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And just like that, it’s 2010.
It’s safe to say that 2009 wasn’t our best blogging year. It’s even safer to say that 2009 wasn’t our best housebuilding year. We tried. We really did. It’s just… there were a lot of distractions.
There was this distraction:
Hi. I’m two.
If you’ve lived with a two-year old, then we don’t really need to explain any more. If you haven’t, imagine a short, cute, demon that picks up everything you put down and moves it, objects to every plan, enters every day with an agenda of their own, and is otherwise generally ornery and objectionist. And cute. Did we mention cute?
Then there was this:
Hi. I’m the weather forecast from most of the summer.
It rained pretty much every day through June and July. It rained enough that Mainers started getting twitchy and lakes overflowed. Rain, rain, rain. Since the majority of the work planned for this year was exterior, you might say that this caused a problem.
And, of course, there was this distraction:
Hi. I’m the U.S. economy.
We all went through this, right? No need to elaborate? Didn’t think so.
And, finally, there is this distraction:
Yep. Another cute, short, ornery, objectionist demon will be arriving in a few weeks.
So 2009 was a bit of a bust house-wise, but we hold out high hopes for 2010. The new baby is actually working in our favor. The last major overhaul of the house was probably around the time we turned a junk-filled room into a nursery. And now that we’ve got another one on the way, well…Annabel will be needing a big girl room, right?
Here’s how the Blog Update conversation has gone around here recently:
Day after we update:
C: It feels so nice to not have the blog hanging over our head.
M: Agreed. All that pressure to come up with something to say. Who needs it?
C: I’m not going to wait so long next time.
One week later:
C: We should update.
M: Didn’t we just do an entry? Besides, there isn’t anything going on.
C: You’re right. I’ll wait a bit longer.
Two weeks later:
C: Do we have anything to write about?
M: Nope.
C: Darn. Well, we’ll have to think of something. It’s been a while.
Three weeks:
C: Okay, we really need to write something or we are going to lose everyone.
M: We could write about how I put plastic up all around the porch to make a winter workshop.
C: That’s old news. We missed the opportunity on that one. No one cares about the winter workshop in April.
M: How about the kitchen?
C: We haven’t done anything else to the kitchen.
M: We can talk about what we will do to the kitchen.
C: Best to not get their hopes up.
Four weeks:
C: GAH! The blog pressure is back! We are such slackers and need to write something. We have to have done something!
M: We created the office.
C: Aha! The office! Why didn’t I think of that? I’ll start an entry.
Five weeks:
M: How’s that entry?
C: Oh man. Writer’s block. I’ve got nothing. It’s crap. Terrible, terrible crap. Plus I’d rather watch Top Chef than write.
M: I hear ya on that!
Six weeks:
C (muttering while curled up in a fetal position on the floor): Need to write, need to write, need to write.
M: Perhaps you are taking this whole blog thing a little seriously?
C: If we don’t write anything we’ll lose the narrative thread of the blog. And then WHAT WILL HAVE BEEN THE POINT OF THE WHOLE THING?!?!
M: Okay, really, I think you might need to relax about it. You’re scaring the baby.
C: I am going to write this stupid entry if it kills me. I am going to make this office entry exciting!
M: M-kay. You do that.
C: Uh oh.
M: What?
C: I don’t really remember what we did to the office.
Six weeks and one day:
M: How’s that entry coming?
C: I don’t want to talk about it.
As you can see, we are suffering from a bit of mud season ennui. Hang in there. We’ll be back.
PS- Oh yeah. We made ourselves an office. Someday you might hear about it.
PPS- Here’s a photo of Annabel the Speed Demon on her Uncle Clinton’s boat during our recent trip to Florida. Does this at all save this entry?
In our last post, we mentioned a strange, bread-product solution to the leak problem we were having in our newly extended heat register. We want to tell you about that, but first let’s back up a minute.
Why is it leaking in the first place? What did we do wrong?
It’s a basic science lesson, actually. Michael soldered the pipe together with a flamethrower (okay, a small propane torch, but isn’t that less exciting?). Although he had drained the pipes before beginning, ’tis the nature of water to not go away completely just because you ask politely. So some water remained in the pipes, which were getting heated well beyond water’s boiling point by the flamethrower.
Okay, class:
Q: Boiling water turns to what?
A: Steam.
Q: And when steam is contained, it does what?
A: It pressurizes and looks for a way to escape.
The building steam pressure within the copper pipe blew out a small pinhole in the solder, causing the minor leak. While our current solution of little plastic container under the drip is consistent with our way of handling house problems right now, we knew that we would need to find a more permanent fix eventually. So Michael consulted the plumbers that he frequently works with.
And thus we were introduced to the plumbing world’s secret fix: Wonder Bread .
(By the way, we really hope that we aren’t breaking some kind of plumber’s code by sharing this. Hopefully plumbers aren’t like magicians and sworn to punish anyone who reveals their trade secrets.)
(Although if we disappear within the next few weeks, you’ll know what happened.)
Apparently, what we need to do is re-drain the pipes and re-solder the joint after stuffing both ends of pipe with little chunks of Wonder Bread. The bread will absorb the steam as it develops, keeping it from invading the joint. After the pipes are sealed, the Wonder Bread, being essentially made of fluff, will gradually dissolve in the hot water and disappear in the system.
It’s a mad kind of brilliance, isn’t it? Who knew that the plumbing profession had it in them?
We haven’t tried it yet. Mostly because we are a little unsure. Wonder Bread? Really? We trust these plumbers and all, but… Wonder Bread? That stuff will survive the Apocalypse and give the cockroaches something to snack on a thousand years later. Do we really want it floating around in our heating system? But we are also hesitating partly because we can’t quite bring ourselves to purchase said Wonder Bread. We’re kind of a multi-grain family, ourselves. What will we do with the rest of the loaf?
Anyway, that’s the answer. We’ll publish the step-by-step photo evidence when we actually get around to doing it, including the inevitable shot of Cherie testing out whether Wonder Bread is really as icky as she remembers.
Yes. We are alive. Sort of.
You see, we went on vacation to visit Michael’s family in Key West.
We had a plan for updating the site during vacation. We were going to update before we left to show you how we painted the living room and dining rooms actual colors other than white. And then we were going to update during vacation to show you some classic Key West architecture. And then we were going to do a post after vacation to let you know that we were back in the land of snow and ice.
Except that we got busy, and then there was illness, and then there was catching up at work and, well, frankly, we decided that we would rather spend our vacation in Key West sitting in the sun and making enough Vitamin D to get us through to June (which is the next time we expect to be able to spend that much time outside again). And we decided that we’d rather spend the days after vacation sleeping it off. Or, at least that’s what we assume we’d rather do because we’ve pretty much been asleep since we got back. (Re-entry to Maine in March is a cruel thing.)
We’ll try to get some updates up soon. We have things to tell you. Things are happening. Or they will be happening if we can stay awake long enough.
We’ve been tagged by both Nadja over at American Four-Square Renewal and by Felicia at Homefront Insecurity to do the "Tell Us Five Things About Yourself That Most People Don’t Know" thing. This is very kind of them, and while we really enjoy talking about ourselves (obviously), we put it off because we didn’t know what to say. Five things. That people don’t know. Hmmm. Even if we exclude our families from this equation because they know a lot about us (and the things they don’t know, we probably don’t want to tell the internet), we still are having trouble thinking of five things that people don’t know. But, honestly, we don’t have much else right now. Cherie meant to take some pictures this morning but then the cat got out and she had to chase it through the snowy, 20-degree woods. So let’s do this instead. Those of you who don’t care can skip to the bottom, where we pick up our usual complaining.
1) We are both left-handed. We are also both tall. (Cherie is more tall-ish than really tall but whatever. ) (While we’re on the topic, Michael isn’t as tall as we always thought. For years he’s told people he’s 6’6" but he had a physical lately and you know what? 6’4 3/4". Liar. Cherie’s looking into annulment.) (What were we talking about?) We are proud of being left-handed and tall, so we have built a house catered entirely to left-handed tall people. We apologize to any 5’2" righties who may own this place after us. But we don’t apologize too much because we’ve both spent a lot of time bashing our heads on low door frames and dealing with appliances on the wrong side of the counter. We’ve earned this.
2) Cherie is from Maine and is always cold. Michael is from Florida and is always hot. Michael refers to Cherie as the human ice cube. Cherie refers to Michael as the human radiator. We don’t understand it either.
3) Since Michael is from Florida, he prefers wearing shorts. He will wear shorts as early as he can get away with it in the spring and as late as he can stand it in the fall. He considers pants to be the work of the devil and, on top of that, itchy. Cherie hates wearing shorts and will do so only under duress (or while hiking when it’s really, really hot). She finds shorts to be uncomfortable and stupid-looking (on her. Not on other people). Michael owns about 20 pairs of shorts. Cherie owns 3.
4) Cherie drives a stick shift, drinks her coffee black, and loves beer. Michael drives an automatic, puts ten pounds of sugar in every beverage he touches, and prefers colorful drinks with umbrellas. Cherie does have girlier shoes and Michael likes football, so that’s something.
5) We love the ocean more than just about anything else. Whether it’s the smooth, warm, green Florida ocean or the rough, gray, freezing Maine ocean, we love it. We love the smell of the ocean, we love the sound of the ocean, and we love to eat things that come from the ocean. Cherie once went to California on a business trip and kept getting lost and going east when she should’ve gone west because she was so confused about the ocean being on the wrong side. That is how connected we are with the ocean. (We like deserts and mountains, too, but they are no ocean.)
More than you ever wanted to know, we’re sure.
And on to the complaining:
We can’t find a bathroom faucet. The vanity is installed and we are ready to go forward with finishing off the bathroom sink. A bathroom sink! No kidding. We are very excited about the prospect of someday brushing our teeth somewhere other than the tub. All that’s standing in our way is this bloody bathroom faucet, or our lack thereof.
We had no idea that this was going to be so hard. There are thousands of bathroom faucets out there, but there apparently are none that a) are several inches high to clear the vessel sink, b) extend out far enough to reach over that wide sink rim, c) are classic enough to go with the Craftsman-style vanity we built, d) aren’t hideously ugly, and e) aren’t hideously expensive. Are we asking too much, do you think? We didn’t know it was going to be this difficult. Maybe we should have designed our house around the bathroom faucet to avoid this problem.
That’s it. We’re tearing it down and starting over. Unfortunately, even if we do that, we will still need to find a bathroom faucet.
Huh.
The things you learn.
For a month now, we’ve labored under the delusion that we began this blog on January 5th, 2006. That was the date we closed on the property, so we were convinced that we put up our first blog post that day.
Wrong. Our first post was January 1st. How very New Yearish of us. We were very on top of things back in January 2006. We must not have been building a house then.
Too bad, then, that we blew right by the blog anniversary date. This is not entirely out of character, as we both are blatant birthday-forgetters and only manage to remember our wedding anniversary because we purposely chose a date that doubles as trucker slang (10-4, good buddy. Over and out).
All things considered, it seems a bit late to be doing a thanks-for-reading retrospective but, heck, why not? It’s the anniversary of the land purchase and that counts for something.
Over the last year, we’ve put up 108 posts detailing our pain and triumph, and an astonishing number of you are reading them.
We’ve been found by hundreds of people searching Google for "shampoo niche" and "building a cat house" and "how to cut Hardibacker" (hint: swear at it a lot) plus quite a few folks searching for some woman named "Cherie Michaels." We don’t know who she is, but if she’s walking around with a name like that she better be a nice person. It’s doubtful we were helpful to any of these searchers, but we hope we at least made them chuckle. Or roll their eyes. Or re-think the building process entirely.
We’ve found wonderful people over at Houseblogs.net where there is proof that there are crazier people than us in the world. Also smarter people, but we don’t talk about that as much. It’s mostly a home renovation site, but they let us stick around for some reason. Probably so that they can feel superior.
We’ve tortured, at current count, seven houseguests by forcing them to work on our house–some multiple times. But they keep visiting. We’ve suckered a number of friends into coming over and helping. Some of them are still talking to us. Even those that suffer humiliation at the hands of the blog. (Sorry, Todd.)
We’ve lost count of how many trees we’ve sacrificed to this little project, or how many pounds of nails we’ve used, or how many bruises, scrapes, and other minor injuries we’ve accumulated. We never had any hope of remembering how many arguments we’ve had about design choices and the budget and is that really the best project to be working on right now? We just ice down the bruises and bandage the scrapes and admit that one of us was wrong and keep going. Has it been worth it? Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes with maybe one no thrown in for the bad days.
We’ve got some great plans for the next year. For one thing, we are starting to get out of the boring part of the building process and into the fun stuff (read: out of drywall and into wood). We’re working on freshening up the look of things around here because we think that a year is long enough to put up with a "temporary" design and we are really sick of that picture of ourselves. We’ve got some special features planned–like more "how we did that" photo albums and a live action webcam so you can see us working. (Ha! Just kidding. No one wants to see how often we slap each other’s butts while working. Trust us. No webcam.) Stay tuned. We’ll get around to it all eventually.
In the meantime, thanks for coming along for the ride. Happy house anniversary to us. Don’t feel badly because you didn’t get us a gift. No, really, it wasn’t necessary. Just leave a comment and we’ll forgive you.
This is what happens when you give an indoor cat a full length window.
She sits like this all day long.
She’s extremely upset with the injustice of the inside cat/outside dog situation. We fully expect her to start stomping around and hollering, "It’s not fair!" while kicking the litter box in a fit of teenage bitterness.
We did briefly discuss letting her outside right after we moved. Then a coyote ran through our yard one afternoon. We haven’t considered it since.
We didn’t run away to a warmer climate this weekend, so yesyesyes, we got some things done, stop harassing us. But first, look at what’s sitting in our driveway.
Michael is no longer driving a truck so delapidated that it loses its radio whenever it goes over a bump and Cherie no longer has to refer to his vehicle as the Truck of Death. This is a very exciting development for us, and we love our new GMC. (Note to the Ford Motor Company: Your trucks are nightmares and should come with warning labels like "This truck will start self-destructing at 70,000 miles" or "This truck will start rusting through instanteously upon contact with water. Please do not expose to rain or puddles." )
We did tear ourselves away from gazing at the truck and climbed down out of the sawdust-free seats long enough to get some things done on the "actual work" front. For example, we started building the bathroom vanity.
You’ll notice that it’s not actually in the bathroom yet, but instead is balanced precariously on a trash can in the dining room. We don’t explain our mysterious workings, we just tell you about them.
The vanity is made from Douglas Fir and will eventually have a mahogany top with a vessel sink. We have the mahogany, but it’s not milled down yet and in fact is buried somewhere down in the basement. We also have the vessel sink, which was last seen in its box under a pile of drywall scraps. We’ll try to pull ourselves together sometime soon, honest.
Because the vanity is balanced precariously on a trash can in the dining room instead of where it should be, you can see what else we did this weekend: drywalling in the dining room. We are approaching 90% completion on drywall hanging, which would be more exciting if we weren’t only about 30% done with drywall mudding.
We also spent part of Sunday picking up the debris, trash, and tools that were scattered around the yard. It is December now and we figured that were pushing our luck with the (relatively) warm weather we’ve had recently. So we packed away the rake, threw out the bits of housewrap and shingle that have been floating around the yard since the summer, put the hose down in the basement to thaw, and generally tried to give the impression that we are responsible homeowners ready for the winter. And then it snowed Monday morning. Not enough to keep things buried until June, but enough to make us feel very justified in spending that time cleaning up.
Now, who wants to go ride through the one inch snow drifts in the new truck?
Okay, yes, living in the house while building it has slowed our momentum. And trying to cook without actual counters is getting a bit old. And it was a little embarrassing that time we were showing a friend around and she said, "Where’s the bathroom sink?" and it took us a full minute to remember that we were supposed to have one.
But there are benefits to living here, as opposed to our rental place. To wit:
1) It is logistically much easier to work on the house in the evening, as we no longer have to worry about getting home, exercising the dog, and getting over to the job site before it gets dark.
2) We no longer have to worry about exercising the dog, period. Who needs walks when there’s woods to run through and deer to chase?
3) Small projects are easier to knock off the list, as we can do them while dinner is cooking or in between dinner and settling down for the evening. Also, it’s much easier to focus now that we are on standard time. Pitch black and cold at 5PM means not being tempted by evening walks or other outside pleasures.
4) No more budgeting to handle mortgage plus rent.
5) No more budgeting to handle mortgage plus rent. (That’s worth saying twice.)
6) The fat cat has lost some weight from her time spent wandering through the trusses.
7) We’ve learned how to survive on a minimum of stuff, since most of ours is in storage. It would be nice if we could find the box with Cherie’s sweaters in it, what with it being November in Maine and all, but that’s a minor quibble.
8) We have a real, tangible excuse to not have people over. Actually, we have excuses for lots of things: wrinkled clothes, being late, grumpiness, bad hair…
9) The lack of cable and internet access means that we’ve both been getting to bed earlier. (See also: dark at 5PM.)
10) We’re one cozy, cozy family unit what with the living in one room thing.
So there you have it, 10 delusional reasons to look on the bright side. Any other suggestions?
It will not come as a surprise to anyone who has met her that Cherie has a tendency to, well, exaggerate occasionally. She has even been known to, once in a while, very rarely, um, make stuff up. It’s all for the good of the story–really!
Therefore, we must come clean and tell you that in yesterday’s entry, which was written while Cherie was at work* and not in consultation with Michael, she posted a conversation that did not actually, in the normal definition of reality, occur. It certainly could have occurred, and has occurred many times in the past given Michael’s tendency to think that Cherie’s moments of genius are more moments and less genius.
But when Cherie got home and told him about the entry, Michael was, in fact, horribly offended that she would think that he wouldn’t want a phone booth in the front yard. In fact, Michael would like it publicly known that he is fully in favor of a phone booth in the front yard. As noted in the comments for yesterday’s entry, Michael has a bit of a thing for Superman and his first reaction to the phone booth idea was, "That would be great! I could change in there!"
So, it appears that we will, at some point, be putting in a (red, London-style) phone booth in front of the house so that Michael can continue under the delusion that he is, in fact, Superman.
(C: Perhaps this can wait until after there is no longer a miter saw in the living room? M: *sigh* I suppose.)
*And she was working hard! She was multi-tasking! Creating reports in one window and writing an entry in another while making phone calls with one hand and scheduling meetings with another. She was very busy and you are lucky she found time for an entry at all! Don’t you judge her!
