Trellis Half Done

You may recall (or possibly not) that our house had, inexplicably, two breaker boxes: the main one in the mudroom and an ancillary breaker box in the crawlspace that was only reachable by wriggling all the way under the house. Not only is that (a) stupid and annoying and (b) unsafe, but (c) the box didn't even work, which meant that the pond, greenhouses, and sundry indoor outlets also didn't work.

So, subsidized by the New Job, we hired an electrician to sort this out, install a ceiling fan on the porch, and add some exterior outlets. Oh, and put in a front doorbell. The fan turned out great, and the exterior outlets are both exterior, and outlets, which I think is all one can ask. The front doorbell... I bought it cheap(ish) from a Home Depot that's closing, and I didn't get to hear what it sounds like before buying. But the description was all Deluxe, so what could go wrong? I mean, the thing plays something like 65 different sounds. Yeah.

Only after the electrician installed the thing did we discover that it has this awful electronic sound--like a ringtone from 2001. On top of that, every one of its 65 sounds is utterly inappropriate, from "Feliz Navidad" to "Dixie." We've basically installed the doorbell version of the Walmart Singing Fish. And on top of that, no matter which sound we set it on, the ridiculous thing always defaults to "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." Two less sporty people than Matt & me you could never hope to find, so this is especially cringe-inducing.

Matt & I were out of town this weekend for his brother Pete's wedding. Pete & Christi were married in an old church in Chappell Hill, which had a lovely ambiance. Matt's posting his pictures from the wedding (url to be added later). I got to spend some time with Ladonna's sister, Denise, and her best friend, Lucy, both of whom were absolutely delightful people.

Then on Sunday we stopped at the Antique Rose Emporium on the way out of town (where Matt & I used to work and, in fact, first met). The gardens are more expansive and mature than ever, which is nice, though they've rearranged the roses in a way that is more user-friendly to the average buyer, but is a little less precise, from the perspective of the dedicated rose fancier. We picked up 4 roses ('Climbing Cecile Brunner', 'Climbing Old Blush,' and 'Mme Alfred Carriere' for the gazebo; 'Souvenir de la Malmaison' because it's a gorgeous old thing), a deep purply curcuma called 'Raspberry Ginger,' and the crinum 'Claude Davis.'

Souvenir de la Malmaison

Glad to be home, though. Weddings can be a bit exhausting for an introvert like me.

Now that, uh, the check's cleared on the electrical work, we can turn our attention back to the trellis.

We put the antique fence pieces the Ks gave us as a house-warming present on top and the hog/goat/whatever-wire that came with the house as the bottom panels.

The trellis, in all its (half-completed) glory

The hardest part so far has been sawing through the wire and doing the math to figure out how everything fits together. You can see that the wire fencing is quite thick. We used up three reciprocating saw blades on this project--wore them down to completely toothless smoothness.

Wire fencing--very, very hard to cut, even with a reciprocating saw

Defunct reciprocating saw blade--click image to see full size.

We had to use 2 x 6s because the antique panels are wider than the hog/goat/whatever-wire panels--the wider frame compensates for the difference.

And we're sticking the whole thing together with these metal flange/bracket thingies (sorry to be so vague--no idea what their proper name is). You can see Matt screwing one on below.

Matt screws on the brackety-flanges

We've got one side done, and will hopefully finish the rest soon. Compared to all the tiresome sawing and multiplying and adding we had to do on this project, screwing in metal flange-brackets is really pretty speedy.

Last item: 'Ducher,' the only white China rose, has started blooming. It's the nicest, softest sort of lemon-chiffon-white color (not, frankly, well-represented by the picture below, but I'm too tired to try to photoshop it into shape).

'Ducher' rose.

Prettifying

This weekend we squeezed in some long-awaited prettification.

We bought some baseboards for the master bedroom. Unlike the front rooms of the house, with their 9" plank baseboards, the back rooms don't require freakishly tall moldings. Since planks-as-moldings have some significant problems (they're hard to cut straight and they're weirdly thick), we wanted to go with more traditional baseboards here.


As you can see, thanks to some holes and other imperfections in the walls, we did still need some height. And the fact that the ceilings are so high means that we need baseboards that are in scale. Below are the boards we ended up with. I think Matt's right that they're a little too elaborate for the style of our house, but there weren't any other >4 1/2" options.


We ran into difficulties cutting these boards, too--they're too tall for our miter saw, and, we realized, we're going to have to bite the bullet and replace a crunched piece of wallboard before trying to install baseboards there. As a result, we got exactly 2 pieces of baseboard nailed in; the rest to be added later after corrections and modifications have been made.

Death to Preval
I found the two missing air vents (master bed and study), so I decided to spray them to match the ceiling, as I had done with our other 5 vents. I got out my trusty Preval paint sprayer and... nothing came out. Change canister, repeat... nothing. Thin paint further, change canister, repeat... nothing. Blow out the plastic straw, disassemble the cartridge, and scrape out all orifices with a twig, repeat... nothing.

I know I've said it before, but this time the iron has entered my soul. No more Preval today, no more Preval tomorrow, no more Preval forever. The product is a menace. I ended up painting the vents with a brush, which of course means a thicker and more texturey finish than a metal air vent ought to have. Next time I need to convert a paint to spray, I'm going the whole hog and buying a sprayer and air compressor.

(Note: for the benefit of any Feds who may be trolling the backwaters of the internet in search of potential domestic terrorists, I meant "Death to Preval" in the rhetorical-flight-of-fancy sense, not in the stockpiling-fertilizers-and-disassembled-cell-phones sense. Peace, out.)

Bit... by... bit...

Matt installed our new fixture in the bathroom. It's brushed nickel--so nice! And it matches our new facet, our stylish drawer pulls, and the frame we bought empty that will someday hold a mirror (picture to come later).

We still need to buy glass shades for the fixture, a mirror for the frame, a vent/light combo, and to refinish the tub. I'm kind of amazed at the quantity of work we've lavished on the bathroom. How, after this much money, energy, and love, the thing has the nerve to not be finished, I'll never know.


Here Matt is after having moved the electrical box. You can see the white strip where the hideous old wooden bar of "Hollywood-style" lights used to be. (By "old," I mean from 1985. Not "old" in the sense of charming, quaint, or delightful.)

Weed barrier!
While he was wrestling with that (and an intransigent project it turned out to be--apparently, the colors of the wires are all wrong, making hooking them up a real challenge) I worked on putting down more weed barrier. Our gazebo is ultimately going to have an herb & wildflower bed around it. For the moment, it's mostly just got the ratty leftovers of the rest of the garden--the sickly Will Flemings we brought from Wolverton, a pitiful convalescent Climbing Peace (we don't even like hybrid teas) and a miscellaneous collection of sulky rosemary and reject peppermints and lemon balms from Matt's old nursery.

Hopefully, the weed barrier will give a little assistance to some of our weaker plants. If nothing else, it will keep the area a little tidier until we can begin to work it properly. Next spring: larkspur, poppies, basil, and oregano!


We also have a half-hearted little bed with a few roses by the light pole. I weed-barriered that, too, just to tide it over until we can really kick it into shape.


Finally, here's Matt's little hobby greenhouse, built right on top of our horrible oubliette.

Incredibly Productive Weekend

The Vests came up to lend a hand around the house, and my word! they put the kaibosh on--well, lots of stuff, actually.

Super-chic Minimalist Valances
Ladonna helped (we're loosely defining "helped" here as "did all the work while Melanie looked on and occasionally said, 'Can I do anything?'"--a role that suited me down to the ground. NB: In my defense, I did make breakfast--mmmm, migas with homefries!) turn the red cotton/linen panels from our old kitchen into super-chic minimalist valances for the new kitchen.

The project was complicated by the fact that the two windows have casings (I think Chuck called them "fascia"?) of differing widths, and by the fact that we were winging it sans pattern. The resulting perplexities account for the slightly manic look on Ladonna's face in the picture below.

Ladonna, celebrating the first completed valance

What you cannot tell from the above picture is that my stylish, minimalist valances have a single, stylish, minimalist pleat down the middle:

Valance with attractive box pleat

Nifty, no?

Both valances, installed

Now I get to go out and buy a bunch of red doo-dads (candles, vases, &c) to sprinkle insouciantly around the kitchen to tie the nutria-and-red theme together.

New Outlets

Meanwhile, Chuck and Matt worked on adding some outlets to the living room. Here is why this operation was necessary:

"Electrical work" à la Matt & Mel

The one wall on which it is logical to put one's entertainment center is a wall that contains no outlets whatsoever and is framed by doorways, making extension cords a somewhat inelegant solution.

When we asked Chuck's advice on the subject, we were delighted to hear him say (as he does with reassuring frequency), "That is NO PROBLEM." And then it got very technical with romex and breakers and boxes and so forth. He & Matt decided to run some of this romex (which resourceful Chuck fortunately had a stash of) in the crevice between the bamboo & the walls, underneath the quarter-round. You can sort of see it in this picture--a yellowish line running along the baseboards, hooked into the outlet to the right.


During their excavations, they discovered interesting things about our house.

For example, the baseboards are actually rather thick pieces of lumber--there is no wallboard behind them. Instead, the wallboard sits on top of the baseboards, making them look much thinner than they truly are. The wallboard, therefore, doesn't get anywhere near the floor--it starts a good 10 inches up.

In addition, there is a horizontal piece of wood running behind the wallboard/baseboard juncture. This means that we couldn't run the romex up inside the wall to a receptable installed on the wallboard--that piece of wood was in the way. So they had to install the outlets in the baseboards instead--not ideal, but better than no outlets at all.

Dating the House
Matt & Chuck also got to take a look at how the wood was joined. It used a "shiplap" join, which Chuck described as an ancestor of tongue-and-groove joints. Because of this, he thinks our house probably actually dates back to the early 1900s, not to 1935, as all of the legal docs say.

Chuck finds a shiplap joint.

Interestingly enough, we've had other bits of evidence that point in that direction. For example, our next-door neighbor, 80-some-odd-year-old Mr. Merreck, was raised in this house, which he says his parents bought in 1920. At the time, he says, it was a farm house surrounded by several acres of gardens. He also says that the current study and master bath were just an L-shaped porch in that day, that the mudroom was a hall, and that they drew water up from a well underneath the back porch.


But our other next-door neighbor to the south, who apparently works on historical homes here in Elgin, says that he thinks it's even older than 1920. It was Matt who had the conversation with him (so I don't know the details), but apparently, he's basing his opinion on something to do with the windows. Would like to learn more about this.

Après Chuck, le déluge

We also mentioned the fact that we had concerns about the air conditioner drip pan upstairs, which didn't seem to be draining properly. Matt had been planning to tackle it with a plumbing snake this week, but Chuck decided to get on it right away (which was probably the right decision). In a small miracle of preparedness, he happened to have an air compressor with him, so he and Matt first blew out the primary and secondary lines, then washed the primary out. Violent, algae-colored gushing ensued.

Here, too, we learned all kinds of stuff. For example, the wee little pipe by the kitchen door is our secondary line (when it drips, we need to get up into the attic and clean out the primary). The pipe by the mudroom has been disconnected and serves no purpose (Chuck theorizes that is was the original secondary line, but as people stopped using the mudroom as an entry, they weren't able to keep an eye on the line, so they disconnected it.) The primary line is under a rock. Yes, that's right, it's under a rock. Odd place for it, I would think, but I'm no civil engineer.

That broken piece of paver covers the hole where the primary line exits.

The pipe is buried, and under the rock is where it empties itself. Whatever. Anyway, it's all cleaned out now, so here's hoping for the best.

Yeah, about those hardwoods...

Bad news.

We got a flooring guy out this morning to take a look, and he said that the most we could get out of the floors would be 5-10 years. They're antique longleaf pine subfloors, and because they're a softer wood, and old, and in pretty bad shape, he's worried that the top part of the grooves would begin to crack off if he sanded them, as is in fact already happening in the dining room.

So Matt & I conferred and considered and researched, and we've decided to go Pergo instead. Cheap carpet was also an option, but for the public areas we really, really, really want the warmth of something that looks like wood. And the nicer grade of Pergo is actually topped with real wood, so hopefully it will be a convincing facsimile.

So we're going to install it ourselves in the living room and dining room. (The adventure never ends--it just takes a different path. Did Confucius say that? Indiana Jones? Albus Dumbledore?)

The rest of the house, sadly, will get cheap carpet. If we stay there 5 or so years, we'll upgrade to something a little nicer, but for now we're going with uber-functional Berber. (This is the ugly side of Pergo--the shady compromises required to fund the stuff. Ah, well. Appearances must be maintained.)

Meanwhile, the painting continues!

The Ks came out today. Nice friends! I worked their tails off and they brought lunch, too (tasty antipasti sort of thing with meats and cheese and crackers and spreads and tomatoes and olives and salad mix).

Clever Keith installed our new GSDI-whatsits--the plugs that keep you from getting electrocuted in the kitchen or bath--as well as our schmancy new computerized thermostat. He also figured out which outlets/lights were wired to which breakers, with predictably unpredicatable results.

Keith, Being Electrical

We recycled the reject yellow paint from the dining room in the master bedroom closets, which I think was wonderfully frugal of us. And who doesn't want a bright yellow closet? Or two? Kate would like you to believe that she painted the entire built-in and closets with nothing but the weency little brush pictured below.

"I painted this whole thing with just this itty bitty brush!"

Meanwhile, progress was made in the master bath, which used to look like that (below left), but now looks like this (below right).

Our New Master Bath: Decadently Chic or Just Psychosis-inducing?

When Matt first saw it, he started muttering "REDRUM! REDRUM!" and wiggling his index finger at me. I think it will ultimately be tres elegante, but he thinks it looks like I slaughtered a cow in there. Which is silly. A cow wouldn't fit in that bathroom. A miniature horse, maybe, but not a cow.

I don't think I've posted any guest room pix, somehow, though I've been steadily working away at it. Here's the room itself--you may not be able to tell, but it's painted "Churchill Hotel Ecru" with a "Dune Breeze" ceiling.

Guest bedtroom with lovely (if currently obscured) view of great big cottonwood

The bath has "Shadow" walls to match the little desaturated aqua flowers on the valance Ladonna & I are going to make for the bedroom window (above).

Guest bath

And finally, Cathy came out (again--thanks Cathy!) Friday and helped me trim the living room and dining room. (Just a faintly lemony shade of white in lieu of the original dingy white, but what a difference it made. SO much more stylish and coordinated.)

Anyway, she vehemently hated my attempt to control the burnt orange walls with cherry red trim, which made me lose faith in the whole concept, too. So we're going with good old "Golden Beam," which is what's in the rest of the house. If the study wants to be burnt orange, I don't have the energy left to resist it. Will paint door to match tomorrow, though am concerned about paint's ability to stick to a metal surface.

Feral Burnt Orange Study