Homage to Shel Silverstein

I’m not sure if this is what Shel had in mind when he wrote Where The Sidewalk Ends, but I’m pretty happy about it. In my ongoing effort to “soften” the front of my house, Pierre took a sledgehammer to the cement paths outlining the front porch. I’m hoping that this will allow me to get in there and get creative with shrubs and perennials. Someone should let my poor hastas know that their days of solitary soldier lines are numbered.

I’m thinking dogwood, rhododenden (spelling?), spirea, cedum, lady’s mantle, and maybe some shiny holly. Less lawn, baby!

Now, what to do with huge chunks of old sidewalk?

Clean windows, clean world

I never realized how much clean windows matter.  Pierre spent a whole day cleaning the windows in my study and it’s like a new room.  Instead of having a thin film of grease and grime between me and my view, all I have is clean sparkling glass.  I can see the lawn!

Inspired by his effort and this new clean vision, I got to work on the downstairs windows.  Windex in one hand and paper towels in another, I rubbed and wiped away years of dirt (and grease?).  Of course, in my version of window cleaning only the bottom halves needed cleaning. Who has time to deal with the ladder? And really, who looks out the top half of a window? Well, as I survey my handiwork, I now realize that a crystal clear bottom half makes the top half look even worse. My solution? I’m hanging some lace.

Then I’ll get to see the world through the muted and misty lens of Victorian romance.  Which will do a nice job of blocking my view of the hairy naked man on one side and the beige vinyl siding on the other.

Mama the Wallpaper Queen

So my mom is here this week-end and she’s been busy. Yup, she’s wallpapering that tiny foyer.  As long as she’s got her shuffle on, she’s fine. I check on her once and a while, but she doesn’t notice me. She’s too busy measuring and swearing. I owe her big!

Local Food Festival

We could have cleaned the windows today. We could have rehung the bedroom closet door or at least painted it. We could have done a lot of things house related, but instead we piled into the VW and headed out to Altamont to check out Indian Ladder Farms and the celebration of local foods.

Twenty minutes later and we’d left the city behind us. We were deep in farm country and apple orchards in the valley beneath the Helderberg Escarpment. We parked our car, grabbed the camera, and bundled up in fleece. It was hard to know where to start: With the apple cider and cinnamon cider donuts? The spicy BBQ sauce? Maple cotton candy? The goat cheese? The goats themselves? The place was packed and there was a seriously sad moment when we thought we’d have to forgo the cider due to the insanely long line inside. But then, thank god, we found the secret outside take-out window around back.  Pretty soon we were munching warm donuts and drinking steaming cider out of paper cups. Sitting at a picnic table in a spot of sunshine, it felt like a pretty great way to start the fall.

We polished off a few donuts, brushed ourselves free of sugar crumbs and the friendly swarm of bees, and made new friends with Bob the woodworker and the woman at River Street Pottery. I began to have daydreams about alternate career paths involving fiber arts and craft festivals.

I even confronted my childhood fear of goats and petting zoos.

On the way home, we tried some other local food…at the Tastee Treat.

Soggy basements

Here in the Northeast, we’ve been getting mucho rain. Pouring, dripping, sluicing. It’s made me aware of many rain-related things such as poor gutters, damp windowsills, and basement puddling. I got home late yesterday and visited the basement for something (who knows, who remembers?) when I saw the water-stained carpet runners. In an effort to make the basement prettier, I bought those cheap rubber backed runners at Home Depot to throw down over the crumbly cement. And now they were wet. Really wet.

Sometimes I feel like I’m on Candid Camera for Homeowners. Seriously, someone should have video taped my efforts to drape the soggy carpets over my skinny rickety clothes rack from Ames. Hilarious. Except it wasn’t. I’m not sure where the water was coming from–possibly the windows, more likely the floor? What’s underneath the basement? I peered into the crusty drain hole (which could be a likely reason for pooling water, now that I think about it) and saw that it dropped a few…inches or feet into darkness. What lies beneath? What creatures slither and slide while we sleep? To be honest, I don’t want to know. I just want things dry.

I cranked the dehumidifer and jerry-rigged some old planking as a kind of prop to put the wet carpeting on. It ain’t pretty, but it’ll do.

Good Things

Wallpaper, anyone?

My mom is coming down in a few weeks to wallpaper my tiny foyer. Even though I swore I’d never use the stuff after the time I spent scraping it, I find myself oddly fascinated by it now. I’m thinking of a William Morris -type print but without the William Morris price tag.

Sherwin Williams has this one that I’m considering.

The First Cut is the Deepest

If you’re waiting for my riffing of Bryan Adams-meets-the-Neuton, I’m sorry to disappoint you. That will be my next blog post! What I’m really thinking about today are the requisite highs and lows of the HOUSE HUNT. My sister and her husband have been searching for a house in Portland, ME for over a month now.  They thought they found the house they wanted only to lose it(or have it scooped out from under them) to another buyer.  Chalk it up to a lax realtor, the Labor Day holidays, the dream of “a buyer’s market” or just bad luck. The fact of the matter is that one day they were imagnining themselves living in this house and the next day it belonged to a different dreaming couple.

There’s no way to completely reframe this situation: it sucks.  And yet, as I listened to my sister’s story and nodded in sympathy, I realized that the only way to figure out the whole housing market thing is to jump in and go through it.  And the loss of your first sweet house is a crucial part of that journey.  You’ve got to go there to know there. You’ve  got to lose your first house so you can land the next one.  It’s all part of the crazy journey of homeownership.  You have to endure your share of battle scars and house sadnessess, but you’ll come out the other side steely and strong and ready to be a Homeowner.

And then you can deal with the rotor rooter man on the day after Labor Day as he snakes twelve feet of backed up sewage from a hole in your basement.

Hang tight, little sister. You’ll find your house and it will be beautiful.