Study Curtains--The Final Product

The New Curtains
Here they are!--the finished curtains, achieved by my mother with blood, sweat, and tears. Or the seamstressy version thereof.

Here they are on the double windows to the east.

New curtains on the east windows

And here they are on the door and south window.

New curtains on the door and south window

I think they look pretty frickin awesome. I think the blue really works with the orangey-tan walls, and the brown keeps their exuberance within reasonable limits.

Nice, no?

While on Mom-related themes, Mom had inquired about the identities of a few of our plants, so I thought I'd post them here.

Plant ID for Mom
First there is this hardy red amaryllis (Hippeastrum x johnsonii). They're a bit hard to find in the nursery trade, though I believe the Southern Bulb folks have them, and also Austin's Natural Gardener. Better still is to cozy up to someone who has a bunch of these in their yard and see if they'll give you a few. However, you don't often see them in suburbs--you find them in little old towns with lots of old houses and old plantings.

Hardy red amaryllis (Hippeastrum x johnsonii)

She also liked the looks of 'Belinda's Dream,' which has a modern rose's shape with an antique's vigor and attractive bush form. BD i s one of Matt's favorites, too, though he recently told me that his very favorite is 'Duchesse de Brabant.' Just like Teddy Roosevelt.

Belinda's Dream

Linden, Cordia, and other Garden News
In non-curtain-related news, our little baby cordia (Cordia boissieri) is blooming its first blooms. It was a jittery little thing in the evening breeze, and wouldn't sit still to take a proper picture.

Cordia boissieri

The linden (Tilia sp.) we bought from Medina Gardens in the fall is making a shapely looking little sapling. I learned all sorts of fascinating things about lindens the other day (courtesy of wikipedia). I had no idea they were so rich in folklore and history. And they can live over a millenium! That is an advanced level of awesomeness--the kind of awesomeness I usually associate with oaks and baldcypresses and sequoias. Lindens (also known as basswoods here in the US and "limes" in the UK--no relation to the citrus) have a number of medicinal uses, make great honey, are a versatile wood, make good musical instruments, make good charcoal, are the national symbols of several east European countries, were sacred to pre-Christian Germanic peoples, and figure in Wagner, Ovid, Homer, Horace, Virgil, and Pliny. A 900-year-old specimen in Germany was supposedly planted by the Empress Cunigunde.

Tilia sp.

Also, our 'Fourth of July' roses are blooming vigorously, which is very pleasing. As usual, my camera--which is great at green--can't quite capture the deep crimson of the real thing.

'Fourth of July' roses

And it's not just the FoJ that's blooming. Actually, all the roses are in bloom, with 3 exceptions: 'Lichterloh,' which is just starting to look as though it may choose life, 'Buff Beauty,' which has been oddly standoffish since it was planted, and 'Ferdinand Pichard,' which suffered some major RoundUp damage last year. RU damage in roses, interestingly, doesn't always show up right away--you often see it the following spring, when new leaves are trying to emerge. They get this scrawny witchy look to the new leaves and the flowers are spoiled. I dumped a bunch of compost on FP in compensation, but he's still looking pretty miserable. I'm sure he'll pull through, but right now he'd hating life.

'Ferdinand Pichard' with severe RoundUp damage

FP aside, and if we ignore the existence of pollen, it's a glorious time of year--temperate weather, actual rain, green in the median strips, and flowers everywhere in the garden.

In Continuation

Headquarters

Work on the curtains continues.

My admirable mother, with equal parts nobility and doggedness, is still sewing away. One of the interesting things about sewing is that you have to do everything twice (or more). You measure several times, cut out and sew muslins before sewing the real thing, hang without hemming and measure, then iron before re-hanging and remeasuring, then machine-sew part of the way, then hand sew the rest. An exercise that very clearly elucidates some of the differences in personality between my mother and myself, as I would have safety pinned the fabric together, thrown it over the rods, and called it a done deal about 2 hours into the project. Fortunately, I'm not the Chief Architect on this one.

Mom, hand-stitching one of the brown panels

Moreover, I seem to have chosen the fiddliest possible fabrics to work with. I helped Mom with cutting the organza-ish stuff on Sunday. It absolutely does not form a square. You lay it out as smoothly as possible, and it still forms ripples and bulges in the middle and weird S-curves along the selvage edges. And then you cut it (it all the while writhing and wriggling all over the place), and it shape-shifts into something completely un-rectangular. We had to tape pieces of posterboard to the floor to give a perpendicular baseline for measuring and cutting.

The Organza System

We also instituted a sophisticated system of soup cans to hold the stuff in place. Mom tells me that sewing the organza was even more fun than cutting and measuring it, but she got it miraculously parallel somehow.

The embroidered blue is also annoying because the embroidery bulges, making measuring and folding a challenge, while the silky blue background slithers all over the place.

Meanwhile, the thickness of the ultrasuede makes it especially difficult to hand-stitch.

Lining the blue

This hand stitching, which I've now done quite a bit of, isn't as onerous as I expected. It's just very, very difficult to make the stitches anything like regular or even. I'm lousy at anything that requires consistency, so having to make stitches the same length the same distance from the edge is... frustrating. Happily, the stitches are rather magically invisible, so no one will know how far I fell from the Mary Ingalls standard of stitchery.

The good news is that the curtains seem to be turning out very well, and all the working and re-working Mom's been painstakingly doing is yielding wonderfully professional results. I know I say that as a person who's had an old fitted sheet and a dismembered seat cover hanging in her window for over a year--i.e., as a person eminently not qualified to judge--but it all looks so marvelously crisp and regular and perpendicular. Moreover, my faith in my vision seems to have been justified--the colors all go together really well. The blue is comlplements the orangey-tan as well as I had hoped, while the brown harmonizes with the bookcase and frames the curtains nicely. The brown also adds an element of austerity that tames the exuberance of the embroidered pattern. And the organza lets us have a clear view of the trees outside our windows. All very, very handsome.

Here's the first completed window, with a piece of fabric hung behind it to partially simulate the under-panels that will provide extra insulation and sunblocking come August.

The first completed curtain, with pretend partial under-panel

In other news, I popped a few more crinum in the ground this morning (my state agency is closed today in celebration of San Jacinto Day. I kid you not. And me without a single traditional San Jacinto Day cake in the house nor an album of beloved San Jacinto Day carols to play on the stereo.) I had ordered a Crinum jagus scillifolia from the Southern Bulb Company last fall. The bulbs weren't as big as the growers had anticipated by the ship date this spring, so they nicely sent me a regular Crinum jagus, a Crinum × powellii 'Album', and three Lycoris radiata in addition to the rather petite little C.j.s. I felt amply compensated. So I planted them all this morning. Which was nice, up to the point that my head exploded. Oak pollen is up today, and I forgot to take a Claritin before going out, and I've spent the rest of the day sneezing violently, snuffling, and trying to avoid dripping trails of snot on the fabric. I've used up over half of a brand new (large) box of Puffs already. Ug. Pity me. Whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine.....

A Weekend of Intensive Draping

Mom, at the Triangle Shirtwaist and Curtain Factory. Sew faster, wench!

So Mom's in the dining room/sweatshop, sewing curtains for the study, and I'm... on the sofa, blogging.

Mom got here last night to spend a weekend sewing like mad. An activity she's not actually all that fond of, but finds herself doing from time to time because she has the misfortune of knowing how. What an exemplary mom!

I bought the last pieces of fabric for the project: chocolate brown "ultra-suede" for the panels and a pale steel blue faux-organza-looking thing for the sheer at the top. (Quick refresher: the curtains will exist in three parts: brown ultra-suede side panels and a central combination panel with sheer ersatz organza at the top and embroidered blue faux-silk for the bottom three-quarters.)

I had meant for the organza to be brown, but couldn't find a good match for the shade of brown in the ultra-suede. While drifting despairingly down the sheers aisle, the blue happened to catch my eye, and I realized that it would be even better than a matching brown because it would accent that hep blue-and-brown color scheme we've got going on that's so killingly stylish right now.

As we remeasured the windows and hung the muslin (that's a "mockup" for us non-seamstressy types), we realized that more fabric would be needed, which resulted my dashing madly one Hancock to another in Austin trying to find 7 more yards of the u-s. So that's been my contribution. I took us to Chez Zee last night to look at the model for this whole project (which, as luck would have it, was closed off for a private party), and I raced around town today for more fabric. Other than that, I don't have much to contribute--partly because I don't know enough to be useful, and partly because Mom has to retreat to the special sewing place in her brain without interruption from callow novices.

However, I just learned that my skills(?) shall be requisitioned for some hand stitching on the lining. Hand stitching! How very Laura Ingalls Wilder. How Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. How Anne of Green Gables. How Caddie Woodlawn. Laura always used to lament that her stitches were all big and sloppy compared to the dainty, regular stitches of Miss-Goody-Two-Shoes, Mary (till Mary got scarlet fever, that is, and went blind. Suck on that, Mary!) Anyway, I shall endeavor to make my stitches small.

Meanwhile, I have learned that sewing takes some insane amount of math. When I have tried to explain these curtains to people, I get a lot of weird looks, which I couldn't understand. I mean, it's three rectangles, for goodness' sake. Then I tried to replicate the calculations Mom was making in Excel so we could jimmy with the proportions ("If we make the rod pocket 4 inches, instead of 6, how much ultra-suede will we need?") without having to hand-calculate all the variations. I'm not a complete slouch at the Excel, but figuring out how to cut the pieces out of the material in such a way as to minimize yardage and then calculate the yardage was more than my spreadsheet could handle, not to mention having to remember to fold in seam allowances (times 2!), headers (times 2!), hems, rod pockets, and so on. How could men possibly justify dismissing female intelligence, mathematical aptitude, and spatial intelligence when we have apparently been grinding our way through these kinds of exercises for centuries? Do they have any idea what a squirrely pain in the ass this is?

Cute--but doomed--brown caterpillars

I also helped by cutting the fuzzy edge of the selvage off of the brown. The 13.5 yards of brown. Oy veh. It made piles and piles of fuzzy brown caterpillars. They're so amusingly fuzzy that I wonder if I shouldn't reclaim them and turn them into something. Since I'm neither Martha Stewart nor McGyver, though, I think that impulse had best be abandoned.

Meanwhile, Mom has cut and hemmed the first panel and its lining and is now working on the finishing hand stitching. Go Mom!

Granny Babe's Live Oaks

The Family gathered in Morgan City, LA, this past weekend for a belated birthday celebration for my mom. Back in Elgin, we finally got a good, soaking rain (they've ended the burn ban! Sparklers and bonfires for everyone!), so there is some greenness happening in the median strips as the grass and wildflowers hesitantly reacquaint themselves with the properties of water. But my goodness, our greenness is puny compared to the greenness in Louisiana. And the azaleas! Great, mounding heaps of them, eight feet tall or more--reaching up to the eaves of some people's houses.

And, of course, the live oaks. We actually have quite a lot of live oaks in Texas, especially (out our way), the escarpment live oak, Quercus fusiformus. But even the venerable pampered giants on Texas college campuses can't match the two leviathans in my grandmother's front yard. They're tall, they're pretty much as wide as her entire lot, and they would be as deep if the family didn't prune them away from her roof. Their trunks are over 5 feet in diameter. Forests of ferns have founded colonies in their limbs. The branch that I used to bounce up and down upon as a child has touched the ground and grown into the soil. The trees are like some sort of massive octupus gods who hold the entire property in their many-armed embrace.


Come to think of it, I don't understand why more cultures don't have tree-gods. Sun gods, I can tell you with great authority as a denizen of central Texas, are highly overrated. Mean, spiteful, infatuated with their own testosterone, selfish, merciless, utterly devoid of creativity--in my pantheon, the sun god would be the jerky one whose cult no one but skinheads wants to join. The rain goddess, of course, would be the benficent all-mother, bringing life-restoring coolness and moisture to her parched children. And her husbands would all be tree-gods--sagacious, long-lived, benevolent, temperate, generous, strong, and beautiful.


And you know what makes me sad/happy about these trees? These are something money can't buy. Obviously, you can buy property that contains ancient live oaks, but if you want an alley of massive oaks to line the driveway of your McMansion, you're out of luck. You can plant oaks, of course, and in a few decades you should have some very nice trees, but no amount of money or privilege or influence or biotechnology or microwave rays can manufacture an ancient oak. There is no way to bend them to our convenience. There is no way to fake it with plastics or growth hormones. Oaks are essentially and utterly and immovably themselves, and we can either accommodate ourselves to them or else do without. Time confers authenticity and meaningfulness, which is, in a way, the oak's special gift.


Believe it or not, this is actually an abridged selection of the pictures I snapped. I really, really love these trees.


My idea of these two oaks is inextricably bound to my idea of my mother's family. They are a Louisiana family, for one thing, and these are very Louisianian trees. And it's a fairly large family--Mom was one of five children, and I'm the eldest of 10 grandchildren. Like the trees, the family stretches in a lot of different directions--I've always found them to be a fascinating collection of very different personalities. And my grandmother's house and these trees are something I come back to once or twice year almost every year--where so many things stay they same, but where over the years I can chart tiny, incremental changes. The smell of Granny Babe's pantry is the same after all these years. The morning rituals of strong coffee and chat around the kitchen table. Granny watching football while she cooks. The joking and teasing that always start when the family gathers together. The carpet and wall colors that have been unchanged my entire life. The ticking of the dining room clock. The little crucifixes hanging over all the door ways. The porch swing I loved to swing on. The cologne my grandfather used to wear. His big, heart laugh and the peculiar way he'd press his lips together and dismissively examine his fingernails to express disapproval. The way Granny can never wrap her head around the foods my brother and I don't eat. ("What?! You don't like hoghead cheese? You don't eat oysters?!")

And then there are the things that do change. Granny's hair getting greyer and greyer. The trees getting wider and wider. Daddy-O passing away. And the changes in me--from the eldest and most solitary grandchild to a married grownup lady sitting at the grownup table. A little girl streaking naked down the long hall, a bigger girl running and sliding in her socks down the wooden floor of that hall, a sulky teenager reading novels on the porch. Going back is always an exploration. Have I changed? Have they? Or is it just my perception of them that is different? I love this combination of change and sameness----it's like re-reading a book you've read 20 times since you were a child. Every time I visit I feel a comforting sense of continuity, a gentle awareness of loss, and a surprising rediscovery of bits of myself I had forgotten.

New Valences

Check it out! Chuck and Ladonna came up last weekend for a visit, and Ladonna did a day-long sewing stint to make two new valences for us. Kind Ladonna! Skilled Ladonna! Here she is, cutting out the fabric for our guest bedroom valence.

Ladonna, seamstressing

And here are the results. This is the pièce de résistance , the valence for the master bath. It's silk. Embroidered silk at that, from the charming boutique fabric store in Austin, Silk Road. And it has a tassel! It makes the room look so much more finished and together now that you can't see the fact that the shutters don't actually reach to the top of the windows. I think she did a lovely job.

Master bathroom valence

And then upstairs we installed this uber-minimalist panel in brown peau de soie (doublespeak for "polyester") with desaturated aqua flowers. I really like the simplicity and cleanness here.

Guest bedroom valence

At the moment, the window is partially covered by a piece of crepe paper, but one of these days (or possibly one of those days--those days in the far-off and vaguely perceived distance), we'll buy some cellular shades like the ones in our bedroom to go behind the valence. Note, please, that the crepe paper matches the flowers in the valence. These things don't come about by accident, my friends. It's all part of living to the manner born. (Product placement: I've been buying my blinds from justblinds.com--so far they've been fairly inexpensive, fast, and of good quality. Very happy about that. [To the corporate headquarters at JustBlinds: will cheerfully accept small consideration in exchange for this endorsement at any time. Don't be shy.])

Blinds-to-be

And a bit of Lagniappe
Photoshop has a new, free online photo editing application called Photoshop Express. I mention this because (1) it's Photoshop (sort of), yet free, and there are those among my acquaintances who might find that compelling, and (2) it has this cool feature called "color pop" that I expect you'll be seeing more of in entries to come. Ooo, trendy!

Our pink mystery rose with "color pop" filter applied. We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

Note, however, that it turned all my freckles grey. Ew. Not all images are well-suited to color pop.

Holiday Recap

One of our more spirited Elgin neighbors. I counted eleven inflatables. Whoa.

Quick overview of the holidays.

We had the Ulrich side over for Christmas this year, for a grand total of SEVEN people at Christmas dinner. Hermit that I am, this was an almost-overwhelming flood of humanity. Not only challenging to my limited extroversion, but also to our modest infrastructure. We don't have enough chairs, glasses, teaspoons, or a large enough tea pitcher for 7 people at once. Sad, but true.

But fortunately, our 5 guests were very gracious and didn't grumble at all about the mis-matched tablecloths draped together to cover the dinner table/card table hybrid, the rocking chair Dad had to sit in for dinner, or the fact that you have to turn the hot water to the guest tub on and off at the wall, as the faucet isn't really up to the task.

Dad, Mattchew, Bianca, Matt, Grandpa, Mom

And it really was fun. I enjoyed showing off the bits of the house that are functional and everyone ooo'd about how much it had changed in the past nine months, so it was all very gratifying. And even without matching glassware, entertaining your family for the holidays feels so very grown up.

We had a fried turkey. The dangers associated with turkey frying had been forcefully impressed upon us by various safety-conscious friends and family, so we prepared by reading the instruction manual cover to cover, researching on the internet, and watching Alton Brown on YouTube.

We also bought a fire extinguisher.

Alton uses this complicated contraption made with pulleys and an aluminum ladder to lower the turkey into the hot oil. We didn't have the resources to make our own Turkey Derrick(TM), but in the spirit of kindred dweebiness, we made a little device of our own for lowering the turkey at a safe distance. We used one of the poles from the hurricane fence we've been slowly dismantling, drilled a hole in it, and bolted on a hook. We suspended the turkey from the hook and carried the whole thing on our shoulders, like cannibals proudly dragging their victims to the spit. Then we got on either side of the turkey fryer, and s-l-o-w-l-y lowered in the 21-lb. beast. Easy peasy!

It did actually fit in the pot just fine--the wings and legs folded in as we lowered the bird into the pot.

And here's the finished bird, prior to carving.

The final destiny of the turkey--some of the best-smelling stock I've ever made.

My biggest present was the refinished hardware for Dottie, Greg, Ezekial, Flossie, Ethel, and Poindexter (our new/old doors). Dad went through a painstaking process to strip, clean, and polish the hardware, with lovely results. Compare to how they looked when we first bought them. The steel plates and knobs turned a pretty, satiny goldy-grey, especially the one in the middle, which had a little bit of brass plating left on it.



The Edwardian plates that go on the closet doors (that is, Flossie, Ethel, and Poindexter) amazed us all by transmogrifying into gorgeous solid brass. (Check out what they used to look like.) Fancy! Fortunately for us, the crystal knobs that we had chosen to go with them were also solid brass, so they match beautifully. We're really looking forward to installing them, but it isn't going to happen right away. We need to refinish the doors, have them cut to fit the frame, and have them installed--so we need to find a reliable carpenter for the job.


Dad was particularly pleased with the smooth mechanism and heavy-gauge brass used in the locks for the closet doors. I can't wait to find out whether or not they are actually mahogany.

In the same category of major house aquisitions, Matt's bday/xmas gift to me was this awesome Tiffany reproduction lamp, which goes really well with the paint job in the dining room. In addition to a very intricate stained glass shade with waterlilies, the lamp also has this nifty flowy voluptuous art nouveau stand (with eggplants? or gourds? we're not entirely sure) and a tiled base in the prettiest shade of green. The whole thing is very serene and lovely and watery and cool.

Our lovely new lamp. To the right is Matt's gourd art, Henri #1

With the fancy-pants chandelier and the table runner and potted plants, doesn't the lamp give the illusion that we have Arrived?

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.

Pre-Parental Frenetic Burst of Activity

So Mom & Dad were coming into town to check out our progress on the house. Seemed wise to actually have some progress to show them.

So for the past months, we've really moved into high gear around the place. The initial goal was to have achieved a state of doneishness wherein all essentials would have been completed, and only fluffy stuff--like replacing ugly light fixtures or installing a ceiling fan on our porch--would be left to accomplish at our leisure.

To be specific, this was my initial goal. Matt, who is able to learn from history and thereby avoid repeating his mistakes, was well aware that I was cosmically, wildly, ludicrously delusional to think we had the time or money to accomplished everything by late August.

Consequently, instead of installing all of the needed baseboards (in the master bed, study, and hall), we contented ourselves with the baseboards in the dining room. Instead of installing the rest of the flagstones for our patio and weeding, mulching, and edging all of our beds, we were pretty darn proud of ourselves for having (mostly) completed the front-side bed, a long, L-shaped number that encloses what I like to think of as the Croquet Lawn. Instead of refinishing both the tubs, I half-finished the guest tub, leaving it in a state of sticky incompletion. (That darn epoxy still hasn't dried in some places.)

Still, we worked our little tails off to get this much done, and what we did really does make a difference, especially in the dining room. (Making baseboards out of planks, by the way, is not for the wimpy, especially when both the walls and floor waver wildly all over the place. 10 x 1s don't exactly accommodate themselves to the vagaries of turn-of-the-century construction.)

Nekkid walls. Note the handful of turquoise spacers, leftover from our bambooing days.

Ooooo! Lovely new baseboards! They currently look one stage better than this pic: all the gaps have been filled in with wood putty, and they've received a new coat of paint.

Mom & Dad were very sweetly complimentary about everything, in spite of its half-finished state. They kept saying that they were amazed by how much we had achieved, which was very gratifying. Apparently, The Family at large (whom they have been visiting recently), were also surprised and impressed by the quantity of work I've been doing, particularly work involving power tools. I'm not sure that their amazement entirely redounds to my credit, actually. I admit, yes, I am kind of bone lazy, and yes, I'd twenty times rather ply a book or a computer mouse than a shovel, but that doesn't mean I'm incapable, particularly when properly motivated (as when a gun is pointed at my head or I am confronted with hideous mint-green paint day after day). Harumph. They should have seen me with that nail gun...

In any event, a good time was had by all, lunch came up beautifully, to be frank, if immodest (grilled chicken and polenta with blackberry-nectarine salsa, tomato gratin, and Spanish potatoes. Tasty!) and we had a very nice time showing everything off and visiting.

Now we need to schedule some more visits quickly before we run out of steam.

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.