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As you may have guessed during this past blog-free week, I was on vacation with Mr. Apron. Either that, or you thought my vegetarian blog was so hot, I had to let it cool off. In any case, I did not advertise our trip to Maine in advance, for fear you might break into my uninhabited home and steal my bassoon, or my sewing machine, or my cheese slicer, three things of great value to me. Even if I had told you I was going to be away, and given you the exact dates, you wouldn’t have found the house empty, because the painters were here again!
Mr. Apron or I had this great idea to have them come while we were on vacation! We’d be like a real Main Line couple and have “work done” without the inconvenience that usually accompanies having workmen in the house. Especially because our bedroom (including closet) was painted, we had to purge the closet of all our precious clothing, and heap it all on the bed, it would have been very inconvenient indeed. So my in-laws (THANK YOU!) let the painters in each morning, collected our mail, played with the lights, and held down the fort while we cavorted up in Maine. (Vacation highlights and photos coming soon…) We sunned, we hiked, we biked, we sailed, we shopped, we dropped, we bowled, we ate, and ate, and ate. And all the while, our house was transforming.
The wallpaper is gone, folks. All the old-lady wallpaper (except in the downstairs powder room, where it’s almost inoffensive, and would be more trouble than it’s worth to redo in a room that small) is gone. Our room is a lovely earthy mossy green. Our office is a slate blue. It feels so good to be home. I don’t just mean having space to ourselves again, and not learning about the financial woes of our neighbors at the B&B due to their loud cell phone conversations. I don’t just mean being able to unpack, do laundry, and cook. I mean the whole thing. I mean being back in a place where we’re truly at home, in our own skin, surrounded by our stuff, our decor, the clothing and furniture that’s meaningful to us, or at least familiar. Even in our nasty 1980s kitchen with its poop-brown cabinetry, and vomit-colored cobble-stone sheet linoleum flooring, and decaying drop ceiling, as I heated up two masala veggie burgers (Trader Joe’s = awesomeness. Tasted like samosas on a bun.) in a little stir-fry pan, I moved around the kitchen pulling out utensils, finding plates, and serving up a very simple late dinner, and it all felt familiar. This doesn’t mean I’m not going to cry tears of joy as we rip the flooring up and tear the “ceiling” down, ‘cuz you better believe I will. It just feels good right now, after having been away since last Friday evening, almost 10 days. We haven’t been away this long since our honeymoon!
We stopped at my parents’ house in RI to pick up the dog, watch old home movies (slipsofthetongue’s 4th birthday on Betamax — much worthy future post), and spend quality time with my parents, (baking scones, being dragged by dogs, and walking around the neighborhood). They suffer from an unfortunate lack of space compounded by having had to move to a smaller house due to real estate prices on the east coast versus our previous home in the midwest, where the cost of living is quite low. And they have stuff. Stuff from 30 years of marriage, 27 years of having had children, and lifetimes of other stuff (dolls, harps, dress shirts, shoes, neckties). It feels a bit cramped, and you have to relearn where to find things everytime you go back.
“Well, the keys are now in the closet where the fridge used to be. The fridge is near the backdoor now, so of course we’ve moved the trashcan over to the butler pantry. We keep the extra folding chair by the door to the dining room otherwise the dogs go in and get stuck and have “accidents”. Also, if you want Diet Coke, it’s in the basement fridge, so while you’re going down there, stop by the sewing room (which is now in the basement) and see if you like any of the shoes I’ve laid out that your uncle just sent me. Careful opening the fridge because the light is out, but you can use the one above the table saw. Also, the watermelon might fall out, so hang onto it as you open the door to grab cokes and clementines for your drive. Also, take a package of masala burgers (ah, you see where our dinner came from?) from the freezer. Don’t use the shower in the hall bath because we have a leak, so you can shower in our room, the third floor, or on the first floor. The dogs need to be fed, but Holly only eats this $60/bag dog food, so make sure Annabella doesn’t get into it. Their bowls are up on the counter in the butler pantry so Annabella (the chocolate lab) doesn’t think they’re a chew toy. Feed Holly (paranoid border collie) in the corner so she doesn’t think the other dogs want her food, and watch Annabella so she doesn’t help herself to Finley’s food once she’s done. “
It is nice to be home. Aside from the heap of clothing on our bed, and the fact that the painters decided I should put my sewing machine near the window, things are pretty much how we left them. And that feels pretty damn good.
A while ago, I lamented our horrific attempts at home improvement, including dying phlox, a shelf that forgot how to assemble itself, and “unbreakable” switch plate covers that somehow did not fit the light switches. I have since uncovered the truth about all 3 things.
1) The phlox was deluged on a fairly regular basis by dog urine owing to lazy dog owners who shoo the creature out front for his last pee, rather than leash him and take him down to the curb to kill the neighbors’ grass. He enjoys the phlox.
2) The shelf had fit together perfectly before. Then we made each board thicker with two coats of primer/paint. It no longer fit so nicely. Our closet-builder friend recommended that we take the tedious step of sanding when the boards’ “swelling” (my first hope was bloating due to the shelf having its period) didn’t go down. We sanded. We grunted. We dealt soft blows with a hammer on a piece of scrap wood so we didn’t split any more boards. The shelf is up. It’s full of books and gorgeous.
3) The fucking switch plates. When our kitchen was designed/remodeled in 1465, switch plates were a standard size. When we went to Home Depot and bought brand-new unbreakable vinyl ones in 2009, they were also a standard size. A bigger standard size — one designed to cover more wall, more mistakes from the painter, more half-assed switch box assemblies. Thus, the sconce which was not too close to the switch in 1465, is now too close to the switch. Mr. Apron took some scary-looking wire-cutters to the plate. And now it “fits”.
The latest saga again involves — you guessed it — switch plates. Because we’re gluttons for punishment. We like to fail at our home improvement attempts, no matter how small.
The walls in downstairs painted, we decded to replace the ugly granny switch plates with new ones. Mr. Apron, being the bridge-brained beau that he is, fixated on some ceramic switch plates at Anthropologie we’d seen a while back. On our next trip there, we scanned the hardware section to no avail. Disappointed, we traipsed back to the sale section, where I played among the racks, and he scoured the tables of tchotchkes, including books about fashion, French pick-up sticks, hair pins, scarves, and dishtowels. Guess what he found? Two double switch plates, in the exact design he’d wanted. And. On. Sale.
Huzzah! Took them home only to realize our electrical system had not been updated since the house was built, and our light switches did not fit in the slots. We don’t have the hundred year old push button switches, nor the modern “decor” rocker switches, nor the boring, usual switches. What we have looks like the ordinary switch, but is just slightly thicker. Enough so that it won’t fit through the rectangular slot of our snazzy new Anthro plates.
The electrician came about something more pressing (I think “fire hazard” was a word the home inspector used), and I begged Mr. Apron to ask him to replace our switches, as trivial as it probably might sound to an electrician.
He did it yesterday.
Take two. I came home, and, craving some pride in accomplishment, immediately went looking for the switch plates. Only they were nowhere to be found. Now I’m not the cleanest person in the world, and I’m not so organized (except at work, where the other SLP and I just organized the office supply closet, and it’s freakin’ awesome), but Mr. Apron’s style of cleaning leaves me, ummm, frustrated sometimes. He cleans out his car by taking a black plastic trash bag, filling it with junk, and stashing it in the trunk of the car, or our garage. Are you surprised I thought my grandma’s quilt had been the victim of an unmarked trashbag and pitched in a feverish cleaning spree? House cleaning is also challenging. Much as I try to bite my tongue and not say, “Where did you put the..?” I am often wondering the same thing.
So, after tearing the house apart yesterday, from top to bottom, looking every place we could have logically stashed the switch plates, Mr. Apron finally uncovered them. In the kitchen. In a bag. Stashed in the dog food cupboard. Because company was coming 2 weeks ago, and he needed to hide our clutter.
Take three: installation. I located 4 cast off screws from the former switch plate and dropped them into the new plate. They fell right through. That’s right, folks; the heads were too small because artsy fartsy Anthropologie switch plates have non-standard sized holes. Off to the hardware store.
ACE hardware was inexplicable closed at 5:25pm Monday. True Value is not really a hardware store any more because they used to be 3 different variety stores, and now they’re condensed into one store that simultaneously carries everything and nothing. Not a loose screw to be found — just packets of useless hardware we couldn’t try out on our switch plate.
Sears hardware did not want to sell us anything. Though they had a nice hardware aisle with tons of metal thingies, there was not a soul to help us. Two ladies staffed the register, and no one else was to be found. After failing to find a screw with the same circumference and a larger head on our own, we meandered through the deseted aisles, perusing gas ranges, air conditioners, caulk, and small children mouthing hardware bits. Finally, I spied an employee.
“Quick! There’s one! Get him!” I whispered to Mr. Apron.
Johnny Hardware had about as much luck as we did on our own finding our Perfect Screw. I took frequent breaks to disappear from the insanity as he kept opening drawer after drawer. Finally, there was a breakthrough. Johnny Hardware suggested using our existing screws (or ones with a slightly longer shank) with washers to keep their little heads from falling through the holes.
By the time we finished with Mr. Hardware and tried to check out, we’d discovered both check-out bitches had disappeared, leaving a growing line of confonded would-be customers. I swear, the store doesn’t want to sell us things.
We finally returned home around 7pm with 8 screws and 8 washers, and a motion detector flood light kit for our next hopeful project. Installation pretty much sucked because the plates are extra thick and — have I mentioned? — non standard. I could see Mr. Apron’s fist curl as we kept dropping screws under the radiator and struggling for some decent light to see by. Finally, they were in. And beautiful. They really do match the colors of the room.
But our success is not without reservation. The one by the door is such a tight fit that it now requires Arnold Schwarzenegger to flip the switch. One day we’ll take it off and sand it down. For now, we’ll suffer, suffer in success or a job that took entirely too much of our collective energy and money.
Mr. Apron and I accomplished two fantastical feats this weekend. Yes, we assembled the shelves, and completely emptied 18 boxes of books. A half dozen more have been relegated to the basement, as neither of us care to think about grad school notes right now, but the shelves are up! And they look great. We’ve established a little reading nook in the living room. After all that hard work yesterday, we’re still married, so we thought we’d tackle something else…
Gardening is not our strong suit, but the previous owners left us with some stumps from greenery formerly known as hedges. I had heard that stump removal was impossible to do, and prohibitively expensive to get someone else to do. Nevertheless, Mr. Apron posted this blog today. Since he’s such an excellent writer, and since many of you have come my way from his blog, I thought I’d send you back today. No need to redundantly write about our efforts.
I tell you this much. In the words of my beloved husband:
“Something very positive was done today, and it wasn’t just the beautification of our little patch of the world. Today’s hard work proved to my wife that we are, on occasion, capable of achievements that may seem daunting, if not next to impossible.”
Maybe the light-switch cover evaded us. Maybe the shelves challenged us to a do-over. And maybe the poison ivy will be our nemisis for years to come. But we can do some things together, even hard things.
Today, we tackle The Shelf again. Last time’s effort was a spectacular and abyssmal Fail. Mr. Apron split the end grain of the wood trying to hammer a shelf into its slot on the vertical pieces. The wood was swollen or water-logged or PMSing and seemed to have grown since the last assembly. But this time, armed with wait time (it’s been a while since we painted the shelves) and sand paper, we shall redeem ourselves.
Why are these shelves so important? They’re holding up everything, and I don’t just mean that literally. Sure, seven foot tall by five foot wide shelving holds the bulk of our reading materials, but there’s more to this story. The books I speak of are currently housed in 40-odd boxes in our spare room. Which we cannot use as a spare room because it’s full of liquor boxes of books. We’d love to get the painters to come in and paint our bedroom (with its new closet!!!) as well as the office. While they were great downstairs at moving and covering our “valuables” (thrift-store, curbside, and Ikea furniture), I doubt they’d love to begin the office in its current state. My boxes and piles of craft stuff are everywhere, balancing precariously on a dresser here, a filing cabinet there, shoved under my crafting desk and threatening to overtake my sewing machine. The final destination of all this crap is a bevy of shelves we’ll install on a free wall in the office above my crafting zone. It’ll be awesome. But, we have to strip (or pay someone to strip) the wall paper, and then paint (or pay someone to paint) before we start screwing in the shelf standards. So it’s a Catch-22. Can’t paint until we clear out the shit. Can’t store the shit till we paint.
As a temporary solution, we thought we could move much of the crap into the spare room so the painters can attack the office, but remember what’s in the spare room? Ah, yes, the boxes of books. This one shelving unit is preventing us from a) having overnight guests (not that we have those kinds of friends anyway…), b) painting the office or our bedroom, c) becoming exponentially more organized, and thus crafting more, and d) having a baby (which we will install in the aforementioned spare room).
The takeaway lesson here, the gestalt, the final message: we cannot procreate until we successfully assemble this shelving unit. Got it? There’s a lot riding on those shelves. Wish us (and our future offspring) luck.
Mr. Apron is upset at me for getting so down on our home improvement attempts, but I keep seeing failure.
1) We dropped $80 at a garden center to buy some plantings to make the bare flower beds look a little prettier. The phlox have since died a pitiful death of dog urine because we let Finley take his final pee right on top of them. But in good news, the 3 tomato plants are yielding about 3-5 grape tomatoes a day, which Mr. Apron is enjoying as a little snack. Grade: B. And now we have poison ivy. Trying to irradicate it has taken out a nice chunk of our front pachysandra. Adjusted grade: B-
2) We dropped $50 in painting supplies at Home Depot to finish a set of bookshelves my father built for me in my first apartment. He gave us unpainted wood mixed with boards leftover from another project, and we decided to paint them to match our new wall paint, so they’d look built-in, or at least as though they belonged. We slaved away for 2 weekends in the stuffy humid garage, priming — squeezing every last drop of primer out of that can — and painting. The color looked great. The boards first stuck to the plastic drop cloths. Then, in an impulse to assemble them when they were dry to the touch, we discovered they no longer fit together. Either they’d swelled (swollen?) too much in the humidity, or the paint was still wet and the boards had absorbed water from it, or they were menstruating and bloated. They just wouldn’t go together. Mr. Apron took a hammer to them, to try to shove them together. Since we did not have a rubber mallet, he cushioned the blows with a dishtowel. And split the end-grain of the board. Later, our closet-maker, Bob, tells us to cushion the board with a scrap piece of wood. Never, he cautioned, hit the end of the board by itself. Oops. The half-assed assembly job is still sitting in the living room, like some great orange albatross. Grade: C-
3) Switch-plate covers. Simple, right? Unscrew the old, put on the new. We didn’t have old ones in the kitchen. Somewhere in between unwallpaper and panting the room, they disappeared. I guess they were probably junk, anyway, being wallpapered to match the walls. So we bought new ones. The kitchen light-switch/outlet is right near a little wall sconce that plugs into that outlet. Its mounting bracket is so near, in fact, that it interferes with the screwing in of the new switch plate. We decided to cut it, and discovered we’d purchased “unbreakable nylon”. Kitchen scissors can’t even begin to try. We can’t even install a $.44 switchplate. Grade: D.
I know we’ll have success with some things, like the tomatoes. And we’ll find pride in home ownership and in fixing things ourselves, eventually. I know I shouldn’t be so down on us, especially when it makes Mr. Apron sad. It just feels like we’re thwarted everywhere we turn, in each new project, no matter how paltry or simple; no matter ho many times we’ve assembled those shelves in the past years (3?), or how stupid it is that our kitchen was designed in 1980 so the switchplate doesn’t fit the sconce 3 inches away.
