A cup of tea, a cup of coffee: a progress report

 Good morning.  My sister Mary Ellen is visiting this week, cheerfully and helpfully living with me in what is basically a reconstruction site.

Here we are working inside on various projects, she with her coffee, I with my tea, while Alexis and his helper saw through roots to dig in the trees around back.

Meanwhile, we await the painter and whoever else shows up...electrician, maybe the plumber, maybe the carpenter, though the last two mentioned their return visits might be later in the week.  It's life around here, always with a full driveway of trucks.

But you will be glad to hear we now have a kitchen sink, faucet, and, best of all, water running!  So far we had mostly been picnicking, washing up whatever isn't disposable in the bathroom sink. The backsplash man, Ben, is on vacation this week, but we can dream...

 Don't feel too sorry for us, though.  On Monday afternoon, my brother Charles and sister-in-law Susan drove up from Cary with my nephew Chet, who has been cooking for me for a few weeks now while all this renovation is going on.

Though he hasn't been a professional cook, his interest in making delicious recipes, finding and trying new foods and spices, has been a great boon for me and Mary Ellen, too.  In fact, when he arrived with his box of this week's specials, the wild mushroom and walnut pate and the beet hummus didn't make it into the frig before crackers came out and people began to dig in.  "Wow!" and "Amazing!" were the sounds between eating.

Both Chet and I are enjoying the adventure of his cooking.  Along with the above treats were roasted cauliflower, a kale, cranberry and nut salad, a delicate white Sable fish with a tahini sauce on the side (we decided the fish was just right without the sauce; the tahini made its own way on the table as a salad dressing or dip), turmeric and carrot rice, and a light cheese flan with carmelized topping that Mary Ellen, Joseph and I were equally possessive of.  Last week, the hit of the menu was butternut squash enchiladas, which, I am almost ashamed to tell you, I did not share with anyone.

But about the house progress:

1) the ceilings are smooth and bright now, and the walls of all the rooms except the kitchen are painted; today, Keith is continuing trimwork.

2) the kitchen countertops, which went in last week, thanks to Josh and his crew, were missing a sink, because, opening the box, we found it cracked...ugh.  Of course, no running water.  (We now know all the things you need a kitchen sink for.)  But as of yesterday afternoon, plumbing is in and only the dishwasher has yet to be further tinkered with.

3) carpentry by the master Chuck has produced beautiful beginnings to a new pantry, a new cabinet with pull-out drawers and a lovely butcherblock top made of the remnants of another job.

4) the porch is almost its old self...rocking chairs usable, extraneous furniture down to a few bookshelves...just in time to enjoy our fine spring weather.

5) a bonus came when the old kitchen counter was removed.  As Daniel and Jose were about to carry it away, it suddenly occurred to me that I could use part of it as a new cabinet top in the living room; I asked, and it was done then and there.  (See photo above:  the glass enclosure to its right, by the way, my brother Charles designed and put in when the first reno took place seven years ago.)

6) outdoors, yard paths are completed, and my next project will be a slightly expanded patio, as soon as  I figure out which material will best support a table and chairs...it isn't gravel and flagstone, I guess, and no concrete, please.

Next, come a lot of small electrical fixes, including a doorbell that, I hope, will work...I'm getting deafer by the day...a new outdoor faucet to water more easily the ever-expanding front garden, the kitchen painted and floor put in, and the porch and landing repainted and stained.

So...so far, so good.  There has been only one day, ironically April 15, when things suddenly began to deconstruct ...that cracked sink, the internet company's interference (for no reason), a major leak requiring no running water at all for a day, and several other snafus.  But the next day we went back to repairing the setbacks and on the progress went.

I'm going out to check on the tree planting now.  My irises are opened, the herb garden is flourishing, and Joseph's lettuce is shouldering up into real leaves.

Be well, all.  Enjoy spring and all its fixings.

A ghost story

 Waking up too early lately, the dark still cushioning me against rising and shining (not to mention getting to work on the house and garden), this morning I lay there waiting for light.  I have been reading The Ghost Variations, 100 very short stories about the way spirits inhabit our world and we theirs.  It's been fun, but at the moment I wasn't in the mood to read, even to pass the time.

There is a quirkiness about the way the author, Kevin Brockmeier, turns the tables on the stereotypical ideas we have of ghost.  No mediums (so far), no white sheets with big Halloween cut-outs for eyes, no knocking on the floor to drive you mad.  Instead, he invents a normalcy that puts spirits and the living in almost interchangeable situations, giving thoughts and feelings and sometimes hilarious perplexities to the non-living (though really, these stories often defy that nomen).  My favorite is the spirit with a terrible sense of direction, lost at every turning and unable to find a single person willing to set her on the right path.

This too-early morning, thinking of the story I had read before sleep last night, I picked up a pen and a few scraps of paper I keep on the night table to jot notes for the next day, and began a ghost story of my own.  I thought I'd share what I've got so far...

It's called...

Time, Gentleman, Time

As if he were a stranger entering a house he's not sure he recognizes, Peter shifts his way from room to room, hugging the wall, mostly.  He's looking for something he can't remember, but knows is there.  That's the way he was his last year...walking around a corner, deliberate and purposeful, his object a sure thing, then suddenly the point of his destination vanished.

When he was finally gone himself, he wondered whether all the things he had forgotten were not entirely erased, but still existed, waiting on some plane he hadn't reached yet.  Finding himself at this place he thought he remembered (even if it was the wrong address), perhaps he could make peace with the insubstantiation of his existence.  The irony of that conundrum wasn't lost on him.

Nothing about the rooms struck him as significant.  There must have been furniture, or pictures on the wall...photographs, even...but such images escaped him.  Toward the back of the house there were voices, so he shifted toward them, though for an instant...he didn't know why...he was tempted to turn down the darkened hall toward the bedroom.

In the dining room now...he seems to know it by instinct...he stops for a moment, then moves into the kitchen.  Here he feels both comfortable and anxious.  His lower extremities begin to ache, but as if from far away, as if he were feeling someone else's. 

The voices are louder from here...he can hear laughter and a small child splashing and giggling.  A man he once might have known, he thinks, is shouting, cheering her on.

Some sharp edge of a memory cuts him...there is a woman with them, her voice...he knows it.  A smell of barbecue on a grill is brought to him by a shift of wind, and close behind it the scent of the cream his mother slathered over him before they walked through the sand down to the water, her hand pulling him little by little toward the low fringe of waves.  She, too, laughs.

Is this where he is, then, way back there again?  No. Not her.  But someone closer.

Closer than he wants to be.  He is too close, he feels, to something he is not ready for.  He stays where he is, in the shadows, watching without really seeing how all this is happening.  

He's new at this state of being, anyone else could tell him; it's confusing, seeing life go on without him.

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By the time I wrote this, it was nearly seven, and the day could get on.  Meanwhile, you can have some fun and see what you can make of it, see where the story can go from here.  I've got to go plant some arum lilies.

In Progress

morning reflections

Well, work is getting done!  The downstairs is a mess of old wood exposed, new wood hammered, ceiling scrapes, dangling and redirected electrical wires, furniture piled on porch and under wraps, kitchen things and books tucked into closets.

new furniture for the porch

kitchen opened up

Here is my dining table for the duration:

All the workers I contacted months ago are showing up and doing good, sometimes brilliant, work, ie., the master carpenter and his master electrician friend, who both think in whole-picture perspectives, and the painter who actually knows how paint is made, changes over time, and shows on different planes. 

Keith explaining the science of paint

Painting will begin in the living room with my firm and firmly final decision, Benjamin Moore's "Persimmon".  I'd tried the Sherwin Williams variety of that color first, but it reminded me of the salmon loaf they served me two hours after Joseph's birth (what is it about the choices hospital dieticians make?). I found the bedrooms-baths color, too, "White Rain", a gentle hint of blue-gray.  For months, I had hemmed and hawed over whether they would match each other, until the other day, making up the bed with the new coverlet I had sewn back on stay-in winter nights, I looked down and saw them happily coexisting in the fabric. Ah.

Since my last renovation seven years ago (I call it Part I of III), when my brother and nephew did most of the redoing, I hadn't collected the necessary roster of experts, and all my relatives who can do such things are now busy redoing their own places.

But a friend recommended the carpenter,  Chuck, who had done a superb job on his bookcases and cabinets, as I saw for myself.  When Chuck came to look over what needed to be done, he nodded sagely at my long list and said he could do most of that. That was over a month ago, before I could move back in, but he put me on his schedule and showed up the first day as I was unloading boxes and bags from my car.

Since then, he's been keeping me apprised of every turn and change, to which I inevitably reply,  Go to it. He brought in his painter, Keith, a friend of his from childhood, who reminisced with him about skateboarding down our hill.  Though Keith groaned at the idea, he  scraped all my ceilings, agreeing they needed it.  Just expect surprises, Keith counseled (sure enough, he was right...as I write, I can hear him struggling with one).  Chuck also called in another friend, electrician Joe, who cut a swath from his overloaded schedule so that the work on the pocket door to the bathroom wouldn't be held up.  (Certain people get priority, he nodded to me; I was glad to be, at least indirectly, on the receiving end of that association). 

Missing my brother Charles, I had searched online for a tile installer and found one whose written reviews included two people I knew.  Ben turned out to be a young fellow with a new baby who, for safety, asked that the house be clean and clear before he came to measure and advise, and who in turn recommended his friend, five-star stone-installer, Josh, who guided me through a bewildering collection of options for countertops.  Josh then sent his plumber, Mr. Ivy, who came when called and now I don't have to brush my teeth in the shower anymore.  Professional nepotism?  Maybe, but it works for me.

The best part is watching and listening as I traverse ever-changing paths through the rooms; they labor and talk and sing comfortably around each other...I find it a cheerful and cheering scene, knowing that, like art, all the mess is creating a new life for the house.

Yesterday so many people showed up...carpenter, painter, plumber, dishwasher deliverer, and electrician...that I decided to get out of their way and continue work on a new gravel-flagstone path in among the ivy tangles behind the house. 

Later this week, two helpers will show up to plant a few new trees in the back yard.  The ground is too contemptuous for me to dig, composed entirely of clay entwined with large tree roots and embedded in rocks the size of stairsteps...in fact, that's what Joseph dug up in the front yard to build two sets of stairs on the slope.

stepping stones, or what I'm grounded on

And speaking of the front slope, I'd best get out there and water the garden.  We have had much rain in recent weeks, but suddenly this week everything is bone dry.  So I am off to the garden center to pick up extra hose and attachments.

That's what we have been up to here...how about you?