Lens, Brush, Quill

Simmering in the background like a pot of overheated pasta, the deck calls to me like a siren sweetly singing.  Harpies, more like.

Last week I  managed to get a dozen 12′ cedar boards stained and set on stickers in the garage to dry, just waiting for a break in the weather.

It finally stopped raining today, so after my job interview at King County, I raced outside to see how far I could get with the damaged decking. It turns out that it was a blessing in disguise that we have had unrelenting rain since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.[1] The deck planking is so soggy that I discovered about two dozen more boards that look just fine, but when you press on them with something hard[2], they ooze like a sponge.

Hey!  I know!  Can I just set fire to this thing so we can start over?  Here you see me cursing the weather gods and realizing that I never knew how much my wife hated me until she bought me a “fixer.”

Happily, the sky gradually cleared, and as the afternoon progressed, I got the worst rotted planks replaced with new, freshly stained cedar.  Now we can use the grill without wearing a roofer’s safety harness!

Time for an extra long Long Island Iced Tea.

I turned on the bath water, and out comes dirty water.

Hmmm.. Is this another problem in the house, or coming from outside?

It reminds me of scenes in horror movies where the actor is in the shower and the water suddenly turns into blood.

Later that day, I found out that the Fire Department had opened the hydrant across the street, kicking up a bunch of rust and sediment.

Mystery solved!

I guess we can now officially refer to our condo in Everett, where we lived for the last six years, as “The Rental.” It will certainly take a lot of adjustment to get used to that idea, on a number of levels. The place still feels like I belong there, as I spent a lot of the last year making quite a number of improvements.

It also competes for my dwindling “free time,” as there are a few details that need completion for the transition.

About five years ago, blinded by bright sunlight, I walked through the patio screen door, ruining it completely. Now that we have a tenant renting that room, I really have to fix it.

I bought a replacement at Home Depot, which they claimed to be adjustable from 77 1/2″ to 80″. The patio door is 80″ tall, and the screen turned out to be a full 1/2″ short of the advertised 80″ height.  Back to Home Depot for a return and refund.

Over to Lowe’s, who stock the older brand that Home Depot no longer carries. We brought the new screen to the patio, cut open the packaging, and [in the voice of Gomer Pyle:] Surprise, surprise, surprise! The screen was punctured and torn, the rollers were abraded from being rolled on concrete, and the metal frame had bash marks and deformation. Saddle up and trot back to Lowe’s to get our money back and another door.

We spent more time driving back and forth than we did installing the screen, but by 2130 hours, the third screen was finally snapped into place and working perfectly. (Why didn’t I do this five years ago?)

When we bought the Everett condo, we never imagined renting it piecemeal, so we did not pay the builder to run CATV to all of the bedrooms. Today, I had that pleasure. At least it was warm and sunny – for the first time this month, I think.

Fortunately, I ran about two million miles of phone jack wire all over Western New York homes as a phone company field tech[1], so wrapping our condo in coaxial cable was a snoozefest.

At least they now make it with a cutesy white jacket, so it is not as breathtakingly ugly.

Another day crammed with completed items I can scratch off the list, and a familiar feeling of exhaustion and satisfaction in accomplishment.  Time for a lemon drop!

A few of our friends and relatives have cautioned us, eyes wide with horror about the tales of our new house, to avoid arguing about all of it. “Oh my god! Don’t wind up getting a divorce over it!” Funny thing is, we don’t really argue about it. We have two distinct domains of expertise, and two different planning styles. But being consciously aware and having discussed it defuses the stress.

I trust her grasp of finance implicitly (she’s a CPA, for chrissake), and she leaves the technical details to me. I do not want to be bothered with calculating the time value of money, or calculating how to juggle funds – just tell me how much we have to spend, and I will tailor the project to fit the limits. With the entire range of puzzles and mysteries both houses are presenting to me, I have all I need to occupy my mind, thanks very much.

Likewise, I’m not going to bother trying to get Camille to be interested in why an aliphatic resin emulsion is better than cyanoacrylate for cementing MDF, or why I used 23 gauge instead of 15 gauge nails on the crown. That is, unless she needs to know because it affects the bottom line. It is a healthy thing in a relationship to have a domain that you can call your own, and to be entrusted to it. She trusts my advice about what things we can and cannot cut corners on, and I trust her opinions about how to afford it. She’s happy when I deliver a highly polished, professional project, and I’m happy to get to do them.

I realized that we think about money at different points in the process. She wants a reasonably firm number up front, before she will allow herself to consider numerous options, while I don’t want to think about cost at all until I have a several designs sketched and a materials list developed. It is the materials list that gives me the “hard numbers” from which I pare things away until I reach my budget limit. I might design a Rolls Royce and wind up with a Yugo, but at least I have thoughtfully considered the entire universe of choices before I started discarding ideas to make tradeoffs on the way to the final product.

In the case of the kitchen, we might decide on some sort of intermediate plan, such as building a wooden counter top that allows me to tear out the tile and accurately discover the extent of hidden damage, while we accumulate the funds to do a full-tilt boogie. But that remains to be seen, because I really want to develop a set of design sketches that we can discuss and choose from. If we have to rip everything out, then we should completely redesign for better ergonomics and traffic flow. It is a perfect opportunity to create something wonderful.