.  Swank.  Soundproof.  Beautifully tiled old bathroom, walk in closet.  My own.  Pigeons walking by on the window sills outside.
12. Then I got a job in Japan and moved into a traditional Japanese apartment in Nakazawa, upstairs from the Quickie Mart and just down the hill from a massive Shinto shrine.  Tiny bathroom.  Tiny kitchen.  Two lovely 6-tatami rooms that opened out on a balcony that overlooked a few thousand acres of rice and the Honshu mountains.  I had tree frogs and mud swallows and a stray cat. 
    
13. I made another mistake.  I moved in with my sister and remodeled an apartment in a house I didn't own.  A story better not dramatized.  Another lovely living space, but one I had to leave when my sister got remarried and sold the house.  Au revoir.
14. I followed that with a dinky little subsidized apartment in a brick WW2 era complex.  Subsidized because I was making about $18K a year working for Planned Parenthood.
15. After two years there, I got married and moved to Florida, where Hubbicula and I resided in a craptastic apartment in a craptastic complex for about a year. 
    
16. During which year, I did mountains of research to figure out where to buy a house.  I drove endlessly through neighborhoods and researched property values and sales trends, and we looked at five houses.  House #5 was perfect, except that it didn't have a garage.  It was a lovely little Arts and Crafts Bungalow in a suspect neighborhood a block from the interstate.  Still, it was perfect, with oak floors, original tiled kitchen counter tops and ten-foot ceilings.  And thousands of little lizards living in my yard, sneaking up my walls, sleeping in my potted plants.  Loved that house.  Almost nothing to remodel in it, except for the urgent need to paint over every room in the house.  Pepto-bismal pink in the living and dining rooms.  Dining room had exquisite paneled walls with a plate rail and a lovely chandelier.  Hideous other colors throughout.  No remodeling until the end, when we got ready to sell it, then we redid the front porch and I redid the kitchen ceiling.
17. That brought us back to Kansas, where we spent two months living with my parents.  It was...okay.  Hubbicula might have other things to say about it, but living in the suburbs was never our plan.
18. So we bought the house we have now.  The tiny, adorable little limestone gnome cottage.  The house of the charming screened porch and the leaking basement.  I have mixed feelings about this house.  I'd probably love it if it weren't the size of a postage stamp.  Oh, and if I didn't wake up on rainy nights and panic. 
    

I believe that's an adequate survey of my various homes, and I'm frankly shocked to discover that I've lived in 18 different houses.  No wonder I'm tired of moving.

What's different about my home now and my childhood home?  Well, not a lot.  It's in Kansas, surrounded by Kansans.  It's a lot bigger town than my hometown.  90,000 people vs. 3,000 people.  It's humid here, but not brutally windy.  We've got eight movie screens instead of one.  We've got squirrels and cottontail rabbits instead of coyotes and jackrabbits.  I don't know everyone yet and I'm related to almost no one.  Still, it's Kansas.  I've got that going for me, which is nice.

My whole life is under construction these days.

At home, my sisters came to visit over the weekend to help me get my basement half-bath functional.  It's a nasty little specimen of manly gas-station hell hole proportions.  So we yanked the toilet and sink, scrubbed the stone walls, installed sheetrock on the open studs on one side, moved wiring, installed a new light fixture, reinstalled the sink brackets, and after I paint, I'll reinstall the sink and toilet.  You think I'm crazy for home remodeling, imagine me plus two 'Zilla sisters.  All of us inherited the "I don't know, but I'm not afraid, and I'll figure it out," gene from our mother, so we pretty much waded in and wrought havoc until we reached the other side with most of the work done.  (I even managed to do some re-wiring, although traditionally I'm the plumber and Hubbicula is the electrician.)  Today, I'm nursing some blisters and a burn on my drill bracing hand, and a pair of enormous bruises--one on the inside of my arm and the other on my right boob--my drill grip.  Because drilling into limestone and concrete requires all the body weight I can bring to it, plus one of my sisters leaning into my back.

At work, my whole office was covered in a fine layer of dust when I came in this morning.  Perhaps concrete dust.  Perhaps asbestos dust.  Perhaps magic pixie dust.  Perhaps stripper dust.  At any rate, the electricity was off in the whole building this weekend, so we came back to some interesting things--like a defrosted fridge and a fax machine on the fritz. 

On the walk to work, they've ripped up the street north of my house.  The street I have to cross to get to work.  Last week, I was able to simply sneak past the barricades and scurry across the street, which had been stripped down to its underlayment.  I felt like a political dissident, trying to sneak across the Demilitarized Zone to the safety of South Korea.  This morning, I found they'd gouged long channels three feet wide and two feet deep into the underlayment and piled mountains of dirt everywhere.  So, no more sneaking across the DMZ to safety.  I had to walk three blocks over, one block up, then three blocks back to get to my regular work route.

I think I'm ready for a vacation.

I finally finished "decorating" my office with an item I salvaged from the the Brain Tumor Hall moving extravaganza.

The English Department decided to part with this gem:

It's one of those serious wall maps that rolls up inside a steel tube that's a good three feet long.  I think it adds a certain something to my office.

I love all the various cat/mirror/light interplay going on in this pic.  (Here's my question--they invented anti-red-eye technology for cameras, but when will they invent anti-yeem technology?  After all, at least 35% of all photos taken in America are of peoples' cats.  Right?)

If you're wondering what sorts of things are on a Literary Map of New England, let me offer you a sample:

There you have it: Salem, MA, birthplace of Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter.  Oh, and home of "Witchcraft."  Odd.

You bet your sweet bippy I can.

My people, the new washer and dryer are like plus-size fashion models: big and beautiful.  Through some combination of ignorance and bravado, hubby and I selected the industry's largest washing machine, which also happens to be quite energy efficient.  It's a top-load, but works like a front-load, complete with a glass lid, so you can watch your delicate and not-so-delicate underthings being cleaned

Hey, how do you know it's a writer's laundry room?  The typewriter:

Five days of plumbing and painting later and I can have a whole lot of clean laundry and more pleasant surroundings throughout the house.  Wednesday I installed the new drains for the washer and utility sink.  Thursday Dadzilla drove down and ran some new pipe for the sink and washer.  Friday I started painting on one of the three rooms I painted, while waiting for washer and dryer delivery guys (who acted like they were extras from The Sopranos, only Irish.) With a good 75% of our daily living space undergoing painting, Friday kind of blurred into Saturday and here I am on Sunday night, back in my freshly painted office, a few hours away from sleeping in my freshly painted bedroom, a good night's sleep away from eating breakfast in my freshly painted dining room. 

For almost a year we've been living with the color scheme of the previous owners, as we had more pressing issues in getting the basement done.  Now, at last, we've repainted in colors we like.  I admit--I may have a black heart, but I'm more of a pastel person when it comes to interior design.  I like light.  I like airiness.  Without further ado, let's take a little before/after tour.  The before shots are really before--before we owned the house, so you can see the color schemes complete with the furnishings of the people who chose the wall colors.  I don't have anything in general against the colors, but they're not for me..

The dining room: way too red and dark for me. 

The kitchen, also too dark--made it feel cramped.

I put the second coat of paint on the laundry room floor and already I feel my laundrui decreasing.  (Doesn't that sound like the right contraction of laundry ennui?)

Maybe I had literary ennui yesterday because I was thinking of my laundry room. 

When we bought the house, it was nearly the deal breaker.  It looked like the stage set for the next Saw movie:
You know me, though.  I'm fucking crazy.  So, we hauled the old washer and dryer--a real pair of uglies--that we got with the house and then scrubbed and scraped the walls and floor.
Tonight I put the last coat of paint on the floor, so check back for pics of the partially rehabilitated laundry room.  After the floor cures comes the exciting part.  Momzilla and Dadzilla are buying us a new washer and dryer of the non-ugly variety.  Also of the variety that will wash more than three bath towels at once.

The strangest thing about the laundry room when we moved in: no dryer vent.  None.  No sign that there ever was one.  Plenty of evidence that the dryer had been vented into the laundry room for the last 40 years--archaeological layers of lint.  I vented the dryer out the window, but owing to the age of the dryer, we quickly got some archaeological lint there, too.

Here is where the two met:
I wanted to lie around like a kept woman, eating chocolate covered strawberries and sipping champagne.  I did in fact make some chocolate covered strawberries (including this mutant conjoined one),
but I ate them on the fly, between scraping up old linoleum adhesive that is like ten-million-year old tar--just a few thousand years away from a diamond, perhaps--and trying to do a little stop-gap plumbing until we can rework the water supply and drains for our washer, dryer, and utility sink.  Momzilla and Dadzilla are buying us a new washer and dryer for our house-warming, so we figured it was as good as time as any to clean up and paint the laundry room.  I would have preferred to postpone this, but the washer and dryer we inherited with the house, well...They Came from the Sixties.  The washer holds about 4 bath towels and the dryer sounds like a blind, three-legged pony trying to pull a wagon full of old ironing boards up a dirt road.  If you're wondering what that block of concrete is, you're not alone.  The dryer used to sit on it, so that it wasn't on the floor, but it's hard not to imagine that someone is perhaps encased in the cement...

So, that's what hubby and I did this weekend--installed a ceiling fan in our bedroom.  In the process, we discovered that the original wiring was still in place in the ceiling.  Old wiring=another step in the ceiling fan installation process.  The first step, however, as it is with all home improvement projects, is make a big mess.

The next step then is rip out the old light fixture, complete with hack-sawing away a big, ugly bracket bolted to the joists, and enlarging the gaping hole in the ceiling

After that, install the new switch*.

Voila!  You have a new, lovely fan.

*Oh, and about a hundred other steps over the course of twelve hours.

No, not the flag of surrender, but the flag of victory!  They did it on the moon, they did it at Iwo Jima, and now I feel like I should be staking a flag in my basement floor, to proclaim that I came, I saw, I remodeled. 

Today was finally moving in day, but before we could crap the basement up, I snapped some after pics, so that you can see how we got from there to here.

The creepy stairwell is now creepily cheerful.  Oh, never mind the mop and the rags at the bottom.  That's just where we've got a little natural spring bubbling up in our basement.

Hardhat area.  The ceilings are so low that there isn't much room for ventilation ducts.  The cheerfulness has crept in here, too.

How the basement looked on the day we looked at the house.  It was originally one big room, but on the east side we built in a bedroom.  Added value, my people.  Plus, more places to store our crap.  The people who sold the house wanted to leave the lousy, plywood pool table.  We declined.  They broke it up with a sledgehammer and left it piled at the curb for the trashies to take away.  Nice.

The office before looks nice from this angle, because you can't see that it didn't actually have any enclosing walls.

And of course, the fireplace, after all the evil spirits were exorcised from the mantle.

Now, I'm going to bed.

It's one of those strange days.  I don't have anything particular to do, yet I can't quite rally my brain to do any of the little things that I could do.  Oh, sure, I'm thumbing through a literary market book, trying to figure out where to submit a handful of stories, but it's half-hearted at best.  I've got my Japanese books and my Spanish books, if I felt like studying.  I don't really.  I can hear someone in the German office typing industriously and frenentically.  Weird.  I wonder what she's doing that still needs to be typed.

I guess I could work on a story or something.  I'm fascinated by this news story about the guy who had a completely random episode of amnesia that lasted for several years.  Not fascinated enough to go find a link about the story, or to actually put pen to paper and write about it.  I could work on finishing the novel about the machine that creates desire, especially as the contest I was going to enter it in has an upcoming deadline. 

Is this post-home-remodelling-project ennui?  Or is it just regular old ennui?  Is it ennui?  Why do I keep saying ennui?  Too much trouble to pick another word.

Maybe I'm just tired.  I have been living in a forced labor camp for several months now.  As always, I was relieved to get to work this morning and sit on my ass doing nothing.  I guess I'll just keep doing it, it's going so well.