On weak solvents and the wrath of Achilles

I was sitting on my neighbor's deck the other day, celebrating Greek Easter by eathing beautifully dyed and oiled hard-boiled eggs while the kids searched for plastic eggs full of candy.

I guess you dye 'em with beets, or onion skins, or the blood of the risen Christ or something. I love shit like that. Tradition! Anyway, as I sat in this weekend's ridiculously beautiful sunshine peeling my universal symbol of life and potential, I dropped the shell over the deck rail and into the yard.

Your Neighborhood Librarian Makes a List

A long time ago, a woman who had just moved back to Spain from Argentina told me a funny story about getting things done. (Was it Venezuela? One or the other.) We were talking about regional differences in spoken Spanish and she said she once found herself describing her day to a neighbor: "First we'll get the car, then we'll get the laundry and the groceries, and then swing by the school and get the children."

Only - the casual verb form of "get" that she was using to mean "pick up" was actually a profanity in Argentina. So what the aghast neighbor heard was, "First we'll fuck the car, then we'll fuck the laundry and the groceries, and then swing by the school and fuck the children."

And oh, doesn't everybody feel like that sometimes?

Yeah, you know her

This coat is too big for The Chairman, too.

Reaching for a grocery bag in the van the other day, I felt a popping in my shoulder. "Crap," I thought. Just one more seam giving way in the ancient cashmere topcoat that is my life. Sigh.

Just kidding. I'm in a pretty good mood, actually. That coat, though. Howza. It's barely even a coat anymore. If that coat went to the Goodwill, they would reject it. If that coat approached you and tried to hand you a flyer, you would hold your breath, avert your eyes, and hurry away.

I inherited it from my grandfather when he died in the 1980's, and he had gotten it as a hand-me-down from his rich brother-in-law. I wore it in high school. I wore it through 6 miserable, icy Cleveland winters during college. I wore it walking to the subway to go to work in Manhattan. It has hung on hooks all across this country, been thrown over beds at hundreds of parties, and it has somehow not gotten lost at the kind of rock and roll shows where there isn't a coatroom so much as just like a pile in the corner.

The lining is in pieces. The cuffs are frayed through. The buttons are on with cinnamon dental floss. But it's 100% cashmere, and in cold weather like this it's the only thing I own that is generous enough to wear over a sweater (three sweaters). Its chamois pockets are intact, and the lining, where it exists, is thick satin. It is soft like a blanket, comes down past my knees, and is both light in weight and warm as love.

But I do look homeless in it.

I'm not what you might call a shopper. I keep stuff forever. I don't wear makeup, I wear jeans every day, and if I'm going to buy anything but striped long-sleeve t-shirts, I probably need a second opinion. My goals are:

1. be comfortable
2. don't look stupid

And I have found that the simpler I keep it, the less likely I am to look stupid. Even my rings are plain bands. Used to be worse. Used to be, I wore no things that had buttons or zippers. Seriously. I was like 120 pounds and living in NYC and I was wearing dumpy cotton knits 24/7. Those were my Carrie years, damn it! Why was I not in a sequined mermaid gown and a cowboy hat on the subway drinking coffee from a paper cup at 8am every day?

On the other hand.

On the other hand, I do have needs. They are somewhat unpredictable, extremely specific, and absolutely imperative. That's why I still have that damn coat, for example. Have I tried to replace it? Of course! But there is no coat that fits my specifications for less than A THOUSAND DOLLARS.

And I have been down this road before. It is a tortuous path. One iteration of this story started in Copenhagen, on the pedestrian shopping street Strøget, in a tiny glove shop, Randers Handskefabrik. Gloves? Well, sure, I could use a pair of gloves - a pair that match, for one thing, and which aren't repaired with cinnamon dental floss (my heavy-duty thread of choice for many years).

Well. In that glove shop, I learned what gloves are. Turns out, matching? is just the beginning! They had gloves in all lengths and all colors, and the leather was light as air and soft as something you'd have to pay a lot for in Thailand. The lady brought out a special pillow to prop my elbow on when she slid a pair of long magenta gloves onto my hand. Wow. But, after wrestling a while with long division in my head, I concluded that those gloves cost $175, and I didn't buy them.

But then I went ten years without gloves. I have this idiotic, vaguely worded, quasi-environmentalist mental prohibition against buying a thing when a preferable version of that thing is known to me. It goes like, "Why buy shitty Target gloves that will eventually end up populating the landfills of this great nation, when I could buy those gorgeous magenta gloves that I would love forever and never allow harm to befall and which would be a heirloom for future generations?"

But those gloves were not to be found in the U.S. And similar gloves were similarly expensive. Why buy two gloves when you'll have to sacrifice an arm and a leg to pay for them? That's a little joke. Cough.

So, two years ago, I shook my head, called myself an idiot, went up to New York, and bought a pair of gloves at Sermoneta. They're not magenta, but they're awful soft, and they didn't cost $300, which is what Randers gloves cost now.

Not all such searches are so ridiculous. For many years, I needed a mariachi suit. That's where an eBay saved search comes in handy, because no way was I going to have a gala suit custom made. Every time anything mariachi came up on eBay, I got a little email, and sooner or later...


your neighborhood librarian jingles when she walks

Also, somewhere along the line I concluded that if I were to own rain boots, they would be red knee-high Hunter boots like the Queen wears. Except hers are green, and she probably gets comped them. I, of course, was unwilling to pay full price for them, and so I went, you know, all my life without rain boots. Luckily, the Plow & Hearth outlet eventually had a pair for about a third of what they usually cost, so during my remaining years, I can walk through deep mud with dry feet. Also, they are good for playing ringmaster.

I woke up one day this autumn and decided that, after 8 years of not wearing a watch, I needed a solar powered atomic digital watch. No batteries to fool with, and as long as Fort Collins, Colorado is safe, it will always display the correct time. And I needed a cloth band, not a resin one. But how easy was that? Twenty minutes on Amazon and that was figured out.

What the hell would I do if nobody had invented the Internet? I'd be barefoot and cold and naked and I wouldn't know what time it is, that's what.

Some things I learn about by chance. I had no idea I needed a pea coat until I saw one hanging on a fence at a stoop sale in Brooklyn, and it suddenly became obvious that the perfect pea coat was an official New York Fire Department dress coat, made in 1953 for, possibly, the skinniest firefighter ever. But you can't wear a sweater under it.

I know the perfect mid-height round-toed biker boots, but they're discontinued, and my last pair was ruined by our cats.



Damned cats.

I know the puffy coat I want - Bodie wears it in Season Two of The Wire. Now all I have to do is find it. You know, I love the costumers for that series. The clothes they picked for the drug dealers telegraph status and situation so precisely, and are exactly what the Baltimore corner boys were wearing at the time - with one exception. My sisters on The Wire just could not bring themselves to put their actors in pants that sagged past the waist. They just wouldn't go there, and I don't blame them. WHY is that a trend that will not disappear? And WHERE can I get Bodie's coat?

Because this cashmere bitch is really just a rag.

I am crushing your head

Zhou, New Year's Eve, 2009, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

This weekend my friend Psychic Friend announced "How was your Christmas (holiday, New Year's)? is no longer a greeting I will acknowledge." Shit man, if I'd'a known that was all it took, I'd'a gotten a t-shirt made.

I swear, I have been living under a cloud since early December. Not the same cloud the entire time - hoo boy, that's when I go into therapy. Different clouds. Clouds of various sizes and shapes and degrees of ominousness. Ominosity.

And. How about I don't write about them? I'm being all unexpected-y, it's a new thing I'm trying. Because usually I am so predictable, right?

But yes. No. I am not going to list off all the crap that has been hanging over my head for two months. I like it. This is working for me. Nothing says "I'm over it" like forgetting all about it. I MAY list the successful resolutions of the things that have worried me.

Like this:

I run a Circus Arts Club at the elementary school. Hula hooping and slapstick routines, a little juggling. I have a unicycle that nobody's tall enough to ride without jeopardizing their future offspring. We try a little stilt-walking. We do a performance in front of the whole school at the end of the club season. Did that worry me? It did! Did I have nothing to worry about because the kids are funny and remembered what to do! I did!

Let's go to the video.

Circus Arts Fall 09 All-School on Vimeo.

You can't see me cringing in the wings every time someone takes a slapstick punch or does a fall, but you can hear all the kids in the auditorium cracking up. I take credit for none of it except the music. Those kids are a riot.

And then it snowed. And the snow caused me no dread whatsoever. In fact, we spent that day hanging ornaments on the tree and listening to holiday music, also sledding, and drinking eggnog with rum in it. That was a break in the battle.



The snow, of course, caused the children to never go back to school ever. Two weeks of winter break! Getting presents wrapped was a challenge, and I also fretted that I'd been so occupied with Circus Arts that I'd neglected to buy them anything of consequence. T-shirts and coloring books. Until Auntie Lo (who is neither my auntie nor the auntie of my kids but who is in a figurative sense everybody's auntie) told me that I fret about this every year.



They like coloring books and t-shirts.

I mean, what the hell have I been complaining about? My parents even took the boys overnight one night so that Bob and I could go see The Allmighty Senators, who hadn't played in like a year, and as a result played just about every song they knew.

After we picked up the kids, we ate many delicious things at Cross Street Market, and then hit the mall to stand in the returns line. Even that was not so dreadful. We bought Mao a pair of orange Vans, and I found jeans at Lucky for half price. Our children sat through me trying on five different pairs of jeans, and were complimentary about every pair. They treat me like a queen, and I should try harder to deserve it. I hope that when they grow up, they do not give me cause to wonder what I have done to piss them off.

Treat your parents decently, or tell them why you do not.

On New Year's Day, our neighborhood roasted a pig. I made barbecue sauce and tried my hand at glogg, a delicious blend of port and cardamom and orange, heated until it turns into an alcohol 8-ball. It was a wonderful wonderful day and I snatched pieces of that pig right out of the roaster all afternoon.



All this time, though, like a lingering metaphor in a Cheever story, the bathtub in the upstairs bathroom has been backed up. Every time the mad whirl slows, every time I have a morning off, there it is, with 2 inches of rusty water in it, and the self-adhesive grippy goldfish we stuck to the bottom when the kids were tiny gradually curling up. I poured Drano and Liquid Plumber down that drain. I plunged. I used baking soda and vinegar, and I used lye. I broke the snake OFF in that fucker. I asked Facebook for advice. I despaired, and meanwhile we all carried our clothes and our shampoo down two flights to the basement, and got kind of lax about toothbrushing.

That clog got stuck in my brain. I saw it, deep in the pipes under the tub, at least 8 feet away from the drain, because I paid out at least that much cable from the drum auger. In my mind it was slimy and black, and made of my hair, and possibly hid a tiny Matchbox car, which accounted for its failure to dissolve when I hit it with life-threatening chemicals.

Bob took several whacks at it. His brother Joe did too. I borrowed tools, broke them, replaced them, bought new ones.

And this Saturday, the same day that My Psychic Friend declared the holidays officially frickin OVER, I came home from work to find the upstairs bathroom clean. Tranquil. Not even a plunger to be seen that might have hinted the filthy battle zone that bathroom has been for the past several weeks. All is well.

The way I walk is just the way I walk

Sam, Molly (making her mosquito face), and Casey, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

Other day, a ton of kids (a squirming, complaining, ticklish ton - they get that way when you pack them in to weigh them) were playing at our house. In, out, making forts, playing tag, wearing hats, playing LEGO. The way I like it.

I was working in the kitchen (read: screwing around on Facebook while reveling in the fact that there were six kids at my house, none of whom required direct or constant supervision - GETTING BIGGER ROCKS) when I heard Zhou, who was working with LEGO in the living room, make an exasperated sound.

I heard him get up, stomp to the sliding door in the dining room and slide the screen closed.

"THIS is why there are so many mosquitos in this house!" he groused to nobody in particular.

I related this anecdote to Bob last night as we stood in the kitchen swatting at pantry moths. I said, "He's only six, but you add a couple 'goddamns' in there and that could have been his grandfather speaking."

Bob said, "That's funny, I was thinking the exact same thing, but it wasn't your dad that came to mind first."

+++++

Our house came with a lovely wooden screen door. The old-fashioned kind, with old brass hardware. Here's a picture.



And maybe you don't think about your screen door every day, but in Baltimore, if you don't have air conditioning, your screen door is an important element in your suite of ventilation strategies. In addition, we have a very friendly street, and if the front door's open, I can be in the kitchen and have a straight sight line out to whomever's walking by. People wander in to say hi, and I can keep one eye on the kids playing out front.

Well, that door eventually fell apart. As things do. You can see where it's starting to come apart in that picture, actually. We hired our pal Rich to replace it for us, and he had a hell of a time finding a wooden one that matched the style of the house and fit the opening. Big surprise, we have a nonstandard door hole. Took him a whole day to shave the thing down to fit. The kids played with the curls of wood from his plane. And then it took me a whole day to stain it. I do not like stain. Here's the new door:



Next, the old hardware that Rich had transferred to the new door stopped working. So, next time our friend Jack was over fixing other stuff (god, it is SO GOOD that we know people that hire out their technical skills - my only motor skill is folding laundry, and Bob can usually accurately dig a hole) I asked him to look at the screen door latch.

The latch hardware was totally worn out in one direction. It's brass, it's 85 years old, a groove was worn in the... the thing. But he managed to jam the spring so that the knob would work if you turned it counterclockwise. The opposite of the intuitive way, but I really like that hardware and I didn't want to replace it with new.

Nowadays, we frequently have visitors who need a brief stymied moment before they get the screen door open. Sorry, friends. But the kids and I have gotten used to it. Neural pathways are teh awesome.

The day that Jack and I made the hot sauce (Jack has tried it and says it's great, I haven't opened a bottle yet), we noticed a rent in the screen door.

"Goddamn it!" I exclaimed.

Jack shook his head. "Gotta beat those kids good when they get home, huh?"

"I don't think so," I said. "They've seen all the trouble we've gone to over that door. They watched you fix the latch, remember? One of their beastly little friends, I guess."

When Mao and Zhou came home from school, Zhou was the first one up on the porch. "Hey!" he called out. "What happened to the door?"

"Well, you're off the hook," I thought to myself.

Mao was next up. "What? Oh, man! Who did that to the door?"

Either they were both innocent, or they are much better actors than I thought, and I am in BIG TROUBLE GOING FORWARD.

That evening, I showed it to Bob. "I am really upset about this door. After all the trouble we went to getting it fixed, now it looks terrible and it's going to let in all the bugs."

"Yeah, that's too bad," he agreed. "Mao told me about it when I got home. I asked if he thought I could blame it on Zhou and he told me 'No. She already knows he didn't do it.'"

I looked at my husband, graduate of three of the most prestigious universities in this land, and furrowed my brow. I did. I know it when I do it, and I have lines on said brow that no amount of Jurlique Calendula Cream can erase.

"You," I said.

"I hate that door!" he said. "I'm going out in the morning, and I have my gym bag, and my laptop bag, and my coffee and my keys, and then the goddamn door doesn't open! What the hell is wrong with that door?"

"You have to turn it the other way," I said. "How long have you lived here? When Jack fixed it, the hardware was too far gone to work the usual way - what the hell! I explained this when it happened!"

"Huh." He went over to the door and turned the knob experimentally, watching the latch go in and out.

"Next time I'll try turning it the other way," he said. "Before putting my foot through the door."

Sheesh. THIS is why we have so many goddamn mosquitos in this goddamn house!

It's a thin line between love and hate

My life for the past week, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

No, it isn't. It's actually a broad gloppy painty line.

For instance:
I HATE painting trim, and I especially do not enjoy it in rainy humid weather. I have bad knees, and terrible eyesight, and ok most of the time I have a steady hand, but jeezely crap - I had to pick dark grey paint to go against that pale-yellow wall? EVERY mishap shows.

But I am done, and now? I LOVE the dark grey against the yellow. I carried the grey through into the powder room off the kitchen, which has like eggplant walls, and the grey looks great with THAT. It's the same grey I used for the trim in the basement, which is a pretty toothpaste blue, and that grey looks terrific there too. It is the L'Oreal Succulent Rose lipstick of trim colors - looks good on everyone.

Some other things to love and/or hate:



I LOVE where I am sitting right now. Since we made a new playroom/guest room in the basement...



(which is to LOVE), we were able to turn the old playroom/guest room into an office, with a desk for the computer, and a table for kids to do art and homework...



... and lots and lots of bookshelves. All that new shelf space meant that I could finally unpack the 27 boxes of books and comics that were stored in the basement and in the guest room closet (which is now freed up (for - whaaat?! - clothes? CRAZAY.) and consolidate the piles of books that were living all over the house...



... notably on the radiator cover in the living room. Not having piles of crap on this thing significantly enhances my calm when I walk in that room.

I LOVE the random doodads I found while unpacking those books, most of which have been in boxes since we left Brooklyn in 2002.



21-cent stamps (when was postage 21 cents?), photo stickers of me and Bob with no children, 1000 lire, and 260 rupees. Of course, when Bob went through his boxes, he found currency from Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe (the most devalued currency EVER IN THE WORLD. Way to go, Zim!). But then he's been to a lot cooler places than I have.

Of course, emptying all those boxes means that we have A FEW cardboard boxes to get rid of...



... and for some reason Baltimore's every-two-week recycling schedule has skipped a week, so I have to live with this garbage dump on my porch for another week. HATE. Thank god we have a covered porch, else all this shit would be brown paste, in all this rain. Have I mentioned the rain? Kind of hating the rain, too.

But I LOVE the way this turned out:



We replaced a window in the basement during the renovation, and I kind of liked the old, munged-up frame. Plus it's the first window Mao ever broke.

The FIRST WEEK we lived in this house, Mao was NOT YET TWO, and Bob catches him in the driveway throwing gravel at the house. I love that! So when the contractors took the old window out, I got the kids and Bob to peep in at me through the window hole, and I printed up the photo life-sized. Made a shadow box out of the old frame - didn't clean it up too much, and I kept the glass, consolidating the broken pieces with special glass glue. So now I have a permanent record of how they looked when we did this giant project. Sort of like handprints in the cement, you know?

I LOVE that I stopped at Wockenfuss this morning and got some for myself, rather than depending on my men to buy me chocolate for Mother's Day.



As Teri Garr says in Tootsie, "I know I'm responsible for my own orgasm."

I LOVE the new blinds in the dining room.



Boy did they not want to go up. That trim is as old as the house and has never been painted, which is beautiful, but damn is it brittle. We have these cordless honeycomb blinds all over the house, and I really like their clean lines and the diffuse light they let in - hey I can be minimal sometimes, not everything in my house is chartreuse-and-turquoise batik!

On the other hand, I am looking for big fantastic batik fabric for curtains for the sliding door, so if you see any...

I LOVE the unobtrusive light-cutting shade in the kitchen:



But I have to say I HATE the moire pattern it makes with the window screen.

We rented one of those giant storage boxes you can keep in the driveway for the duration of the renovation, and this weekend, My Hero Husband got it all the way emptied out. Significant milestone. But when the truck came to pick it up:



Let's get another picture of that, shall we?



Those ruts are TWO FEET DEEP. Plus there's broken concrete all through there. We're going to be on a home tour the first week of June. WHAT am I going to do? HATE big trucks and mud.

And speaking of rain, rainy springs really seem to bring out the ants.



Hello, ant. I am going to kill you now.



Fantastik? Is some kind of ant neurotoxin - they're dead before they even feel the dart. And when you wipe up the dead ants? You're cleaning the counter!

You know? I bet they could all land on the head of a pin.

failed metaphor, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

Today on Flickr I noticed that my friend Leslie found a bird's egg and wrote a lovely but somewhat fatalistic metaphor about it.

The photo made me think of the tiny pearl that I found inside an oyster at a restaurant on Tybee Island last week - so I thought I'd take a picture of it and write something a little more cheery as a reply to Leslie's entry.

As I was trying to focus on this glowing little miracle, no larger than a mustard seed (and no, that was a metaphor I was not going to pursue), I was thinking that Leslie is right, we are fragile like an egg, but we can also be persistent and perfect and unexpected, like a pearl made from a speck of grit... and then I dropped the freaking thing and spent the next 25 minutes crawling on the incompletely-clean and by the way very slanted office floor, with my myopic eyes and bursitis-y knees, and I started thinking that sure, perfection exists, but it's so elusive and hard to hold onto and... and friggin SPHERICAL, it could have rolled ANYPLACE in this damn room, and holy crap how did drywall dust end up all the way up HERE? Oh and NICE, that's a dry dead bug I just put my hand on.

So I decided to leave the metaphors to Leslie.

With Balaclava helmets over their heads, yes

Self portrait, thinking about going back to blonde, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

I am in a FOUL mood. I am in such a bad mood that it's FUNNY. Tonight at work I was a little hypoglycemic and a little menstrual (TMI? F.U!) and I stalked over to my colleague 'Librarian' Is A Euphemism for WHAT? (LIAEFW for short) and told her to give me some of the M&Ms she has stashed in her desk or I would pull her hair.

Her M&M's bag was, as it turns out, being used to store plastic spider rings. Ho yeah, it might have gotten ugly had not another librarian (Pseudonym Forthcoming) stepped in with a bag of Dove Dots.

Now, I have forbidden myself to write about my job on this blog, except to make very general observations, or if I did something silly, or, in more than one case, to complain about being ogled. That is my right. I get ogled, I get to complain. And so tonight, I must limit myself to a few very general observations.

While most people who come into the library looking for help are delightful and civil, some are not. Some people who use the library are lazy. Some are dumb. Or ill-mannered. Some, of course, are mentally ill and need residential services and don't get them because this is America and apparently we think that crazy people are picturesque additions to the landscape. Also tonight, the Internet was so slow as to be considered a Barrier To Effective Service. And for some reason, every time I answered the phone, the volume was WAAAY up and crackin in my ear. Ow.

Of course, I started my shift feeling all Buffy Season Six (in which the writers humiliate the blonde in every way they can imagine) because I had spent eight of the previous 24 hours crawling around on the basement floor. I painted the baseboards, I scrubbed the stray grout off the slate floor tiles in the bathroom (um, that took TWO HOURS), I sealed that slate floor, and I started to lay the carpet tiles in the guest room down there.

Lets count down the positions I have been spending a lot of time in on the basement floor:

6. Kneeling
5. Squatting (including squatting with head on wall for balance)
4. Criss-cross applesauce
3. Hands and knees
2. Prone

And the number-one position for scrubbing grout, sealing floor tile, painting baseboard, AND laying carpet tile:

1. Elbows and knees, ass in the air

It was like yoga - with solvents.

Life used to be so hard

Yeah, no. Actually, now that the contractors have gone, MY work increases exponentially. I (we) have to figure out where things go in the new kitchen, wash or wipe or vacuum or dust EVERY SINGLE THING IN THE HOUSE, seal the deck, seal the grout, seal the new bathroom floor, install the carpet in the basement, move furniture, paint, figure out curtains and blinds... basically reconfigure my house.

But I don't mind. You know I don't. I'm sitting here in the new kitchen working on the laptop and the only sounds I hear are the dishwasher and the washing machine (both of which have been running more or less constantly since Friday, the last day the contractors were here). I can gaze out the kitchen window at my two new bird feeders. I can gaze, uh, INSIDE the kitchen window at the toaster sitting peacefully in its corner on the new countertop. All is well.

To wrap up this thing, here are before, during, and after photos of the work on our house. We had half the basement leveled and built a family room / guest room and full bath down there. We re-did the kitchen. We had sliding doors installed in the dining room, leading to a new deck.


BASEMENT

Before:


During:


They had to cut out the previous, viciously slanted, basement floor and pour a new, flat, one. That corner in the upper left is where the bathroom is now.



Basement guest room leveled and framed. Stairs are to the outside.



Guest room painted.



This little ell was going to be my office, but now looks like a good spot for an elliptical for Bob. We'll make the old playroom into an office / homework room. It has windows.



Bathroom getting its slate floor.


After:


Here's that little ell with drywall, ceiling, electricity, paint and molding.



The blue-sky guest room, with ceiling, light, a new window.




And! Visitors to Chez Librarian will luxuriate in their very own full bathroom! Enjoy the heated floor, the ample light, and the oversize tub! Be sure to notice the dark-purple towels that an entire staff of librarians and everyone I know on Facebook helped me find! Stocked with LUSH products, courtesy of my sister-in-law Janie!

I love this room.


KITCHEN

Before-before-before:



This was an early conception, using IKEA's kitchen planning software. That program kept crapping out on me, it uses a lot of memory. But it's pretty close to what we ended up doing, actually.

Before:



And this is on its VERY BEST DAY.


During:



First they destroyed it.



Then they rebuilt it.



Then it was paint, floor, electricity, cabinets.

After:



And then it was time to stand back and sniffle.


DECK

Before:



Hugged tight to the house, only projects about 8' at its deepest. Old and splintery, with nails that we knocked back in every spring. Its time had come.

During:



Wrecking the old deck. I would have enjoyed doing that part myself, actually.




Building the new one. Bigger. Two levels.



We wanted it to step down into the yard in increments, like.

After:






DINING ROOM (sliding door to deck)

Before:



See those two little casement windows? That was previously about it for our view of the backyard. Our house seemed to literally turn its back on the yard - you couldn't see it from anywhere inside the house.


During:



So we paid men to come and chop a big giant hole in the wall.



They found a pack of cigarettes. This is the same brand in which the famous Honus Wagner baseball card was found. No card. We put 'em back in the wall, along with a half-smoked pack of Marlboro Reds.

After:



"Then, window, let day in, and let life out."



And curtains for when the sun is too much.