The Fixer Upper House and Garden

Dry Run

Though he was trying to be nice, the Sears appliance guy was nothing like the fictional Maytag repairman. The Maytag repairman is like a jolly bartender who wants to solve your problems and/or introduce you to his mother. The Sears guy is more like a waiter who just wants you to finish your dinner so he can get the tip and give your table to the next people.

It's true the Sears man was all business when he showed up at my house today. Clean, too...even eager. It's just that he showed up an hour early. I was told he'd arrive "between noon and 5 p.m.," so I had a million things packed into the morning. I was racing out the door at 11:00 when he called to say he was on the way.

"What? Why are you coming now?" I asked. I didn't mean to yell; I was just trying to be heard over the din of the excavator's back hoe.

"Because you're next on my list," the Sears man said.

"You're not supposed to get here till noon," I said.

"Well I'm either coming now, or I'm not coming at all," he said without emotion.

He had to come. I've been without a dryer since Tuesday and the laundry pile smells like...well...it smells like a wet basement. But C was desperate for me to drive her to her friend's house. I had to chose between my middle daughter or the dryer.

I delegated, putting M in charge of all appliances and repairmen. But before I left, I checked on the dryer to be sure it still was half-broken. The light worked and the drum got hot, but it still wouldn't spin around.

Ten minutes later when the Sears guy got here, the spinner was spinning just fine. He still charged me for the house call.

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

Here are a few pictures of "excavation day."

T watches the first few digs from the second-floor.

Lunch was a little bit surreal. (These are not my curtains btw; they came with the house)

 

Milo was on guard. Doesn't he look cute with his new haircut? (Again...not my curtains)

The excavator prepares the hole for "the dead man's wall." This wall, which will be poured tomorrow--weather-permitting-god-help-me---will connect the new foundation with the old. Fortunately, our house sits on hard-packed clay. This is good news for the house, bad news for the future garden.

Here's another picture of the girls and dog watching all the action.

Um ... I mean Omm

I stood against the wall, my shoulder pressed into white, nubby cinderblock. My legs pointed toward a ballet bar at one side of the room while my upper body turned to the windows behind me.

"Twist at the waist not the hip," said Kristy, the yoga instructor. She spoke in a soft voice, like a nanny reading Good Night Moon at nap time. She approached me stealthily; pressed her index finger gently into my left hip.

"Try to flatten your lower back against the wall," she whispered, sliding her hand through the arc of space where my back was definately not flat against the wall. I twisted some more, tried to flatten that space. A slow pain oozed through my lower back as if the discs were caught in a garlic press.

"I have back issues," I said through rigid jaw bones. "I have issues with my whole left side."

"Why do you think that is---that it's only your left side?" Kristy asked in that nursery-school voice. She is older than me, thinner; an empty nester with curly hair in clips like mine and luminous skin. Large, soft-looking breasts swayed beneath her yoga top.

I twisted more.

"It's the hip I carried my kids on," I said. I didn't admit that by the time I could no longer carry my youngest child, she was long past needing me to.

The cinderblock chafed my bare shoulders.

"What we give and what is taken," announced Kristy to the class. "We are givers!"

And then to me more pointedly, softly: "It's interesting it's your left side, because the left is the feminine and the right represents the masculine."

She pronounced all three syllables slowly, distinctly. "Mass Cue Lynn."

"Your masculine side is strong," she said with her finger pressing into my hip again. "Something to think about."

She walked on to the next person and I thought: I didn't know I had a masculine side. I wondered why it was so strong...so well and rested...so together...while my poor, martyred, nurturing, feminine, left side sank slowly and painfully into the ground. How had this happened? Why? I thought of freshly showered Husband reading the New York Times on the blue couch when our kids were small, as I changed diapers, mashed bananas, folded laundry and asked him things like "do you want some decaf coffee?" while holding the cup's hot side so he could grab the handle.

(As I wrote that sentence, a coyote howled, a dog barked and then there was an indistinguishable murmer, high and grounded: "nyee! nyee! nyee!" It's 3 a.m. But back to the yoga class:)

Or had my right side gained muscle and agility by compensating always for its injured sister...an able leg grown stronger when the other is braced?

I twisted against the cold wall, my mind full and most certainly not empty, and the pain in my lower back released. The pain that moments before had made me wince was gone and I felt relief in my lumbar spine: an itch scratched, a muscle loosened; the welcomed punch on swelling dough.

(Now there is a pungent stench through open windows: Skunk.)

Kristy coaxed the class into straighter poses ... and moments later I was back in the minivan wondering about my kitchen counter. Lately I've been visualizing a butcher-block island made of end-grain mesquite. (This photo is from the folks at www.livingelements.com; click on it for a larger view) The end-grain mesquite countertop is different, which is good. It reminds me of gardening, which I love. It'd go well with my new-but-looks-like-old kitchen's exposed brick wall and bead-board ceiling. It's dark and hard. Strong. You could cut the stalks off brocoli and mold clay bears on that counter and it'd be no worse off. It's so masculine.

Maybe too masculine, for now I'm thinking I should shore up the feminine. That I should nurture the nurturer with soft colors and gentle materials in this kitchen where my daughters will finish growing up and where, quite possibly, Husband and I will grow old. Um, well, given our proclivity toward moving, at least older.

And back to square one on the countertops I go!   

The Spin Cycle

Imagine a shirt that's just gone through the spin cycle while tangled in the agitator of a top-loading washing machine. When you pull it out it's so twisted and knotted that you can't tell which article of clothing it is. It looks like a wet, cotton pretzel made of rags.

That shirt you just imagined---it's me. This is how I feel this week. We're supposed to find out about our permits...yesterday. We're supposed to sign with a contractor....yesterday. July 4 is ... tomorrow, and the whole town is sipping sun tea on front porches. I can hear the middle school band, practicing their parade things.

The sun is shining but I feel like I'm standing in a hail storm.

I realize things could be so much worse. I'm not going to go over the myriad ways things could be worse. I have a list  longer than the sleeve of that shirt I just told you to imagine. I'm sure you've lived through far worse things than waiting for the builder's permits and the builder and the building to begin. I know I have.

Death and Destruction

The man we bought the house from died the night before we closed. I haven't thought about him much since then, other than to wonder if his spirit is the source of the strange moaning noises we occassionally hear coming from the basement.

But now that we're getting closer to the start date of the renovation, I think about Bob a lot. Like the room I'm sitting in right now---he worked in here, watched TV in here, played board games with his kids and then his grandkids--for some 45 years. He added the room to the house in 1961: a square family room with a vinyl floor, brown walls, a full bath and no windows on the east wall.  It's so poorly insulated that I wore a down vest while working here almost every day this winter. The girls and their friends have been coloring a village on the walls. Soon it will all come tumbling down.

Would Bob care?

After he died, we learned he used to say he'd never move out of this house. I felt horrible about closing the day after his death, so we gave his wife the option to reschedule. But she was closing on her new condo the same day and needed to go forward. She needed closure on the closing.

Later I told a woman who once lived on this block that I felt sorry for the family. But she said: "Don't feel sorry for Bob. Bob drove a motorcycle and sailed and rode bikes with his wife.  Bob loved life."

I wonder what he'd think about the renovation?

I also wonder why ... for me ... this renovation is so evocative of death and destruction. I get the shakes whenever I visualize the demolition of this room. It's so violent. So final. So potentially ruinous. ... But isn't renovation a form of renewal? Doesn't the "re" prefix mean to do again? Why does this renovation make me think of death--always death?

I must start visualizing a phoenix rising from the ashes. But what does a phoenix look like?

It's All Relative

In a lovely neigbhorhood of Madison, WI, another family is living in a near-exact replica of my house! My friend Therese sent me this photo. It's much nicer than my house (at the moment!). When we get to the fun part---decorating---I'm thinking of doing hunter-green shutters, like the Madison house, with white trim and a white door (but not as white as it is now).

Madison Dutch Colonial at top; my house on the bottom:

Dirty Laundry

For the first five or 10 years of my life as a parent, I was certain other mothers had things down while I, alone, floundered at the job of parenting. In my mind, other mothers' children didn't cling to them at birthday parties. Other mothers worked-out every day. Other mothers had better jobs, reliable sitters, flatter abs. This "other-mother" routine was a maddening act of self defeatism that took years to peter out.

Now that my oldest is nearly 13, I no longer think everyone but me has a bead on parenting. I've realized the kids who read in preschool or waterski'ed at 4 or made the travel soccer have--it turns out--the same pre-teen issues as my kids have. Time heals more than just wounds: In time, zits pop out on even the loveliest of cheekbones.

I've also seen that my own kids are doing pretty well despite my parenting weaknesses and a year of tumultuous change. But even as my confidence in parenting has grown, there's one area I still feel terrifically insecure about: I'm certain other mothers are better at laundry management than I am.

After years of practice, I cannot keep up with this daily chore that grows, like my children, larger every day. In every room of my small house, piles of dirty laundry smoulder like mulch while stacks of clean clothes wait to be folded on beds, radiators, table tops ... any and every flat surface in the house. My children have inherited this shortcoming--none of them can manage to get their dirty clothes into the laundry basket  or their nicely folded (by me) clean clothes into their dressers. Husband is equally remiss. If I place a pile of clean boxer shorts or black sox by his pillow he will ACTUALLY PUT THESE ON THE FLOOR when he goes to bed rather than place them in his dresser. He says he can't tell the clean piles from the dirty ones.

All this helps explain why I agreed to buy this house that needs such a lot of restoration. The new addition is going to include a laundry chute. The chute will start in the kids' 2nd floor bathroom; it will travel through the kitchen and woosh down into a cavernous laundry basket in the new part of the basement. When I've described this old-fashioned system to other mothers, many have wondered why I don't just put the washer/dryer on the 2nd floor or in the mudroom. They've pointed out that I'm still going to have to lug clean clothes up two flights of stairs. Of course I thought of this. I examined the laundry-room conundrum from every possible angle. I researched laundry-room designs. I interviewed friends and relatives and the sales-people at Home Depot. And I realized that with dirty laundry as in life, recognizing your weakness can turn out to be your greatest strength. Upstairs-laundry rooms don't work if you're the kind of person whose laundry is always in flux.

I''m that kind of person. Now if only I could afford an elevator system that returns clean laundry to the second floor....

Fresh Air

Early this morning as I was walking my dogs, I experienced the best weather of my life. The lake rippled slowly onto the wet sand like soapy bathwater. A warm breeze blew like flannel cloth against my legs. Tree branches swayed above the bluffs, performing a ballet with their oblong shadows to the back-drop of a turquoise sky. All the while the 17-year-cicadas hummed like a latte maker stuck in overdrive. When I could ignore the signs posted all over town that said "Aerial Spraying Tomorrow," I felt relaxed for the first time in over a year.

Now it's 2 p.m. and 90 degrees. Every window of the house is open, and the breeze that embraced me like a baby's receiving blanket this moring is now blowing papers all over the floor, like a toddler in the midst of a terrible fit. School work; bills, camp notifications; bills. My family-room looks like a dumpster for recycled paper. But I don't mind. I 'd rather sweat it out in front of an open window than wear a sweater in the summer. This is why, several years ago and at the suggestion of my dear friend Louisa, I bought a Mazda MPV. At the time, it was the only minivan with middle windows that open.

Oh, but for those opened middle windows!

A few hours ago, I drove into town with all the windows down, letting the wind toss my hair into a spaghetti frizz. I needed to buy a bug catcher for T's upcoming Indian Princess camp-out, and--because it was the last day of school--I needed a large coffee with two dollops of half-and-half and a packet of Sugar In The Raw. Driving home, I sucked coffee from the plastic lid like a kid guzzling apple juice from a sippy cup when suddenly, a cicada flew through the window and bonked into my face. Talk about the ultimate bug catcher!

"Pfpfitpfpfpfitpfpfitppfifot!" went the cicada.

It sounded like my Irish grandmother cursing the Devil and her husband as she did the washing up after dinner every night.

"Pffpfitpfifpfitpfpfpfpfittpfitit!"

The cicada boinged off my cheek and took another dive into my thigh. I knew there was nothing to fear; like most humans, cicadas are just looking for companionship before the inevitable end. And a little fun. They don't bite or scratch or sting. They cause no disease and mean no harm. But, man, are they ugly! Uhg-Lee! UGLY! They're downright prehistoric looking, with a black tube-like body; lacy, slow-mo wings; and red eyes that bulge like a frog's.

I had to get rid of the cicada. It creeped me out to have it boinging into my body like that. And besides, I needed to pick up the kids from school. So I pulled the car to the side of the road and shooed the bug out the passenger window.

At least one of us is free...for now.

Postscript: here is a picture of T holding a 17-year cicada. She has become their benefactress, moving them from the driveway and yard to trees to save them minivan tires and Milo's sharp, white teeth. Our dog is enjoying these bugs far more than the rice-and-lamb kibble that we dump in his dish at mealtime. Instead of coming to his bowl when he's called , he trots to the back door and licks his chops. Cicada sushi, anyone? . Below is a young cicada emerging from its shell.

Noise

I grew up in the corner of a converted attic of an old Colonial home. I guess it's a stretch to say I grew up in a corner...I slept there, played there and talked on the phone way more than I ever did any homework up there. It was my bedroom, a cozy nest with yellow shag carpeting, sloped ceilings and windows that opened with a crank. The only downside to my third-floor hide-away was that it was insufferably hot in the summer. So from Memorial Day until well into September, I slept on the sleeping porch.

Oh, to have a sleeping porch! It was a sparse, narrow room off the master  bedroom, with three walls of hinged windows, a bead-board ceiling and painted wood floorboards that creaked beneath my bare feet. When we couldn't sleep, my sister Christine and I would watch airplaines glide silently from one end of the window-wall to the other, faraway and deep into the night. We felt so safe against their smallness.

Except for during massive storms that turned the sky the color of Stretch Armstrong, we always left the windows open on the sleeping porch. And while the screens did a pretty good job of keeping out the bugs, the smells and sounds of summer were vivid from our breezy causeway: purple lilac from the patio below; sugar-sweet magnolia, pungent skunk. I wish I knew the names of all the bugs and animals that performed in the night-time symphony, like the dense cricket choir, the frantic whirl of locusts, racoons caterwauling in the dark as they tipped tin trash cans onto our old blacktop driveway. No matter how hot it was, no matter how thick with humidity the air, it was always cool and peaceful on the sleeping porch.

Many years ago, we sold the house to a family who enclosed the porch, wrapped it in floor-to-ceiling book shelves and plunked a massive air conditioner condenser on the patio. It's just as well, because the night is noisy now. The days are too, what with all the air conditioner condensers as big as small pianos, lawn mowers the size of golf carts, and airplanes that fly so low you can make out the logo on the jet wing. I wonder what the sub-terrainian ecosystem makes of all our noisy clatter?

What do you make of it? Everyone I know --eveyone but me and husband--runs their AC all spring and summer long. When I go into my friends' houses during the summer, I always want to borrow a sweater. When my friends come into my steamy house, they want to leave. One recent summer, my friend Isobel walked into my living room and cried out: "Adrienne! Your candles are melting!"

OK--so they were bending over a little from the heat. So what? Candles are cheap; and isn't humidity good for the complexion? Doesn't everyone in the Midwest and Northeast know that no matter how hot it is when you go to bed, there's almost always a bit of a breeze by 2 o'clock in the morning? And that it's OK to sweat? And that we're not supposed to sleep under down comforters in August?

I admit to being extreme in my appreciation for sweaty weather. And yes, I will install central air in the renovated portion of our house (for investment purposes!) But we won't run it very often, especially not at night. I want our kids to grow up falling asleep to the cricket lullabye. I want them to hear cats screaming like laboring women in the night and to know how unusual it is to hear a coyote howling in the suburbs. I want them to appreciate the difference between a cicada and a locust, and to wake up to a woodpecker's taptaptapping on the hickory tree beneath their window. I want us all to hear the rain fall like pennies on the roof.

Of course, we moved into our house on Halloween and I have no idea where the next-door neighbor's air conditioner condenser is situated. Probably it's below my youngest-daughter's window, she being the nature girl of the family. Probably it's huge, like their spacious shingle spec home that's less than six feet from my living room.

VVVvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv.

The Sears Wish Book

My sisters and I used to ogle every page of the Sears Catalog Wish Book when it arrived at our house in the outer-boondocks of Chicago every December. Like all the kids in our split-level neighborhood, we'd check off every item we wanted: barbie cars; pogo sticks; giant stuffed snakes in psychedelic colors. Every page offered a wider array of things to dream about.

So when my friend Therese e-mailed me the other day to say she saw my exact house in a suburb of Madison, WI, we began to wonder:  Could these be Sears Roebuck & Co. mail-order kit houses?

An initial search on the internet leads me to believe "my" circa 1920s Dutch Colonial is some sort of kit house---possibly Sears but more likely another less famous brand. Dutch Colonial homes like mine with gambrel roofs, double-entry doors and two-story garages exist in older suburbs throughout the Northeast and Midwest, although they've been classic tear-down targets due to their smaller rooms and stingy bathroom options--by today's standards. (Footnote: They also have high ceilings, great millwork and steal-beams in the basement.)

Does anyone in the house-blogosphere know how to find out if a home is a mail-order kit house and if so, from which company?

Narrow Passage

In the backyard of the east side of our house, there's a narrow alley that no one but the dogs ever enters. The dogs love it because they can run at full speed, barking, to meet the neighbor's golden retriever where the fence ends; kind of like going to confession without the dark chamber.  I was thinking of training them to use this space as a latrine, but I feel lucky enough that they "go" outside to begin with (and not in the house). So we've pretty much overlooked this narrow passage as we work on plans for the addition.

Then our architect, the wonderful Miguel, came up with an idea to use this space as a little courtyard adjacent to what will become the eating-area of the kitchen. French doors will open onto a small patio made of (affordable) stone, with a path leading to a somewhat larger patio with a table in the back yard. Poof! Something comes from nothing but a good idea. Now I'm envisioning blooming vines trailing up the fence, pots of herbs, and a wicker chair with a comfy cushion.