22 posts tagged “remodeling”
Because I think I bought the wrong size. Or it doesn't match the rest of my decor.
This is me after a day spent in the attic. Yes, I'm wearing a bandanna, goggles, dust mask, and a head lamp. It's fricking dark up there. And eerily quiet. And full of moon dust-like insulation. And pixies. But I wasn't supposed to tell anybody about the pixies.
Oh, right, what was I doing up there? Installing ceiling fan braces. There are few home features I hate more than wobbly or rattly ceiling fans, so I believe in attaching them to serious braces fastened to the studs with heavy deck screws. Also, I love ceiling fans. I'm installing them in the bedroom, the office, the living room, and the kitchen. I'd install one in the dining room, but that just seems like overkill.
To prepare for this adventure, I loaded up my backpack with all the tools I thought I might possibly need for the adventure, including my newly purchased cordless drill. I don't own 200 feet of extension cord, so I figured that would come in handy. I should have taken snacks.
The kitchen was easy. I had to enlarge the hole in the ceiling a bit to accommodate a 4-inch electrical box, which is standard for ceiling fan braces, but the brace went in easily. From there, I crawled to the pantry, where I installed a new electrical box, and ran the wiring to the light switch. Then I schlepped over to the office, dragging all my supplies and my plywood platform with me. (Because squatting on joists for hours at a time is unpleasant, it's better to have somewhere to sit.) Once again, the hole in the ceiling had to be enlarged via drill and hand saw. Then I had to shim one end of the brace to make it level, but it went in easily enough.
After that I slithered over to the bathroom to repair a hole in the ceiling and install a new electrical box. Seeing a trend? Yes, most of the light fixtures in the house had been attached directly to the ceiling without the benefit of a box. While doing that, I realized I'd forgotten a box to install in the hallway. And it was getting dark. And the dining room light fixture opening was in the wrong place. I wasn't going to be able to get it all done in a day.
Still, I was dead-set on getting all the ceiling fan braces installed, so I persevered. Alas, it wasn't meant to be. I crept toward the bedroom, but as I felt about with my foot, digging through layers of blown insulation looking for the next ceiling joist, I found ... nothing. No joist. Not where it should have been anyway. In most modern houses, joists and studs are installed at 18-inch intervals, or sometimes 24-inch intervals. Things are slightly less predictable in old houses. I once lived in a house with 21-inch center studs and joists. How I discovered that, it's a long story.
This house, though, this house ... it mostly has 24-inch centers, except where it doesn't, namely in the bedroom and living room. There, the ceiling joists are 36 inches apart. Too far to install a ceiling fan brace. So I get to plan another day in the attic and this one will be a doozy. I'll have to drag a bunch of lumber up there and sister in some more joists, close enough together to support ceiling fans, and to provide a bit more stability in those ceilings.
Am I starting to regret buying this project house? Oddly enough, no. I'm kind of looking forward to the project. As sick as that is.
No, I'm not pregnant. Stop it with that, okay?
I do, however, have an electrician. He's at the house *right now* doing electrically things. Shhh ... don't scare him away. These Kansas electricians are delicate, shy little creatures.
Oh, the unspeakable, you wanna know about that?
I got my new Rammstein CD. It is full of delicious guitar crunchiness and snarling vocals and ... Edith Piaf. For reals. That's not what's unspeakable, though. I love Edith Piaf. What's so horrific is that I think Till Lindemann isn't just my Armageddon Fuck* anymore. As long as he's willing to sing Edith Piaf songs, I might, just maybe, possibly want him to call me the morning after the world ends. If you're scared to click on it and listen, don't be. This song is fairly quiet and suspiciously ballad-like.
Oh, non, rien de rien / Oh, no, nothing at all.
Oh, non, je ne regrette rien / Oh, no, I regret nothing.
Till has a little difficulty wrapping his mouth around the French, but it all sounds lovely, replete with roaring guitars.
*For those of you not familiar with the concept of Armageddon Fuck™ let me 'splain. The AF is a person whom on a surface, conscious level you find disgusting. Not merely unattractive from an aesthetic viewpoint, because sometimes the AF is physically attractive to other people, but a person whose behavior or general demeanor or social status or public personna repulses you. No way you would ever want to have sex with that person ... unless the world were going to end in the next hour or so and you knew you would never have to see the AF again and he/she would never call you. One shot, death imminent, a chance to fulfill all your most embarrassing, skankiest sexual fantasies. Because secretly, subconsciously, you really do find that person attractive.
As an example of the concept: a certain relative of mine who shall remain nameless, her Armageddon Fuck is Leonardo DeCaprio. Now plenty of people find him attractive and plenty of them would be happy to have him call the morning after, but my sister unnamed relative finds him kind of skeavy and way too popular. Unless the world were going to end. The lead singer of Rammstein, however, is the prototype Armageddon Fuck. I find him physically repellent. I like big bruisers, especially with a little gut, but he's a greasy, sweaty, hairy, sneering, contemptuous, chain-smoking *shudder*. Except when he opens his mouth and sings. He can count to four and make me weak in the knees.
I must go rock out. More on Rammstein and the house develops tomorrow.
My crazy fambly came up on Sunday to help me take down my upper kitchen cabinets. As in every other room in the house, the ceiling in the kitchen needed to be taken down and replaced, so down came the cabinets. Not that easily, though, which I'll hopefully have more pics of later.
After all the demolition was done, however, I was alone in the kitchen and glanced out the window to see robins. Lots and lots of robins mobbing the several juniper trees in my yard. I'd never seen it before, but they were swarming over the trees devouring the berries. I tried to get some decent pics or video of it and had about given up, when this happened.
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.
- I came home from the hospital to a little house in Bethany, Oklahoma, where the streets were and still are dirt.
- When I was a year old, we moved to another tiny house on Polk Street in my "hometown" of Hugoton.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
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:
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:
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.
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),
