Pre-filter, New Doors

So our awesome new powerful pond pump has been pureeing fish and then getting clogged by their sad, lacerated corpses.

Gross.

We've lost both Thor and Jupiter, veterans whom one would have thought had the age and wisdom to... not swim into a sucking vortex of doom.

So I decided to make a crude "pre-filter," as they're called in the pond biz.  I got a cheap black bucket and drilled holes in it using a small keyhole drill bit.  You want to make enough holes to give the pump unimpeded water flow, but not so many that the thing loses all structural integrity.

Ultimately, I'm planning to fill it with very coarse lava rocks to keep out the little fish; but as it is, it will at least keep the big fish, who are larger than these holes, from Vita-mixing themselves.

So far, it seems to be working fine.

Meanwhile, our favorite carpenter, Javier, made us a pair of swinging doors for the living room. We needed to be able to keep the cats in the living room with us without losing air circulation. Matt and I were stumped for years--we though of turning wooden screens into doors, but that's expensive and it's hard to find a design that would harmonize with the house and have small enough holes to keep the cats in. Then one day Matt spotted some decorative aluminum panels at our local hardware store and had a brainwave.

I'll be painting the woodwork and trim, but I think we'll leave the metal as is.  The paint would only flake off, anyway.

The cats are mayhem-prone, so we don't like to let them into the front of the house unsupervised.  But of course, they often run off to the kitchen to counter-surf while we're watching tv, the little hellions. Hence the doors. Now they can't escape bonding with us! Yay!

Thanks to Chuck and Ladonna, whose Christmas present funded these doors.

Floral Purpitude

Purpleness
Busy Memorial Day weekend. I added a bunch of plants to the blue & purple garden, which has hitherto been a bit sparse. I planted
(1) leadwort
(2) society garlic
(3) 'Ophelia' egglplant
(4) 'Twinkle' eggplant
(5) 'Classic' eggplant
(6) mystery plum-colored perennial

The existing plants were
(1) Blue butterfly plant (Clerodendrum ugandense)
(2) white-flowered jasmine
(3) plumbago
(4) Crinum macowanii
(5) young X Chitalpa tree

When we (someday) build an arbor over the kitchen patio, we'll grow skyvine up it, producing even more lovely bluey-purple. It shall be SO serene.

Door Work
So that was Saturday. Sunday I sanded the three antique doors that Javier sized for us. I used 220 on problem areas (stains, bits of paint, &c.) and 600 everywhere else. I used my little hand sander, which really works reasonably well, though it was an undeniably long and tedious process to finish all three doors.

Then on Monday I stained (using a color called "Gunstock," to match the shelves in the study. Sheesh, that name is silly. If the stain could talk, it would say to me, "Wal, howdy ma'am." See? Silly.) The door to the master bed was darker than all the rest when stripped, so it naturally came out darkest when stained. The others are not only lighter, but brighter, so I'm thinking of applying a quick coat of a color I think was called "American Cherry." Inexplicably, it was quite light and distinctly greyish in color (shouldn't a "cherry" stain be dark and red?). I'm hoping that little bit of grey will dull down the orangey red a bit--but only a bit. Best test on the hinge side first.

The varnish will have to await our next paycheck (not to mention a resurgence of motivation). At the moment, the mere thought makes me despair (multiple coats, complete sanding of all sides between coats--faugh!--as medieval knights sometimes say when faced with a particularly foul-breathed dragon).

Even in their incomplete state, though, the doors look ever so handsome. I've always appreciated them as being solidly built, pretty, strong chunks of wood, but it wasn't until I was vacuuming off the dust--painstakingly, inch by inch--that I was really struck by how very solid they are, how smooth and satiny the surface is, how perpendicular all the pieces of wood are, and just in general how very satisfying and admirable the doors are, particularly when you consider that--unlike contemporary doors--they weren't extruded from some machine and steam-molded into a flimsy simulacrum of wood. Some person or people shaped them by hand. And--amazingly--everything fits together and all the angles are square and nothing is warped or caddywhompus. The things some people know how to do.

The Bard
And finally, I witnessed my new favorite Shakespearean reference of the year the other day. Jon Stewart and John Oliver were discussing the expenses abuse scandal in Britain:

JO: I'm from England, Jon. And even mid-scandal, I'm proud of this royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle and its moats, yay, its unwittingly public-funded moats—

JS: You—you’re gonna go Richard II on the moats thing?

JO: Fuck, yeah. Strap in.

Sing it, baby.

5-Panel Doors & Other Interior Excitement

Antique raised 5-panel doors: Installed! Master bed, study closet, bathroom

And Matt said he thought we weren't doing enough on the inside of the house...

Three Doors Hung
Javier the Carpenter installed three of our antique doors today for us: Dottie, Greg, and Ezekial, which are the three raised five-panel doors. Now that they've been trimmed and the hardware applied, we need to stain and varnish them. On the whole, it seemed to go smoothly, but as is always the case with our house, Javier was challenged by its lack of perpendicularity. He hung the doors level, but the frames into which he had to fit them are sort of trapezoidal, which is interesting. This is particularly noticeable in the master bedroom, so he's going to bring a wedge-shaped piece of trim to offset the gap at the top right.

Rimlock Reassembled

The mechanism of the reassembled rimlock. Click for bigness.

Inspired by the general door-related hustle and bustle, Matt finally got the old rimlock that came with the house to work. This took so long (we both worked on it most of the morning), and there is so little guidance on the internet about how to reassemble a rimlock with all its pesky springs that we decided to make a video for the benefit of other DIYers. Matt was the talent. I directed. If Blogger ever succeeds in uploading the darn thing, I'll post it below.

How to Reassemble a Rimlock: The Movie

A side note about the rimlock. There is no company name on this one, but there are numbers. Several of the components are stamped "1085" (or "1035"--hard to tell which), and the back plate is also stamped with an "8." The front plate bears a number "2", and both front and back have these odd braille-y looking marks: eight dots on the back; six dots on the front. Not sure what it means, but is interesting.

Interesting markings on the rimlock

You Have Been Diverted...
In other news, our washer motor went out a week or so ago. We figured we have 3 options: (1) repair it, which Matt thinks would be a waste of money, (2) replace it with a cheapo stop-gap piece o' crap, which seems to me wasteful and galling, or (3) bite the bullet and get one of those fancy-dan front loaders I've been yearning after for ages. Guess which one we (I) chose. (It's good for the environment! Reduces your utility bills! Looks super-sexy!)

There is, however, a wrinkle. The mudroom has always been this weird hybrid. It had a door to the outside, a washer and dryer, a shower, a toilet, a sink, and the water heater. I think it may have been the house's original front entry, which explains why it also has the fancy portico and a sidewalk that dead-ends in the middle of the east yard.

Somewhere along the way, it was demoted from front door to side door, and it was a steady downhill slide from there. The reason for the laundry appliances is clear enough, but I have no idea why an extra bathroom--in the laundry room-slash-mudroom--was necessary. We long ago yanked the toilet and sink in the interest of simply being able to navigate the room, but the shower is still there in a partially assembled state. The old washer is currently sitting in it.

This looks not entirely genteel (by which I mean "is gross" and also "looks icky"), the new washer will need more space, and the shower surround cuts into the room in an utterly gratuitous manner. So now seems like an opportune moment to rip out the shower, clean the scuzz off the walls (it's the one room in our house that has never felt the tender caress of my latex-laden brush), paint, and generally try to make the place look less likely to incubate the latest variant of swine flu or SARS or bird flu or whatever the CDC's flavor of the month happens to be. Because right now, there's a deeply ground-in, decades-old grodiness that no mere mop or broom can vanquish.

We were going to try to hit a daylily open house tomorrow, but I think we'd better spend that time on the laundry room instead. The laundry project also pre-empts any staining, gutter-hanging, bermudagrass-fighting plans we had. Resources hastily re-allocated. Attention re-focused. Vision re-imagineered. We used laundromats for years. No way they genie's going back in that grimy, over-priced, time-sucking bottle with uncomfortable plastic chairs.

Paint-Intensive

Some posts I have more difficulty being sprightly than others. I'm tired, I'm grumpy, and the universe is exhibiting a certain lack of sparkle that I am incapable of manufacturing on my own.

This may be one of them. Sorry for the lack of sprightliness. I'll try to be more interesting next go round.

In the interim, what we have here is more on the order of a report.

Item the First: More Fascia.
We bought some exterior paint (aside: Lowe's has already discontinued the paint color--Dune Breeze--that we used on our interior trim. There are colors that are almost identical, but they have different names. What purpose does this serve exactly? "Golden Beam," for example, has been replaced by--I kid you not--"Gilded Endive"--because what could be more reasonable than applying molten gold to a salad green? Anyway, I get the allure of the nonsensical new name, but I actually, oddly, choose my paint colors based on the color, not the name. End digression.) and some new pieces of fascia to replace the rotten fascia behind the defunct gutters.

Item the Second: Paint the Fascia.
I primed the new bits of lumber and painted everything the new shade of faintly lemony white ("Betsy's Linen," it's called. This name brings to mind the story of the origin of the color "isabelline," a short of yellowish taupe. Princess Isabelle's dad, King Somebody of Somewhere went off to war, and in a gesture that is distressing from both a Freudian and a hygienic perspective, the princess swore not to change her underclothes until he returned. The war dragged on, and isabelline is supposedly the color her underwear was by the time her father returned, years later. Story is almost certainly apocryphal, but still: Ew. Moral: don't name yellowish things using words that are synonymous with "underwear."). We now have enough lumber for one long and one short side of the house.

Item the Third: Scrape the antique closet doors. Again.
Cleaning the last remaining traces of paint from the corners of 2 of our antique doors is taking FOREVER. For-FREAKIN-ever. That old paint was formulated with kryptonite or something. I'm using the gel paint remover that turns to a powdery solid when it's done lifting the paints, and we're scraping it out of the crevices with a metal spackling spatula and these little stiff-bristled brushes. Basically, imagine us vigorously and repeatedly scrubbing every inch of the trim with toothbrushes until the caked-on paint remover gives way. Fun, no?

The good news is that I finally stumbled upon a Technique. DIYers, take note:
When clearing crevices with a spackling spatula, do NOT hold spatula parallel to the door itself--much too easy to accidentally pare off pits of trim that way. Instead, hold spatula perpendicular to door and pull towards self. Spatula is much less likely to jump from one crevice to another and less likely to damage wood.

Item the Fourth: Paint kitchen door.
You may remember that we had to install a new kitchen door during the Weatherstripping Surge. Sadly, it was filthy and painted forest green on the inside and beige on the outside. Have been meaning to paint it for weeks now--since I was already in my special painting outfit and had a paintbrush full of paint, it seemed like time to divert that road to hell that I'd been paving and take care of the darn thing.

All in all, a profitably spent day, but now I'm backachey and funny smelling and--inexplicably, as I was in the workshop most of the time--I feel sunburned to boot. Bleh. I'm going to shower and go to bed. Perhaps tomorrow--while tackling 4 or 5 major cooking projects--I'll feel more chipper. Peace out.

Whaddaya know? The weather outside IS frightful!

We had a really lovely weekend, temperature-wise. In the sixties and seventies, with a lively, brisk wind blowing. Last I checked the wunderground, they were predicting more of the same, if slightly cooler, all week. Imagine my feelings when I stepped outside this morning in capris and a short-sleeved shirt to discover it was below freezing, with a wind chill at something like 12 degrees. 12 degrees Fahrenheit, I might add.

And I'm afraid I didn't even enjoy the weekend weather like I should have. I got caught up in a round of indoor activities. I've been stripping the paint out of the corners of some of our antique doors (we finally got an estimate from carpenter Javier for resizing and installing all 6 doors--ouchie! Will have to save up for that project). You may recall that we had all 6 dipped and stripped at the local antique refinishers in downtown Elgin. However, the three skinnier doors had very persistent coats of paint, and extra hand stripping is required to clean out the trim. This takes much, much longer than you would have ever thought, and apparently requires 2 coats. Bother, bother, bother. So far, I've worked on one side of one door. I'm using a paste that turns blue and dry when it's ready to be scraped off, which at least minimizes the mess somewhat.

I also worked on a special craft project for Christmas (in addition to proper store-bought presents--I'm not Laura Ingalls Wilder--I don't expect my recipients to be satisified with the equivalent of an orange and a rug made out of rags.) I can't go into details, but I found myself in the scrapbooking supply section of Hobby Lobby for the first time. My, there were lots of flower-shaped decals! However, I flatter myself that my offerings are sufficiently Horrid as to subvert any overweening cuteness from the scrapbook aisle. Horrid, but fabulous.

And I worked on Christmas cookies. I made macarons for the first time (first time eating them, too. Not sure what possessed me. A sort of gastronomic keeping up with the Joneses, I think. Macarons are apparently all the rage this season.) Fidgetty little blighters. One batch turned out picture perfect. The second batch, baked on parchment instead of silplat, and having sat for about 15 minutes before baking, were wrong in apparently all the ways a macaron can go wrong. No "feet," cracked surface, too lumpy and rounded, and chewy inside. Then, per the recipe, I made a disasterous filling called Italian buttercream , which is prone to separating and melting and is also too sweet. So out of the whole fiasco, I got about 8 cookies that are gift-worthy: 4 for my boss and 4 for my cleaning lady. Fortunately, the pralines I made with pecans given us by Mr. Marek turned out just dandy.

Right

Wrong

Finished product. Only the ones with the chocolate ganache filling are giftable. Chocolate never lets me down.

Those Who Cannot Remember the Past...

For some reason, I've been dallying with TileDoc again, the maddening epoxy product that is, apparently, designed to cover one's bathroom surfaces in a perpetual layer of foul-smelling sticky white goo. You may remember my many struggles to re-finish our guest pedestal tub (for the full, harrowing account, see previous entries "In Which I Inhale a LOT of Epoxy," "Tub, Shelves, Groundcloth, &c. &c.," and "Success! At Last!").

The problems with TileDoc are 2-fold: 1) it goes on best when aerosolized, which is difficult to accomplish without a power sprayer and air compressor, and 2) it only actually dries when it's applied during a full moon when Uranus is in the House of Leo and the solar winds are unusually high. Or something. The not-drying problem is, itself, 2-fold: a) you must measure the two components very, very, very accurately (I recommend filling a pyrex measuring cup with 1/4c of water, pouring the water into the intended epoxy receptacle--such as an old salsa jar--and marking the water level with a sharpie. Repeat with a 2nd quarter-cup of water so that you have 2 sets of markings on your jar. Then pour the clear, sticky stuff first to the first line and the white, opaque stuff to the second line. but given my success rate, you may not particularly care to take my advice.) And b) you must coat the surface with the faintest possible sheen of the stuff. This latter can be extraordinarily difficult to do. I have no advice for you on this subject, other than Be strong!

Anyway, I've embarked on this dubious endeavor because I just can't stand the stupid grey tile backsplash above our sink one second longer. We got the bathroom looking more or less genteel and tamed--at least if you squint--and the anomalous backsplash really wrecks our groove.

Note the pointlessness of the grey backsplash

Also, we have guests coming at the end of May, and I'd like to hide our tessellated shame. We haven't the resources (cojones?) to do anything about the much larger expanse of hideous grey tile (and its repulsant sidekick, Moldy Old Caulking) in the shower surround, but we DO have an opaque shower curtain, so that problem's handled. It was time, however, to take care of business where the backsplash was concerned.

So I painted the stuff on with a brush about 4 hours ago. It's still tacky (in both senses--it will need at least 2 coats to adequately hide the grey), which strikes me as a bad sign. On the other hand, it's drier than it was before, so perhaps there's hope?

Oddly enough, the corrosive, chemical odor of the epoxy made me feel strangely nostalgic. The human subconscious--or at any rate, my subconscious--works in very, very peculiar ways.

New TV
...And on to things that do work. Mom & Dad just got the New Hotness in terms of TVs, and they kindly gave us their old TV, the Old Hotness, which, by Matt's & my standards, is an utter leviathan and a fancy one at that (back off, would-be thieves--it's about 15 years old and weighs more than Mount Rushmore. You've never be able to get it out of the house. Plus it's not digital-compatible.) They also gave us an entertainment center to put it in (nice parents!), which is also no featherweight. Many people, including hired help, a benevolent neighbor, and my brother, combined their efforts to extract the units and get them into and out of our Jeep and trailer.

In any event, it's now reposing in electronic glory in the den, plugged in, re-programmed, and ready to go. Thanks to its superior antenna, we now get two PBSes, two CBSes, and (¡que suerte!) four Spanish channels. We watched a DVD on it last night, and everything was all crisp and lovely and, you know, big. No more squinting to read subtitles.

The funny thing is that we haven't figured out what to do about the old TV, so we are now not merely a four-TV family, but we have a two-TV living room. And in case you wanted a quick headcount, the residents here are (1) me, (2) Matt. In our defense, 1 TV is halfway dysfunctional and lives in the garage, 1 is our wee little kitchen TV, and 1 is the usurpee, probably fated to take up residence in the crawlspace under the stairs. Still. 4 TVs. 2 people. Livin' the Costco lifestyle, my friends.

For a truly immersive multimedia experience

Other Long-Term Projects
But what, you may be wondering, happened to the porch swing (meant to be our Valentine's Day present) How about those antique doors and knobs? The shade patio? The hedge of mutabilis roses to replace those scraggy abelia? The other hedge to hide Mr. Ugly Car and his opprobrious cohabitants? Quick summary:

(1) The bolts that I bought for reconstructing the porch glider are too short for the thicker pipes (part of the dismembered hurricane fencing from the back yard) that we're using to replace the rusty original supports. So I need to trek out to Austin Bolt Company, whom I utterly adore but whose hours of operation are problematically short, and exchange them. But the frame is rustoleumed and ready to go, and the new red oak slats are stained and varnished with 3 coats of spar urethane for protection.

(2) "Greg," the last of our new (old) doors is at Elgin Furniture Refinishers getting stripped. Next time we're in town during their operating hours (probably next Sat), we'll pick him up. We need to get in touch with Javier (the dude who built our lovely shelf/drawer unit in the study) to get his estimate for sizing and hanging them. I suspect that he's been hesitant to call us because it'll be a fair pfennig. Ouch.

(3) Re the shade patio (for latest pix, see "The Patio, & More Flower Pictures"), Mom & Dad very nicely gave us some ooftish for our 5th Anniversary (yesterday--Happy Anniversary to us!), which we will take to Lowe's to convert into metal edging. We'll install it around the current configuration of pavers, lift up the stones, and put down some sand. We may have enough from the old sandbox on the property, or we may have to buy a few bags. Then we'll reinstall the pavers and cap them off with a little cement.

(4) Re the mutabilis hedge (meant to stand at the head of the driveway and give our back yard a little privacy), well, the two roses we planted last year are doing nicely. But there's a huge gap in between them where we need to plant 3 more, so we'd be flattering it if we even described it as "spotty." The four abelias remain in their original locations for the time being. It would probably be foolish to move them this late in the year. We're going to plop them around the shade patio, but if a few croak, there are plenty of nicer shrubs we can substitute in (especially oak-leaf hydrangea and American beautyberry). Even so, I'd feel kind of slummy about killing all four. So the abelia relocation is postponed. But I'm willing to plant mutabilis as late as June of this year (it's that rugged), so we may at least get that part going soonish.

(5) Mr. Ugly Car's hedge--Matt was given some second-hand primrose jasmine (Jasminum mesneyi), so we've planted a line of them inside our property line. They're puny now, but we plan to water and fertilize the bejeezus out of them, so hopefully they'll be quite sizable next year. Primrose jasmine makes a rather massive fountain of light-colored evergreen foliage. I don't actually think they are the absolute best choice in landscape design terms--they look too much like the grass below and the ash above in color and even leaf shape, and they don't have a lot of definition--but they smell delicious and they'll accomplish our primary goal. And they were free, which is one of my favorite adjectives ever.

The Porch Swing Project, Bookshelves, and Miscellany

A New Cafe in Elgin
I am particularly pleased to note the opening of a new cafe/sandwich shop/ice cream parlor on Main St.: Cafe Nirvana (or Nirvana Cafe? not sure which). I am unhappy to report that, like every other business in Elgin, it's closed on Sundays. Apparently, while I am desperately roving the streets of Elgin, looking in vain for coffee, books, newspapers, pharmaceuticals, and antiques, the rest of the community is sitting silently at home reading the Good Book and, I don't know, tatting or something.

Cafe Nirvana (Nirvana Cafe?)

Anyway, we finally made it during operating hours, and it's really nice inside--small space, but high ceilings, lots of light, cool stone floor, exposed brick walls--just very nice and up-to-date and chic. It has free WiFi! The sandwiches and smoothies were fine, though the ciabatta was disappointingly soft (note to America: ciabatta is crusty, people. It's not Italian for "hamburger bun.") But all in all, it was a very respectable alternative to the rancid grease we've been treated to repeatedly at City Cafe. We still like El Maguey (and their margaritas), but one can only eat enchiladas so many times per month. Now we can vary it with sandwiches every now and then.

Window Work
Last weekend we finally did some long-deferred work on our windows. We scraped paint off the inside of the panes in the front of the house, which makes a surprising difference to how the rooms feel. I scraped so hard, I broke a window pane. I am Woman. Fear me. (Not to worry--I just caulked the broken piece back in place--I may be violent, but at least I'm resourceful.)

Matt & a partially scraped window. He didn't break anything.

And I used cement patching to cap the stones on the front window. When we moved in, this window had a piece of 2x4 wrapped (inexplicably) in a disgusting old pillowcase on the exterior sill. I think it was meant to keep water from seeping between the stones and the house as the stone-installing people neglected to cap this window off (unlike all the other windows).

I had assumed that the cement patching would dry to a nice, neutral whitish-grey, like most cement in the known universe. Not so. It dried to the vivid deep grey you see below. Will have to paint that some day. Not anytime soon, though.

My first stab at stone masonry

Progress on the Bookshelf Front
Meanwhile, we had a second meeting with Javier to clarify the style of drawer front we're looking for. That went great--we met him at his shop and saw more of his work and feel very good about the quality of his workmanship and his reliability. The surprise is that he's going to start Mon. and expects to be done by Friday! Yeep! I was expecting another pay cycle between now and the completion of the project. So the next week and a half shall be rife with Ramen and frugality.

This is where the bookshelves will go.

Happy Valentines to Us
Meanwhile, to keep from getting bored, we've started another project. We're rehabilitating the rotten old porch swing that came with with house. It's to be our Valentine's present to each other. It is also going to be stained red (with white metal), but that's just a coincidence. We'd still be staining it red even if it were a Mardi Gras present. I like red.

We thought, well here's a nice cheap little mini-project we can do as an inexpensive yet enjoyable present to each other. It'll cost, what, 40 bucks? We'll just buy some wooden slats, stain and varnish them, and screw them in place. Badda bing.

Not bloody likely. We paid $80 for the wood alone. And of course, once we starting really taking apart the swing, we discovered that the frame for the swing (not the stand, fortunately, just the swing) had rusted through in several placed. So there's also the cost of buying a long piece of steel pipe that Matt will have to cut, procuring a pipe bender from his work, cutting, bending, and drilling the pipe, as well as the cost of the stain, varnish, and new hardware (which we'll have to buy at Austin Bolt Company rather than Lowe's because Lowe's doesn't carry the right kinds of bolts nor wholes boxes full of acorn nuts.

So we really could have saved ourselves a lot of time and probably a bit of money* if we'd just bought a brand-new porch swing and thrown this one away. However, we used Texas red oak for the wood, and we're going to rustoleum the hell out of the metal, so perhaps we'll end up with a slightly better quality item in the end. And, you know, Al Gore would be proud. Reduce, reuse, recycle, right?

The pitiable condition of the swing--rusted and stained with algea.

Matt examines the rust holes glumly.

The stand, while rust-stained, doesn't have any holes and is still solid. Matt scrubbed off the algae preparatory to a thorough spraying.

Red!
The new wooden slats for the swing.

Shade Patio Pre-Groundbreaking
We're also getting started on the shade patio. This is going to be a long, slow process. We'll need to level the ground at least a little, put down metal edging, put down sand, place the pavers, then brush a dry cement into the crevices. Today we did a trial run of the central medallion thingy to figure out how big it will be and where the different components will go.

Here are all the pavers we've got.

A lot of pavers

And here's the central design of our patio-to-be.Trial run of the pavers

Flossie Returns
And finally, we picked up Flossie this weekend from Elgin Furniture Refinishers.

Flossie, all scrubbed and clean

Interestingly, Flossie turned out much lighter and brighter than Edith. I wonder if Edith hadn't been stained at some point, while Flossie was merely painted. you can kinda see the difference in the closeup below--Edith is in the back and Flossie's in the front (click on the pic to view full size).

Edith & Flossie

We dropped off Poindexter, too, so soon we'll be finished with all three of the new painted doors. Next will be either our 2 original doors that came with the house or else the stained 5-panel doors that Mom & Dad bought us. As the latter will be a little cheaper, which ones we start on next may come down to budget.


*Okay, maybe we couldn't have saved money by replacing the glider. I just did a quick web search, and the cheapest glider I could find was $250; the vast majority were between $400 and and eyeball-popping $1,200. Huh. Let's hear it for the Al Gore Way! Reduce! Reuse! Recycle!

Edith Returns; So Does Mr. Ugly Car

Naked Came Edith
We sent Edith off to Elgin Furniture Refinishers to be dipped and stripped. Edith is one of the tall, narrow, painted antique doors that we'll be using for our closets. We retrieved Edith today and sent off Flossie in her place. The cost only came to about $56 each, so it was definitely worth it when you consider the time it would have taken to strip the many layers of paint off by hand.

That's Edith as she originally looked on the left; stripped, on the right.

She turned out handsomely, though the refinishing guy told us she was made of pine, not mahogany. Bit of a downer, that, but she'll still make a very attractive, period-appropriate addition to the house (and I was a little doubtful about the mahogany claim). We'll need to get the paint out of the crevices ourselves (the guy recommended using a dental pick), then hire a carpenter to cut the doors to size, then sand, stain, and varnish them. Then we'll install the hardware and get a carpenter to hang them.

Edith, closeup

So this project could go on for a while.

A complicating factor is that we can't seem to find a bloody carpenter anywhere in Elgin. We have an immediate need for one to make us some built-in shelves in the study (for which Chuck & Ladonna gave us a very generous Christmas present). So far, the only people I've come across are affiliated with "design studios" and cabinetry shops. As you might imagine, these people are well outside of our price range ($3,500 for a bookshelf?!?). I don't need a shop, fer cryin out loud--I need a dude with a tool belt and a saw. So the search continues.


Mr. Ugly Car: 1, Plucky 1st-time Homeowners: 0
Meanwhile, the Battle of the Buick drags on. I may or may not have mentioned that for a while Mr. Ugly Car appeared to have moved out. We thought: divorce! Hurrah! No more hideous Buick! But then he moved back in (and brought his sofa with him). Not good. Once more various cars were parked on our property, wearing ruts in our sod and flipping us the metaphorical bird. But then we hadn't seen him for a while and last weekend some of the women of the house apparently summoned the cops. We though: Restraining order! Excellent! (Not to seem to bloodthirsty: no one appeared in any way damaged during the cop-summoning incident). But now he's back, parked in our yard again, and what's worse, he's been leaving Corona bottles at the base of our Chinese tallow!

The vile handiwork of Mr. Ugly Car

There's a cache of about 4 or 5 empty bottles nestled at the base of the tree where he parks. From this, we must deduce that he knocks back a bottle or two on the way home, doesn't want the Old Lady to know about it, and as a genial 'fuck you' to Matt and me, stashes the evidence in our yard.

What sort of knuckle-dragging barbarian does these things?!?

We ♥ Mother Earth; Mother Earth ♥s Us
Incidentally, we only found out about the Coronas because we finally decided to attack the east side of the house. The pecans and the cottonwood have been shedding like mad--there was a 6-inch crust of leaves covering most of the east yard. There was no point raking until the trees were bare--our yard is huge; it's not the sort of thing you want to do more than once per year. Now that it's January, we figured it was time. So I started dragging off branches (cottonwoods drop branches like you wouldn't believe) and Matt raked. Thus the Corona bottles.

A happier by-product is that the leaves inspired Matt to make a compost heap. It's the sort of thing all gardeners ought to have, but we haven't been able to before now (because of renting, apartment-dwelling, &c.) He knocked it together in no time out of spare fencing components from the partial dismantlement of the hurricane fence. Clever Matt! We're so green! (Go to our next entry and scroll to the bottom to see the compost heap in action)

So today we transport the 5 metric tons of leaves from the side yard to the compost bin. Yeehaw.

Snapshots of Winter in Elgin

The baby Bur Oak Mom & Dad gave us. Check out the fall/winter color!

Glass slag hanging from the gazebo. We get our slag (yes, we have a slag habit) from The Living Desert on Hwy 71, SW of Austin.

Our big, old, not very productive, but venerable pecan.

A little bit of New Orleans in Elgin--I made two king cakes with cream cheese filling (1 for work, 1 for us). I had to make my own purple using blue sprinkles mixed with a lot of red food color. Turned out pretty freakin' awesome, if I say so myself--tender, moist, sweet--YUMMY.

New (Old) Doors!

This post has been a while coming. A couple of weeks ago, Mom & Dad took us to the big antique show at Round Top. It's an annual event that attracts vendors from all over the US, who rent tent- and hall-space in the fields around the tiny hamlet of Round Top.

Our goal was 2-fold: to find some antique doors and door knobs to begin replacing the hideous and dinky modern doors at Chez M, and to get a little education about armoires, which we will hopefully be buying next year. (We don't have anything like enough closet space in the master bed, so Matt's been storing his clothes in a hand-me-down Elfa unit in the hall. It's bohemian-industrial-yuppie chic.)

Imagine our surprise and delight when Mom & Dad called to tell us that they'd gone up to Round Top early, scouted around, and already found a whole set of doors that matched the style and measurements we sought. They also learned some stuff. For example, the two remaining original doors in the house (the mudroom door and the study door) are raised 5-panel doors. This helps to date them, say the antique guys, because doors with 5 panels that don't have a raised rectangle in the middle are characteristic of a slightly later period. Our doors, they say, date from ~1903-1907. Yet another tantalizing piece of data about our home's age! Mom & Dad also offered to buy the lot for us as an early Christmas present, which made us happier still.

The doors Mom & Dad found are varnished and made of pine. They're really in pretty good shape--we'll need to strip, sand, and paint them, but on the whole, they're beautiful doors--so much so that I'm tempted to re-varnish them instead of painting, only then they wouldn't match any of the trim or woodwork in the rest of the house. I named them Dottie, Greg, and Ezekiel.

(We're like a university--if you give us goodies, we'll name them after you. [Ezekiel isn't named after anyone--it just sounded like a turn-of-the-century sort of name to me.] So we've also got The Dottie & Greg Ulrich trellis, The Aunt Pauline and Big David paint jobs, The Chuck Vest outlets, and The Ladonna Vest valances. Matt & Bianca gave us a very generous Lowe's card when they came up to visit, so we're probably going to add The Matt and Bianca sawhorses to the collection tomorrow.)

Dottie, Greg, and Ezekiel

Three of our door frames were too small for most 5-panel doors, according to the antique guy. He said the size we were looking for didn't become common until later, when door styles had changed. As the doors go to our built-in in the bedroom and the hot water closet--all later additions--this isn't surprising.

He did, however, have 3 mahagony (!) doors from the 1920s from an old hotel in Columbia, South Carolina. These were in a different style, but they did fit the frames. Meet Pointdexter, Edith, and Flossie.

Poindexter, Edith, and Flossie

We also really cleaned up on door knobs. We found complete matching sets of steel plates and knobs for the 5-panel doors, and we got some crystal knobs (I do love crystal knobs--they were positively sparkling in the sun when I took these pictures) to go with the plates that came with the hotel doors. I especially like that combination--the plates have a charming Edwardian flourishiness--not the full-on Victorian ornateness, but definitely plenty of art nouveau flair.

Poindexter's plate

You'll notice, as well, that two of the knobs are a match set, which is kind of nifty. We could have gotten a third that also matched, but I was drawn to a slightly more curlicue version (middle below) that we'll be using in our bedroom. Matching is overrated, anyway.

Steels knobs and plates, along with crystal knobs and assorted hardware

Dad has compounded his kindness by offering to do the restoration work on the hardware, which will entail polishing them on a wheel and putting a protective finish on them. As we have plenty of toilet-installing, edging, mulching, and electrical work to keep us busy over the next several months, we were more than happy to turn the goodies over to him.

Ooooo! Sparkley knobs!

In other news, Matt successfully pulled down the rest of the chinaberry yesterday--its defeated corpse lies in pieces all over the back yard. As it fell, it sent bushels of half-rotten fruit flying, with the result that our side yard smells like putrid apples. Truly disagreeable trees, chinaberries, in life and in death.

Vital Stats

There are a number of, well, numbers that I'm going to need to be able to access as I make purchases for the house. Just so I always have them handy, I'm going to put them here.

In addition, I'd appreciate it if my friends and relatives who like antiquing could keep an eye out for antique 5-panel doors (doesn't have to be oak--fir or pine is just fine) for us. Our house came with one original 5-panel door (at right), a smaller, plainer version that leads to a closet, and another 5-panel door that had been modified to hold a glass pane where two of the panels used to be. The rest of the doors in the house are a uniform hideous cheapness--dinky little hollow things that feel like they're made of cardboard. Why anyone would replace a lovely, solid-wood door with that ghastly flimsiness, I cannot guess. Anyway, we'd like to replace them back again.

I'll put the dimensions we're looking for below. If you come across any for a reasonable price (less than $90--I've even seen them for as low at $55 online), I'd be very grateful if you'd give me a call. We probably won't be able to afford more than one at a time, so this will be an ongoing project.

Similarly, we're looking for nifty antique door knobs. This house, which has 8 interior doors downstairs, has only 1 original doorknob (see left). We adore old doorknobs--so much personality!--so we'd like to replace the dismal modernities with something a little older and more interesting.

I'm not very picky about these, just so long as they're old and don't have paintings of pheasants on them. They don't need to match each other or anything. I do prefer dark metal finishes, however. The house is from ~1910-1920, so knobs from the early 20c would be ideal. I don't think we'd want to pay much more than $35 for a door knob. Again, if you see anything you think I'd like, please let me know. Thanks antiquers!



Master bath hardware: 8 knobs, 2 pulls

Air intake vent - 14 x 30"

Bathmat - max. 40.5" w


Baseboards
Dining room - ?

Kitchen - ?

Master bed - ?

Study - ?

Master bath - ?

Guest room - ?

Guest bath - ?