I am having the most relaxing Saturday, or any day, that I have had in many months. It feels like a new day. When last I reached out to you, my loyal band of followers, I was still in the honeymoon glow of my new blog. I had piles of rocks regularly weighing down the springs of my poor little truck. I was amassing a stockpile of ingredients to whip up a nice concrete counter. I had white ceiling paint on my hands and new track lighting on my mind. Most of all, I had time.
In the ensuing month and a half, that all got sucked away by the vacuum cleaner that is a busy life. I just slogged through my busiest month of work in a few years, fighting a lack of focus and a pull toward all my projects the whole way. Sleep became a rare commodity, set behind glass and to be used only in emergencies.
Projects of choice took a back seat to the project of necessity. We hired our two builders to install a skylight and check out the rotting trim board on the back of the house. The skylight has brightened our staircase wonderfully, adding natural light to the center of our house. Kris hit a renovation sweet spot, getting maximum effect for a minimum of effort (and investment).
The trim board, however, seemed a plank pried off the very front of Pandora’s box, had the box actually been a box and not an ancient Greek jar made of clay. It’s removal revealed the existence of wet, rotting, ant-infested wood that looked worse than anything we found while renovating the 150-year old Bethel farmhouse. Those builders, who rather enjoyed these new iron nails, but still enjoyed using a wooden peg and some post-and-beam here and there, could not have imagined the odd greenish tint of pressure-treated lumber. The contractor who, just 19 years ago, trod the earth where I now sit, certainly had such advances available to him. While there are many wonderful design elements and fine craftsmanship in this unique house, they failed at creating a waterproof barrier on the east side of the house and they managed to install windows that leaked water directly into the walls. We spent a couple of days peeling back the sheathing and harvesting the crumbling pieces of their failure.
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| We found rotten wood as high as six feet above ground level. That qualifies as not good. |
As of now, the wall is buttoned up a bit, but we are still awaiting the delivery of new windows that don’t have a drain-into-the-wall-cavity feature and a back door. A visual inspection of other trim board around the house suggests there could be similar trouble in a couple of other places. We haven’t yet cracked them open, but that is coming. Cross your fingers.
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| This is not what you would like to see when you crack open a 19-year old house. |
There has been some progress on the topics of interest, however. The mold for our concrete counters is nearly complete. In fact, I stopped only because I realized I had not taken photos as I went, for your benefit, dear reader. Of course, I have not been back to finish the mold or to take the photos. And now the weather has turned cold. Pouring a counter will now involve heating the garage for a few days, until it is cured enough to move it inside.
I also attended a very popular rock-wall building class. It was a bit too popular for me. There were students all crawling over each other trying their hand at fitting the perfect rock into the collaborative effort. Twelve feet of wall becomes a very small space with six to ten people hefting stones and meditating on the shapes of voids and the material to fill them. I watched one fellow student hem and haw for minutes before finding the perfect stone for the near corner of our wall, only to have another student remove it seconds later to try his hand at it. After the third time someone successfully re-conquered this not-so-troublesome corner, I couldn’t watch any longer, much less insert myself into the melée.
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| Stone Age free-for-all. |
In the end, I did pick up on the art of using small wedge stones to solidify those big blocks, but I didn’t quite feel like that was seven hours of knowledge imparted.
A few days later, at Secret Location #1, I would crush one of my fingers in between a rock of 100+ pounds and another that was large enough to have no intention of changing location any time soon. It hurt so badly that I actually ran around my truck twice, yelping in pain. Blood was trickling from underneath the fingernail and it throbbed as if it had its own heart. The blood slowed. The throbbing lasted an hour. The pain lasted for days. I was terrified the nail would come off. I have an irrational fear of losing a fingernail. I know it happens, but never to me and, like I said, it’s an irrational fear.
It is now November. It is a Saturday. I am a few days removed from my hellish stretch of work. I have a new plan and a new confidence for this month. As proof, I have taken the time to fill you in on my adventures. I even managed to sit and read a book for a couple of hours this morning. It has been a long time since my mind was at ease enough to carelessly consume fiction for a couple of hours. I like today.
As for the finger, it has turned all sorts of colors in the past few weeks. It threatened to fall off, then didn’t, and now seems to be loosening up again. Who knows? I’ve grown tired of worrying about it. It will be what it will be. It has had the effect of dispelling my fear of losing a fingernail. Now I only have my irrational fear of losing teeth as an adult. That one still gets me, especially in my dreams.
Talk to you soon…
Dave
