The Accidental Mason

Although masonry is something of a family institution for us at this point, it is not an activity that I have personally engaged in. Until now.

Rocks are something we have in great abundance here. Not only are there nice white limestone rocks in the ground at various spots on our property, but there are larger ones that just litter the roadsides. It looks as if when they spread the caliche on the roads here, they push aside the larger rocks in favor of smoothing out the smaller ones. Thus, every non-paved road is lined on either side with the rejected larger rocks. A. picks these up whenever he has his trailer out and brings them home.

So then we have free building material.

Now, I'm not going to start fussing around with mortar or Portland cement and all that stuff, but if I need a border for my newly-created flower bed so it doesn't get trampled by rampaging children? I have rocks.

We won't talk about the fact that the actual flowers didn't come up in the flower bed. Let's just focus on the nice border, shall we?

Or when A. plants some olive trees and doesn't want them to be trampled by those same rampaging children? More rocks.

No, we do not live in quite a warm enough climate for olives, but A. has a plan for protecting them in the winter. Fingers crossed.

Or when A. plants a row of tiny peach seedlings* that will definitely get trampled if not protected and could also use a little shelter from the relentless wind? Rocks to the rescue.

Please ignore the carpet of weeds, thank you.

I did all of those small enclosures myself, and I can see the appeal of stonework. It's very satisfying to fit all the pieces together. Kind of like a puzzle.

That said, my hands are definitely too weak--and my child-free time too limited--for any sort of large stone project. So I'll leave the chicken coop to A. and continue with my little protective rings. 

* At least, we think they're peach seedlings. A. planted about 90 unlabeled pots with various kinds of stone fruit pits, apple seeds, and who knows what else, so it's going to be a bit of a surprise. They're almost definitely a stone fruit, though.

The Very Fancy Lone Survivor

When we were in Tucson for Thanksgiving, we went to a very fancy garden center to buy a fig tree for my brother-in-law's new house. It was a truly impressive establishment that obviously caters to people who have a lot of money to spend on their landscaping. They had everything. 

This was, of course, a torment for people like us, who do not have a lot of money to spend on landscaping but nonetheless covet all the orange trees and fig trees and peonies and everything else for our new, totally un-landscaped house.

We really couldn't be buying a bunch of plants, though, so I consoled myself with a package of Very Fancy Tulip bulbs that were still way more than one ought to spend on tulip bulbs, but at least weren't a fifty-dollar tree.

There were six bulbs in the package. A. planted them in front of the house right next to one of the raised beds that flank the entrance to the driveway.

About three days later, there was an obvious gopher excavation right where he had planted them, and we sadly wrote the Very Fancy Tulips off as victims to the wretched rodents.

Also, A. spent many vindictive minutes flooding the hole and then putting poison in it. Too late for the Very Fancy Tulips, but it made him feel better.

But then, this spring, what should appear? Are those . . . the Very Fancy Tulips?

Yes! Three of the Very Fancy Tulips had survived the gopher incursion and were sending up their leaves. Of those three, only one actually bloomed. But what a bloom it is.

So fancy.

We also have some plain old red tulips left behind by Dale in the raised beds that seem to be flourishing with no care whatsoever--even propagating themselves, which is very unusual for tulips. This caused A. to remark that perhaps these Very Fancy Tulips are a mite too fancy for our admittedly harsh environment.

Nonetheless, we will be carefully transplanting our three remaining Very Fancy Tulips into a less vulnerable position in the hopes that next year we might get all three to bloom.

Hope--and the Very Fancy Tulip--springs eternal.

Making Dreams Come True

Clotheslines are very important to me. I've been hanging clothes outside to dry almost exclusively for years now. I like it, and I like not paying for the propane or electricity for a clothes dryer.

And now, settle in for a short history of my life with clotheslines. Whee! With many links to pictures of Clothesline I Have Known, because I appear to have a slight fixation.

Ahem.

The first clothesline I remember using was when I was growing up in Tucson. We had one on our back patio and my dad was pretty militant about us using it instead of the dryer. It takes clothes about two minutes to dry there, so I can see why he was so insistent about it. I found it kind of annoying at the time--teenagers are like that--but it started my clothesline experience.

The clothesline at Blackrock was always between two trees, as there are many, many trees to choose from there. First it was between the sweet gum tree and a cedar tree. (Bonus photo of that clothesline, because yikes, I have a LOT of photos of clotheslines on this blog.) Until the cedar tree almost fell right over from rot and had to be removed.

Then the clothesline was moved to a spot between a basswood tree, a utility pole, and a tulip poplar tree. Until the tulip poplar blew over in a violent storm. Then we just had the shorter clothesline between the basswood and the utility pole.

At our house in northern New York, there was no clothesline until A. put one up for me under the elevated porch. We eventually moved it to a spot between a birch tree and a spruce tree, so the clothes would get more sun and also not be right outside the back door. It was a pretty short line, though, so it wasn't good for much except hanging out blankets or whatever.

I never did get a clothesline put up at our rental house in the village here, mostly because there was nowhere convenient to run it and we didn't want to dig a giant hole in the yard to put in a standalone one.

When we moved to this house, A. put up a temporary clothesline for me between the fence and the shed. I never intended that to be the permanent spot because it wasn't long enough and also it was exposed to the often-strong winds here that would blow things right off the line with some regularity. The wind also blew loose dirt all around there.

I was determined that at this house, where we anticipate staying for many years and where the weather is good pretty much all year for line drying, I was going to have a clothesline that really worked the way I wanted it to, not just a random one put up wherever there happened to be supports for it. After all my experience with clotheslines in the past, I knew exactly what I wanted.

The preferred style of clothesline in this area is two T-bars of heavy pipe to make a double clothesline. I liked this idea very much and told A. that's what I wanted. With two full-length clotheslines, I would finally have enough space to hang two loads of laundry. I have never had this much clothesline space, and now that I have to do two loads of laundry every other day, I could only hang all my clothes out if I did a load every single day. And then I still couldn't put up sheets and other things.

I also spent some time thinking about where I wanted the clothesline positioned, eventually deciding on the backyard, which is completely enclosed by the house on the south side and a high board fence on the other three sides. This blocks the wind enough that even when it's blowing a gale everywhere else, there's never more than a pretty good breeze back there. Also, there are no trees there, which means no birds perching over the line and soiling the formerly-clean clothes with their droppings.

Gross.

A. built the clothesline I specified, in the place I requested. I bought some heavy-duty clothesline to put on the frame, some really awesome metal clothespins to anchor the clothes on the line even if the wind is strong (and also to replace most of the wooden clothespins I have always hated because they seem to break far too frequently).

We think it could use an additional prop in the center to hold everything up properly, but other than that easily-remedied issue, I have the clothesline of my dreams now:

Happy sigh.

And as a bonus, A. also made me a compost bin so I wasn't just dumping garbage in a pile in the corner of the back yard:

Incredibly ugly and cheap afghan left behind by Dale. Nothing is more patriotic than a compost bin.

Three cheers for A. He sure knows how to spoil a woman.

Basking

My sister sent me an areca palm as a housewarming present. I placed it in the same spot I had the Christmas tree, and the other morning I realized that it gets a direct beam of light just as the sun is rising in the morning.

Spotlight on the areca.

This makes me happy every time I see it. Lucky for me the sun rises every morning, so I have a guaranteed bright spot to my day every day.

Ha. "Bright spot." Inadvertent, but funny.

That's all. Have a bright day, my lovelies.

All That Glitters Is Not Gold

The first time I saw this house and property, I cried.

It wasn't the hideous paneling that reduced me to tears, or the mustard-yellow plastic kitchen counters and avocado-green plastic bathtubs original to the 1970s single-wide trailer. No, bad as those things were (and, in the latter case, still are), it was the glass and metal littering the ground that did it.

The entire back pasture--an area that encompasses approximately half an acre of bare dirt--glittered with broken glass and bristled with old nails.

Meticulous landscaping was not one of Dale's interests.

I walked around this junkyard while Dale showed me the old pig pens and chicken coop, and as I went back to the car to buckle the children in, I literally had tears in my eyes. This was where I was going to raise my children? This junked property that resembled a miniature war-torn city was where my crawling baby would play outside?

And so, I cried. Just a little.

Even at the time, I realized this was ridiculously dramatic*. It was just glass and metal. Nothing a little work couldn't fix.

Or, as it turned out, a lot of work. A lot of stooped, tedious, drawn-out work.

A. conceived of a very clever method for getting up most of the metal. He attached a big roller magnet to a long-handled metal rake. This way, he can rake the dirt, and the nails and so on stick to the magnet. This is still a lot of work, but at least he has a tool to help him.

Perhaps he can launch a line of tools under the Woodchuck Man brand name.

The bits of broken glass, however? There's no tool for that. Nothing for it but to pick each piece up individually. And so, I have.

Thankfully, this is something I can do while the children play outside. Especially now that Poppy is big enough to walk around and mostly entertain herself outside.

Where "entertainment"=climbing up on a cinder block and falling off over and over again. It's like woodchuck step aerobics.

There's a box that stays in the back pasture that I am steadily filling with pieces of glass.

There have been other boxes with glass in them that have already gone to the dump, but this is the most recent.

Yesterday I found a disposable coffee cup blowing around and within 10 minutes had filled it with the junk under the clothesline, so it's not just the pasture that needs some work.

A. has big plans for an orchard and vineyard in that pasture, which would certainly be an improvement over the bare dirt, but first we have to get rid of all the glass and nails. A. sourly remarked that it would have been a lot more fun to be here when all those bottles of beer were being drunk and used for target practice. True. But he's raked almost all of the pasture, and I've picked up most of the glass, so we're getting there.

And I don't feel like crying anymore when I see the back pasture, so big improvements all around. 

* It had been a very long day with the children because A. had been gone all day, so I wasn't at my strongest mentally or emotionally anyway.

It's a Dirty Job, and We Have To Do It

The very day A. was due home from New York, I had a terrible time keeping the fire going. After all my boasting about my careful fire care during his absence, I figured I had jinxed myself. But then I realized that the handle attached to the damper inside the stove pipe seemed to have come loose and was no longer turning the damper to open it. Which meant that the fire wasn't getting enough draft to burn well.

A. confirmed this when he got home and said there was nothing to be done but let the fire go out and take the pipe apart in the morning to get at the damper.

When we got home from church, he said, "Okay, I'll fix the stove now. It shouldn't take too long."

Those, my friends, are the very definition of famous last words.

He took apart the stove pipe. This is when he saw that there was a rather dangerous build-up of creosote inside the stove pipe. So we had to get that cleaned out lest it cause a chimney fire and burn the house down.

Not exaggeration.

However, we don't have the proper tools to clean the pipe. A bunch of old rags attached to a long, stiff wire did the trick, along with A. basically sticking his entire arm up the stove pipe. Luckily, our house is only one story, so the stove pipe isn't that long and this cleaned out the majority of it.

Now here is where I tell you my main objection to wood heat: It is filthy. Hauling in wood means dirt and bits of bark all over. Loading the stove means smoke and ash sometimes come out. Cleaning out the stove means ash gets everywhere. But the filthiest of all is cleaning out the stove pipe.

This is not what you want to see in your kitchen.

In addition to all the creosote that came out of the pipe and (more or less) into that pan there, the actual pieces of stove pipe that A. took apart fell to the floor and scattered creosote across a large part of the kitchen floor under the table.

I knew we had to do this, but to say I was displeased about the mess was a vast understatement.

A. bore the brunt of the filth in the cleaning of the stove pipe:

Look at that chipper chimney sweep.

But I was tasked with the clean-up of the actual house when the stove had been re-assembled. 

Thanks to Bugs Bunny (for the boys) and a nap (for Poppy), the children at least were out of the way during the part where the stove was in pieces and piles of creosote were all over the kitchen. But just as A. finished up and I was starting to sweep and mop the horrid mess off the floor, the cartoon ended and Poppy woke up.

The boys were whining in the doorway that they wanted lunch, Poppy was crying in her crib, and I was faced with the reality that a mop does very little to actually clean a large quantity of creosote off the floor.

I sort of got the floor cleaned--leaving Poppy to cry in her crib for a few minutes and ignoring the whining for food--but for the rest of the day everyone was going around with gray socks. 

After the kids were all in bed, I got down on my hands and knees with many wet rags and got the floor really clean. Hands and knees was the only way to do it. The mop was just pushing dirty water around, because it got dirty immediately, as did the water in the bucket the first time I dunked the mop in there.

This morning I spent some time with another rag cleaning window sills, cabinets, the top of the microwave . . . basically every flat surface in the kitchen that had collected a layer of fine creosote.

But now the kitchen is finally clean again, and the woodstove won't burn the house down. Hooray.

The Furnace Curse

It's December 31st, and we know what that means! It means while the rest of the world is gearing up for a night of champagne-fueled revelry to ring in a new year, the Woodchuck Family is cursing and scrambling to fix a furnace.

Oh yes. Again. What are the odds this would happen to us again a year to the day that it happened last time? In a different state! With a different furnace!

Low. The odds are low. And yet . . .

When I was up at 2:30 this morning for the third time with Poppy, it sort of blearily dawned on me that it was pretty cold in her room. So I checked the thermostat. It was set for 65 degrees, but it was 54 degrees in the house.

I just stood there for a second in my pajamas staring at the read-out before realizing that meant the furnace wasn't working. At which point I thought to myself, "You have got to be kidding me." With a very profane adjective before "kidding," I'm afraid.

Anyway. At least I knew why she kept waking up. Nothing to be done at that hour except bring the baby into bed with us. I told A. the furnace wasn't working and he got up to get the woodstove going again. This took the chill off the kitchen at least, but it was still too cold to put Poppy back in her crib.

I laid there listening to the furnace trying to start over and over again before eventually getting up at 4 a.m. to turn it off entirely. I didn't bother going back to bed. I wasn't going to be sleeping anymore, anyway, and I figured that way I could keep the fire going.

Since I was up, I checked the weather forecast, which was a winter storm warning starting tonight: high winds, 3-10 inches of snow, five degrees . . . How's that for timing?

We really needed to get that furnace going.

At first I thought we might be out of propane, as we had been getting low, but the propane-fueled stove was still working, as was the propane hot water heater. Then I thought maybe the furnace needed a new air filter, as that was part of the problem last time. The previous owner had left behind a new air filter (thanks, Dale!), so I slid that in there. Nope.

A. eventually got up and climbed up on the roof to be sure the vent wasn't iced over. Nope.

Next I started many rounds of phone calls to the propane company, trying to find a service guy that knew anything about newer furnaces like this one. No luck. One eventually told me to call a heating and cooling contractor he knew, and it was that kind man who diagnosed the problem over the phone. The drain was frozen.

So A. disconnected the drain hose and let the accumulated water drain into a jar. The furnace started working. Hooray!

Of course, it was still frozen underneath the house somewhere, which was not something we could easily remedy, but he just left the jar under the disconnected hose and we can dump it occasionally.

The important thing is that we have heat. Happy new year, indeed.

A Christmas Tree, Dead Animal Skins, and Two Rustic Benches

Remember how I said I needed to find a way to block the Christmas tree off from the marauding, now-toddling (albeit extremely unsteady) baby? I did. And I'm so pleased with the result, you get to hear allll about it. Yay!

First thing was putting the tree up. Now, normal people have a tree stand. We don't. There is one at Blackrock, but that's the MiL's. There was one at our house in northern New York, but that was our landlady's.

I saw tree stands at the hardware store about six weeks ago and I said to A., "I should get one now. If I don't get one now, it will all of a sudden be time to put up the Christmas tree and I won't have it and will be 150 miles away from a tree stand."

I didn't buy it. And my prediction was correct.

However! Our small pinyon pine is only about three feet tall, so it's not some huge, heavy fir that requires a lot of infrastructure to stay upright. A. was sure he could find a way to anchor it securely enough. He did.

He found an old metal bucket left behind by Dale the Bachelor, put the tree in it, and filled around the tree with stones. With the addition of water, the bucket was sufficiently heavy to hold the tree upright.

Under this we wanted something to catch the inevitable drips of water when I re-fill the bucket, so we put a rubber pan of the sort used for livestock care. And under that, because I knew the tree needed to be elevated to get it up above its barricade (more on that in a second), A. put his small handmade bench.

He made this bench years ago at Blackrock out of slabs of hand-planed wood and no hardware, just drilled out holes for the whittled legs to fit in. It's very rustic, quite attractive, and actually extremely useful.

I liked the way all of this looked so much that I didn't bother with our tree skirt. I never liked it, anyway.*

Perfect.

The barricade I decided to use is the Taos bench. This is actually a sort of couch--in fact, it used to be the dog couch at Blackrock--given to us by the MiL when we moved. She'd had it for many years, acquiring it from friends when she lived in New Mexico in the 1960s. The story she told me is that it originally came from a juvenile detention facility, presumably in Taos. I have no idea how old this thing actually is, but it is also handmade and hand-carved with no hardware used in its construction, just wooden pegs. Much like A.'s bench, although slightly more refined.

All I had to do was angle it across the corner the tree was in and boom: No babies allowed.

When I started stringing the lights (my favorite task, as you may recall), Cubby and Poppy were the only ones in the house. I had found a box of A.'s furs when I was getting out the tree decorations, so I gave that to Cubby to entertain the baby with.

I haven't had a child yet who isn't enthralled with dead animal skins.

I did wait until she was down for a nap before starting with the ornaments, because letting the three boys help me was bad enough without adding a baby into the mix. There aren't enough furs in the world to distract her from that craziness.

Anyway. The tree was eventually all lit and decorated and I also added some further decoration to the Taos bench in the form of some sheep skins.

And a highly decorative three-year-old.

Those sheepskins, incidentally, are from these guys. Because I am vindictive, I may have said out loud as I was arranging the sheepskins on the Taos bench, "You guys ate my garden, but the joke's on you, rams."

Anyway.

The real test of the barricade, of course, came when Poppy woke up from her nap. As predicted, she crawled straight over to the bench and tried to find a way to the tree.

"Wait. I can't get to the temptingly shiny plant with all the toys hung on it?"

"YOU DID THIS TO ME, YOU CRUEL MOTHER."

That's right, Poppy, I did. I'm pretty proud of it, too.

* Why is it so hard to find a tree skirt that isn't ugly, garish, or cheap-looking? I've not yet succeeded in this quest, anyway.

Post-Move, Pre-Unpacked

Hello from our new house, my lovelies! The internet guy showed up completely unannounced today and hooked us all up with phone and internet service. You can all thank Ray for the fact that I am now able to unleash my regularly scheduled (or rather, sporadic and random) drivel upon the online world once again.

So what have we been up to? Well, we moved. And we ate dinner.

First dinner in the new house, as you can tell from the background chaos of boxes, random wires, and crap on the floor.

That, by the way, was supposed to be the night that I was too exhausted to cook and I was planning on just setting out whatever random assortment of proteins, grains, and vegetables I had on hand to let everyone get their own meal. 

Yeah, so much for that. I was exhausted, but I still cooked pasta with salami and cream cheese and an egg scramble with peppers and onions and cheese. I think I might have Compulsive Cooking Disorder. I just can't make myself sit down to a "meal" of random foods if there's any possibility of having a cooked meal instead.

Anyway.

Now that we no longer live 200 yards from the school, the boys take the bus. This school only has two (very small) buses. The bus that comes to our house only picks up one other child. It's a pretty good situation, as far as riding the bus goes.

Plus, the view while waiting for the bus is pretty great.

I'm still trying to adjust to my new kitchen--the stove burners seem to go directly from scorching flame to extinguished without much middle ground, and there's really no convenient place to hang my dish towel yet--but A. put up a temporary clothesline for me today, so I know I really live here now.

I just have to be really careful not to drop anything in the dirt while I'm hanging it up.

A. also very kindly set up the bunk bed for Charlie and Jack--this took him four entire hours, as he was doing some adjustments to the original structure--and has screwed in approximately five million screws for hooks, racks, bookcase braces, and various other things that need to be attached to a wall. 

All the furniture is in place and I'm slowly working my way through all the boxes and bags of very-hastily packed things, some of which I never found from the first move. I'm going to have to brave the dreaded Walmart again to get a few things that I don't want to have shipped (laundry baskets, trash cans, and so forth). But soon. Soon everything will be put away in some semblance of order, and then all I have to do is keep it that way.

Well, I can hope, anyway.

Mad Minute

Or rather, Mad Five Minutes, as that is the amount of time I have allotted myself to pound this post out. Here we go!

I am standing at the counter in our completely empty rental house. I just finished the final cleaning of it in preparation for handing in the keys tomorrow. This house still has our phone and internet hooked up, until the company switches our services to the new address. There is currently no phone or internet at our new house. Thus the radio silence the last couple of days.

We're moved in, though! Every last bit of our stuff was in our new house by yesterday afternoon.

It sucked. I hate moving. Not that I am alone in this, but I sincerely hope I don't have to move again for a very, very long time.

I have to go home now because A. is there with three rampaging boys and one very cranky baby, who was apparently awakened from her too-brief nap by said rampaging boys. Thanks a lot, boys.

We are not amused.

And that's my five minutes. See you back here when my internet is up and running. Peace out.

Some Progress

Our moving week is progressing about as I expected. That is, random and rather chaotic, but steady. We brought another trailer-load of things up to the new house today. I unpacked the kitchen things right away, mostly because I need the paper and boxes to move more kitchen things.

I have a lot of kitchen things. And many of them are very, very heavy. About the only downside to cooking exclusively with cast iron and stainless steel is that they are heavy as hell. I'm used to it when I'm actually cooking, but when I start adding the various pots and pans to boxes and then realize I can't actually lift the box, I can see some of the appeal of lightweight cookware.

Anyway.

I took a moving picture for you.

You're welcome.

You may notice that my "new" kitchen is not exactly state of the art. Here is the story about this kitchen that I tell everyone: When the guy we bought the house from--name of Dale--was showing me around, we walked into this very, ahem, basic kitchen and he said, in his very Western drawl, "Now this kitchen. Ev'ry woman luuuuvs this kitchen." 

And that, Dale, is probably why you are single.

Despite the lack of granite countertops--they're this odd cushiony yellow stuff--and high-end appliances, it's not so bad. Of course, my frame of reference is the 1920s-era kitchen at Blackrock, so this 1970s trailer kitchen seems pretty modern in comparison. It at least had a spot for a dishwasher and enough electricity for it. Positively luxurious.

Also, the dining room has the perfect spot for my lovely liquor cabinet.

A spot under a very bright window that makes it impossible to get a good picture, but you get the idea.

You can see that I don't have a lot of liquor in that liquor cabinet yet, but I do have a bottle of gin big enough that it doesn't fit in any of the spaces under the cabinet. Classy, no?

That bottle is just sitting there in that house, waiting on us to finish our labors and toast the completion of our move with a cocktail.

We're getting there.

And Now, To Watch the Paint Dry

(And this post might be about as exciting as that activity.)

Everyone, your attention, please.

I have finished painting. I repeat, I have finished painting.

Well, as much as I'm going to finish before we move into our new house by the end of the month, anyway. 

I don't know how many hours I've spent total, but almost every Monday and Wednesday for the past six weeks, as soon as I put Poppy down for her afternoon nap, I would rush up to the new house, paint madly as quickly as I could, then rush home again in time to pick up the boys from school.

It was kind of stressful, actually, and also very tiring. But I knew that once we were moved in, I wouldn't regret a single bit of paint I had gotten on the walls.

I got the living room done, the dining room, Poppy's bedroom, the entryway, and the hallway. I did not paint any of the bedrooms besides Poppy's, the two bathrooms, or the kitchen, although they all could have used it. 

I also didn't do as careful a job as I might have wished. I just did not have time. And in this case, done is definitely better than perfect.

I'm pretty pleased with what I did get done. Wanna see*?

Let's start with the living room, shall we? And its infamous paneling.

Those afters actually don't show the finished product, because I painted the brown baseboards too. Close enough to get the idea though.

Now, Poppy's room. Remember how I said the whole thing was covered floor to ceiling in paneling even uglier than the paneling in the living room? This is it.

Seriously, what is up with this? It looks diseased.

I couldn't get a good after picture because there's no natural light in there and it's too dark. This was the best I got. At least you can tell the paneling has been covered up.

Next, the dining room. I wasn't going to bother painting this, because at least it didn't have any gross paneling in it. It did, however, have flat white paint on the walls that was covered in spots and stains. The whole house was painted in flat paint, as a matter of fact. Flat paint is impossible to clean.

Plus, it looks, well, flat.

I don't seem to have a picture of the whole thing done, but here's the progress picture.

Yes, that light fixture on the right is broken. That's on A.'s (very long) list.

I didn't take a picture of the entryway, but it had the same flat white paint as the dining room, and also had that same ugly border thing near the ceiling that the living room had. Now it's the same yellow as the dining room.

Last, the hallway. These walls had more flat paint, this time an odd pinkish white that just looked kind of dirty. I painted it a kind of ivory color. Though it's still a narrow hallway with nasty brown carpet.

All this paint, incidentally, was custom-mixed by me. And the reason it was custom-mixed is because the former owner left behind some paint that I decided I might as well use. Unfortunately, it was a kind of ugly orangey-yellow. So I pretty much just mixed that with white paint in different combinations to make various shades of light and lighter yellow, or just mostly white with a slight yellow tint.

As I told A., it means all the room colors are very harmonious, because they're all in the same color family. Sounds legit, right?

Of course, it also means that I can never touch anything up without painting everything all over again, because I'll never to be able to match the current random colors.

Anyway.

The painting is done. For now. There may be some more at some point--like those bathrooms, or maybe Cubby's room--and probably also some brown carpet remediation, but for now, I'm calling it quits so we can work on actually getting moved in by December 1. Wish me luck.

* I spent a minute trying to get the before and after pictures side-by-side before giving up and figuring you can get the picture (ha) as is.

The War on Paneling

I am proud to announce that all of the atrocious fake paneling in our new house has either been removed or painted over.

It was a big moment for me when I realized that today. I completed the conquest of the paneling by priming Poppy's soon-to-be room for painting.

Her room, which I didn't get a picture of before I started, was covered floor to ceiling with even uglier paneling than the kind in the living room. You might think that is not possible. It is. This paneling had little dark spots all over it that I guess were supposed to be fake knot holes or something. I don't know. It was awful.

The room is also tiny and, worst of all, it has no window. So try to imagine a miniscule room with no natural light, fake paneling on every surface, and brown carpet.

This is the only picture I got of the wretched paneling. It is, of course, blurry, because there's no light in there. Because there's no window.

I can't put my bubbly little girl in a depressing brown cave.

Not a bear cub; doesn't need to live in a cave.

Anyway, I got it all primed today in preparation for painting, and it occurred to me while I was toiling away in this nasty brown cave-room that we could cut a window in the door for her to get some light in. There's actually a window right across from her door in the hallway, so this would help. We'd have to cover it with Plexiglass or something. I haven't figured out the details, but I'm working on it.

The living room has also been completely primed and is ready for painting.

Overwhelmingly white at the moment, but a vast improvement from overwhelmingly brown.

So the next small chunk of time I have, I can start cutting in by the ceilings and floors, and then it's only a swish (or several dozen swishes) of the roller and I will have a fully painted living room. And Poppy won't have to sleep in a cave.

Progress.

Trailer Improvement

Hey, you know what a one-year-old thinks is hilarious? The sound of sandpaper on a wall. I know this because Poppy has been accompanying me to the new house while her brothers are at school, and watching my attempts to make it less ugly.

"Less ugly" is my design aesthetic, incidentally. Somehow I doubt I'm going to score my own show on HGTV (is that the right one? I don't have a TV so I have no idea) with all my careful improvements to our added-on-to trailer.

On the upside, this is the best house for an impatient person like me to be working on. It was so bad to start with, anything I do will make it look better. Also, I don't care if my children totally destroy it, which they probably will. Sort of the same idea of driving an old beater car so you don't care if someone sideswipes you.

So far I've gotten the walls in the living room spackled, the spackle sanded, and the walls wiped down in preparation for painting. Poppy assisted me in these jobs by trying to stick her fingers in the exposed electrical outlets, pulling the step stool down on herself while I was getting a clean cloth, and breaking my sunglasses.

I got most of the living room ceiling painted today during one of her naps. It was this nasty dark brown that could best be described as "excrement colored." It really needed painting. After I did all I could while she was crawling around, I came home to drop her off * before going back to the new house to paint the ceiling, because there are some things you just don't do with a baby present. Painting a ceiling is definitely one of them.

A. has to do the rest of the ceiling for me, because I couldn't reach. And then I can paint the walls.

This one is not invited for that, either.

It's slow going getting anything done working around a baby and three other kids, but I'm getting there.

* Obviously, A. was home. I didn't just leave the baby sleeping and then drive ten miles away.

Friday Family Fun: Party On, Wayne

Instead of a thrilling descent into a wild canyon or a long drive to the beach this Friday, we drove twenty miles to the park in the next village over for a birthday party. Cubby and Charlie were the ones who were technically invited, but of course we all went. It was at a park; it didn't matter.

They had a wonderful time. A bunch of kids had brought scooters, so there was much scootering on the basketball court. There were hot dogs and chips and lemonade and cupcakes. There were goody bags with a superhero theme. And of course, there was a pinata*. Pinatas are de rigueur--or whatever the Spanish equivalent of that would be--here for children's birthday parties. I have taken note of this for future parties for my own children, assuming I ever actually have one. Wouldn't want to let everyone down.

Our new house was on our way home, so we stopped there to let the kids run wild through the empty rooms. I remember doing this myself many times as a military child. It was always exciting.

Less exciting for the parents, I now know. A. and I spent the whole time wandering around talking about the possibility of installing a dishwasher and how to paint over tacky fake paneling.

Well, I talked about those things. A. mostly talked about how much space there was in the attached shop for his tools and where he could plant garlic.

We have different priorities.

I'm sure I'll talk more at length about the house in the coming weeks, but briefly, it's a 1970s single-wide trailer--heLLO, classy!--with a substantial addition to make it into an actual house. For the past fifteen years or so it has been lived in by an older man living on his own. To say the interior design is dated is being generous.

Now, I am not an interior design person. My eyes glaze over when people start talking about "spaces" and paint colors and accent walls or whatever. But even I, low as my standards are, take issue with this living room.

Even a cute baby in the middle of the floor can't make this room attractive.

The first order of business is going to be closing off that pass-through to the kitchen that Cubby and Charlie spent the whole time leaping off of. The guy who built the addition was a little obsessed with pass-throughs. This one is going to become a partial bookshelf. It can't be a full bookshelf because it would block all the heat that needs to get from the woodstove in the kitchen to the living room.

Jack was totally enamored of the old-school wall phone with extra-long cord. He spent the whole time talking on it (it is not connected), winding it around the baby--who kept crawling after him to grab the cord--and stretching it out to make an obstacle for Cubby and Charlie to jump over.

Wild times in the ugly living room.

Charlie was particularly disappointed that we couldn't just stay in the house from that moment on. Why, he asked me, can't we just move in now?

Why? Because Mommy has to paint over that paneling ASAP. Living with that would surely cause me irrevocable mental anguish. Luckily, our two big Oriental rugs will nicely cover up the hideous brown carpet. 

Anyway.

After an hour at the new house, I remembered that I had sourdough on the counter and it was surely an erupting mess at this point, so we rushed right home.

As I suspected.

So that was the fun yesterday. To be continued with another trip to the new house today so A. can unload all his tools and things from the Honda and the trailer he drove back from New York a few weeks ago. Including . . . the huge chest freezer! Let's hear it for a meat stockpile!

Leaping off of shelves and setting up the chest freezer. It's gonna be a good day.

* Yeah, that should have the Spanish "n" with the little squiggle over the top, but the instructions for doing that in Chrome were like a page long, so . . . no. Sorry. It's a gringo pinata for you.