The Kelly House

Leaving Well Enough Alone

2012-02-23T15:46:00.000-06:00

Could we all pause in whatever we're doing and observe a small moment of silence for my original floors, a little tiny piece of which I uncovered today? See 'em, running perpendicular to the new floor, right next to the gaping hole? Sigh....They don't look to be that bad, at least not in the 6 or so square inches of flooring I can see. Still, I suppose (grudgingly, and with regret) that I ought not to tear up the oak flooring we just spent hours and hours sanding in order to uncover another floor that we'll have to spend hours and hours sanding. Especially not when I don't know what the rest of the original floor looks like. This might be the only decent spot in the whole thing. The rest of it could be water-damaged or terribly scarred or missing altogether and replaced with plywood or something. I mean, this house was apartments for years and years, so the chances that the floors look decent all over are really slim. Right? Right. Yes. It's better to leave well enough alone.

Except...I had exactly these same fears when I tore off the ugly shingles from the outside of the house. And that turned out well. Really well. Exceedingly well. In fact, on the whole of the house WTB replaced three clapboards, and then only because a stovepipe hole had been cut in them.

Something tells me I really wouldn't get that lucky twice. Right? Yes. Right. Not to mention that tearing up the oak floors now would mean a waste of all the time and money I've spent so far. Right? Yes. Right. It's better to leave well enough alone. Isn't it?

How Cool Is This?!

2012-02-22T01:03:00.001-06:00

The online version of This Old House recently listed their Best Old House Neighborhoods for 2012, and guess who made that list? Lexington, Missouri! My little hometown!

In my estimation, my neighborhood is easily the best of the Best Old House Neighborhoods...but I might be a tad biased. Still, living practically smack in the middle of the Old Neighborhoods National Register Historic District, being surrounded by gorgeous old houses, within walking distance of the other three (yes, three!) Historic Districts in Lexington--our downtown, the Highland Avenue neighborhood, and Wentworth Military Academy--and having the best neighbors ever, my neighborhood's got almost everything a person could want. A little ten-minute stroll (7 minutes if I'm walking with WTB) and I'm downtown to get a reuben at Riley's Irish Pub & Grill, browse through the furniture and antique hardware at Missouri River Antique Company, buy a book or two and a great cup of coffee at River Reader, check out the cool stuff at Patlen's Smart Shop (which is located inside a former bank building that was once robbed by Jesse James), and window-shop the fabulous furniture at Blackthorn Trading Company. (This is not an all-inclusive list of the shops by any means--just my very favorites.)

Come see Lexington for yourself. You can plan your trip at www.visitlexingtonmo.com and find links there to local Bed & Breakfast inns, our area wineries, and a calendar of events. And should you fall in love with Lexington, there are several historic properties for sale in town. I can't say enough nice things about the folks at Welcome Home Realty, who specialize in historic houses and have a real passion for the properties they sell. Some of their listings are truly swoon-worthy.

The Incident

2012-02-19T13:31:00.000-06:00

A couple of days ago I ventured down into the scary basement to take Joe The Floor Guy's advice and look at the underside of the floors. Because the actual basement extends under the house for less than half its length (the rest is crawlspace) I knew I wouldn't be able to see much. I could see all of the kitchen floor (which is not being refinished) and part of the dining room, but I wasn't about to climb up the dirt walls and wiggle around down under the house in all the dust and cobwebs and Lord knows what else just to see the parlor floor. Most especially not when I'd already pretty much made up my mind to stick with the floors I've got. (Go back and read the comments after my last post--lots of really good advice there. Thanks to everyone who commented and gave me food for thought.)

So Charlie and I finished sanding the rest of the floors Friday and Saturday. Not without incident, however...

We'd been scraping at the black glue and varnish in the corners and along the edges of the three rooms for hours and hours. It was a long and tedious job, made even longer by the fact that both of us have almost no patience and so we took several breaks to sit outside on the front porch in the sun. Friday afternoon I walked into the other parlor (where all the furniture's stacked up) looking for something and literally stumbled across a Craftsman Multitool. I took it to Charlie.

"Look what I found," I chirped.

"Does that thing have a sander on it?" he asked.

"Yep," I said, "and it's got a triangle-shaped head so it'll get back in the corners and there's a whole pack of sandpaper in there and---"

"Where'd you find that?"

"In the other room," I said. "Dylan and Sarah gave it to me for Christmas three years ago."

Charlie adjusted his hat. He made that little 'huh" sound he makes when he's stalling. Then he said, "So you've had that thing this whole time? And we've been scrapin' glue off with a [bleeping] pull knife and razor blades?!?!"

Uh-oh.

"Yes...I guess I forgot I had it...."

"How in the hell do you hand scrape for hours and hours and forget you have a multitool?!" Charlie yelled.

I'm hoping that was a rhetorical question, because I didn't answer him. I just handed him the multitool and walked away.

Needless to say, the rest of the sanding went much quicker than it did in the beginning, so yesterday afternoon I went to Lowe's to pick out stain. After much agonizing deliberation, I came home with Minwax Golden Oak...which is way too light. I swear it looked darker on the little sample in the store. At home it looks, well, golden. And pale. So I'll be taking that back as soon as I can and exchanging it for something like Chestnut, which I should have bought in the first place. If there's rain or snow or other weather that prevents pouring concrete, Charlie will stain the floors Thursday and Friday; if there's concrete weather he'll start the floors on Saturday. In the meantime I'll be cleaning up lots and lots of dust from the floors and the walls.

Joe Makes Me Think

2012-02-11T23:12:00.000-06:00

Joe The Floor Guy called Friday afternoon to say that he was coming by to look at the floors and give us some free advice. I immediately began to worry and fret, and that became contagious. By the time Joe got there an hour later, Charlie and I had convinced ourselves that we'd torn up the floors beyond repair, that we never should have started this stupid project, and that I'd be better off just covering it all up with carpet.

When Joe showed up he walked through all three rooms, took a look at the still-yucky floor in the other parlor, told us that there really isn't an easier way to get the glue up than to tediously scrape at it, and declared that we did a pretty good job.

Then the trouble started. Joe verified my opinion (and Mare's too) that these aren't the original floors. "You have wide pine under this stuff," he said. "What's on there now is red oak, but it's a cheap floor and not real thick. It'll last awhile, though. You know, you could take this stuff up and restore the original floors...."

I'd been thinking the same thing, remembering when Mare and I did just that on another old house he used to own.

Charlie read my thoughts. "Oh, no. Hell, no. If you're gonna do that, you're on your own. I didn't go through all this sanding for you to pull it up."

"It would be a big pain in the ass," Joe said, "because it's all hand-nailed and you'd have to fill in all those holes."

"Like I did when I took off the outside of the house," I said brightly. "I had to fill in billions of nail holes in the original clapboards."

"Oh, Lordy," said Charlie.

"Well yeah, compared to that this wouldn't be so bad. We've refinished floors like that before and they look really good when they're done," said Joe.

"Oh, Lordy," said Charlie.

Joe continued, "If you're gettin that idea, what you need to do is go downstairs and look up at the floor from underneath to see how much patching and stuff there is. It'd be a big job for you, but it'd bring back the original floors."

"I wonder if they raised the baseboard..." I mused, then looked at the wall closely. "Nope, looky here. You can see the seam between the plaster and the top of the baseboard. I bet only the shoe moulding was raised. That would mean I'd just have to pry that off, not the whole thing. Oh, gosh, Joey, now you've got me thinking...Mrs. Kelly would be happy if I put back the original floors."

"Then Mrs. Kelly better come back from the dead and help you do all that," Charlie said. I sense a mutiny.

Joe left laughing. "Let me know what you decide."

Free Agency

2012-02-06T21:23:00.000-06:00

I knew it would happen sooner or later. Joe The Floor Guy got wind that Charlie and I are doing the floors ourselves. Joe hit me up on Facebook chat.

Joe: Hired a free agent, didya? You're on the list now...the bad list.

Me: I feel really bad about not hiring you, but honestly....I can't afford you.

Joe: Just kidding. Where are the finishing pics?

Me: We're a long way from finished. That's as far as we got on our days off.

Joe: DAYS?! I could've had it done in a day! Haha.

Me: That's cause you & your family are like the MLB of floor refinishing....we're more like the Little League team that's in last place....or the Bad News Bears.

Joe: Make sure you get all that old varnish off, or the new stuff won't bond right.

Me: Okay.

Joe: Do a light sand between coats.

Me: Okay.

Joe: And get in the corners good. Do you know how to get in the corners?

Me: Ummm....

Joe: I'll just come over Wednesday and evaluate your progress.

Me: No! I'm afraid you'll walk in and be all, OH MY GOD, you're doin it ALL WRONG!!

Joe: Duh. You know I'm gonna say that. But I can give you a little free advice.

Me: I am scared.

Before & During

2012-02-05T20:53:00.001-06:00

I can't really call these before-and-after photos because we're still a long way from "after", so I'll say they're before-and-during pictures.

Front parlor before

Front parlor sanded

(Looks uneven because I hadn't run the ShopVac yet.)

I couldn't get a before picture of the foyer because Charlie was half-done in there before I even knew he'd started, but here's what it looked like after he was finished sanding.

And saving the worst for last...the dining room. This is the room I was most worried about because it had so much damage to it. Several years before I bought the house, the neighbor's tree fell over in a storm and poked a big hole in the roof of my house. I'm not sure of the particulars, but the end result was a pretty large patch of water damage (about 4'x4') on the floor and the total replacement of the original plaster ceiling in there with sheetrock.

Ugly.

Not so ugly.

The floors are pine, narrow-width boards maybe an inch and a quarter. Oddly, the dining room floor's made from hundreds of short little pieces. (You can bigify the pictures and compare the foyer floor to the dining room floor to better see what I'm talking about.) In places we could see the original stain and varnish. The floors were stained sort of a maple color originally. I'm thinking of going a bit darker to even out some of the bad places in the floors that didn't completely sand out, like maybe an oak or walnut.

Last night I had a nightmare that while I slept, some creature came into the house and turned the floors black again. In the dream, it was sort of like a giant land-dwelling squid that poured out ink. I woke up terrified about 6 a.m. and ran into the dining room, then through the front parlor and into the foyer. The floors, of course, had not turned black. What a relief.

Woooo Hoooo!!!

2012-02-03T17:53:00.000-06:00

With a post title like that, you know it can only mean one thing.

Yup, Charlie started on the front parlor floor today.

The historic first pass of the sander

My mother called me this afternoon to ask how things were going. "I don't think he has any idea how long he's been workin," I told her. A few minutes later Charlie walked into the kitchen. "That clock on the stove's not right, is it?" I assured him it was. Four-thirty. He'd put in three solid hours of work. My mother and I laughed. Charlie looked grim. He may even have uttered a bad swear at that point.

But the floor looked like this:

You can barely see the floor through all the dust....

Note that in the first photo, the curtains are up; in the second they're not. Yeah, probably should've taken those down before he started sanding....

When I saw the floor without that damnable black glue on it for the first time ever, I jumped up and down and clapped my hands. This time Charlie laughed. "I take it you like the way they look so far," he said. I answered a resounding, "YES!!"

He still has a long way to go. It's taking much longer to sand that black junk off than he thought it would. (His original plan for today was to sand the front parlor, the dining room, and the foyer.) As I write this, it's nearly 6 pm and he's still working. I've been trying off and on for the past half hour to get him to quit so I can buy him a nice steak dinner at the pub. He is most definitely not a grasshopper...

Less Grasshopper, More Ant

2012-02-01T23:35:00.000-06:00

It's becoming quite clear to me that the universe is trying to tell me something.

And that something is: stop putting things off, girl.

The original plan for Wednesday was to come home, stay up, and pretty much kick butt on the house: get the second coat of paint on the parlor window, put the sash locks back on, clean house, do laundry, move some furniture and--most importantly--pack up the 5 billion fragile little things in my great-grandma's china cabinet so that Charlie and I can move furniture on Friday and start in on the floors.

Instead, I slept until 1:30 in the afternoon. (Totally Charlie's fault for not calling me on his lunch break like he usually does, right?) Then I straightened up the house a bit, colored my hair, and went to supper and movie night with my bestie Amy. "Meh," I thought, "I can do all that stuff on Thursday, no problem." Which would've been true, except...halfway through the first movie I got a page from work that I was being called in on mandatory overtime for day shift on Thursday. Day shift. Ugh. But as my friend Colleen tweeted, "Just think though, it's extra $$." True. OT pay which will go towards stain and poly and picture rail and other stuff. It's a good thing.

Thursday night I am cleaning my house. Then I'm pulling all the small furniture into the other parlor. Then I'm packing up the china cabinet. I am. Really. No more putting things off. I need to be less like the fabled grasshopper and more like the ant.

The Dryer Works: A Tale of Procrastination

2012-01-30T23:12:00.000-06:00

A few months ago I had to fill out a Pre-Evaluation Worksheet at my place of employment. Those things are awful. I fill one out, my boss fills one out, and we hope our answers meet somewhere in the middle. It's chock-full of uncomfortable questions. ("What can your chain of command do to assist you more effectively?" Right. I'm gonna criticize my superiors, in writing, in a document that stays in my personnel file for 5 years.) There's also a horrible fill-in-the-blank section. One of the sentences there is: "I am better than anyone else at ____________________." My first impulse was to fill in the blank with the word "procrastination". Honest, but probably not conducive to a raise. In support of the assertion that I am better (actually, worse) than anyone else at procrastination, I offer this:

My dryer stopped heating about 20 months ago. It stopped working altogether about 16 months ago. Today it was finally repaired. I did nothing whatsoever towards that end--it was Charlie who called the repairman on Friday.

Twenty months. Almost two years. It took the repairman less than an hour to fix the dryer. First he put an electrical thingy (a voltimeter?) on the dryer and determined it was getting only 110 current, not the 220 it needed to work. We ventured into the basement and discovered that half the breaker for the dryer was tripped. I felt sorta stupid for not noticing this myself, but the repairman said that the switch was only a wee bit away from the ON position, so it wasn't obvious. He reset the breaker and the dryer came on, but it still wouldn't heat. The thermal fuse was blown. He replaced that, turned on the dryer, and it worked beautifully. In celebration, I put my jammies in the dryer to heat 'em up and then ran and jumped into bed before they cooled off. (After the repairman left, of course.) It was quite lovely. Even though, since it was almost 50 degrees this morning, that wasn't really necessary.

The first step towards recovery is admitting that you have a problem.

"Hi, my name's Jaynie, and I am a procrastinator."

Good Days, Indeed

2012-01-29T00:02:00.000-06:00

It's been a good couple of days.

Charlie got in town from work early on Thursday and moved all the furniture out of the front parlor, fixed the low water pressure and the leak in the kitchen faucet, took up the rest of the tack strip in the front parlor, and put one coat of paint on the parlor window trim. I hung two more strips of wallpaper.

Then on Friday, he got back in town really early. By "really early" I mean that I was buried under the covers and a pillow fort when he called me and said, "What're you doin, sleepin?" I wiped the drool off my face and said, "Well, yeah. Doesn't everybody take a nap after they go to Lowe's at 7:30 in the morning to buy a ShopVac?" Charlie considered this a moment, "Ummm, not really. Let me in." I panicked. "You're here? Like, at my house, here?" My voice may have squeaked a tiny bit on that last part. This man cannot see me in my dorky Hello Kitty flannel jammies with bed-head and without concealer to cover the big zit on my forehead. I leaped out of bed, yanked on a pair of yoga pants, put my hair in a ponytail, tried to pull my bangs over the zit, tossed on the first shirt I laid hands on, and went to open the door. At that moment I realized the shirt I was wearing was the hoodie I borrowed from him a couple nights before. Hell's bells.

Charlie noticed. Of course he did. "Were you sleepin in my shirt?"

"No, of course not," I said. "I didn't wanna answer the door in my jammies and so--"

He looked at me critically. "What the hell happened to your head?"

I may have died a little on the inside then. But I think I made a good recovery. "So, uh, anyway, I bought a ShopVac."

"So you told me on the phone." He kicked the box. "And right here it is."

Now would be a good time for the basement trapdoor to finally fail, so I can just fall through it.

I cleared my throat. I tried to be business-like. "So. I'm sure you didn't come over here just to chat."

He grinned. "Maybe I did."

What an evil man.

And then he proved that he did not, in fact, come over just to chat because he patched the stovepipe hole in the front parlor, re-hung the piece of kitchen backsplash that fell off months ago, went to two rental places to find out how much a drum sander costs to rent, called one of his friends and asked him to come over Monday and fix my dryer (which hasn't heated in a year), and--saving the best for last--he took the sash locks off all five windows in the front parlor so that I could cook the paint off of them in the CrockPot. He was highly skeptical of that paint removal method until he himself fished a sash lock out of the hot water and the paint slid right off.

It was a good couple of days. A very good couple of days, indeed.

And He Said...

2012-01-25T01:50:00.000-06:00

So Tuesday night Charles got into town from work early and we talked floors. Again. We talk about floors a lot, but we make no progress. This is due almost entirely to the fact that he works days and I work nights and we don't have the same days off. Two weeks ago he said he'd start on the floors as soon as he got laid off, which since the weatherman was calling for snow, we thought would be imminent. Charles does concrete work for a living. It's unheard of to still be pouring concrete, in Missouri, outside, in January. But here we are, and it doesn't look like he's going to be laid off anytime soon. We were talking about something then, something like working whenever we wanted, when I said, like an idiot:

"That reminds me of the scene in that movie Sweet Home Alabama when she says, 'What do you wanna marry me for, anyway?' and he says--"

Charles interrupted me with a grin, "And he says, 'So I can kiss you any time I want'."

And right about then the protective coating of ice around my heart cracked off and my heart fell out of my body and bounced across the floor like a cat toy before I hurriedly scooped it up and shoved it way, way back down into my chest, I mean wayyyy down in there, and covered it back up with caution and skepticism, because there will be none of this falling-in-love schidt occurring here anytime soon. Nope. None. Not even if he is 6'2" and built like an MLB pitcher and knows that scene from a movie and especially not just because he said he'd refinish my floors for almost nothing. Not. Gonna. Happen.

So after I stuffed my little black and bruised heart back into my chest and recovered (sorta) from that near-disaster, I asked him how he knew those lines from that movie. He said, "Because I've seen that movie about a thousand times...but don't tell nobody, okay?"

I promised not to. But I had my fingers crossed at the time because even then, thirty seconds after it happened, I was thinking, I gotta blog about this....y'all can keep a secret, right?

Delayed

2012-01-22T21:06:00.000-06:00

By now, I thought I'd have most of the front parlor papered, the china cabinet packed up, and the furniture moved out of the dining room. That was the plan as of Thursday afternoon.

But you know what happens with best-laid plans...

First, as I was getting ready to hang more wallpaper Thursday afternoon, I noticed that the trim around the big window in the front parlor looked a little scroungy. Then I realized that's because it's still white. White. Not Lyndhurst Estate Cream like the rest of the trim in the parlor. Somehow, way back when, I completely missed painting that window trim.

Then, Charles worked a 15-hour day on Thursday, which put him back in town after 11 pm....a little late to ask a normal person to help me move furniture. (Note that I, not being a normal person, would and often do begin a project after 11 pm...) So, we rescheduled the furniture-moving and floor-prepping for Friday. And then Charles got sick with this icky upper respiratory stuff that's going around.

Still, I have plenty to do even without the dining room floor, right? So I got up Friday morning(ish), intending to paint that window trim. After about an hour of walking around my house freezing and shivering and coughing my head off, I realized that no work on the house was gonna happen.

I spent Friday and most of Saturday tucked into bed with my Nook, the kitties, my flannel jammies, and copious amounts of NyQuil and hot apple cider. I'm feeling much better now.

Just in time to go back to work for three nights.

Finally

2012-01-19T17:47:00.000-06:00

Finally, the front parlor alcove is completely papered. I'm almost embarrassed to tell you how many hours this 3.5'x7' space took me to paper. But I'll tell you anyway, in the hopes it might get me some sympathy: twelve hours. Sheesh. Just as I was putting up the last strip, Journey's "Don't Stop Believin" came on Pandora. Thank you, Steve Perry, but I could've used that motivation earlier in this project. Not only did I finish the alcove today, but I put another two strips of paper on the wall to the right of the alcove. That wall's just 4 feet wide, and all but about 5 inches of it is papered. I still have two 15' walls to go, but one of them has a window in the middle of it and the other has a fireplace, so someone (Karen Anne??) who can do maths might be able to figure out what percentage of this project I still have left. Later tonight I'll put up some more of the trellis paper that goes above the picture rail. (That's what that is hanging down in the top of the photo.) The trellis pattern repeats every inch, so it's an easy match. Unlike those blasted flowers and vines in the main paper....

Dreaming

2012-01-17T23:53:00.000-06:00

Remember that movie about Selena a few years back that starred Jennifer Lopez? Of course you do. Go ahead, admit it. I won't tell anybody. I watched it too. Like ten times. Poor Selena. Anyhow, in one of the scenes, Selena's crooning about dreaming of someone and staring off into the distance all doe-eyed. That's pretty much how I've been this week.

Picture rail...refinished floors...wallpaper...picture rail...refinished floors...wallpaper...

Yep, dreaming.

I haven't heard back from the lumberyard yet about a price per foot for picture rail, so tomorrow I'll call them and check. I'm hoping it's not too pricey, because I need a lot of it. The front parlor's 15' by 15' with one window and two doors. (There won't be picture rail in the alcove.) I also need to ask WTB if he has sawhorses I can borrow, because I need to paint the picture rail before we hang it.

Tuesday afternoon Charlie and I talked about the floors again and decided we'll start in the dining room first. (Charlie is The Dude Formerly Known As Chas, who told me a couple of days ago that he actually doesn't mind my using his real name, so henceforth Charlie or Charles he shall be.) That means that on my days off, I'll be packing away everything in my great-grandmother's china cabinet so that we can move the china cabinet. And the buffet. And the dining room table, four chairs, two buffet lamps, two side chairs, and a small table. And we'll have to roll up the 8'x10' rug in there too. Hopefully all that will fit into the two parlors.

And finally, there's the wallpaper. I started in on it again on Monday and hung one strip above a window in the alcove before realizing, hey..this is Monday...I work on Mondays now. Duh. Two more pieces of wallpaper (one below a window and the other next to it) and the alcove will be done. Based on how long it took me to hang those two strips on the opposite side of the alcove, that'll take about three hours. From then on, it should go quickly. I'm hoping that I can get most of the wallpaper hung during my days off later this week.

Further tales to follow, and with photos if anything interesting occurs.

Say What?

2012-01-13T21:14:00.000-06:00

White Trash Bob doesn't text. He thinks he does. He even sends texts sometimes. But those texts are so random and cryptic that they almost always necessitate a phone call, so I stand by my original pronouncement: White Trash Bob doesn't text. As proof, I offer the following.

WTB: Drain pipe in yard?

Me: Yes. Do you need it?

WTB: No I could not find where it fell off your hour

Me: What?

WTB: House not hour.

Me: It didn't. Floyd gave it to me.

No answer. From this conversation I gather that WTB was wandering either through the alley or through my yard, saw the drain pipe, and thought something needed fixing. What makes this funny to me is the reason Floyd (my next-door neighbor) gave me the drain pipe in the first place:

because last summer WTB said my downspouts needed to be re-routed.

So when Floyd and Gwen had their gutters and downspouts replaced, they gave me a long piece of drain pipe to use in WTB's downspout re-routing project. A project he's apparently forgotten about.

That's okay though. Between the front parlor picture rail, the floor refinishing, and the long-delayed bathroom remodel (which will happen later this year, although not as I'd originally envisioned it) I'm sure we'll be seeing a lot of WTB.

Gonna Get Good

2012-01-10T15:02:00.000-06:00

Yesterday Chas called me on his way home from work to ask when I wanted to start on my floors. At the time, I was standing in the lumberyard talking to a guy about picture rail for the front parlor. This strikes me as very funny.

Anyhow, it should surprise absolutely no one that my answer to his question was, "Tonight." Chas makes this little noise, sort of a cross between a grunt and an "uh-huh", when he's stalling the conversation. He made that noise. I backtracked. "I mean, you could come look at 'em tonight. I don't expect you to actually start on 'em after you worked a 10-hour day pourin' concrete."

So last night he came over and looked at the floors, cursed the people who glued carpet to them, speculated (as did Mare a couple of years ago) that they might not be the original flooring, kicked at the tack strip still left here and there, pulled out a couple of staples, and then gave his verdict: "Let's get goin' on 'em."

I, of course, took that to mean right this very minute and was ready to push the furniture out of the dining room and into the mostly-empty front parlor. Then, in a rare moment of practical thinking, I actually said, "I probably oughta finish papering the front parlor first, and maybe even hang that picture rail." And he replied, "Well, I can help you with that too." I resisted the urge to jump up and down while clapping my hands. (At least until after he left.)

Stay tuned. This is gonna get good.

Mean What You Say

2012-01-05T22:46:00.000-06:00

Me: Don't say that unless you mean it.

Chas: I mean it.

Me: No, really. You don't just throw that out there carelessly.

Chas: I didn't throw it out there. I really mean it.

Me: Because if you say that to me, and I start to believe it, and then it turns out that you didn't really mean it--Well, that would be bad.

Chas: I really mean it.

Me: Say it again.

Chas: I'll help you refinish your floors.

Meowy Christmas

2011-12-24T05:18:00.000-06:00

Merry Christmas from all of us at The Kelly House:

The Cats Marie, Louis & Gracie

The Dog, Liberty

And Me

Just A Lil Update

2011-12-18T16:07:00.000-06:00

My brother's house is now empty. In one long marathon of packing, we finished it all up. I'm happy to report that nothing was broken except for a glass lid on a Corning Ware dish that was the victim of my nephews' swordfighting with a curtain rod and a yardstick. (Did I mention my nephews are 33 and 31??) I have six boxes of Rodger's belongings at my house left to go through, but I'm finding it's easier to do a little at a time. In the meantime, my littlest cat Gracie has claimed one of the boxes as her bed. I'm also happy to report that the box the boys thought was full of porn (which I'm sure is why it was packed into my vehicle) had only one porn mag in it, right on top. The rest of the crate contained architecture magazines. Who knew Rodge was into Mid-Century Modern?

I decorated both parlors for Christmas this year. The front parlor has a 7-ft Christmas tree loaded with ornaments and surrounded by a quilted and beaded Christmas tree skirt, a little table with four caroler figurines on it, and lighted garland strung along the mantel with two glass hurricane vases full of minature gold ball ornaments and lights. The back parlor has a 6-ft tree with a broken stand held together with Hello Kitty duck tape and nothing on it but lights. Guess which parlor the kitties have access to?

Other than that, not much going on here at the house. After Christmas the wallpapering of the front parlor will begin again in earnest.

A Long, Strange Trip

2011-12-08T03:25:00.000-06:00

"Sometimes the lights all shinin on me

Other times I can barely see

Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it's been..."

The Grateful Dead, "Truckin"

I've never before had to pack up a house after someone's death. It's odd and sad and sometimes funny and mostly surreal. All the things we accumulate, all the mundane bits and pieces and the occasional extraordinary object, when taken separately don't seem to amount to much...but together, it's someone's life. There are secrets in our family, and half-truths, and things told (or not) with the idea of protecting someone, and some of that's been laid bare in the process of packing up my brother's house.

I should have seen that coming, but I didn't. Neither did Rodger's sons, Jimi and Jon. So we've spent almost as much time sitting together smoking and talking about Rodger's life as we have in packing it up. An afternoon goes like this: we split up into different rooms of the house and start going through things, then I stop to read an old letter and get teary-eyed, and Jimi yells from the kitchen, "What the hell are all these photos of three coffins?", and then we hear Jon tell the neighbor "We want our food back" when the guy admits he cleaned out my brother's fridge, and then the three of us meet in the living room so I can share the letter and explain the three coffins (those of my maternal grandparents and my cousin, from the car wreck), and we laugh at Jon for saying that to the neighbor, and then pretty soon we're out on the back porch again huddled together on a plastic bench against the rain and cold, smoking Marlboros. A few days of this before Jimi starts chuckling and says, "This is ironic, ya know? The three of us smoking outside dad's house when he died of lung cancer," and then I laugh and say that I quit smoking years ago but I'm only doing it now because I'm giving in to peer pressure, and Jon laughs and says, "It is what it is."

That's become our frequent refrain: It is what it is. Because I don't have the answers to the questions the boys ask me, and none of us knows why Rodger did the things he did, and all of us have to live with this gaping maw of regret and try to get past it somehow. In the end, what matters most is this: Rodger loved us, he was proud of us, and he did his best to protect us. It is what it is.

Rodge Jams It Up

2011-11-29T05:17:00.000-06:00

My big brother, Rodger, y'all:

Last night at the visitation, one of my brother's longtime friends told us a funny story about Rodger taking off to California to find Jimi Hendrix. Rodger didn't find him then, but I bet there's a helluva jam in Heaven when they find each other now.

And Then There Was One

2011-11-27T20:49:00.000-06:00

My birth mother, known fondly as Tookie, had four children. First came Perry in 1949, then Rodger in 1952, then Phillip in 1962 and lastly me, in 1967.

Perry died the same year Phillip was born, the victim of an accidental shooting by Rodger with a gun their father bought them, a gun Tookie never wanted my brothers to have. She divorced their father not too long after that.

Sometime about 1965, Tookie rekindled a love affair with her high school sweetheart, a big bear of a man who was unfortunately (for my mother) married to someone else. When she discovered she was pregnant with me, she did not tell him. My brother Rodger, barely 15, drove Tookie to the hospital and didn't ask any questions when she came back home three days later without a baby. Those questions he'd save for later.

I was raised south of the river, my little town a 20 minute drive or so from the little town where Tookie was born and raised and where she brought up her two remaining boys. I've always known I was adopted, known it like I know my name, and accepted it as just the way things are. My adoptive mother told me a bit about my birth mother over the years: that both of my mothers were the same age (Tookie was in fact 42 when she had me, two years older than my adoptive mother), that I had brothers, that one of those brothers was known as a stellar guitarist and keyboardist even when he was a kid.

In the summer of 1979, my brother Phillip begged Tookie to allow him to live in Colorado with our cousins until school started again. She reluctantly agreed. He was killed in Colorado in a car accident a few weeks later.

When I turned 18, my adoptive mother handed me my adoption decree, which allowed me to know Tookie's name for the first time. I went looking, but found nothing. Tookie had moved several times over the years--to Kansas City, to Colorado, back to Kansas City, then to Reno--and I couldn't find her.

In 2001, I happened to see Tookie's obituary in the Kansas City paper. I went to her visitation. In my mind's eye, lots of people would be there and I'd blend into the crowd. The reality was a bit different. Maybe a dozen people stood around the front room of the funeral home, and when I walked in the door a little old man scurried up to me saying, "My lands! You must be Gene's daughter. You're the spittin image of him." That's how I discovered my birth father's name. Three more steps across the room and I felt a hand on my shoulder, turned, and came face to face with a small man in an ill-fitting tan sportcoat who looked so much like me we could be twins. We stood there staring at each other. "You're my baby sister," he simply said. "You're my big brother," I replied, and hugged him. The next afternoon he played a Jimi Hendrix song, Little Wing, at our mother's funeral. For weeks after that we were inseparable. Turns out he'd been looking for me since I was born, but didn't know my name because Tookie absolutely refused to tell him anything about my adoption. The years passed and we stayed in touch sporadically. He moved around a lot, always looking for another gig, another band that needed a guitar player, a keyboardist, a bass player, or a backup singer. Rodger struggled most of his adult life with alcohol addiction and so I heard from him most often in his periods of sobriety.

My friend Janice called me Saturday. She'd grown up with Rodger, a fact I didn't learn until very recently when I happened to mention to her that I was adopted. She said, "Oh, honey," and began to cry. Somehow I knew she was calling about Rodger. "Is it my brother?" I asked, and she said yes. Rodger had died on Tuesday at a hospital near Kansas City. I hadn't seen him or talked to him in nearly five years. The person who brought him to the hospital knew that his only kin was a little sister, but couldn't remember my last name. The hospital released Rodger to the funeral home in his hometown and asked the funeral home to notify them of any next-of-kin located. In the way of small towns, it went like this: the funeral home tried to call my brother's best friend Billy who happens to be without phone service because he's in the county jail, and then called a relative of Billy's who told them he didn't know my name but they should call Janice, then called Janice who gave them my name but told them she would inform me of my brother's death herself. I got the official phone call from the hospital ten minutes after I hung up with Janice.

Tuesday afternoon we will bury my brother on the hillside in Southpoint Cemetery near our mother and our brothers Perry and Phillip. I am now the only living child of Tookie.

Craziness

2011-11-24T03:25:00.000-06:00

What a crazy week, and this is only Wednesday. Wait. I mean, this is only Thursday. Thanksgiving Day, or as we in emergency services call it, Thursday. I think we dispatchers might be included in the firehouse Thanksgiving supper, but no one's formally invited us yet. I'm bringing a ham sammich tonight just in case the firefighters forgot about us.

Amy & me somewhere in IL.
Royals cap covers Bad Hair Day.

Anyhow, I had planned on painting the newly-caulked east wall of the house on my last days off, until the weather turned too cold and rainy to make that possible. After that, I had visions of finishing the paper in the alcove of the front parlor. But then my bestest bestie Amy called and said she was going to Tennessee to pick up her step-daughter who was in a bit of a tight spot, and would I like to come with her? So, Saturday morning instead of going home to sleep, I hit the road to Gainesboro with Amy. If you've never done it, I don't recommend driving across three states and into a fourth one on no sleep, even if you are sharing the driving and you're with your dearest friend. We made the return trip to Kansas City the next day. This taught me two things: 1. Amy is one of very few people I would willingly spend that much time in a car with; and 2. I am not cut out to be an over-the-road trucker.

I slept 14 hours on Sunday night into Monday. That's approaching my record of 16 hours of sleep at one stretch, achieved last winter. (Yes, I am somewhat proud of that.) That made me well-rested enough to tackle the front parlor paper again. I tore down the crooked strip in the alcove and replaced it with a straight one, hung the "top" paper (the one that will go above the picture rail) all along one wall and partway across the header in front of the alcove, and made it two-thirds of the way around the alcove walls. That alcove, with its four windows and all that trim, makes for some slow going. Very slow going.

Maybe next week will be better.

Front Parlor Paper

2011-11-16T22:50:00.000-06:00

If I finish papering the front parlor without either losing what's left of my mind or falling through the windows, it will be one of the greatest accomplishments of my life. Raising a child pretty much alone, finishing my B.A., delivering a baby over the phone, and papering the front parlor. Yep. The top four, right there.

After a whole lot of angst which culminated in my taping wallpaper up with Scotch tape, I decided that all of the alcove, baseboard to ceiling, should be papered in the floral paper. There's no picture rail in the alcove (where the stained glass windows are that "bump out" on the front of my house in the profile picture) because it's pretty much all windows.

I can tell from the ghost marks of the picture rail that it wrapped around the corners of the alcove and stopped at the window trim. What I can't tell is if the alcove was originally papered with two wallpapers, or just one. So I agonized. What did Mrs. Kelly do? What would she want me to do now?

The ceiling in the alcove is a few inches lower than the rest of the ceiling in the front parlor and the windows are also lower than the other window in the room. The space between the top of the window trim there and the ceiling, though, is only 3 inches shorter. I couldn't decide what to do. So I taped up wallpapers in the alcove to see what it looked like with one and then with two. One wallpaper, top to bottom, won out. For now. Unless I decide, once I get past that point, that it looks dumb.

But all those windows and fancy trim and windowsills wider than the trim and fluted trim under the windows mean that I have to measure and cut the paper verrrry carefully. What's in this photo took me over an hour to do. That's one strip of paper. So much light comes in those windows that I'd better be extra-careful with the pattern here because any mistake will be really noticeable. And that one strip of paper is crooked, I noticed this afternoon, so it will have to come down. Really crooked, not just a little crooked so that I can fudge it.

I'm at work until Saturday morning, so I have plenty of time to worry over that crooked piece of paper while not having time to actually correct it. Sigh...

I Have Returned!

2011-11-14T19:07:00.000-06:00

It started on Friday. Randy asked me if I was coming to St. Louis to have supper with him and go to a hockey game. "Nah," I said, "The weather's supposed to be really nice and I think I'll stay home and work on my house." Lately when I've made a statement like that two things have followed: a bad swear at the end of that sentence, and a noticeable lack of any actual work getting done. I didn't utter a bad swear, and y'all already know that I spent Saturday on the roof of the house.

Then came Sunday, in which I finished all the scraping on the east side of the house. All of it. After that I went to the flea market in Excelsior Springs to see if the lamp I passed up two weeks ago was still there. It was. I bought it. It's ugly as homemade soap right now, but I have makeover plans for it. (Which I will share here, if it turns out well.)

Front parlor progress

Niiiice.

Along came Sunday night with nothing to do, so I started wallpapering the front parlor. (One lonely little strip of paper has been hanging there since May.) White Trash Bob and I had a discussion last week about which to do first, the paper or the picture rail, and he finally convinced me that it'd be easier to do the paper first. I am stubborn; WTB is persistent when he's right. It was quite a discussion and included much waving about of arms.

Which brings us to today, in which I finished caulking almost all the clapboards on the east side of the house. Annnd, when it got too chilly outside to be spreading caulk around with wet hands I came inside and hung up a few strips of the trellis wallpaper that goes in the space between the ceiling and the (future) picture rail. After supper, I plan to hang up more wallpaper.

So I have not one, but two projects going on at the same time. One outside; one inside. Do y'all realize what this means? It means that really and truly, at least for now, my house-loathing is over. I went to bed last night sore and tired but happier than I've been in weeks because I got something important accomplished on the house. Wait. Make that two important somethings. My house mojo has returned--and better yet, I have returned! I feel more like myself than I have in a long time. Hallelujah!

The Thing Which Scares Me

2011-11-12T21:24:00.000-06:00

I passed up a road-trip to St. Louis this weekend. Supper on The Hill. A hockey game. Hilarity with a long-time friend. Why? So I could work on my house. I think I got my house mojo back, what do y'all think?

So today (after a very long nap, of course) I went right out there, leaned a ladder against the house, dragged a broom, a rake, and a trowel up the ladder with me, and went up on the roof. Bravely, I might add. (Y'all must recall my well-documented fear of heights.) I attacked the giant pile of leaves and sticks that had accumulated up there, scooped about a bushel of pecans out of my gutters, and then...and then...I had to face getting back down the ladder. Yikes.

Eleanor Roosevelt once said, "Do one thing every day which scares you." Yeah, well. With all due respect to Miz Roosevelt, she never had to deal with this schidt. There's a reason why we've never seen photos of ol' Eleanor up on a roof. She did a lot of amazing and inspirational things in her life, but I bet she never walked around on the roof of her house with a phone in her bra trying to psych herself up to climb back down that ladder.

Help arrives.

And when I finally did scoot to the edge of the roof (backwards, at that) and put one foot on a rung of the ladder, it went a little sideways and screeched along the gutter for two or three inches. Or maybe that was me screeching. Anyway, to put it like my bestie Sharon would, "I was a-scared." I scrabbled back up onto the roof. And then it occurred to me: No one knows I'm up here. I broke the South Street Rule. And since nobody knows I'm up here, I better hope someone's available to come over and hold the ladder for me while I climb down it, or it's gonna be an extremely long night. Fortunately, someone was. My beloved son, Dylan, who's home from work recovering from minor surgery to his wrist.

Let's see...climbing up the ladder and then back down...I surely think that counts as two scary things, so I'm good for tomorrow. No need to be a risk-taker tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll just scrape and caulk. Safely. No climbing about on top of the house.

If you follow me on Twitter, then you already saw that pic and read about my other shenanigans. If you don't follow me, I'd sure like it if you did. You can click on "join the conversation" on the Twitter badge to the right, or on the highlighted word "Twitter" in this paragraph. Thanks, y'all.

The Caulky House

2011-11-01T17:24:00.000-05:00

Seriously, after the past couple of days I'm thinking this place is more The Caulky House than The Kelly House...

The before-and-during shot...Curling paint to the right, halfway down; nicely-scraped paint above and below that; and then allllll that caulk. Work pauses until Saturday.

Creepy

2011-10-31T11:53:00.000-05:00

I saved some pics until today to show you, because they're appropriately creepy.

Now that discussion on tearing out the shower stall on the back porch/laundry room has turned serious, there's the question of what to do with the gaping holes that will be in the porch ceiling once the ugly shower is gone. (The walls surrounding the shower stall extend up through the porch ceiling.) I thoroughly detest the 1970s-era acoustic tiles on the ceiling and was hoping that the original beadboard ceiling might be above them. First I carefully removed one of the tiles. And by "carefully removed", of course I mean I smashed the thing with a hammer. Insulation and dirt rained down. No beadboard or other earlier ceiling was visible. Well, crap.

Then I wondered just how much insulation was up there, and if the roofline of the existing porch at all matched the roofline of the original porch, and if the ceiling might be raised so that the transom between the kitchen and the back porch might be used (right now it's painted over and was tacked shut), so I climbed up on a stepladder, pried the transom open, and took these photos:

A fair amount of insulation.

Existing roofline does not match original at all.

Impressive cobwebs.

And the results of this investigation: The ceiling will stay right where it is....but it will be covered over with beadboard.

The Truth Comes Out

2011-10-30T06:39:00.000-05:00

You cannot hide the truth. It always comes out. This I have learned in my nearly 45 years on this planet.

When last I blogged, I told y'all that John said the point of old-house restoration is "to keep moving forward". Remember that? John said, "The point here is to keep moving forward." Moving. Forward.

And then yesterday I found out that he's re-done his bathroom four times in the past five years. Four times. FOUR. In five years.

Ohhhhh yeahhhhh, you know I made fun of him for that.

Look, A Kitty!

2011-10-25T13:32:00.000-05:00

My friend John has known me for 30 years. In the past three decades, he's gotten used to hearing me go on and on about my crazy ideas and big plans for this or that. He lets me prattle on for a little while, and then, invariably, he laughs, points, and says, "Look, a kitty!" It's his way of reminding me that I am...shall we say...easily distracted.

The most recent instance of John's saying, "Look, a kitty!" came Sunday night, when I first told him I was going to paint the kitchen turquoise and then explained (again) my plan to remodel the two bathrooms, beginning with tearing out that shower stall. "Look," he said gently, "the idea here is to keep moving forward. The kitchen's done. Why would you repaint it?" Oh. Well, that makes sense. And then he asked, "When did you finish fixing that peeling paint you were talking about?" Ouch. Um. Well, I haven't finished it.

But I did start it. Yesterday. I went out to the east side of the house and discovered that it looks even worse than I thought it did, so I commenced to scraping yesterday afternoon. I got almost all the loose paint scraped off, and then I went out to the new hardware store in town and bought several tubes of painter's caulk, and then I came back home and commenced to caulking. I finished the full length (about 20 feet) of three clapboards before I began having doubts that I was doing it right and called White Trash Bob for affirmation. (It was WTB who suggested this method of fixing the peeling: scrape all the loose paint off, wet your hands, dispense a big blob of painter's caulk into one palm, and smear over the clapboards, sealing in the edges where paint meets wood. He did this with great success on an old house he used to own, so I have high hopes for my own house.) WTB declared that I was indeed doing it correctly and that I should have no trouble finishing before winter if the weather holds and if I work hard on my days off.

And then we decided that since yesterday was one of those rare late-autumn days of unseasonably warm weather and clear skies, that what we really ought to do was to get on WTB's motorcycle and go for a ride to enjoy the weather and the changing leaves on the trees. We got back just before dark. Thereby proving that a Triumph motorcycle can also be a kitty.

I Have An Idea

2011-10-21T10:17:00.000-05:00

I have an idea. Another one, besides painting the kitchen turquoise. Now mind you, I've been sick since Sunday morning so I've had a lot of free time to think, in between sleeping, and barfing while Mean Little Marie stands on my back (she has well-earned her name), and going to the doctor, and sleeping some more.

Y'all probably remember me griping and complaining about how much it bugs me that the back door's been moved and doesn't match up with the back walkway. The reason the back door was moved is that Charline (the suckiest of the Sucky Previous Owners, the one who shingled the damn house) had a shower stall put in on the back porch, right in front of the door, which necessitated moving the door. The stupidity of this continues to thoroughly amaze me.

Anyhow, Mare and I came up with this grandiose plan a little over two years ago to remodel the bathrooms: we'd tear out the shower stall, move the back door to its (sort of) original location, put in a window where the door is now, knock out the wall between the two bathrooms, tear out all the fixtures in those two bathrooms, repair the water-damaged subfloor, lay a hex tile floor, put up beadboard, paint or paper the walls, and then install all new fixtures and a clawfoot tub. Whew. This is typical of Mare and me, to come up with a plan that far outstrips both our time and our resources.

Now here's my new idea: Divide and conquer. Tear out the shower stall, move the back door, and put in a window. Leave the rest for later. Of course, it's not really that simple. Tearing out the shower stall will still be a pain in the hiney. So will moving that door and putting in a window. A lesser pain in the hiney, though, than trying to do everything all at once. Now I just have to track down Mare, who's been MIA for several months and see what he thinks of this idea.

Oh, and I'm still hanging onto that other idea of painting the kitchen turquoise. I just got sidetracked this week by illness. I'll find more pictures of the kitchen, both past and present, so you can get a better idea of what and where I'm planning to paint.

That Advice Thing, Again

2011-10-19T23:24:00.000-05:00

This post isn't really my typical blog post. It's a public service announcement. So, listen up.

If you have a best friend who is a paramedic, very intelligent, highly respected, and who looks out for you like you're his favorite sister, and that guy tells you, "The department's giving free flu shots; you oughta get one", the proper response to that is a resounding, "Okay, I'll run right over there!"

Not, "Meh...I'm not in one of the high-risk groups so I think I'll skip it."

Because if you do not take that good advice to get a flu shot, and then you end up with the flu, and you call your brother-from-another-mother Kenny to whine about how awful you feel, you will not get any sympathy from him.

You will get, "I told you so, Calamity! I told you so!!" (Yes, the man calls me Calamity. And it's stuck, so now other people call me this, too. Sigh.)

Get a flu shot. Especially if you're in one of the high-risk groups: the elderly, people with compromised immune systems, health care workers, pregnant women, people with asthma or other respiratory diseases, and at-home caregivers of children younger than 6 months old. But even if you're not in one of those groups, get a flu shot. (Unless, of course, you have a severe allergy to eggs, have ever had Guillain-Barre Syndrome, or have had a bad reaction to a flu shot in the past.)

Or you could end up like me. In the words of Catherine Aird, "If you can't be a good example, you'll have to serve as a horrible warning."

Playin' the Blues

2011-10-18T02:30:00.000-05:00

It's 2 a.m. I couldn't sleep very well Sunday night (I have a cold or something--sore throat, stuffy nose, headache, etc.) and so I laid down for a short nap Monday after lunch. I woke up at 7:30 p.m. So much for going to the new hardware store in town to get paint samples. Sigh. So here I am, at 2 a.m. Tuesday morning, hoping that I go to sleep soon and that I don't sleep through my alarm. Again.

I've been playing with Virtual Painter on the Valspar website.

Deep Turquoise

Glass Green

LaFonda Teal

Ocean Soul

Positano Blue

Sea Wave

Tidal Teal

I've narrowed it down to these. So far. Until later today when I come home with 57 paint chips. (Past experience speaking here.) Then I'll tape those up all over the walls, force myself to narrow it down to my ~~three~~ ~~four~~ five favorites and buy samples of those, which I'll paint onto posterboard, tape onto the walls, and live with for a ~~month~~ week until I decide which color to use. Which one do y'all like best? I have a favorite already, but I don't want to say in case it might keep someone from saying it's a godawful color.

(By the way, it's not that I have any overwhelming allegiance to Valspar--although I do like it--it's that Valspar is available locally and I'm trying to support local business.)

House of Blues

2011-10-15T04:59:00.000-05:00

Yesterday afternoon when I was looking for something in the cargo space of the Toaster (what the guys at work dubbed my Kia Soul) I pushed a bag aside and the contents spilled out: red envelopes, scrapbook paper in different shades of turquoise blue, pink ribbon, white cardstock. Supplies for my save-the-date cards. They were gonna be so cute, y'all. Sooo cute.

Let's all pause just a moment for a prayer, shall we? Thank you, Jesus, for giving me a brain so that I could figure out that marrying a man who hates old houses, calls me by his ex-wife's name, and goes through a one-liter bottle of Ten High Bourbon in three days would have been a terrible, terrible mistake from which I might never have recovered. Amen.

Anyhow, as I was cramming all that stuff back into the bag I was thinking about how much I like that color combination. Pale turquoise and a clear red is such a lively, pretty combination. It's a shame I don't have anywhere in the house I could use that.....or do I? What if I repainted the yellow kitchen? Would it look good with the red-and-white chicken wallpaper? Turquoise might not look good with the green table and chairs, but I've been wanting to repaint them anyway. I bought them online and the description said "distressed"--in reality, it looks like a wolverine clawed the table legs and the chair backs. I painted the kitchen yellow back when the outside of the house was still covered with yucky brown shingles and I was dying for some color. Now that the outside of the house is yellow, this is a bit too much yellow for me.

What do y'all think? Pale turquoise? Robin's egg? Stupid idea?

The Other Side of Craptastic

2011-10-14T04:02:00.000-05:00

The craptastic door from the other side. With baby gate in place.

Go ahead and laugh, y'all. It's funny as all get out. But hey, it works. And best of all, this little bit of redneck ingenuity was free because I already owned both the door and the baby gate.

Craptastic

2011-10-13T04:06:00.002-05:00

The craptastic kitchen door is back. I have admitted utter defeat. But strangely, I feel better now that it's back. Allow me to explain. (This is a somewhat long explanation, so if you want you can skip to the funny story in the next-to-last paragraph. I won't be offended.)

Note the year on the calendar.
Hey, the days are the same, so it works.

About a year and a half ago, I decided the door between the kitchen and the laundry room/enclosed back porch was just too ugly and awkward to tolerate any longer. It's a wider-than-average door (the doorway is the original back entrance to the house; the door is decidedly not original to the house) and it opened against the fridge, so when the door was open, and you opened the fridge door, it bumped against it. The open door also blocked the trash can and recycling bin, which because of the layout of the kitchen can't be put anywhere else. So, in a snit, I took the door off and shoved both halves of it down the basement steps. I intended to buy a folding door, which would've looked nicer and not stuck out into the kitchen awkwardly. But guess what? They don't make single folding doors that wide, nor do they make double folding doors that narrow. Grrr. The chirpy woman at the big-box store told me I could special-order a folding door the size I needed, but I have better things to spend my money on.

However....not having the door there at all proved way more problematic than having an ugly door there.

First, winter came. The laundry room has no HVAC and no insulation in its walls (not that the rest of this house has insulation in the walls, either) so it gets mighty chilly back there. All that Arctic air wafts into my bedroom, which is conveniently located just off the kitchen and laundry room. Last winter I hung a big fleece blanket in the doorway to block the air. You won't see that crafty idea on HGTV, I tell you.

Second, the laundry room is bright and sunny. This is a nice feature if you're a ~~daywalker~~ person who sleeps at night. It's irritating if you're trying to sleep in the daytime and, even if you close the bedroom door, sunlight streams in through the kitchen doorway and through the transom above the bedroom door and right into your eyes.

Third, the animals can't be shut in my room while I'm trying to sleep because they have to potty, or they bicker, or they need a drink or a snack. (Like little kids, really.) Simply shutting them out doesn't work either because Louis Cat sticks his paws under the door and rattles the door in the frame or Libbi (my dog) scratches on the door because she's lonely. They also have access to the kitchen that way, which means little kitty pawprints on the kitchen countertops (eww!), Louis popping open the cabinet doors to go spelunking in there, and Mean Little Marie turning on the kitchen faucet.

So the craptastic door is back. In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, I braved the basement (and found a dead, petrified mouse on the dirt floor down there), retrieved the two halves of the Dutch door, and re-hung it. I hadn't bothered to take the hinges off the door when I removed it, so re-hanging the door took about 10 minutes. And I put this off for 18 months. I amaze myself...and not in a good way.

Roughly five minutes after I hung the door, herded the animals to the laundry room, shut the door, and latched the flap on the pet door, Marie tore the flap off the pet door, breaking both the plastic hinges and the plastic latch in the process. I attempted to re-create the hinges and the latch with Hello Kitty Duck Tape, but Marie tore the flap off again and then became even more enraged when the tape stuck to her paws and fur. (If you ever have to pull Duck Tape off an angry cat, I recommend donning heavy gloves and using a big piece of cardboard as a shield. Less blood loss that way.) Now there is a baby gate in front of the door, which is closed. It doesn't look stupid at all.

And then, something wonderful happened. I went to bed and got 6 hours of uninterrupted sleep. No cats stepping on me, no dog burrowing under the covers, no Gracie licking my hair. And when I woke up, the kitchen was just as I left it. No water running (Marie can turn the water on, but not off), no cabinet doors open, no cardboard dragged out of the recycling bin and chewed up. Wonderful. I expect more wonderful things when I get home this morning and any mess or chaos that occurred overnight is confined to the laundry room, which is now a giant kennel.

Craptastic door, I think I love you.

Doin' Up The House For Halloween

2011-10-12T04:33:00.000-05:00

Perspective, Or Not

2011-10-11T22:30:00.000-05:00

In the ongoing saga of renovation burnout...

I went out this weekend with some friends, and we ran into some other friends, who of course asked me what I was working on at the house. My answer? A roll of the eyes and a loud "GAH!"

To which our friend Steve replied, "Uh-oh", and then sat me down for a heart-to-heart. He told me mostly what I've already heard: that I should ride out the lack of motivation because it will return someday, that I should do what has to be done before winter and wait on the rest, that everyone with an old house goes through this at some point, and that if I have something small and not too expensive I should hire it out to improve my mental state.

Then The Magnificent Greg chimed in and pointed out something that should have been obvious to me: When I was working on the house down the street with my then-boyfriend Mare, we had help. Lots of it. We knew three or four other couples who were also renovating/restoring old houses and we took turns helping out each other. (All of those couples but one have since split up, by the way, which probably ought to tell me something....) Working on an old house mostly alone is wholly different from working on an old house with the help of 6 or 8 good friends. For some reason, that didn't occur to me before now.

And then a woman who lives down the street (who is half of the only couple to have stayed together) said, "Taking those shingles off the house is the best thing you could have done for it. Every time I go by there I just say, WOW." That prompted an friend from high school who I haven't seen in years to ask me about that, and I told him the story of tearing off the outside of my house, whereupon he let out a low whistle and said, "Holy shit."

So I went home that night feeling a whole lot better about the house and my mental health in general.

That, in turn, prompted me to get off my hiney yesterday and decorate the porch and the parlor windows for Halloween. Picking a project that will pay off in terms of appearance, as Karen Anne said. (Photos next time because I can't find my USB cable.) After that, I took Milah's good advice about a fall cleaning doing wonders, and I scrubbed my floors and cleaned up the house. All of which brightened my spirits considerably.

And then, as I sat in my nice clean second parlor, the phone rang. It was my favorite local realtor, the guy I would entrust to sell the Kelly House if it ever comes to that, and he said, "I heard through the grapevine that you like a little house on Highland." I heaved a big sigh and said, "Oh yes, I really, really do." He told me that he's sold it a couple of times, knows a lot about it, and would love to show it to me. I resisted the temptation. For now. Oh, how fickle is my supposed love for my house at this moment....

Crush

2011-10-07T00:35:00.000-05:00

I'm seriously crushing on that house over on Highland. Seriously.

I first developed this crush when I spent about five hours inside that house during last year's Old Homes Tour. I liked the house already, but an afternoon spent with folks ooh-ing and ahh-ing over it while you walk 'em through it can make a girl's heart flip right over. And then there was the Laurel-and-Hardy moment just after the tour ended, when all us girls (including the house's owner) kicked off our shoes, leaned back in chairs on the sun porch, and prepared to post-mortem Tour Day until someone said, "Uhhhh....someone's at the door," and the homeowner said something like, "Oh crap, it's the realtor and she wants to show the house," and we rushed around putting away a couple of snack trays, stowing dirty plates in the dishwasher, tucking tour signs into drawers, and then all us volunteers ran out the back door and hid, giggling, until the realtor and the looky-loos got inside, whereupon we dashed out to our cars and made a getaway. That was fun. (Also, I want y'all to know that I went to high school with the realtor and I am biting my tongue because I really, really want to say something snarky. Suffice it to say, I was in the geeky crowd--hard to imagine, I know--and she was a Popular Girl. Admire my restraint, y'all.)

Anyhow, because I was thinking about the Old Homes Tour, I googled it and found a non-blurry photo of the house and a nice little description of it. Ain't it cute?

Good Advice

2011-10-06T03:14:00.001-05:00

"I often give myself very good advice, but I very seldom follow it."

--Alice In Wonderland

I'm a lot like Alice. I can think a problem through, sit myself down, and give myself very good advice. And then I go and do whatever I want to do anyway, which very often is the polar opposite of the good advice I'd just given myself. That's why talking things over with friends is important. Y'all think of things I wouldn't, remind me of things I've forgotten, give me great ideas, and put things in perspective.

After I read the comments to my last post, three things stood out:

Karen Anne's advice to take a wait-and-see approach. "Either the price will come down further or the house will be sold, solving your problem."

Sandra's very wise reminder. "All of us enslaved to an older house covet ones that are perfectly finished."

Dave's good advice. "Accept the burnout and go with it when it happens."

I thought about all of that on my days off, mostly while sitting on my front porch with a cold beer in my hand, and I made a decision that's a conglomeration of those three pieces of advice: I'm going to finish what has to be done before winter (namely, the peeling paint on the east side of the house) and then I'm going to sit back and wait until my restoration burnout dissipates, because everybody who has an old house feels this way sometimes and it will probably pass--but if it doesn't go away in a year, then I'm going to buy that house on Highland. A year. I'm giving myself a year.

I also took Dynochick's advice about putting hot towels on the floor to dissolve the glue, but that didn't work. Joey (the floor guy) thinks that's because the glue on my floors is newer and not water-soluble. Speaking of Joey, when things slow down a little for him this winter, he's going to come over and give me a real estimate for refinishing my floors. A real estimate, not the "somewhere between $2,500 and $5,000, prolly" that he gave me a couple of years ago.

Then I sat down with a calculator and started working on a Real Budget for the bathroom renovation. A real one, not the seat-of-my-pants estimating that I usually do. I want to come up with a total cost for materials, add a healthy 15% to 20% to that to hedge against unseen problems (because you know there will be some), get a plumber in here to bid the work I don't know how to do or don't want to mess with, add in Joey's estimate for the floors in the rest of the house, and then get a loan to cover all that and be done with it. The two things I detest most about my house right now are the horrid floors and the horrid bathrooms. Horrid, I tell you. If the floors and the bathrooms were done, I might forget all about the Highland House...but if I don't, having that stuff done will help out my resale value. I'm against loans on principle (haha, principle) but in this case, with my mental health at stake, I'll make an exception.

And speaking of mental health...remember The Devil Queen? If you're not familiar with this blog, you really ought to read it. John says in the header that it's a cautionary tale, and it truly is. My house is not nearly "the ruin" (John's word) that the Queen was before John and his wife started their restoration, but this is a case of Restoration Burnout becoming terminal. Reading The Devil Queen again makes me feel both better and worse.

A plan. A year. Or so. Mark your calendars, y'all, because come Fall-ish ~~2013~~ 2012, we'll revisit this issue.

Late Edit: Thanks to Kate H. for pointing out my incorrect timeline. I shouldn't try to write intelligently just before bedtime. :)

Movie Night

2011-10-05T04:24:00.000-05:00

I still haven't found my missing house mojo. But in the meantime, I found something on YouTube. Something wonderful. "Videos For Cats", and that's exactly what they are--videos for kitties to watch.

So little Gracie and Louis had a movie date.

Isn't that cute??

I Lied...A Little

2011-10-02T04:44:00.000-05:00

I have a confession to make, y'all. I lied. Just a little. It was more a lie of omission, as the priest would say, than an intentional lie. So if you're grading on the curve, I thought I'd throw that in there.

Anyhow, my long absence from this blog has not been entirely because I was mourning the loss of the clawfoot tub. It's because I have a serious case of Renovation Burnout. I mean, a serious case. Like, almost terminal. I have not done a damn thing on my house other than to maintain the usual state of untidiness and clutter since...oh, my...since August 2nd. Oops. I told my daughter-in-law that I'd taken a thirty-day break from the house. Hey, Sarah, make that a sixty-day break. Yowza.

Just how bad is this Renovation Burnout? Bad enough that I seriously contemplated chucking it all in and buying another house. Yeah...that bad. Not just any house, though. An 1845 Greek Revival that's six blocks from my house in another one of the four National Register Historic Districts in my town. It's a terrific little house. You can see for yourselves here. (The photos don't do it justice.) The two upstairs bedrooms are tucked under the slope of the roof and are cute as can be. The kitchen's really pretty, the hardwood floors are gorgeous (I wonder if Joey refinished them??), the rooms are all painted these warm Pottery Barn colors, and the downstairs bathroom even has a clawfoot tub. The best part is: the house is done. Done. Finished. Routine maintenance only. No painting to be done, no wallpaper to be hung, no glue-crusted floors to be refinished, no yucky 1970s bathrooms, no picture rail to hang, no light switches that don't work, and as far as I know no scary trap-door basement. (I have to end this list here, before I cry.) Tempting. And did you see the price?! Holy Buyer's Market, Batman!!

So then, I appealed to my friend John (a house appraiser and old-house-freak like myself) before I ran off foaming at the mouth to the realtor's office.
Me: "Talk me out of this, John. You know, like you did before."
John: "Location, location, location. You've got location where you are. There's a reason this house is down to where it is."
Me: "But I love her."
John: "Just say no!....To debt."
Me: "But I love her."
John: "Your house has one of the best locations you can probably get in Lexington."
Me: "But...but..."
John: "Sorry to piss in your Post Toasties, but you asked me to."
Me: "I know...but still, with all that said, this house makes me swoon. It's like being in love with someone I know is bad for me. I mean, I think it's like that. I certainly have no experience with that. Nope. Not me."

So I didn't go running off like a rabid chicken to the realtor's office. (Do chickens get rabies?? Christine??) And that's only partly because by the time I woke up Saturday afternoon the realtor's office was already closed. Today I'm safe, because it's Sunday.

Dear Readers, I appeal to you: One of you, please buy that house. ~~Or make me an offer on mine.~~ I beg of you, buy that house. It's the only way to end this craziness and house-loathing.

Tub Story 2, A Tale of Procrastination & Woe

2011-10-01T01:20:00.000-05:00

I apologize for my long absence, but I have been mourning the apparent loss of my free clawfoot tub.

I say "apparent" because although it's lost, no one seems to know exactly what happened to it. See, a long, long time ago--like at the beginning of baseball season, when it looked like the Red Sox might make the playoffs instead of falling completely apart in an astounding night of baseball that left me whomper-jawed and kicking things--what was I saying?? Oh, yeah. A long time ago, like back in April, there were two clawfoot tubs in the parking lot of what would later become the awesome new hardware store. They were both painted green. Mine, in case you wondered, was the slightly smaller one on the right which was a slightly lighter shade of green and had had its feet removed. Shortly after the hardware store opened, both the tubs disappeared.

Two weeks or so ago, I asked The Magnificent Greg (aka The Tub Giver) to check on the whereabouts of my tub. He came back with a mumbly answer that was something like, "I dunno where it is," which might have been the truth or might have been TMG's way of sloughing me off. So then my daughter-in-law and I drove around behind the hardware store to see if someone might have dragged the tub back there for safekeeping. My heart leapt when we found a little tub on a pallet, missing its feet, which was in the process of having its paint removed. "That's it!" I squealed. Sarah said, "Mom, what paint's left on the tub is white, not green. I don't think that's the same tub." I may have wept a little, but I bravely took her out for shrimp nachos and beer, which made me feel a teeny bit better.

But I am still sad. A free tub, lost. Lost through my own procrastination and stubborn refusal to ask for help in hauling it from the parking lot to my house way back in April. Procrastination....stubborn independence.....Hmmm, that's a familiar theme here. And I know last time I talked about the tub, I said if I'd lost it I would need one of y'all to come kick my hiney. Well, that's not necessary. I've already kicked myself plenty over this thing. I lost a free tub. Free. So now, the budget for the bathroom remodel has increased again by about $1200, conservatively. Rats. Which means it will be put off again, until probably Spring of 2013. Rats, RATS.

And now, I think I'm done kicking myself over it. At least temporarily. Competitive Freezing Season (also known as Winter) will be on us before we know it, and I have stuff to do. Lots of stuff to do. I need to scrape the peeling paint off the east side of the house, caulk over it like White Trash Bob taught me last fall, and then paint it. I need to make sure all the storm windows are secure, check the caulking around the window frames, put some Seal-N-Peel around the inside frames of the windows, put plastic film (ugly but effective) over the leakiest windows, and generally get the house tucked in for winter. After that, I can make a list of the winter/indoor projects....some of which are still hanging around since last winter. Or even the winter before. It's that procrastination thing, ya know?

Never Forget

2011-09-11T10:18:00.000-05:00

Ten years ago today, I was sleeping in because I'd worked late the night before. My cell phone rang and it was my boyfriend at the time, Nate, who was a sheriff's deputy. "Turn on the tv," he said abruptly, then, "I'm going to Higginsville PD to watch television." He hung up. My first reaction was irritation that he woke me up, and then puzzlement that he was watching television while he was on duty. I turned on the television in time to see the second plane hit the World Trade Center.

The most poignant memory I have of the news coverage of that day is seeing some footage of the rubble of the World Trade Center and hearing the eerie whistles of the PASS devices belonging to firefighters trapped in all that concrete and steel. I remember grabbing the hand of my partner at work (although, oddly, I cannot recall who I was working with) and we stood there crying as we watched that. Three hundred forty-three. Even people not in the fire service know what that number represents.

Today I pause to remember those firefighters lost, along with the police officers and civilians who also lost their lives on that awful day. But now, ten years later, I also pause to think about the people who survived. People like Matt Komorowski, an FDNY firefighter who was trapped in a stairwell at World Trade Center along with five other members of his Ladder Company and a woman they were helping to evacuate. That's Komorowski's helmet in the photo. He keeps it in a glass case in his living room, still covered with the dust from that day. That helmet is a symbol to me of survival. September 11, 2001 represents a a terrible loss of life, but it is also the most successful rescue operation that FDNY has ever conducted. Today I mourn those lost, but I also celebrate those who survived.

Photo copyright National Geographic.

That photo, and others that are part of a collection of survivors' stories,

can be seen by clicking on the highlighted text.

Tub Story

2011-09-10T01:40:00.000-05:00

Someone asked in comments last week how my clawfoot tub ended up in the hardware store parking lot, and it was then I realized that I never told y'all about my clawfoot tub in the first place.

The Magnificent Greg, the bestest of my best friends, gifted me a clawfoot tub last spring. (Incidentally, this gift is not why Greg's the bestest of my best friends--he's held that status for at least a couple of years before the bathtub.) Greg lives in a pre-Civil War commercial building in downtown Lexington. The first floor is retail space, and the upstairs is a very cool-looking apartment. This building, during the Civil War, was the headquarters of Confederate General Sterling Price, which I believe adds something to Greg's general aura of awesomeness. Anyway, Greg decided to remodel said apartment and get rid of his little clawfoot tub. So, being the bestest of my best friends, he immediately called me and asked if I wanted it. For free. After I came to after passing out at the thought of such a generous gift, I said yes. (Of course I said yes--who wouldn't?!) I didn't have room for the bathtub at my house last spring, and the ginormous bathroom remodel is still a year or so away, so the people who remodeled Greg's apartment agreed to keep the tub for me. They were in the process of their own giant remodeling project--turning a former car dealership into a hardware store--so they set the tub on a wooden pallet in the parking lot of the store.

And there it's been for months and months. I go by and visit it every couple of weeks and tell it that I'm taking it home soon, very soon, just as soon as I can find enough people to haul the thing to my house. Yesterday before I left for work I thought I'd go by and take a photo of the bathtub to show you how lovely it is. It's a 4-foot-long vintage cast iron tub with big claw feet and right now it's painted a sort of juniper green on the outside.

And....the tub is gone. Nowhere to be found. I'm hoping they've just moved it to inside storage. I'm hoping they didn't think I abandoned the tub. I'm hoping it's not now in someone else's house, or listed on eBay, or--horrors!--in someone's yard filled with dirt and mums. That's what I'm hoping. Because if it turns out that I've lost my free clawfoot tub due to carelessness and neglect, then I will need one of you to kick me right in the hiney.

Be Still My Heart

2011-09-02T01:29:00.000-05:00

I can't stop thinking about it. And every time I think about it, I smile. My heart skips a couple beats. I'm insanely happy.

Lexington has a new hardware store.

(What did you think I meant???)

Yep, a brand-spankin-new hardware store in the big building where the Chevy dealership used to be, so I'm doubly happy. We now have a decent place to buy tools and sandpaper and plumbing supplies and electrical stuff, and now folks see a nice locally-owned business instead of a vacant building when they come to town from the south. And to top it all off, they sell Valspar paint, which saves me a 45-minute trip to the closest big-box store and lets me support small business. (Although I will kinda miss the hot guy in plumbing at the Lowe's in Warrensburg.) I'll need Valspar paint when I finally decide to tackle the peeling paint on the east side of my house. That's a September/October project.

Now if I could just find someone to help me get my cast-iron clawfoot tub out of the hardware store parking lot, I'd be really, really happy...

Channeling Scarlett

2011-08-30T07:07:00.000-05:00

Not to sound all Scarlett O'Hara or anything, but...As God is my witness, I will finish painting the trim in the second parlor soon, if only because my blog's starting to sound like this:

Wish me luck.

Porching

2011-08-22T22:57:00.000-05:00

My friend Jill and I agreed some weeks back that more nouns ought to be made into verbs. There's actually a linguistic term for this: verbing. Apparently verbing is a growing trend and Jill and I did not, in fact, think of it ourselves. Therefore, because we are nothing if not trendy girls (snicker), we've decided that "porch-sitting" shall now and forevermore be known instead as "porching".

Y'all know my fondness for porching. I porch nearly year-round, except when freezing cold keeps me from it. My favorite porching season--indeed, my favorite season, period--is summer. As far as I'm concerned, baseball, porching, and peaches are the Holy Trinity of summer. Late afternoon porching with my ever-dapper and gracious neighbor Carl is the best. (And not just because he provides rum & Cokes.) A close second, though, is middle-of-the-night porching. That's when the furbabies and I sit amiably together on the porch with almost no noise but the crickets and the frogs. It's lovely. Still, practical considerations have to be made, and one of those is the need for at least a little light. Sometimes I turn on the ceiling fixture in the brown parlor so that the light spills out onto the front porch, but I really prefer candlelight. Candlelight requires matches, of course, and I'm forever misplacing the matches, or leaving them on the porch so that they get rained on or the box gets floppy from the Missouri humidity.

Then I spied this great little idea on Pinterest.

A Mason jar with matches in it. Brilliant. It keeps the matches dry and looks cute to boot. The original idea used a Mason jar with the ring, and the flat lid had sandpaper glued onto it. I tried that but the only sandpaper I had was 80-grit, which pretty much tore the head off the match as I tried to strike it. So, I got one of my other jars with the zinc lid, cut the strike strip off the side of the matchbox, and fitted it inside the lid. Wabam! A weatherproof and cute container for porch matches. And since I mentioned Pinterest, I must tell you that if you haven't already discovered this website, you really ought to go there. It's a ginormous pinboard (thousands of pinboards, actually) of craft ideas, home decor, fashion, recipes, photos....almost anything you can think of that you like, you'll find on Pinterest. I will not be held responsible if you become hopelessly addicted to this website. If you can tear yourself away from Pinterest, and you have an Android phone, then you really ought to download the photo app Vignette for it. The demo version (which is free) has so many filters and effects that you may never upgrade to the full version. (The photo in this post was processed through Vignette,) Now make no mistake, I doubt seriously that anyone will become the next Annie Liebowitz with just a camera phone and Vignette, but it sure does make taking photos with your phone a lot more fun.

Progress

2011-08-18T01:14:00.000-05:00

Yes, I did manage to accomplish something before coming back to work this week. Progress has been made.

Tuesday afternoon, as I walked through the back porch/laundry room with a hammer in my hand, I reached out with the claw of the hammer, snagged a shingle on the wall that surrounds the shower and tore that sucker right off the wall. It fell onto the floor. It's still there. I care not.

I know what you're thinking: Yes, a Sucky Previous Owner really did shingle two interior walls with the same fugly cedar shingles they covered the outside of the house with.

And also: Yes, the shower stall juts out into the back porch/laundry room in a way that's extraordinarily awkward and ugly. This is one of the big reasons I want to destroy the shower and remodel the bathrooms. That, and the fact that the back door doesn't line up with the walkway through the backyard anymore because the SPOs moved the back door when they installed the shingled shower.

And finally: No, I'm not starting the bathroom remodel yet. I just tore a shingle off the wall so I'd be able to say I got something done on the house this week. To paraphrase Dr. Seuss, progress is progress, no matter how small.

Craziness

2011-08-13T05:11:00.000-05:00

This past week has been crazy. Downright insane. Crazy weather, crazy man at the gas station telling me I've brought the Gates of Hell upon myself, crazy work schedule, crazy flea medicine that caused Libbi to actually have more fleas than she did before I used it, crazy yard light at the neighbors flashing off and on constantly for five days now...craziness.

And because of all that, I've gotten nothing done on the house since the last time I posted. As my friend Sharon would say, "GAH!" My greatest accomplishment in the past eleven days has been to maintain the house's usual level of dust and cat hair without it getting any worse.

Tonight I work a very odd 5-hour shift in the wee hours, then a nap, then a road trip during which I might possibly allow myself to feel the teensiest bit of self-pity because the 13th was supposed to be my wedding day. Back by suppertime Monday night for burgers, beers and shenanigans at Westport Flea Market with the inimitable Dougar.

And maybe, just maybe, something will be accomplished on the house before I go back to work on Tuesday night....

So Far, So Good

2011-08-02T23:10:00.000-05:00

With slightly over an hour left until it's officially Wednesday, things are lookin pretty good on the ol' to-do list.

~~Haul all the Christmas decorations & assorted junk out of the closet in the second parlor.~~
~~Tear up the carpet in said closet. (I forgot it had carpet until I started painting the trim.)~~
~~Remember to wear decent shoes (i.e., not flip flops) whilst tearing up said carpet.~~
~~Take up tack strip in closet and around ginormous return vent in floor.~~
~~Put all the stuff back in the closet in some semblance of order.~~
~~Donate junk as necessary.~~ I actually got rid of the treadmill that neither Mrs. WTB nor I want. WTB was going to throw it away last fall until I protested and WTB rolled it across the street to my front porch. I intended to use it, but the dang thing makes my knees hurt. Mrs. WTB has a new one and didn't want this one back, so it's been taking up space in my parlor ever since. The treadmill will find a new home at my friend Lisa's house come Sunday.
Call WTB and ask him to take decent pics of hardware marks. You'd think I might've remembered this, what with the whole treadmill issue. But no.
~~Remove transom hardware from parlor/bedroom door.~~
~~Strip paint from hardware. Say bad swears as necessary.~~
Paint door trim. I'll probably do this sometime tonight.
Replace transom hardware. See above.
~~Throw away dead plants on front porch and admit utter failure there.~~ Those things were crispy-fried. Next spring, I'm turning those urns into the self-watering kind. For reals. Then I can water every 3 days instead of 3 times a day.
~~Paint other trim in parlor. (Some, probably not all.)~~
~~Take other bottom door off closet.~~
~~Strip door hinges.~~
Paint closet door.
Re-hang closet door.
~~Remember that Tuesday is Taco Night.~~ I remembered at 9:35 p.m. They stop serving tacos at 8:00 p.m. Rats.
Remember that Tuesday is Taco Night in time to actually buy & consume tacos. Fail. But since my friend Ron so kindly pointed out that I weigh more than Micky Ward (at least at his fightin' weight) maybe I really don't need those tacos anyway.

Keeps Me Honest

2011-07-31T17:54:00.001-05:00

It's not enough for me to just make a list. To be truly motivated, I have to make a list and post it here. Keeps me honest.

So this is my list for the next three days:

Haul all the Christmas decorations & assorted junk out of the closet in the second parlor.
Tear up the carpet in said closet. (I forgot it had carpet until I started painting the trim.)
Remember to wear decent shoes (i.e., not flip flops) whilst tearing up said carpet.
Take up tack strip in closet and around ginormous return vent in floor.
Put all the stuff back in the closet in some semblance of order.
Donate junk as necessary.
Call WTB and ask him to take decent pics of hardware marks.
Remove transom hardware from parlor/bedroom door.
Strip paint from hardware. Say bad swears as necessary.
Paint door trim.
Replace transom hardware.
Throw away dead plants on front porch and admit utter failure there.
Paint other trim in parlor. (Some, probably not all.)
Take other bottom door off closet.
Strip door hinges.
Paint closet door.
Re-hang closet door.
Remember that Tuesday is Taco Night.
Remember that Tuesday is Taco Night in time to actually buy & consume tacos.

There. I think that's ambitious but reasonable. Maybe.

Where in the World is WTB?!

2011-07-31T02:37:00.001-05:00

Y'all may have noticed the conspicuous absence of White Trash Bob from my blog this summer. He's still alive and well and living across the street from me in the house he's dubbed The Coal Miner's Despair. I haven't seen much of him lately because he is, as Mrs. WTB calls him, my "project husband" and I haven't had any big WTB-type projects this summer. He's also a claims adjuster for a major insurance company and with the tornadoes and floods in the Midwest this summer, he's been really busy. I'm hoping to recruit him this fall or winter to help me hang picture rail in the front parlor. (More about that picture rail and the front parlor in a post coming soon.)

Anyway, I was thinking of him yesterday because he has a really good camera and I do not. DaveS asked me to post another photo of the ghost marks/hardware scars on the trim around the closet doors in my second parlor.

That's the best photo I could get with my little digital camera. If you bigify it I think you can see the horizontal lines and the patched nail or screw holes in the four corners. Also, now that I look at this photo, those gouges seem to form a circle... Any ideas as to what kind of hardware was on here originally?

The Devil's in the Details

2011-07-29T01:32:00.000-05:00

When I took the craptastic hardware off the closet door in the second parlor, I expected to find ghost marks from the original hardware. I did not. That caused me to stand there for a minute or so frowning and saying, "Huh."

I am absolutely, positively certain that this is not the original hardware:

Craptastic.

It's ugly and flimsy, and nothing original to this house is ugly and flimsy. I threw it in the trash right after that photo was taken. I don't feel bad about it. I couldn't even give away a whole mess of it for free on Craigslist when Mare and I re-did the kitchen. (This junk matches the junk that used to be on the kitchen cabinets.)

What I'm wondering is, what was on there originally? If I had ghost marks from the original hardware, I'd try to buy hardware the same size and style. I'd like to put these awesome latches on there, but since I need four of them, $74.95 a pop is a bit pricey. These latches are almost as awesome, in my price range, and the turn button almost exactly matches the knob on my transom hardware. I'm keeping an eye out on eBay as well. Still, I'd feel better about the latches if I knew what was on there originally.

There's a bunch of ghost marks on the door and the trim, but none of 'em really make sense. See?

I outlined em in painter's tape so you can see em.

This is the kind of thing that just drives me bonkers, because then I start thinking....

I think the doors and maybe even the trim might've been re-used, either from someplace else in this house or from another house. (The Kellys owned at least three other houses in Lexington, none of which remain, and at least two farms in Lafayette County which I haven't tracked down yet.)

From top to bottom, here's why I think that:
A. There's a seam in the trim piece between the lower doors and the upper doors. I cannot see a seam on any other piece of door trim in this house.
B. Those huge hardware marks on the door trim (left and right). It doesn't look like a patched mortise (too smooth), more like a ghost mark from some sort of large hardware.
C. That big square in between the two lower doors. It's perfectly square and I can see patched nail or screw holes at each corner of it. Was it some kind of latch plate? In the middle of it is a triangular gouge, which might be damage caused by whoever pried off that hardware.
D. And finally, those ghost marks from hinges on the lower third of each door. They're opposite the hinge side of the door and at the same level, but there's no mark like it on the upper part of the doors. Weird.

I've always thought the closet was original to the house...but maybe not. The inside walls of it are rough, as if they left the roughcoat on the plaster and didn't put on the finish coat. That's what made me think the closet was original...but now, looking at all the marks on the trim, I'm not so sure. This room originally had an exterior door that led to the side porch...could the trim have come from that?

Could the doors be cut down from the original basement trapdoor? The existing trapdoor is clearly not original--it's plywood. The back porch (where the trap door is) was already closed in by the time my mom's friend Teresa moved into one of the apartments in this house back in 1947. Maybe when they enclosed the back porch they re-used the trapdoor as those closet doors?

Or maybe all this angst over the closet comes from being home for two extra days with a horrible summer cold (fever, cough, headache, congestion, earache) and a UTI that has me running to the bathroom every 45 minutes and using bad swears when I get there. (Was that an overshare?? You ladies understand.) Maybe I should just buy the darn iron and brass latches, which really are pretty cool, and stop all this rat-on-a-wheel-type thinking....

Best Before & After Ever

2011-07-26T23:20:00.000-05:00

Today I had pretty modest goals:

Finish stripping one set of transom hardware
Paint one door of the clothes press
Paint trim around press door
Re-hang press door
Paint at least half the trim on the parlor door
Re-hang transom hardware

I accomplished all but the last two as I write this, and I'll probably finish those later tonight.

As I was getting ready to paint the trim around the parlor door, I noticed that I'd never stripped the striker plate to that door. It's one of three striker plates still left intact and in place after some idiot made the stupid decision to saw all the interior doors in half.

When I took it off the door it looked like this, so I thought it was probably a plain striker plate like the other two Mare and I had uncovered. But then, just as I dropped it in the CrockPot, I noticed something on the other side of the plate, the side that had been against the jamb. Something wonderful.

I had a Howard Carter moment. (Yes, I am a geek.) See it there, in the top left corner? That little leaf? It's not a plain little striker plate at all. Oh Sweet Mary!

A couple of hours later I fished it out of the Crock Pot and (ow, that's hot!) rubbed the gummy paint off with my fingers. No brass brush scrubbing for this little gem.

Behold...the best before & after ever...

Is that not the most gorgeous little striker plate you've ever laid eyes on?? All these years it's been hidden under layers and layers and layers of paint.

Excited, I took it over to my son's house. "Mom, that's amazing!" he exclaimed. "What are you gonna do with it?" I must've looked at him like he wasn't quite bright. "You're not gonna put that back on the door, are you?!" he said. I told him that was exactly what I planned to do. "No, no! You should put it in a little shadow box." I considered it, but I really think I'll put it back on the door. Mrs. Kelly probably picked out these striker plates when the house was built, and all the doors on the front ("public") part of the house must have had them. This one and the one on the front door are the only two fancy ones that survive. I do think it would be the best memorial to Maria Kelly to use it. The striker plate won't get much wear: the door between the foyer and the second parlor (which is where this one came from) is almost always open, and even with all those layers of paint the latch barely caught the strike plate. (The doorknob and its hardware are not original to the house.) I'll keep an eye on it, and if it looks like the striker plate's wearing, I'll take it off and replace it with a plain one since I have a couple of extras of those.

As a side note, it makes me sick at heart to think of all the beautiful door hardware that must have been thrown away when the doors were cut in half. I thank my lucky stars that the house still retains what little it does: the front door hinges, doorknobs, backplates and striker plate; most of the transom window hardware (except for what was on windows that opened to the outdoors); two plain striker plates; seven sets of steeple hinges (only one hinge was so badly broken that it had to be replaced) and this fancy little striker plate.

I think I'll stare at it a few more times before I put it back on the door jamb....

True Story, For Reals

2011-07-26T00:10:00.000-05:00

Whenever my friend Jennifer-A makes a declaration that might be met with skepticism, she begins by saying, "True story". Faced with the same situation, I end my declaration with, "For reals". So if, for example, I had an absolutely stellar day, an almost unbelievably good day, it might warrant using both "true story" and "for reals" at the same time.

Like this:

True story. I accomplished more today (Monday) in restoring hardware than I have in the past two years. For reals.

And, I owe all of this incredibly good day to a brand-new reader, DaveS, who commented on my last post (written in the wee hours of this morning when I had reached the limits of my frustration) with a solution for freeing the screws on my transom and door hardware from their paint prison. Dave said, "A utility knife works very well for getting at painted-over hardware. You can use it to cut around the edges, to burrow down to the screws, and to clean out the screw slots. Once you get the blade down into the paint, it generally will flake off just by twisting the tool." Genius. I read that Monday morning (and by "morning" I mean a little after noon) while eating my breakfast. I nearly knocked over the kitchen chair jumping out of it. I even left a peach half-eaten on the table, and usually wild horses can't drag me away from a fresh Missouri peach. Ten minutes later I had two sash lifts off the windows in the front parlor. Sash lifts that I've been trying to remove for two years. Bless your heart, DaveS, you have my undying gratitude.

An hour or so later I plopped all this into the CrockPot.

Five sash lifts, a hook & two hinges

And a few hours later, after a long soak in the CrockPot and a little scrubbing with a wire brush, that icky hardware was beautiful again.

I wish those two sash lifts weren't broken. It occurs to me, though, that if you have a jackwagon mentality such that you'd blob paint all over original Victorian hardware, then you're also stupid enough to yank on a stuck window until the sash lift breaks. The hook is broken too. There at the top of it should be another hook.

It's still beautiful, though.

Hello, gorgeous.

No way is that hunk of hardware gonna be hidden away in a closet again. I'm putting it away someplace safe for now, and then this hook and its unbroken twin will have pride of place in the re-done bathroom.

And now, if y'all will excuse me, I have to go scrub the last little bits of paint off those hinges and check on the transom hardware that's soaking under a thick coat of CitriStrip.

Sidetracked

2011-07-25T00:38:00.000-05:00

I have finally finished painting the trim on the four windows in the front parlor. Finally. No more standing in the oven. Just one more big window (with no stained glass panes, so no teeny muntins!) to paint, and a second coat of paint on the baseboard, and then I can put up wallpaper in the front parlor.

What's that you said? Oh, you thought I said I was going to finish the other parlor first? Wellllll, I did say that. But I got sidetracked. And this time, it wasn't my short attention span or my tendency to bang around the house like a pinball that sidetracked me. It was something worse. Now listen up, because I don't say these words very often:

I can't do it by myself.

Ack! It pains me to say that. I absolutely, positively hate admitting that I need help. Even worse, I hate asking for help. This time, though, I'm going to have to. See, before I can finish painting the trim in there, I need to remove the hardware from two transom windows and from the clothes press. The clothes press has eight hinges, four cabinet latches, and two (or maybe three) ornate hooks. Of course, every bit of this hardware has paint glommed all over it. The screws aren't even visible on the transom hardware. I've tried the old trick of putting the screwdriver in the slot and then whacking it with a hammer, I've tried using stripper to get the paint off the screws, but no matter what I try, I just can't get a good enough bite on the screw to remove it. I shouldn't feel bad about this, I guess, because I remember Mare having a lot of trouble getting the hinges off the doors when we restored that hardware. (Now that I think about it, I seem to remember ~~nagging~~ asking him to take the rest of the hardware off the doors and windows...)

So, until I can get someone over here to help me, I can't finish the other parlor. Unless one of you fine people reading this has another idea for how to remove painted-over hardware...Know it? Spill it in the comments. Please and thank you!

It's An Oven

2011-07-23T04:43:00.000-05:00

This might, at first glance, appear to be a rather ordinary feature of a Queen Anne cottage. But it's not.

It's an oven. (An oven with a broken storm window.)

And although in this photo it seems to be nice and shady and cool, it's not. It's an oven.

Or at least that's how it's felt to me the past couple of days as I've been standing inside painting interior window trim with the sun blazing through the windows. I can also verify that heat, in fact, does rise. It's about 20 degrees cooler sitting on the floor drinking a Gatorade than it is standing on the ladder painting teeny little muntins.

The alternative to slowly baking while I paint would be to wait until nightfall, I suppose. But then I'd be backlit by the shop light I drag around while painting (try putting cream paint on white trim without one and just see how many spots you miss) and because my house is a tad closer to the street than most, I'd be visible for blocks to anyone walking or driving down the street. Not to mention that occasionally, I engage in sudden fits of crazy dancing around the house whenever an INXS song comes on Pandora. I wouldn't want anyone to have to see that. I feel bad enough just putting that mental image in your heads, so I certainly wouldn't want to be held responsible for the psychological scarring that would surely happen if anyone actually saw that.

So, later on today after my giant nap, I'll be back up there painting. In the oven.

Let's Review

2011-07-12T22:54:00.000-05:00

So here's that to-do list I made Saturday, with completed items crossed-off...

~~Put a third coat of paint on the foyer side of the door.~~
Patch & paint the parlor side of that same door.*
Finish painting the trim in the parlor.
~~Tear up the last little strip of carpet in there.~~
~~Scrape up the glued-down carpet pad.~~
Patch & paint the parlor side of the parlor/bedroom door.*

And here's what I actually did on my days off:

Cleaned out the big closet on the back porch.
Hung a shelf up in that closet.
Tore up tack strip in the two parlors. (Some, not all.)
Painted some trim in both parlors.
Made cinnamon rolls from scratch.
Moved the clothes rod in the parlor closet.**
Dragged a wicker table destined for the trash back into my bedroom to use as a tv stand.
Moved all my clothes out of the teeny closet in my bedroom and into the big closet in the parlor.
Pushed my nightstand (which was doing duty as a tv stand) in front of the bedroom closet.***
Put together a shoe rack.
Hung up a set of 11 pictures in the second parlor.
Had movie night with the kitties and the doggie after the staple incident.

*I'll probably at least patch the doors before I go to bed tonight--er, in the morning.
**I figured out that the problem with the parlor closet is not that the closet is too shallow, it's that the clothes rod was installed too close to the back wall. I moved it forward and now I have a great big closet to use. For now. Unless and until I decide to put back the doors to the side porch.
***I have six--yes, six--doors in my bedroom, so wall space is at a premium. Ever since I moved into this bedroom, I've been without a nightstand because the bed is flanked by the kitchen door and the closet door with about 2 inches to spare on either side. (By the way, the other four doors lead to: the bathroom, the spare bedroom, the side porch, and the second parlor.)

As usual, I'm totally incapable of sticking to a plan.

The Importance of Proper Footwear

2011-07-11T23:01:00.000-05:00

So there I was today, ripping out carpet in the brown parlor, listening to the Robert Earl Keen channel on Pandora, and cussing because the last bit of carpet was stuck to the floor extraordinarily well, all while wearing flip-flops. This is a cautionary tale, folks. (And if you follow me on Twitter, you know what's coming.)

I stepped into the closet to get a better angle for yanking on the carpet. Ow! Ow, ow, OW! What the heck was that?! I fell back against the closet wall and grabbed my right foot. Blood dripped off the side of my $1.50 flip-flop. (That's $1.50 for the pair, not just the one, so you know they're high-quality.) I may or may not have said numerous very bad swears at that point. I'd taken a copper staple to the foot.

As I hopped on one foot to the bathroom, stringing blood through three rooms, I remembered that the night before, several of us had gotten into a discussion on Facebook about when and where it's appropriate to wear flip-flops. How ironic. If I didn't have a hematoma the size of a quarter on the ball of my foot, I might even think that's funny. Right then it just made me mad. At myself, for wearing stupid shoes. In fact, it made me so mad that after the bleeding stopped (apply-direct-pressure-with-a-clean-cloth-don't-lift-it-up-to-look-at-it-if-it-keeps-bleeding-you're-not-pressing-hard-enough) and I'd put on both a Band-Aid and some real shoes, I went back in the parlor, yelled out "Towanda!" (or a profane equivalent), tore out the carpet, and then yanked the staple out of the floor. There's a practical reason for that last bit: I wanted to make sure the staple was intact and part of it wasn't still in my foot.

Tonight, at the direction of my favorite medic, my brother-from-another-mother Kenny, it's rest, elevation, ice, Tylenol if needed, and Vitamin C. ("Vitamin C?" I said. "Sure," Kenny replied, "It helps restore the blood supply. Why do you think they give you oranges when you donate blood?")

Tomorrow, I'll be scraping the glued-down carpet pad off the floor and painting some trim. And wearing proper shoes.

The South Street Rule

2011-07-10T23:50:00.000-05:00

After I mentioned the scary basement (with its aptly-named trap door) in my last post, a couple of folks reminded me that I should take my cell phone with me just in case the door slams shut while I'm down there in the basement. I always take my cell phone to the basement with me, but it occurs to me that I might've forgotten to tell y'all exactly why I do that. (Aside from the obvious fear of entrapment.)

I take my phone with me everywhere because of the South Street Rule.

The South Street Rule: If you are alone in your old house and you will be standing on a ladder, climbing atop a chair or countertop or some such thing, going down to the basement, going up to the attic, running up or down steep stairs, playing with electricity, or doing anything at all which might possibly in someone's wildest imagination cause you to be injured, carry a phone with you at all times.

The South Street Rule, Abundance of Caution Clause: Before engaging in any potentially injurious activities, call a neighbor and tell them what you will be doing, where in the house you will be, and what time you expect to be finished. Call the neighbor again when you are finished to sound the all-clear. If you fail to call said neighbor or answer the phone within a reasonable time frame, said neighbor has the right to kick in your door (if necessary) to ascertain your level of health and welfare.

This rule was enacted a decade or so ago in my neighborhood because a little old lady who lived all alone took a tumble off a ladder, badly broke her leg, and laid there on the floor in pain for over 24 hours until one of her friends, having not heard from her in awhile, went to her house and discovered her injury. Since then, many other calamitous things have occurred--among them, the seat of a cane-bottomed chair gave way while Carl was standing on it, Katherine whacked her head on a heat duct in her attic, Mary fell down the stairs (twice), I pitched off a ladder, a storm window fell on me, I hit myself in the face with a prybar--and in every instance, help was there almost immediately.

The South Street Rule. Reason #3,287,491 why I love my neighborhood.

What To Do?

2011-07-09T17:23:00.000-05:00

I have four nights off. Four. Nights. Off. What to do, what to do? I did a "lap" through the house to decide: bedroom, second parlor, foyer, first parlor, dining room, kitchen, then back to the bedroom. Hmm.

I really, really want to knock out the wall between the two bathrooms, just to see what it'll look like. Since there's plumbing and electrical in that wall, that might not be the smartest thing to do.

Maybe I'd be lucky enough that the original ceiling on the back porch is still there and I could tear out that ugly acoustic tile ceiling. A few minutes' investigation with a flashlight while standing on a chair and looking through the transom above the kitchen door proved that, of course, I am not that lucky.

The other night I had a dream that I painted my bedroom floor. It still seems like a good idea. Before I could do that, I'd need to move all the furniture into the second parlor, then clean the floor and sand it and prime it and....yeah, that sounds like a big pain in the hiney. Especially since the second parlor's in shambles.

The second parlor. That's it.

So here's the to-do list for the next four nights/days:

Put a third coat of paint on the foyer side of the door.
Patch & paint the parlor side of that same door.
Finish painting the trim in the parlor.
Tear up the last little strip of carpet in there.
Scrape up the glued-down carpet pad.
Patch & paint the parlor side of the parlor/bedroom door.

And one more thing on the tentative, possibly, maybe, just maybe to-do list: Brave the scary basement to try to figure out where the other end of that damn extension cord is. There's about 18 inches of extension cord poking out of the floor in the second parlor. (Why in the Sam Hill would someone do that?!?!) I have no idea where it's plugged in, but White Trash Bob and I believe the basement is a good possibility.

Wish me luck. Photos and tales of woe to follow.

More Water

2011-07-03T09:47:00.000-05:00

Here's a different kind of before-and-after...

This is the photo I took of the Sni Bridge in Wellington last week. Wellington is the next town west of Lexington along the Missouri River. The woman standing on the bridge works at Catfish Charlie's, a restaurant there in Wellington. I asked her then if the flooding had cut down on their business. "It has, a little," she said. This was taken before the Missouri River rose on Friday to 26.8 feet at Napoleon, which is just west of Wellington. Flood stage at Napoleon is 17.0 feet. (An aside to history buffs: Lafayette County has Wellington and Napoleon, and in between is an itty-bitty town called Waterloo. Hee hee.)

Before the Missouri River crested.

And here's a photo of that same area, taken Friday evening:

After the river crested.
Photo courtesy of John Pinkston.

That's Catfish Charlie's on the left with the green roof. The Sni Mini Mart is on the right. I stood in their parking lot to take that photo last week. Someone from Charlie's told me on Facebook yesterday that since the restaurant is on stilts, the water hasn't flooded the interior. With the parking lot and the ramp to the door underwater, they've had to close for now. They've sandbagged the Mini Mart and it's become a little island, so it's still open. Friday was supposed to be the crest at 26.8, but I just checked NOAA and the river's now at 27.2 feet and predicted to drop over the next several days.

I promise that I'll write about something besides water soon!

Gray Water Ahead

2011-06-28T15:08:00.000-05:00

You know you've worked really hard and gotten really filthy when the water going down the shower drain is gray. I predict that, just a few minutes after I hit the "Publish Post" button, gray water will be swirling in my shower.

Why? Because today, I dug up some ginormous hostas on the west side of the house and divided them into less-ginormous hostas, then did the same with some ginormous daylilies, then hammered in 14 ft of edging, then planted the hostas and the daylilies in the front flower bed, then bought five coral bells and planted them, then yanked hundreds of weeds out of that bed and spread mulch there. Now it looks like this:

The porch would look nicer without that orange extension cord....

This is the former site of the dratted vinca. In two years it's gone from a huge bed of vinca (some of it's still growing there under the rose), to a big ugly muddy mess, to a bed of newspaper weighted down with bricks (to smother the stubborn vinca), to a weedy mess, to this. I'm looking forward to seeing those daylilies bloom because, although they came from my mom's yard a couple of years ago, neither of us can remember what color they are.

And then, because I wasn't quite filthy and tired enough, I hammered in another 6 ft of edging around the other front flower bed, weeded it, and put some leftover mulch on it. (I didn't quite have enough, as you can see.)

Please ignore the bare back corner.

And now, I think I'll stand in the shower until the water no longer swirls gray and I've used up all the hot water, and then I'll sit on the front porch with a big glass of lemonade and eat some of the raspberries Gwen picked out of her garden for me this morning.

Water Over Road

2011-06-27T10:26:00.000-05:00

More signs are popping up along 224 Highway (an east/west route that runs along the Missouri River) that warn "Water Over Road". In the little river towns, that's a common thing every spring. We usually drive around the roadblocks to see for ourselves. That's what I did Monday morning on my way home from work.

Taken looking WB from the Sni Mini Mart parking lot.

The bridge at Wellington didn't have any water over it, so I parked my car in the Mini Mart parking lot to see how high Sni-A-Bar Creek is. Pretty darn high.

And then I walked across the bridge to get a closer look at the water over the highway.

Yikes. No way am I driving through all that.

So I got back in the Brave Little Toaster (the nickname the guys at work have given my Kia Soul) to find another way home. With 24 Highway (the other main east/west route through Lafayette County besides the interstate) closed for bridge replacement just east of Wellington, getting from here to there is...interesting. I backtracked just a little ways on 224 to get back to Route 131, which runs north/south from Wellington. I took 131 to FF Highway, then took FF to a gravel road called Flournoy School Road, then drove along the gravel road until I could get back on 24 Highway east of where it's closed. And when I finally got to Lexington, I decided to drive over to 224 again to see how bad it is from the east end of the flooding.

Not looking so good here either.

That was taken at about the same location where my son took a photo back on June 4th. It sure doesn't look like 224 will be open for traffic anytime soon. So far, that's my biggest inconvenience. The town's water plant has been sandbagged for about three weeks and the river hasn't topped the sandbags yet. Let's hope it stays that way. I feel sorry for all the people upriver who have been evacuated and are losing their homes and belongings.

Someday

2011-06-24T05:00:00.000-05:00

Someday.

Greg told me, in the interest of fairness and accuracy, that I should've added the word "someday" to the first sentence of my last post. As in, "Someday I'm gonna knock out this wall right here to get rid of this stupid little bathroom and make one nice-sized bathroom, and then someday that tub you're givin me will go about right there where that sink is now." Not tomorrow. Not next month. Maybe not even til next year. But someday. Someday, by God, I'll have that bathroom. Someday when I have the money saved up (although Greg generously giving me a clawfoot tub will save me a chunk of money) and when I have the courage worked up to tear out a wall, a shower stall, two sinks, two toilets and the ceiling from three rooms. Then I'll have that bathroom. Someday.

Someday soon, I need to move that clawfoot tub of Greg's from the hardware store parking lot to my back porch. And someday even sooner than that, I need to put one more coat of paint on the door between the foyer and the second parlor.

Yep, It's Drywall

2011-06-20T05:01:00.000-05:00

Me: So I'm gonna knock out this wall right here to get rid of this stupid little bathroom and make one nice-sized bathroom, and then that tub you're givin me will go about right there where that sink is now.

Greg: Wait a minute, are you sure that's not an original wall?

Me: I'm sure. Welllll....now that you say that...

Greg: I'm not sure, hon. It makes sense that this might've been a little room off the back porch originally, like a 19th-century version of a mudroom.

I get a hammer. WHACK!!

We peer at the hole I've just knocked in the bathroom wall.

Greg: Yep, it's drywall.

Foyer Rug

2011-06-19T17:31:00.000-05:00

I found a rug for the foyer. But now that it's in there, I think it might look a little blah...I don't know...What do y'all think? I really like the rug, I'm just not sure I like it in the foyer. It's a jute and cotton blend, so it feels pretty soft underfoot. I can see it becoming a favorite kitty scratching place, so between the rug and the table-window-Depression glass combo that Jan pointed out (thanks, I hadn't thought of that!) the kitties will not be allowed in here except under close adult supervision.

At least it covers most of the yucky floor

Possibly blah rug notwithstanding, the foyer looks a darn sight better than it did four years ago...

Ick.

And that photo was taken after I pulled up wall-to-wall carpeting the same color as the walls and chipped away a QuikRete ramp between the foyer and the second parlor. (Still can't figure out the reasoning behind that one!) When I moved in, the window was covered by rickety wooden shutters and a voluminous tan balloon shade. Please note the "kitties are IN" sign on the front door. Classy, no? Back when the front porch was enclosed and boxed-in the front door, the cats spent a lot of time on the front porch. I did not. Now that the porch walls are knocked down and only half of it is screened, the tables are turned--I spend a lot of time out on the front porch and the kitties spend a lot of time in the second parlor meowing at me through the window.

When I finish painting the door between the second parlor and the foyer, then this room will be done! Foyer, front porch, house exterior, kitchen, dining room: done. Front parlor, second parlor, back porch (laundry room), two bathrooms, and two bedrooms: still to do.

Foyer Progress

2011-06-14T23:29:00.000-05:00

Antique bench, thrift store mirror

Remember how I said I was going to stick to one thing until I finished it? And that one thing was the foyer, right? Well....I sorta got distracted. I know that comes as a shock to....ummm....no one. Sunday was declared the Day of Sleep (because I worked 60 hours last week) and then Monday and Tuesday were taken up with shopping, visiting with my son and his wife, and planting a little garden in my back yard. (Which I hope to have pictures of for the next post.)

Anyway, the foyer's not finished, but I did make some progress. It's neat and tidy now, for starters. I hung up a mirror I bought at the thrift store (which may be temporary if I find something I like better), moved the bench from my mom's house to the foyer with my son's help, hung up the two bird prints, set a little half-round table in there that my mom and I found at an antique shop, and patched the holes and the center seam in the door.

Taken from front porch

That poor door. It must have been one of the last ones that Mare and I did, because towards the end we were running low on wood glue and so, even though I've patched the seam on the front of the door, if you stand on the other side you can still see light shining through it. With the other doors, the seam's pretty well filled up with wood glue. I'll have to be extra careful not to slam this door, remembering Mare's admonition that if I slam the doors, they just might crack in half again. That would not be good.

The bench is one that my mom's had since I was little, and she bought it from an estate sale. The story of the bench is that it came with a family who moved here from Kentucky in the mid to late 1800s. There's storage under the seat, which comes in handy. My mom replaced the cushion on it years ago, and it just so happens that the upholstery goes with my wallpaper pretty well. The bench needs something else...maybe a couple of throw pillows.

Bird prints & little table.
(Taken from the parlor.)
The front door's open.

The little half-round table we found at the Brass Armadillo on Monday. Originally I planned to paint it, because it looked pretty bad in the store. But after I got it home and cleaned it up, I think I like the look of the dark wood legs against the cream baseboard. My mom gave me the Depression glass dish that's on the table, and I need a little tray or something to go there, too. Something that looks like it could be used to hold mail or keys, but not too big.

I haven't found an area rug I like yet. With all that pattern in there, I'm thinking maybe a jute or seagrass rug would look nice. Something that looks good and adds a little texture without adding any more busy-ness (is that a word??) to the room. What do y'all think?

The Great Karen Anne

2011-06-13T06:33:00.000-05:00

I owe y'all a HUGE apology. I am almost wholly ignorant of how the interwebs works and I mistakenly thought that changing my URL was no big deal. I thought that somehow everyone would magically come along with me....yeah, not so much. What I really thought, in sorta technical terms, was that the old URL might automatically redirect you here. I totally did not expect that typing in the old address would result in a Blogger message saying the blog had ceased to exist. So I panicked a little, and then I didn't know what to do, so I just took a nap, and when I woke up I read Karen Anne's comment: "If you still have access to the old url, you might post the new url there..." Which is much kinder than saying, "Hey, dummy!", which is what I deserve.

This reminds me of the time, years and years ago, when I was renting half of a duplex and my dirtbag neighbor moved out of the other half in the middle of the night without telling anybody. She also didn't throw away any of the food she had setting out all over her kitchen, which resulted in a cockroach infestation the likes of which I hope never to experience again. That's how we found out she moved, a couple of weeks later when the roaches ran out of food over there and migrated, en masse, to my half of the house. Seriously, it was like the invasion of Normandy.

What was I saying? Oh yeah. My changing the blog's address was pretty much like my dirtbag neighbor's move. Only without cockroaches. So if you found your way here, it's only because Karen Anne gently nudged me in the right direction. All hail The Great Karen Anne!

Housekeeping

2011-06-12T04:02:00.000-05:00

The URL (address) for my blog has changed.

It's now

http://the-kelly-house.blogspot.com

I hope y'all can still find me...this is worrisome. Looks like I kept my followers, but I don't know how all this stuff works. Somebody please comment so I know I'm not alone in the blog wilderness, k?

Shame, Shame

2011-06-11T18:03:00.000-05:00

Because Christine said she's a visual learner, and because Karen Anne asked "yucky floor?", and because I have no shame, here's what the entryway looks like:

There's the schoolhouse desk, which belongs in the second parlor (through that doorway behind the desk), the scraps of wallpaper, the can of paint in the corner and the bird prints. In the corner opposite the can of paint you can see a narrow cardboard box--that's the wallpaper for the front parlor. If you look closely, you can see a Can of Hope atop the desk. White Trash Bob gave me that. I have no idea why my wrecker bar is in here. Nothing needs wrecking. And look, Karen Anne, there's the yucky floor. I got a little bit lucky with this room and when I yanked up the glued-on carpet, some of the glue came with it, mostly around the edges of the room. My temporary fix for that (until I hand over my life savings to Joey the Floor Man) is to cover the center of the room with an area rug.

I estimate that straightening up this room will take me three hours, including the drying time for the paint on the door and the trip to and from my mom's house for the bench. Shame on me for putting this off for five months.

This might've been a better photo had I stood on the front porch to take it, but I was in my flying piggy jammies at the time. So maybe I do have a lil bit of shame...

On A Roll Again

2011-06-10T03:22:00.000-05:00

Before the, um, recent unpleasantness in my personal life, I was on a roll at the Kelly House. I'd committed to working on only one room at a time and actually stuck to that commitment. I had plans for the other rooms of the house, but I fiercely resisted the temptation to start on another thing before the first thing was finished. For the first time in...well....ever, I had both mental goals and written goals, in some cases complete with projected budget for said goals.

And then I completely and totally lost my cotton-pickin' mind and nearly married a man who doesn't even like old houses. What. The. Sam. Hill.

It's taken me a bit to recover from that. (Truth be told, I'm not completely recovered just yet, but I sure am working on it.) Ever since the fur-babies and I came back to the Kelly House full-time, I've flitted from one thing to another and accomplished not much besides making the house look like an even bigger disaster than it was. Trim partially painted here, one strip of wallpaper there, furniture pushed out into the middle of the rooms, pieces of carpet being yanked off the floor. It's time to get on a roll again.

So I settled down to one goal for the next week: finish up the entryway. Months ago I stripped off the old yucky paper, painted the trim in there, hung that fabulous chocolate wallpaper and put up a new wall sconce. Then I stopped. There's a box of wallpaper scraps in the corner, my big orange EMS box/toolbox is smack in the middle of the floor, the schoolhouse desk from the second parlor is blocking the door, and the cool bird prints I bought are on the floor propped against the wall. This week I'll straighten all that up, hang the pictures, paint at least the entryway side of the door between the entryway and the second parlor, try to find an area rug to cover up the yucky floor, and retrieve the antique bench from my mom's house that belongs in there. Getting one thing done always motivates me to get the next thing done, and then the next thing, and then the thing after that. In theory, anyway....

Uh-Oh

2011-06-05T05:01:00.000-05:00

Uh-oh.

Photo courtesy of my son, who snapped this with his phone about 4 pm Saturday.

That's 224 Highway in Lafayette County, Missouri, just 2 or 3 miles west of Lexington's city limits. Between the trees on the left and the railroad tracks on the right, there's supposed to be a road. All the rainfall we've had lately has made the Mighty Mo overflow her banks. That's a common occurrence around here, although it's a bit late in the spring for that much flooding. We got word last week that it will only get worse. The Corps of Engineers is opening the Gavin's Point Dam near Yankton, South Dakota a little bit at a time. (Note that in this case, "little bit" is a relative term.) That creates a slow and terrible domino effect of flooding for everything in the Missouri River basin down river from Yankton. The Corps tells us that a slow release of water is better than a huge rush of water if the levees break. That's probably true, but to me it sounds like the difference between being slapped around several times versus taking one hard punch to the face--either way, it's gonna hurt. Lexington is situated on a bluff above the river, so the town itself won't flood. Lafayette County is mostly farmland (the whole county has a population of less than 34,000) and those farmers are listening to the local radio reports and worrying that this might be the Flood of 1993 all over again. I hope they're wrong, but the National Weather Service's flood warning for the county sounds grim: "Record upstream reservoir releases have begun and will likely continue for the rest of the summer." That tells me this won't be the last time I write about flooding.

Dear SPOs

2011-06-01T00:56:00.000-05:00

Dear Sucky Previous Owners,

I'm not sure I believe in Hell, but if there is one, then I am sure there's a special place there for y'all. I don't know for sure who committed what sin against this house, so I'm lumping you all together in this post. All of you, every last one of you, deserves beachfront property at the Lake of Fire. And when you get to Hell, I hope the house you have to live in has three layers of wall-to-wall carpet that's stapled and glued to hardwood floors and I sincerely hope that Satan makes you tear it all out by hand with only a dull box cutter and a pair of broken pliers to help you. I hope you get real warm while you're tearing out that carpet and try to open a window, only to find that every stinkin' window in the house has been painted shut. May your house in Hell have a cute lil side porch that you can't get to from the parlor because some fool sheet-rocked over the door and put in a closet--a closet so shallow that the hangers are crooked in it, with cheap sliding doors that run off the tracks all the time. I hope one of the times that you're wrangling with the closet doors that you look up in the top of the closet and see a tiny patch of beautiful wallpaper (which may or may not be original to your 1887 house) with a grayish-tan background and lilies of the valley on it and that you realize that paper's been obliterated under several layers of paint.

That's what I hope, because then you'll know how I felt yesterday when it took me almost two hours to tear out the last bit of nasty carpet (a swath slightly less than 4 ft. wide and about 11 ft. long) from the second parlor and its stupid, useless closet.

One last thing: I hope you try to roast marshmallows over the flames from the Lake of Fire and that just when they reach ooey-gooey perfection and you're about to plop 'em onto your graham cracker and piece of chocolate, the marshmallow drops off the stick and falls into the fire. I hope that happens over and over and over and you never get to eat that 'smore. Cause that would be Hell, as far as I'm concerned.

Your pal,
Me

Back Home

2011-05-27T00:35:00.000-05:00

Taken Monday or Tuesday in Joplin, Mo.

That's one of the guys I work with, on duty in Joplin with our department's Heavy Rescue Team. They're back home now, after going without sleep for almost 48 hours while they checked neighborhoods in Joplin for survivors. It's difficult work, both physically and emotionally. Please keep in your prayers the emergency service workers in the tornado-devastated areas.

A Very Small Thing

2011-05-26T03:11:00.000-05:00

I want you to know right away, because I think it's important to say at the start, that what I'm going to tell you about is really a very small thing in light of what's happened in Joplin and other places that had tornadoes. It's a very small thing indeed when you consider that people have lost their lives and their homes and all their possessions. But small as it is in comparison to that, on any other day it would have been somewhat big news, so I decided to tell you anyway.

Sunday afternoon I was standing in my front parlor when a giant flash of lightning lit up the sky. Immediately afterwards, there was a huge CRACK and then what sounded like a small explosion, and two minutes or so after that I heard the wail of a fire truck siren. I grabbed my camera and drove in the direction of the siren. One block north of me and two blocks west, I found the fire truck. At my church. Lightning had struck the church, but it didn't catch fire.

The lightning completely demolished the masonry cross atop the front parapet.

And sent big chunks of stone tumbling down the front steps of the church.

But left the rest of the parapet undamaged.

The force of the lightning sent pieces of stone into the side yard,

out into the streets to the south and east, and into the yard of a house halfway down the next block.

We found pieces of the cross in the church's front yard.

And even though it's a very small thing, because no one was hurt and the church didn't catch fire or have interior damage, it still hurts my heart a little to see that broken cross in the grass.

Joplin Tornado

2011-05-23T00:54:00.000-05:00

By now y'all have heard about the tornado in Joplin, Missouri. That's a few hours away from me, and my loved ones and I are all okay. A lot of people in Joplin aren't able to say that. My heart goes out to those folks. If you're inclined to pray, please say some prayers for the folks affected by these tornadoes, and for some very special people who are often forgotten when disasters happen: emergency services personnel. These men and women are maintaining calm and professional demeanors in the face of devastation. I have all the respect in the world for them. If you want to hear just how bad things are down there, give a listen to Jasper County law enforcement radio traffic. It's heartbreaking. (Warning: It's a live radio feed, unedited, and some of the things you might hear are disturbing.) The fire department I work for sent our Heavy Rescue Team down there Sunday evening to rescue and recover victims of the tornado who are in collapsed buildings. From what I'm hearing, my boys are walking into hell on earth. Please say a prayer for them, too.

If you live in the Joplin area and want to let your family know you're safe, or if you have loved ones there that you're checking on, please go to the Safe And Well page of the Red Cross website.

If you are a medical professional and want to help the victims of the Joplin tornado, please register at Show Me Response and they will contact you if you're needed. Jasper County officials are asking people not to self-deploy. Please wait to be contacted before responding.

Want to donate money to the Red Cross for victims of the Joplin tornado and others? Text REDCROSS to 90999 to donate $10 or donate online at http://www.redcross.org/.

Jumping Off

2011-05-20T03:42:00.000-05:00

When I was a little kid, I loved the feeling I got on Fridays, that sense of being about to jump off the ledge of the long, boring week and land smack at the beginning of the weekend. Back then, I suffered through the rules and the tedium of the school week, enlivened only a little by cinnamon rolls on the lunch tray or Stamp Club on Wednesdays, counting down the days and then the hours until I could be free to do whatever I wanted until school reined me in again on Mondays. Whatever I wanted usually consisted of playing outside until dark, running to the curb every time I heard the fire truck, and reading a good book while eating cereal straight out of the box.

Not so much has changed since I was a little kid. I've traded a five-day school week for a three- or four-night work week at a job where I not only get to stay up all night (only my grandma ever let me do that when I was little) but I get to see and hear fire trucks every day. In between the 911 calls and the paperwork and the firefighters coming in to gripe about getting banged out on a call in the middle of the night, there's enough downtime for me to wish sometimes that I was somewhere else, just like I did when I was little. And Fridays (at least every other one, nowadays) still mean that I'm on the verge of being able to do whatever I want. The best part of being a grown-up is that now my weekends last for three or four days.

So here I am, with a little over three hours left on this shift and 12 more hours tonight, and I already have that jumping-off feeling. Tuesday I tilled up the front yard where the icky vinca used to be and spread out mushroom compost, hoping it would rain this week so the compost would soak into the dirt. And it did. I love it when things work out like I planned. (Possibly because it so rarely happens.) If the weather cooperates, I'll transplant some hostas from my mom's yard into my yard and buy some coral bells to plant there, too. Eighteen chicks are peeping in their nesting boxes at the farm and seven more are due to hatch by today, so I'll go see them and then take a walk through the woods with my friend. After some cautious wheeling of my left arm, I've determined that my shoulder is feeling good enough to maybe hang a strip or two of wallpaper in the front parlor. The book "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" is even better than the movie version and deserves a few hours of my attention sometime in the next four days, most likely while sitting on the front porch with a dog and a cat or two. I'll try my best to convince my son and three or four of his friends to bring home the clawfoot tub that Hildy's donating to me. And speaking of Hildy, if he's in town we'll no doubt sit on the tufted settee at the Franklin Hole, drink a beer or two, and solve the problems of the world.

I can't wait for the weekend to get here.

Flowers Inside and Out

2011-05-12T08:38:00.000-05:00

Last week I tried to hang wallpaper, but it didn't go so well. My shoulder protested mightily, so I gave up after only one strip. It looks like this in the front parlor now:

Here's a close-up so you can see the pattern better:

The piece on top with the trellis pattern is just stuck up there with painter's tape. After the trouble I had wrestling the big flowered strip into place using pretty much only one arm, I wasn't about to reach way up there next to the ceiling. Ouch. (The doctor said, "If it hurts, don't do it," when I asked him what I was allowed to do, so I'm taking his advice.) Anyway, you get an idea of what the two papers will look like together. Keep in mind that picture rail will cover the seam between the two papers. The top edge of the picture rail will be even with the top of the trim around the door. (The horizontal top piece, that is, not the bullseye corner piece with the other trim above it.) I agonized over this wallpaper something terrible last fall, and now that one strip is up, I can't imagine why I worried so much. I think it looks pretty good. So far. A whole room of it might be a different story....There I go, agonizing again.
Since I couldn't put up any more paper, I decided to clean up the yard this week. I trimmed back the daffodils that were done blooming, planted a few containers, and weeded the fence row. This morning when I got home from work, I saw that Esther's great big iris are blooming along the fence.

Esther is the tiny little old lady who lived (and died) in the Kelly House just before I bought it. She planted these iris all along the fence, and lots and lots of daffodils around the patio, and that dratted vinca that I dug up from the front yard, too. When I was chopping away at the vinca, I found a 1970s-era necklace with an enamel owl pendant in the overgrowth. I like to think that losing that necklace there was some sort of karmic retribution to Esther for planting the dang stuff.

So I have flowers, inside and out, at the Kelly House. I love Spring.

Cuter Than Paper

2011-05-06T03:52:00.000-05:00

Not to infringe upon the territory of Christine, the Chicken Whisperer, but I just gotta show you this:

That little lump in the hands of my friend Doug is a baby chick, who was about two hours old when I snapped its photo with my phone. I know I promised you a photo of the front parlor wallpaper, but this lil chick is way cuter than wallpaper.

Next, Please

2011-04-29T01:39:00.000-05:00

I am back in my own house. No more living half here, half there with my belongings (and my sanity) divided between two houses.

Before I go any further, I just have to say: Thank you, all of you. The support and advice and empathy I've gotten in the comments to my past few posts has been nothing short of amazing. I am one very lucky woman to have blogfriends like you. Thanks, y'all.

The first few days, it was enough just to be back in the Kelly House, with its high ceilings and transom windows and boxy little floor plan. I spent quite a bit of time, I must tell you, just sitting there. (Honestly, I couldn't do much else because I'd separated my shoulder three weeks ago. I was clambering up a riverbank with AJ and a couple of his friends and when the hill crumbled under me and I started to fall, AJ's friend Aaron grabbed me by the left elbow and hauled me up.) But now I'm feeling better, both emotionally and physically, and I think it's time to consider what's next for the Kelly House.

There's the bathroom remodel, which Sharon has dubbed the Behemoth Project because it involves knocking down a wall, laying tile, putting up beadboard, installing new fixtures and a clawfoot tub, demolishing a shower, and moving the back door of the house, all to turn two awkward bathrooms into one nicer one. That seems a bit much at the moment.

Then there's the front parlor. The old wallpaper's been stripped, the plaster walls have been repaired, all the furniture's pushed out into the center of the room, and part of the trim's been repainted. Since that's what I was working on last winter, it makes sense to start again there.

So on Monday, my next day off, I'll be hanging wallpaper in the front parlor. I can't wait!

She Sings

2011-04-23T05:01:00.000-05:00

"Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her,

still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings."

--Victor Hugo

The thing about living in a small town all of your life is that, if you're lucky, you develop friendships that last for decades. The people who love you, faults and all, are the same people who sat next to you in kindergarten, cried with you over skinned knees, giggled all night about stupid boys, were brave enough to ride with you when you learned to drive a car on gravel roads, visited you in the hospital when your baby was born, and stood next to you at your daddy's grave. So when one of those girls invites you to lunch and upon arriving at the restaurant you see four more friends, you know something's up. Something big.

Five of your best friends gathering together to tell you that you shouldn't get married almost exactly four months before your wedding day (when one of them is your maid of honor to boot) is, indeed, something big. We laughed and we cried, and the words they said rattled around in my brain all week:

He doesn't understand you at all and he has no idea how amazing you are.

The Kelly House is your dream. What kind of man, who claims to love you, demands that you give up on your dream?

Rather than complementing your fire, he dulls your shine.
Honey, you shouldn't have to work this hard to be a little bit happy...and you're only a little bit happy.

I realized that they're right. They didn't talk me into anything I hadn't already figured out on my own: this relationship with AJ is not going to work. I told him as much the other night, sitting at his kitchen table. And then the fur babies and I went home to the Kelly House. Some of my furniture is still at AJ's. I'm not sure where my work boots are. The refrigerator is empty except for a jar of mayo and one beer. I won't have cable and internet until Wednesday at the earliest. More than that, his family will be terribly disappointed and upset, I expect to have to answer the question "What happened?" at least 50 times before the whole town knows and to endure snickers because I'm calling off another engagement (this is my third in 20 years), and I think when reality sinks in that AJ won't be nearly so reasonable as he was upon first hearing my decision.

In spite of all that, I am happy...or maybe I'm not quite happy yet, just relieved, but I'm quietly approaching happy again. I sing. My family understands and supports me no matter what, I have the best friends anyone could ask for, and I am back where I belong. Like that little bird, I have wings.

Hello, Gorgeous!

2011-04-21T20:25:00.000-05:00

Check out the floor my good friend Joey and his daughter Alicia just installed in a customer's new house. I am drooling over the sheer gorgeousness of this floor.

Gorgeous...just gorgeous. Did I say "gorgeous" already? Yowza, what a floor.

I don't even want to think about the math involved in planning out that pattern. Alicia figured it out.

A closeup of the pattern. That's red oak, walnut, cherry and Brazilian tiger wood.
Gotta give Joe and his family a shout-out: If you're anywhere near the Kansas City area and want or need some floors, give Burkhart Hardwood Floor Company a call at 660-259-3204.

Out of Options

2011-04-21T01:34:00.000-05:00

Kind of a lot has happened since my last post....

I called the realtor and told him I wouldn't be listing my house anytime in the near future. He didn't seem surprised.

Then, I told AJ I wouldn't be selling my house. Probably I should've told him first. It didn't go well.

And then, I told White Trash Bob. He was delighted.

And after that, I took a look at the terms of my mortgage. My heart sank. My mortgage prohibits using my home as rental property, or as a business, or as anything other than a primary residence. In the words of Astro from The Jetsons (and my friend Ryan) "Ruh-roh".

So I heaved a big sigh, put on my big-girl pants, and went to AJ with three offers: "Let's sell your house and live in mine." Absolutely not. (Which I expected, since it's already been discussed.) "Okay, then let's rent out your house and live in mine." Nope. "Well then, how 'bout we sell both the houses and buy one that neither of us has ever lived in?" Flat no to that one, too. Oh. Hmmm. Well then.

And with that, it seems I am out of options. It's back to The House or The Guy.

Stupid

2011-04-15T07:12:00.000-05:00

Last Monday I ran into a lawyer friend at the gas station and he noticed my engagement ring. John is known for his bluntness, so when he asked, "What do you want to do something stupid like that for?!" I wasn't surprised. I was, however, taken aback a bit when he then said, "You better not be selling that house of yours." I told him I was indeed planning to sell the house and he rolled his eyes. "Stupid," he said. "Stupid, stupid, stupid." He walked with me back to my car and said, "I can think of three reasons right off the top of my head why it's stupid. First, it's the biggest asset you'll ever own and you'll be selling it at a loss in this market. Second, you don't need to sell it--it's not like you're moving across the country or hurting for money. And third, what if you sell it and the sonofabitch you're marrying drops dead? Then you're homeless. Stupid."

I told John I would give his advice my careful consideration, took laughing umbrage with his calling AJ "that sonofabitch" (they don't know each other), gave him a hug, and promised to call him soon.

And sometime between Monday afternoon and Wednesday night, that man who cautioned me against being stupid did the stupidest thing imaginable. He took a bottle's worth of sleeping pills, washed them down with alcohol, and then went out to his garage and started his truck. The coroner says the pills killed him before the carbon monoxide did. John was 50 years old. I met him 15 years ago when I worked for a lawyer in Kansas City and John was our opposing counsel. He was so impressed with my paralegal abilities, and I with his firebrand courtroom style, that when he offered me a job I took it. It was just the two of us in his office in my little hometown, and between clients and court appearances we argued politics, traded gossip, talked about raising kids alone (his daughter and my son are the same age), and went to lunch together every day. John was the most difficult person I have ever known: he called me four times a day, every day, the entire time I worked for him, to make sure I was on time for work and really in the office while he was not; he expected me to pick up his laundry at the cleaner's and his daughter at school; he would deliberately take the other side in an argument, even if he didn't actually hold that opinion, just to have something to fight about; and he fired me at least three times and then called me an hour later to say he didn't mean it. John was also one of the most intelligent men I have ever met, was a capable attorney (he would want you to know he had a 100% acquittal rate at jury trial), showed almost unbelievable generosity to his true friends (of which there were few), was the best father I have ever witnessed, and had a keen wit and sense of humor. I adored John. I didn't tell him that nearly often enough.

So while his last act was stupid, John was decidely not stupid. Neither is his advice. I am giving myself another week or so to consider whether what I'm thinking now is wise or merely a knee-jerk reaction to John's death, but for now the plan to put the Kelly House on the market is postponed.

Having My Cake

2011-04-08T23:30:00.000-05:00

Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier Beale: You can't have your cake and eat it too, in life.
Edith "Big Edie" Bouvier Beale: Oh yes, I did. I did. I had my cake, loved it masticated it, chewed it and had everything I wanted.

The lines above are from the original "Grey Gardens" movie, the documentary filmed in 1979, and if you haven't seen that one then I highly recommend you rent it, if only because it will make you feel better about your own housekeeping abilities. I feel very safe in saying that, even though I haven't actually seen your house, or yours, or even yours, because Big Edie and Little Edie were, quite possibly, the original hoarders.

But I digress. What got me thinking about the Edies was that today, all day, I cleaned my house and sorted through things and dragged a couple of bags of junk out to the trash, and then one of my neighbors stopped by and said something like, "Don't you wish you didn't have to sell your house?" and after she left I sat in the middle of the front parlor just staring at the stained glass windows there all teary-eyed. Of course I wish I didn't have to sell my house. I wish, like Big Edie, I could have my cake and eat it, too. In my case, "everything I wanted" would be both having the perfect guy and living in the perfect house with him. I can have half of that: either I can marry the perfect guy, and not live in the perfect house; or I can live in the perfect house and not marry the perfect guy. The former seems a better choice.

I read back through that paragraph I just wrote, and it sounds incredibly spoiled. It sounds like whining, and I hate whining. I hardly ever whine, and usually when I do someone smacks me. Maybe I need to be smacked. I mean, really, what in the Sam Hill do I have to complain about? I'm marrying a guy who is so thoughtful, kind, honest and loving that he really is darn near perfect. We'll be living in a house that's not in a constant state of renovation, doesn't have cracked plaster ceilings, and won't cost 300 bucks a month to heat. Those are good things. They are. Right? I mean, right. Right?? Someone smack me. Please.

Four Projects, Four Weeks: Revelation

2011-03-31T06:09:00.000-05:00

I've had a revelation. Right after the afore-mentioned meltdown, and just before I worked 54 hours in one week, and along about the time I was studying for a huge skills test at work, but about a week before I started having a sore throat and an earache, I had a revelation. This revelation came courtesy of my faithful reader Karen Anne, who said, "The world isn't going to collapse if this isn't done in four weeks, ya know." She might as well have appeared to me in a burning bush. Seriously. That's how much of a revelation that sentence was. Oh. Yeah. She's probably right.

So instead of working on the house for an hour or so in the morning when I got home from work and then sleeping for only 4 or 5 hours so that I could work on the house again for an hour or so before I went back to work, I slept for 7 or 8 hours and waited until my days off to work on the house. A little. In between sleeping a lot, recovering from this stupid cold, partying with my friends for the first time in ages, and folding laundry while watching chick flicks. After I got all that done, I worked a very little tiny bit on the house. Not nearly enough to be done by tomorrow.

But guess what? The world continued spinning on its axis. Disaster did not befall me. Karen Anne is right.

Karen Anne (and you) just might be tickled to learn what happened next. The best part of slowing down is that AJ took me to a jeweler's on Saturday, where we discovered that we both like emerald-cut diamonds and that my ring size is a teeny 4.5, which meant that the ring he picked out by himself the next day had to be sized way down, so that I had to wait until today for AJ to get down on one knee in the kitchen, in the exact spot where he first said "I love you", so that he could ask me again to marry him, this time with ring in hand. I said yes this time, too. And now, with a chunk of diamonds on a band of white gold, it's official: we really are engaged.

Four Projects, Four Weeks: A Real Plan

2011-03-25T01:35:00.000-05:00

Okay, so I'm a little over two weeks into this "Four Projects, Four Weeks" thing. Just past the halfway point. So I should be halfway done, right? Bwah ha ha ha ha ha! Not even close. It's okay, y'all don't have to pretend to be surprised by this. Even I'm not really surprised. If I've learned anything the past four years of working on the Kelly House, it's that nothing ever goes as planned.

Mostly when things don't go as planned around here, it's because of...well...it's because of a lack of a real plan. "Do this, do that, do the other things, and have it all done by April 3rd" is not a real plan. It causes me to run all around the house frantically doing a bit of this and a bit of that and generally making a worse mess of things. The house looks like it's been ransacked. It's so bad I won't even take pictures of it. And friends, I have shared some embarrassing stuff with y'all over the years. This is bad. Very bad. The good news is that there is no more wallpaper on the front parlor walls. Wahoo! The bad news is that there is so much other stuff to do that I am overwhelmed.

Yesterday I had a meltdown that started with me sniffling and fighting back tears as I cleaned the bathroom (but really, doesn't everybody want to cry when they clean the bathroom??) and ended with me sitting in the front parlor wailing over the phone to AJ. Generally, I do not wail. The man wisely recognized the situation as dire indeed, came over immediately, and together we lined out a Real Plan.
Each room now has a to-do list. That way, anyone who comes over in the next couple of weeks and wants to help can see exactly what needs to be done. (Actually, I'm hoping that seeing the to-do lists will guilt people into helping.) Breaking down everything room-by-room helps it seem a tiny bit more manageable to me, too. Then I made labels which say "AJ, G-ma, Dylan, Sale" to stick on the furniture so that everyone knows the destination of each piece of furniture in the house. That probably sounds really crazy, but there's been a surprising amount of confusion over who gets what and I'm tired of answering the same questions over and over. "Yes, I really am selling the buffet. No, not that wicker furniture--the other wicker furniture. No, the kitchen chairs are being sold--the dining room chairs go back to Grandma's house." You can see how that might get tiresome. And then, AJ extracted a promise from me that I would let him help me on the house this weekend. He has previously (and repeatedly, I should add) offered to help on the house, and I've always turned down those offers. Brushed them aside with an off-hand, "Oh, I can do it by myself." (Y'all know those are my favorite two words: by myself.) AJ said simply, "I know you can do it by yourself. I'm tellin you, you don't have to." Oh. Right. The whole teamwork thing. I'm still learning how that works.

And after all of that, we went back to his house, where I discovered he'd baked a chicken for supper. What a guy. A real plan. A good supper. Promises of help. I feel better already.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

2011-03-17T19:46:00.000-05:00

I answered the phone this afternoon and was greeted by a broad Irish brogue. "Top o' the mornin' to ya, darlin'!"

He continued, "I know you have a bit of Irish in ye, but I'm thinkin' you don't know so much about the folklore of your country, so allow me to educate ye. All those times ye misplaced a tool in that house of yours, all those many many many times, you've been thinkin' it was your own daft head causin' that. But that's not the case, me girl. Twas the fairies who did that. You've failed to show the fairies what a kind heart ye have, and so they bedevil ye. So the next time you're workin' on that house of yours, be sure to leave a wee bit of food out for the fairies. Sure, they may not eat it, but it's showin' them that ye have a kind heart."

When my laughter subsided enough that I could speak a complete sentence, I said, "Happy St. Patrick's Day to you too, Bob!"

White Trash Bob. The inimitable, irrepressible White Trash Bob. Gosh, I'll miss living across the street from that man. He's constant entertainment.

Four Projects, Four Weeks: Day 8

2011-03-11T01:11:00.000-06:00

It was a week ago yesterday that I dragged my stressed-out self into the realtor's office and agreed to finish four projects in four weeks so that I can list my house by the first week of April. So how am I doing? Welllll...I'm not sure. I packed up all of my winter clothes (optimistically), my pots and pans and a bunch of kitchen stuff and my cookbooks and moved all that over to AJ's. I cancelled the cable and the internet at my house. I gave my little red microwave to my pal Nita. And every afternoon after I wake up I scrape wallpaper off the front parlor walls before I go to work. Only the wall above the fireplace and the upper half of the east wall of the front parlor still have wallpaper on them. That's good, right?

Or is it? I still haven't even begun to remove the wallpaper from the other parlor. The back bedroom still looks like something from an episode of "Hoarders". Three Christmas trees and four boxes of decorations are still in the basement. The floors are still covered with black glue. And all the other stuff I've accumulated over the past four years is still scattered all over the house. Yikes.

But reinforcements are on the way. My daughter-in-law Sarah has ten days off from work and has offered to help me at the house. AJ is coming over Sunday to patch the holes in the plaster walls of the front parlor. My mom says she'll pack up the eleventy million things I have in my two china cabinets. Nita says she'll come over the last week of March and help me clean. So I am trying to take it just a day at a time and not panic. I still have three weeks to go. I think I can, I think I can...

And I started a new little blog, less about houses and more about life. I hope you'll like Sweet Red Pickles.

For Reals

2011-03-06T04:19:00.000-06:00

First off, I have to say a huge thanks to y'all for all the well wishes and good thoughts in the comments to my last post! It means more to me than you know.

So, having sprung the ~~big~~ ~~huge~~ ginormous news, I thought I ought to tell y'all a little bit about where we go from here. Yes, we. I'm dragging you, my faithful readers and trusty advisors, along with me for the rest of this crazy ride. Truth is, I just couldn't do it without you. For reals.

I knew that, of everyone in the world, it's my blogfriends who would really understand the bittersweet nature of what I'm doing. Yes, I'm sure I have to sell the Kelly House. For reasons I won't get into here, but that are financial and emotional for both AJ and me, it just makes more sense to live in his house. AJ's house is 110 years newer than the Kelly House and it's beautiful. Well, except for that green-and-white gingham wallpaper in the kitchen...that needs to go. And yesterday, when we were standing in the breezeway watching geese fly over, AJ did mention that he'd like to make the patio a bit bigger, brick in the grill, build an island out there and maybe even put in a hot tub...so it does seem quite likely that I'll be moving on to other projects at his house. Which is soon to be our house. It's also quite likely that I'll be writing about those projects in a separate blog.

When I say soon, I mean pretty darn soon indeed. Exactly how soon, I don't want to say just yet because, although AJ and I have a specific date in mind, we haven't shared that date with our kids (his two daughters and my son) and we want to tell them first, of course. Suffice it to say that we'll be getting married during my favorite season of the year...and that my DIY talents aren't limited to house reno, so you just might be hearing about a wedding project or two.

And I'll still be blogging, right here, until the Kelly House sells. I'm hoping that will happen sooner rather than later, but you never know. The house around the corner from mine sold three years to the day from when the for-sale sign first went up in the yard. Three years. Gulp. Pretty scary. Before I can sell my house, though, I have to list it. And before I can list it, I have a couple of teeny-tiny things to finish up. See, shortly after AJ popped the question and I stopped smacking myself in the forehead and muttering "Holy hell, hooo-leee hell!" (well, okay, I still do that, but not 17 times a day any more) the panic about selling my house set in. Oh lordy, who's gonna buy it in the shape it's in? What if I don't even get out of it what I owe on it? Should I finish it all up before I sell it? Should I just stop what I'm doing and run? I had several days of racing thoughts like that before I finally got myself into the office of a realtor I trust with my life (how often can you say that?!) and got some good advice.

That advice boils down to four projects in four weeks. Four projects. Four weeks. Kinda makes your blood run a little cold, doesn't it? First project, finish taking the painted-over wallpaper off the front parlor walls. (I am very nearly done with this.) Second project, same chore in the second parlor/front bedroom. (I haven't even started.) Third project, sand the black glue off the floors and leave 'em bare wood. (I will be happily paying someone else to do that.) Fourth project, get the house spic-and-span and ready for showing. (I am tearful just contemplating that one.) The next several posts will be part of a series titled "Four Projects, Four Weeks: Day [whatever]". Please do come back for those, because I'll need everybody's encouragement and support. When I say I can't do it without y'all, I mean it. For reals.

The Big Thing & The Other Big Thing

2011-03-03T05:34:00.000-06:00

I have begun this post four or five times, discarded what I wrote, and started over. Once I decided not to write a post at all and instead watched the first hour of "The Runaways". (Sadly, I cannot recommend that movie--this from a girl who wanted to be Joan Jett when she grew up.) I debated with myself, a not-very-productive argument. It went something like this: If I tell 'em the big thing, I have to tell 'em the first big thing, and I don't know if I should throw the first big thing out there...but I can't tell 'em one without the other or the whole thing makes no sense. (Makes no sense, kind of like that last sentence...) At last I consulted one of my besties. "Not to sound all Nike or anything," she advised me, "but just do it."

So. Here it is. All of it.

The First Big Thing: I am getting married!

Yes, you read that correctly. Married. Me. Typing it makes my fingers all tingly. I am getting married. Holy crow. I've never been married, so this is uncharted territory for me. You know that feeling when you lean just a bit too far back in a chair and you almost fall but don't? Yeah, that's pretty much how I feel all the time now, every day. And while that might sound like not such a good feeling....trust me, it is. It's the best. That feeling makes me dance in the shower. It makes me laugh out loud while doing something perfectly ordinary like mashing up potatoes for supper. It makes me randomly stop in the middle of what I'm doing to stand, stock-still, and just breathe in and out for a minute and whisper wow....just wow.

Okay. Enough of that mushy malarkey. This is a houseblog, for the love of Pete.

So here's The Other Big Thing: I am selling the Kelly House.

I hope no one hurt themselves falling off the chair after reading that. Really. I hope no one choked on a bit of ham sandwich or an ice cube. Maybe I should've given y'all some warning. Better prepared you. After all, I've had a couple of weeks to wrap my head (and my heart) around the idea and it still freaks me out. See, it's okay to be freaked out. It's even okay to say things like "Oh lordy" and "Are you sure?" because these are, after all, tough times to sell a house. Especially when you never planned to sell that house because you stalked it for years before you bought it and had a five year plan to restore it and just now finished the outside and just now made some real headway on the inside and you thought you'd live in it forever and ever---Excuse me for just a moment while I cry a little, okay?

There. I feel ever so slightly better. It's hard to let go of the Kelly House. AJ (my husband-to-be) knows this. He understands when I get teary-eyed talking about all the work I've done on the house. He is proud of me and what I've accomplished and he knows that, in a very big way, the Kelly House is part and parcel of who I am as a person. To his everlasting credit, AJ has never once said, "It's just a house." He knows that the Kelly House is more than just a house. It's proof of my independence and stubborn determination and grit. He gets that. Which has a lot to do with why I love this man so much.

So, work continues on the Kelly House, though the plan now is a different plan than the one I had even a month ago. More on the new plan as we go along. And, the blog continues as well, for as long as I own the Kelly House. Y'all have been with me this far, so I'll hope you'll stay to see how the story ends.

Sometimes It's Nice

2011-02-23T22:55:00.000-06:00

Sometimes it's nice to help out someone else with their house....but sometimes, it's even nicer not to help at all, and instead just stand back and watch the work that follows the debate. And snap a photo, of course.

This one was taken at my son's house the other morning while the menfolk installed a new front door for Dylan and Sarah. The two men I love most in the world are in this photo: that's my son, Dylan, fartherest (is that a word?) from the door and to his left, my boyfriend Allen. The other two guys in the photo are Allen's brother Larry on the far right and their Uncle Clarence in the checked shirt.

Four men. One door. No effort on my part. Sometimes it's nice.

Odds & Ends

2011-02-17T04:15:00.000-06:00

Super Bowl Sunday I was the designated driver for New Boyfriend and his friends. (And let me clarify that my loathing of football is still intact; therefore, I watched "Love, Actually" at my house for the tenth time while the boys watched the stupid game at someone else's house.) I have a Kia Soul, a car known as The Brave Little Toaster among my friends and which was not designed to haul around two large guys in the back seat. (NB, an average-sized fellow, fits into the front passenger seat quite nicely.) As the guys wedged themselves into the Toaster, one of them grumbled, "Jeez, Jaynie, do you drive this thing or live in it?" The back seat was nearly covered with books, some tools, clothes, plastic containers that once held leftovers, and a couple pairs of boots. And a piece of backsplash.

Yes, backsplash. From the kitchen reno in March of--gulp--2009. I had miscut a piece of backsplash and bought a new piece way back then...and it's been on the back seat of the Toaster ever since. Which means that there was, until yesterday, a big chunk of kitchen wall behind the stove with no backsplash.

Scotty shamed me into action. Yesterday--hey, he shamed me into action but didn't cure me of procrastination!--I dragged all the junk out of the Toaster with the help of my (now-retired) Wingman Randy. Then I measured, cut, and hung the new piece of backsplash. We dug further and found more house-related things in the back seat of the Toaster: the last four cabinet pulls for the kitchen cabinets, my wrecker bar that I'd long thought to be left behind on the roof of the house, the paint chip from when I matched paint to front parlor wallpaper, and two boxes of Keurig K-cups.

The cabinet pulls are now on the cabinet doors. The wrecker bar is in the bottom of the EMS box that I snagged from work in a surplus property giveaway, and my other tools and nails and sandpaper and the like are all neatly organized in the EMS-box-turned-toolbox. (I should mention that it's been sitting empty in my spare bedroom for four years.) The paint chip was taken to Wal-Mart and I brought a gallon of Dutch Boy paint home. Only the K-cups are still not in their proper place, but today I am going to clean out the kitchen pantry. Oh yes, I am.

It feels good to have all those little odds and ends taken care of...not to mention that the Brave Little Toaster is now also the Clean Little Toaster, at least on the inside.

No New News

2011-02-08T14:40:00.000-06:00

Nothin new here. The scraping of painted-over wallpaper in the front parlor continues, now at a breakneck pace. Really. New Boyfriend's sister loaned me her steamer, so now I can continue using one while waiting for the other to warm up. Awesome.

No cool new photos to show you, either. I mean, really, how many times can I post pics of bare plaster walls? It'd be like the 1970s when your Aunt Mamie invited you over to her house to see slides of her trip to Wyoming...the same thing over and over and over....When I start putting up the new paper, or when White Trash Bob and I start putting up the picture rail, then I'll have some photos to post. Happily, I'm slightly past the halfway point in terms of wall area, but not in time because the border takes forever to scrape off. I think it must be attached with some sort of waterproof glue, and it's on top of the 1930s-or-so border, which is on top of the 1930s-or-so wallpaper, so I'm using a utility knife to score through all three layers of paper. Given my history with ladders and utility knives, I'm amazed I haven't yet injured myself. Although, now that I think about it, today's the one-year anniversary of my fall from the ladder in the dining room and the subsequent sticking of the utility knife in the floor....hope I didn't just jinx myself....

Stranded

2011-02-04T00:30:00.000-06:00

I am here. I survived Snowmageddon III, the dumping of snow that the Kansas City area received Tuesday and Wednesday...but not without (minor) incident. (Warning, this is really long...but also at least somewhat funny.)

In the wee hours of Tuesday morning I was doing laundry when my dryer quit working again. (Last time it was the heating element; this time it quit altogether.) I waited until 3:45 a.m. when the New Boyfriend gets up for work to call him and ask if I could use his dryer. Of course I could. "But," he said, "the weather's gonna get really bad, so I'll come get you and then you can use my truck today because it's four-wheel-drive." He showed up a few minutes later, we loaded my laundry into his truck, and we went to his house.  So far, just a few flakes of snow here and there. He left for work with a friend and then, in an appalling lack of common sense on my part, I fell asleep in a big chair while watching the Weather Channel.  Six hours later I woke up to the wind howling and snow coming down so hard I couldn't see the houses across the street. Uh-oh. "Travel is not advised," said Weather Channel Dude. Seriously, uh-oh. It's only a couple miles to my house, I thought, surely I can make it. I packed up my laundry and went out to his garage, fully intending to back the truck out and go home. But when I hit the garage door opener, the door rose to reveal two feet of drifted snow packed against the front of the house. This was about noon. I called AJ. "Stay right where you are," he said. "And go out to the dog pen and let Maddie in the garage." Maddie is his cocker spaniel. I bundled up and went out to the dog pen, where the snow was already drifted as high as the chain link fence. "Maddie!" I called. "Maaaaadiiieee!" No sign of her anywhere. I stomped around the dog pen for ten minutes or so without locating her.

Stranded. At the boyfriend's house. Not exactly miserable conditions. He built the house in 1997, so it's 110 years younger than the Kelly House, it's beautiful, it's cozy warm, and there's cable tv and a pantry full of food. Sadly, there's not a speck of painted-over wallpaper anywhere and absolutely nothing needs fixing. I was bored. By the time he got home I had two loads of his laundry done in addition to all of mine, the kitchen was clean, and I picked up all the beer cans and peanut shells that he and his buddies had left behind in his man-cave. Bored, I tell you. (Incidentally, his needle-nose pliers were nice and clean, too, since I didn't think to check his pockets before I washed his jeans and the pliers did not reveal themselves until they got to the dryer and banged around.)

At some point Tuesday the Governor of Missouri declared a State of Emergency and called out the National Guard. My son called me to tell me they were okay and to let me know that Guard trucks with soldiers were stationed at all the entrance ramps to I-70 to prevent people from getting on the interstate. It was closed both eastbound and westbound from state line to state line, a situation previously unheard of. (Emergency vehicles were allowed through, and the medics at my department told me it was surreal to be the only vehicle on the interstate for miles and miles while transporting a patient to a hospital in Kansas City.)

AJ and the guys he works with burst into the house about 5:30 p.m. (their usual 45-minute trip home having taken twice the time) covered with snow and cussing like sailors. They'd left their trucks in the street and waded through snow ranging from knee-high to chest-high just to get to the house. "Where's the dog?" he asked me. "I couldn't find her," I told him.  He went outside to the dog pen with one of his friends and started calling her. Still no Maddie. Methodically they criss-crossed the dog pen until finally, in the corner, they saw snow moving. Poor Maddie had, at some point, dug a hole into a snow drift and as the snow kept falling and the wind blowing, she'd been sealed inside her little snow cave, invisible to us. AJ scooped her up and took her into the warm garage. Maddie was a very grateful little dog.

"We'll go to your house, shovel the walks, and come back to get you," AJ told me. Twenty minutes later he called me. It had taken them that long to drive the two miles to my house and recon the situation. "Your alley's completely drifted over higher than the bumper on the truck and there's snow up to that little window on the back of your house. We're gonna dig out the front walk and get you in that way." Uh-oh. "Um, AJ? I don't have a key to my front door," I said. He conferred with his buddies. "Hell with it," he said, "we're pickin up some beer and comin back to my house."

Stranded again. With four guys and a case of beer. Worse things could happen, you know?

Wednesday morning, amazingly, the place were AJ works was not closed down, so the guys dug out one of the trucks and left for work. I stayed at AJ's and worried about how I was going to get to work myself. Taking a snow day is not an option when you work at a fire department--we're all essential personnel. I called my boss. "Do the best you can," she said. "Some of us have been stuck at the station for 36 hours, though, so if you have any way of getting here to relieve us please do so." Wednesday night when AJ got home from work he and four other guys set to clearing the snow away from the garage door so he could get his truck out. He drove me to work. After being up since 3:15 a.m. and shoveling about 4 feet of drifted snow off his driveway, this man drove 90 minutes round-trip to take me to work. (Yeah, I know, he's probably a keeper. Or maybe he was just desperate to get rid of me.)

I had packed a bag Wednesday night when I left AJ's house, thinking that I'd have to stay at the fire station Thursday. (I work Wednesday through Saturday this week; AJ's off Friday through Tuesday so he would be able to retrieve me Friday morning.)   Thursday morning at shift change an Assistant Chief appeared in the doorway of the Comm Cave. "C'mon, Jaynie," he said, "I'll give you a ride home." Woo hoo! On the way out to his Command Vehicle (a 4WD Blazer) he told me that it's actually the policy of this department to shuttle its employees to and from work in severe weather. Wow, how awesome is that?!

Thirty minutes later I think the Asst. Chief might have been rethinking that policy when we tried to stop at a traffic light and slid out into the intersection. "Oh my gosh!" he said, "We're sliding, this is us sliding, we're sliding on ice!" We skidded out into the intersection and finally came to a stop. "Holy hell!" I shouted. He laughed. "I'm really glad that truck didn't hit us because that would've been a lot of paperwork," he told me. "And I might've gotten hurt!" I reminded him. "Well, yeah, there is that, too," he admitted.

When we finally arrived at the Kelly House, the City Street Dept. had plowed the alley and someone had cleared the snow from around my car. (I suspect it was my neighbor Darrell, who helped my son dig out half the alley the last time it snowed.) The wind must have blown just right, because the snow in my back yard was only knee-high, so I was able to yank the door open and get inside the house.

Five fur-babies greeted me joyfully. Even Mean Little Marie was glad to see me...probably only because she was running low on kibble, but still. Happily, Libbi had used the potty pads I always leave by the back door, so the mess was minimal. I refilled their food bowls (they hadn't run out of water because I have one of those 5-gallon pet waterers), cleaned the litterboxes, gave each one of them a hug and kiss, and then we all piled into bed. Ahhhhh, back in my own little house. Snowmageddon III has been survived.

Bleah

2011-01-28T01:59:00.000-06:00

From the Soul-cam on the trip home last week

I do not like winter, a fact that I may have previously mentioned one or...oh...a thousand times. I do not like the cold weather or being cooped up in my house for months or the snow-covered streets. I miss baseball season, my front porch, peaches, lightning bugs, going barefoot, and steaks on the outdoor grill. (Okay, I have to stop the list right there, before I start to cry.) I do not like the way all those things affect my attitude for the worse. But what I dislike most of all, I think, is the lack of color in my world during the winter. Bleah. Gray skies, white snow, gray highway, black trees. Bleah. I know, I know...gray and white and black are colors...but not happy colors. There's all this gloominess outside and, for now, there's gloominess inside too. The painted-over wallpaper in the front parlor would make me feel gloomy no matter what color it was painted, but the sickly pale blue is depressing. And when I scrape it off, there are off-white plaster walls underneath. Though I admire the skill of the person who plastered those walls, and there is a certain beauty to them, they're still pretty much colorless. I'm looking forward to seeing that nice new floral wallpaper in the front parlor soon. It motivates me to keep scraping away at what's on there now, and I think I've finally reached the halfway point in that room with the paper removal. I might possibly, just maybe, get the new wallpaper up ahead of schedule. But until then...Bleah.

I Am Jealous

2011-01-20T03:39:00.000-06:00

Tonight, just after I got to work, my phone lit up with a call from White Trash Bob. Y'all may have noticed his absence from this blog--he's been absent from the recent work on the Kelly House, too. I try not to borrow him from Mrs. WTB any more than I need to, and the wallpaper removal, at least, I can do by myself.

It's been Snowmageddon II in these parts the past couple of days, so I assumed he was calling to make sure I got to work okay.

Me: Yes, I made it here without incident.
WTB: Oh, is the weather bad?
Me: You're so funny. Look outside.
WTB: I am looking outside. It's sunny and 71 here. I'm in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Me: Sometimes I almost dislike you. I am jealous. Horribly jealous.

I am jealous because this was the view from my front parlor windows about 4 p.m. Wednesday afternoon. I do not like winter. I do not like snow. Therefore, I am jealous of WTB's basking in the New Mexico sun.

But then WTB asked me what I've been working on these past few weeks and I told him all about taking the old paper off the foyer walls, and then putting the new paper up in the foyer, and my angst over the front parlor paper, and how I am, I estimate, maybe 40% done with taking the paper off the front parlor walls.

"And then what?" he asked.
"And then I ask you kindly if you would please come over and help me put up picture rail, and then I put up the new wallpaper. Two kinds," I said.
"Oho!" WTB said, "Wrong order, my dear. Put up the two kinds of wallpaper first, and then I'll come over and help you put up picture rail."

This is very good news. Very good news indeed. Firstly, it means that I can continue this paper off/paper on roll that I've been on and move straight from tearing off yucky wallpaper to putting up nice new paper. Secondly, it means that I will have much-needed help with the picture rail. I am motivated to work extra-hard on the wallpaper removal on my next days off. But I am still jealous of WTB being in New Mexico.

Crazy House Lady

2011-01-19T03:09:00.000-06:00

Tuesday night I went out for burgers with a really good friend at Westport Flea Market. (Yes, it really is both a burger joint and a flea market and I highly recommend it.) Later, as we sat outside my house talking, Doug suddenly asked me this question:

"You got any kids in this neighborhood, about 7 or 8 years old?"

The question threw me. "I don't think so...." I said. "Why?"

"Cause I was just thinkin..." Doug laughed. "I was just thinkin, if you had some kids in your neighborhood, they'd probably call you the Crazy House Lady, and they'd tell their friends about you: 'There's this lady, she lives in that yellow house, and she is crazy. She's the Crazy House Lady. She never comes out of her house, she just works on it all the time, and there was this one summer that she spent the whole summer just scraping and scraping on this one 3-foot-wide piece of her house..'"

I laughed too. "You don't think people already call me the Crazy House Lady?"

"Probably so, " Doug admitted, "but if you had little kids in your neighborhood it'd be a legend. They'd say stuff like 'She never looked at us or talked to us and one year we had a lemonade stand in the yard across the street and she walked all the way around the block so she didn't have to talk to us.' Stuff like that. They'd tell people that they never saw anybody go in or come out of that house, that you just lived there alone and never quit workin on it for the rest of your life. And then when those little kids grew up they'd drive past here and point out the house to their wives and say, 'That's it! That's where the Crazy House Lady lived!' That's how legends get started, I'm tellin you."

I think I'm glad I don't have little kids in my neighborhood...