The Fixer Upper House and Garden

The Fixer Upper Garden

One of the things that really motivated me to buy T.F.U.H. 20 months ago was that it needs a total landscaping overhaul, and I really love to toil in the garden. My green thumb is going to come in handy, because the front evergreens are so dense and overgrown that five children can simultaneously lay on top of them without even bending the branches. The side garden is a barren mudslick and the backyard is so bereft of plants it looks as if a bomb went off. The property endured decades of benign neglect from the P.O.s and nine months of cataclysmic assaults from us: The demolition of the old addition, the digging of a new basement, the building of a new addition and the installation of a storm drain all have detonated the property. There's nothing left but rocks, scrappy trees and hard, clay soil...I can hardly wait to get started!

This is the future bluestone patio:

Milo's Mudroom Mayhem

We designed the mudroom with two things in mind: a place to store stuff, and a place to store dogs when dogs need to be stored somewhere, such as when they have muddy paws, or when workers or small children are in the house. Allie, our labrador, took to the den-like room immediately. Milo, a cockapoo, considers it a prison, and he swiftly figured out how to escape. At first I thought he was scratching the Dutch door so it opened just enough for him to wiggle out his 20-pound frame. But then M and her friend used a hidden camera to catch the rascal in action: He actually scales the door, like a monkey. You can see the video at the left-side of the blog. Just click the "play" button on the widget that says "One True Media." (You can make the video appear bigger by clicking the "zoom" button on the frame.)

Old-Fashioned Girl In Old-Fashioned House In Old-Fashioned Town

It's true I live in an old-fashioned town. It has a gazebo in the square, concerts in the park and a village hall built out of local bricks a hundred years ago. The people are friendly, only one dog barks and even the post-office workers smile when they see you.

It's not true the women dress as if they were members of the FLDS. Well, at least not most days. One day every year a bunch of ladies put on hoop skirts and floppy hats to teach the local school urchins about village history. I was part of this group this year, and we had a lot of fun.

You'd be surprised how comfortable the hoop skirt is---very forgiving and breezy. I was trying to look noble when my electrician took this photo.

While walking to town, my friend Karianne (a true Dutch Colonial) got more hoots from men than she's experienced in years, but it was quiet at the gazebo:

Here a bunch of ladies teach the local urchins how to play blind-man's bluff.

The spot where we're standing was once a garbage dump:

The Gambrel Roof

Here are before-and-after shots of the gambrel roofed addition.

Before:

After:

 

Blog Updates

Dear friends and readers,

I am as un-techy a person as you'll ever find, but a little thing called "widgets" is making it easier to navigate the blogosphere. Just six months ago, I grappled with how to start a "favorite houseblogs" sidebar to this blog. Now I can link to other blogs very easily (if you're a blogger who reads my blog a lot, let me know!). Widgets also have made it easier for me to connect with you, dear friends and readers. I've just added "feedblitz" (upper right corner), which allows you to get my posts delivered to your e-mail address if you so choose. And I've also added a "search" function that lets you find stuff on the blog.

So if you want to revisit last summer's flood,  or read about soapstone, or get some tips on mudroom design...search the blog!

Now if I could just find a widget to fold the laundry...

The Living Room

Originally we had big plans for changing the function of the living room, including building columned half-walls that would separate the main, narrow section from a small attached sunroom. This would have created a lovely office for moi...but after we decided to install a storm drain in the yard...well...the lovely office for moi got flushed away.

And this is OK, because the phoenix rises out of ashes...and the dough rises out of quickened yeast ... and May flowers spring from April rains ... Anyway, looking on the bright side: after we refinished the floors, painted the walls and cleaned up the fireplace, the living room emerged as the go-to place for curling up, catlike, in a comfy chair with the Sunday paper, and reading it all, even the Auto section and the circulars from Macy's and Target. It's a great place to go to play board games, or visit with a friend, or chat on the phone. And the room's spaciousness deceives visitors into thinking the house is a bit bigger than it really is.

The living room is only partially furnished at this moment in time due to fund compromisation (I just made up that word). You can see how nicely the floors turned out:

The fireplace bricks are the exact same color and texture as chocolate chip cookie dough before you dump in the bag of chocolate chips:

 

Did I mention how nicely the floors turned out?

Get out your sunglasses! The walls were really really white

And this:

The Mud Room

I don't mean to brag, but my mudroom has a Dutch door. It also has 4 cubbies, a coat closet, 8 deep shelves and room for two dog beds. It isn't fancy...but it's so incredibly functional. I don't know how I survived the first 13 years of parenting and dog "companionship" without this room.

Milo prefers to sit on my feet at all times, but Allie likes her lair:

These cubbies are very handy:

Quiet ... At Last

I am home and there are no workers digging in the yard or hammering in the basement. The phone is not ringing, the kids are out with Husband and the sleeping dogs are not even snoring. I vacuumed every day this week, because it's shedding season for labradors and visiting season for T.F.U.H. (people kept stopping by and I kept inviting people to stop by). So in addition to being quiet, it's also very tidy here.

Ah, blessed peace; how I've missed you.

This is the first time since we moved that I feel relaxed. I've been so busy...and am having so much fun in the house. Last night we hosted dinner for a progressive party, which is a remarkable way to entertain. I must remember to volunteer for this type of thing more often. In a progressive party, everyone meets at one house for cocktails; then you break up into groups of 8-10 people at various homes, and after dinner everyone gathers for coffee and dessert at another destination--in our case, our church.

If you're a dinner host, here's what's expected of you: You set the table and provide wine. You do not cook. You do not mix martinis. You do not bake an interesting dessert. But if you're like us, you do install light fixtures an hour before the party, polish your silver for the first time in 15 years, and hope darkness falls before the guests arrive so no one notices the backhoe in your yard. Here are some photos:

M helped set the table and took these photos; C kept replenishing guests' water goblets; T was polite but shy and Milo didn't throw up on any shoes:

The morning of the party, my friend Ginny invited me to a flower-arranging seminar, where I made this centerpiece:

 

I will never forget unpacking, drying and repacking my crystal and china on the driveway last summer, after a flash flood dumped 18 inches of water into our basement (where all of our belongings were stored). This is the first time I've used the "good goblets" since then and I was sad to realize how many we lost during the flood. Hand-blown crystal is not very sturdy! And, yes, it was dark by dinner but it still was hard to miss the construction equipment in the yard (which was used to dig a storm drain earlier in the day). I think it even added a little charm to the evening.

The Phone Niche

One of the best things about T.F.U.H. is that it has a telephone box in the hallway. We don't know if the niche was original or added later, but I suspect it's purpose was to house an early-model wall-mount telephone. When we first bought the house, I considered dry-walling over the niche or changing the trim, but in the end I decided just to paint it and have an electrical outlet installed in the lower cabinet, making it a highly functional space with the added bonus of looking really cool.

I bought a wall-mount phone that's based on a model from the 1940s but has touch-tone buttons in the dial holes. It's heavy and is not cordless...a plus in a home where the cordless phone is always getting lost. ("Crosley Dreyfus 500" at www.crosleyradio.com. I paid $50 and just found out it's now on sale for $20! Harumpf!!)

Now that there's an electrical outlet in the small lower cabinet, we use this space to recharge cell phones.

This is what it looks like closed:

The Dining Room

We had our first dinner party on Friday night and one of the dogs threw up on our friend's shoe. Actually, the dog threw up under the shoe when our friend, Pieter, had his legs stretched out beneath the dining room table. Later as he crossed and uncrossed his legs, the vomit got pressed deeper into the rug, which, I must point out, is cream with a lovely blue border.

(Note to daughters: do not buy cream-colored rugs for your dining rooms when you are grown up)

We all laughed nervously when Pieter noticed a large, clumpy, brown smear of something underneath his feet and on his shoe, oh, about the time I was serving dessert. "What did I drag in?" he asked in a melodious Dutch accent. Husband and I immediately suspected the dogs. Well, I immediately suspected just one of the dogs: Milo, who absorbs stress like Bounty paper towels pick up juice spills. At first I thought he had brought in a clump of mud, because the brown smear had no odor. But when Husband took a closer look, he found an intact, undigested nugget of Purina One in the mix.

OK ... so ... yuck.

In a situation such as this, we can expect Husband to remain calm and non-chalant, which is His Way. For me, remaining calm in the face of dinner-party vomit requires enormous discipline and a huge amount of reserve, which I amazingly was able to summon, at least while our guests were in the house. But later that night, after an exhaustive and unsuccessful search for vacuum cleaner bags in unpacked moving boxes...well, let's just say I experienced a different set of emotions.

Fortunately Husband saved the rug...and the weekend...by renting a Rug Doctor at our local grocery store early Saturday morning. The rug cleaned up perfectly, and he used the machine to clean several other area-rugs that have been in storage for 2 years.

So all was well at The Fixer Upper House. All is well. Here are some shots of...and thoughts on...the dining room:

The original dining room was almost a square at 10' x 11', and Husband and I considered turning it into a den/office. When we hired Miguel, our architect, he convinced us to use it as a formal dining room, because that is what the house intended it to be. We bumped the wall back about three feet into what was the old kitchen and is now a butler's pantry/mom office, which we're calling "the butler's office." I'm so glad we did this, because the new dining room is beautiful.

(Regarding unpacking: In addition to not being able to find vacuum cleaner bags, I'm missing a few things from the dining room, among them one shade for the chandelier, 7 china tea cups and a chinese urn filled with my dead cat's ashes):

My mother bought the mirror (shown below) in the early '70s, a year or so before she died. When I was growing up, I thought the mirror was "too modern" and wondered what my mother had been thinking when she hung it in our foyer. Years later, when my sisters and I divided our parents' things, no one wanted the mirror, but my younger sister took it and kept it unboxed in basement after basement after basement for years and years and years, not wanting to hang it but unable to throw it away because it had been our mother's. When I decorated my last home, I started thinking about the mirror and "getting" what my mother had been thinking. I asked my sister if I could have it, because her husband didn't like it much, but the mirror was so heavy that mailing it to New Jersey would have cost a fortune. So it continued to sit...and collect dust...in two more of my sister's basements ... until last summer when she and I settled into houses that are 20 miles apart, and she gave it to me, and I had the glass replaced because it was cracked, and then I renovated T.F.U.H., and Husband hung the mirror on the dining room wall. I absolutely love the mirror, and I love my sister for giving it to me, and my brother-in-law for not liking it, and Husband for hanging it, and Miguel for convincing us to bump out the wall and turn this old square room into a proper dining room, and ...

This is what the dining room looked like before the renovation:

                                                  ...............

Well, I can't find a "before" picture of the dining room! It was a small, almost square room with pink wall paper and blue carpeting.