Many Happy Returns

The Story of Someone Else's House

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Sat, 25 Jul 2015 15:16:00 +0000

Once upon a time, this house was next door to us.

We used to be so jealous of its yellow-ness, because if your neighbor's house is yellow, you cannot also paint your house yellow. It is...well, it isn't written. But it's definitely a rule, I think.

A nice guy lived there, and he had an awesome Mustang that our children loved to listen to morning and evening (you could hear the vrooming through the walls, over the sound of the A/C. Old house problems). He used to have a beautiful backyard garden that we could see from the kitchen window, but he got tired of taking care of it, so he tore it out. Oh, well. It was his yard. We built a fence so we couldn't see in his yard anymore, and he paid for half, like a good neighbor.

He bought a new house and sold this one, quick as a snap. He didn't even have time to list it.

The new buyer was a builder who wanted to build a new house. We were sad for the old house, but oh, well. It was his house. We took this picture so we'd remember it.

The builder took his time building a new house. He didn't do anything with the old house. I called the realtor like a nosy neighbor and asked, impatiently, if he'd please keep up with the lawn. He sort of did so. Every once in a while someone would come by and take things out of the house--the appliances, doorknobs, plumbing fixtures.

The house sat for three and a half years. It didn't look lived-in anymore.

You could see it was still a nice house, though, and we hoped maybe someone would save it. That yellow paint still looked as sunshiny as ever. A guy came to live in it who worked for the builder. He cooked on a fire-pit in the back yard because there was no stove, anymore. He put window-unit air-conditioners in because the central air unit had gone long ago. He had a mean dog.

After a few months, he moved out. He took the window units with him. The windows were left open to the air and the rain and the creatures of Houston. (I snuck over and tried to shut them. They were totally stuck.) We heard from a neighbor that the house had sold, again, to another builder.

We knew it was coming, but there's nothing like the sound of a Bobcat in the morning.

This is what's left.

The new builder seems to be actually interested in building a house here. I'm sure it will be a pretty-enough house. I'm excited we'll have neighbors again, after four years (come be my neighbor! I'm only a little nosy, I swear). I'm really excited there's not a place for snakes and possums and I-don't-want-to- think-about what else to live in a vacant house just a few feet from my front door. You certainly can't be mad about the neighborhood property values going up.

But I'm sad for that cute little yellow house. The property records show it was about the same age as my house--built by a guy named Cecil from the Virgin Islands. It was the last house on the block until the 1940s; to its North, there was nothing but farmland for miles until you got to Spring. Cecil was a kind of suburbanite frontiersman with a British accent living with his children and grandchildren in his pretty little house. Someone refurbished it at some point, and before it was left to rot, it had good bones and nice finishes. I bet it was a good home. I hope the new home has a place in some family's story like I imagine the old one did.

Emma and 812 Main Street

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Thu, 23 Jul 2015 22:32:00 +0000

I'm such a homebody, you guys. I've been running into friends freshly home from great summer adventures, and when the conversation turns, people ask, as they do, "What have you been up to?" I say, with what I think is audible happiness and relief, "NOTHING." Sure, the kids and I have been to the pool, and the library. But lots have days have been like today, where I listen to the whine of lawn tools and the roar of the garbage truck and the voices of my children imagining they are Endermen and waiters and bunny rabbits as I do the dishes and make some appointments and peanut-butter and Nutella sandwiches. My vacation this year is staying in my beautiful house and enjoying the heck out of it.

I've been so hesitant to make more blog posts. I've not really had the urge to write stuff, for one thing, and I've felt kind of weird about thinking that anyone is interested on what's inside my house, for another. My writing itch has returned, probably as a side effect of all of this delicious leisure, and if I think about it, I'm really interested about what's going on with other people's houses (if you wrote a blog, I'd totally bookmark it), so why wouldn't other people want to read about mine? And if you're not, you won't read. Issue resolved.

I've also been a little embarrassed to show parts of my house that aren't finished yet. There's almost no furniture in the front room, and every time the pizza guy comes to the door and says, "Oh, just moving in?" in a totally friendly way, I'd like to sink through the floor when I have to say, "Nope." I'd like to claim that I'm such a devout minimalist that I plan to keep most of the room bare (not true) along with the other unfurnished, unfinished rooms in the house, or that some really pressing thing has monopolized all of my time (a total lie). I'm just slow, is all. I have a couch for the living room, my "parlor," but deciding what fabric to recover it in is taking a LOT of thought. And that's just an example of what's going on in the whole house, and I'm embarrassed for you to see that it took only ten months for my house to be built from slab to finish, but it's been eight months and I don't even have curtains for all the windows.

But what's the point of thoughtfully filling my house with just the right stuff for me if I'm not going to invite people in? So come into my family room, which is not finished, but is finished enough for now, for you to come have some tea with me (even if it's just imaginary tea because you live far away).

So this room is open to the kitchen, (behind me when I was taking this picture), and it used to be the kids' bedroom. It's bigger, by two or three feet, widthwise, than it was when it was a bedroom, but it has the same triple window that it used to, and it feels like the same sunshiny room it used to be when my baby boy (now almost EIGHT!) would nap in my lap in a sunbeam from that window. So I like this room, just a little. The paint color is Sherwin Williams Gardenia, which they list as white, but is clearly just the right amount of sunshiny yellow. I'm a sucker for primary colors, and should probably not have gone all out for the red accents, but those curtains used to be in the old dining room AND they are just the same color as my awesome stove, so there they go and I love them.

The centerpiece of any family room is a squishy couch, of course. This one is grey velvet (that cleans up surprisingly easily), and is great for napping, watching tv, and playing way-too-competitive rounds of Monopoly (which the coffee table is big enough for--KEY).

If you have any thoughts about my pillows, I'd love to hear them. All I really know about pillows is how to drool on them while napping, but I give decorative (washable) pillows my best attempt.

Part of why this room took me so long to put together was this rug. It's actually individual one-foot squares from Flor that I spent about three months agonizing over and rearranging into the perfect "random/not too random" configuration. I should have asked for help from their free design service. If you and I are pals, you know that's a hilarious and nonsensical idea (Asking for help?! Bah!). It's a good rug, made from 100% recycled materials, that's comfy and washable. And you can play board games on it and the board doesn't get all bendy. I should have known that a rug this dark would show crumbs and fuzz more than I would like, but the internet told me I should have a darker rug to "anchor" my space. Who knows? Fortunately, this is also a centerpiece of my living room:

I love my robot vacuum a lot. It's super awesome, and I highly recommend it, especially to people who may have small people in their house that produce crumbs at an alarming rate.

Someday, this folding table will be replaced by some kind of awesome real table, and someday, I might also have a piano on this wall to the right, but for now, this is a happy drawing/computing/doing homework station.

My kids don't get homework from school, so they make up homework to give each other. I know! They also don't wear glasses (knock wood, turn around three times, says the mom who's always had corrective lenses), so these specs from a birthday party goody bag are a prized possession.

I didn't think this comfy chair was going to go in the family room of this house--I just didn't think it would work. I'm pretty OK with it, though, and I'm glad, because this is an awesome reading spot.

And these squishy kid chairs are part of the unfinished-ness of this room-we'll theoretically have real chairs here, someday. I haven't found any I want yet, though, and the kids love these, so they can stay until one of those things changes.

I always feel like I don't have enough stuff on the walls. I'm working on that in here, but at the same time, I'm pretty happy with how things are for now.

This is my favorite spot, though. It's more than enough. The bird painting is a housewarming gift from my dearest girlfriends by an artist (Raina Hampton) from the town where we all went to college together. The square thingys are lead ceiling tiles, probably old, certainly retouched, that I found fourth-or fifth-hand for cheap! And the photograph is from the University of Houston archives and is a photograph of Main Street in about 1915.

So you can see lots of old cars, some dudes in super-cool hats, the Bender Hotel (which I think is a hilarious name), and there on the left, just past the first street light, the sign for Battelstein's department store. Battelstein's is a part of Houston history, for sure, but I think it's also part of the history of my house, so I think it has a place on my wall. Herman Fritch was probably the guy who built my house, in 1915 or so, and lived in it with his wife and son for thirty years. He worked every day of his life, as nearly as I can reckon, and got up every day, walked four blocks to the streetcar at Heights Boulevard, and took that little train until right about here, where he went to work as a tailor at Battelstein's. I'm not sure why I think this is such a neat picture, really, other than that nostalgia is my drug of choice.

That, and this is the same street from Google Maps today. The Bender Hotel became the San Jacinto, then an office building, then, despite the marble and brass interior and the carved granite details, was demolished and replaced by a parking garage. Battelstein's built a new building in 1950, but it's been abandoned about as long as I've lived here. I love Houston, and the city's drive for progress is making us the next great global city, if I do say so. But it seems like there's as much value in remembering as there is in building new things, and maybe that's part of my job as a lover of old stuff. So I have an old picture in my new family room, and I remember.

Fortunately, Houston is discovering, along with the rest of the world, that progress and history aren't natural enemies. The Carter building, next to Battelstein's, is now a schmancy new JW Marriot, retaining original features and celebrating the building's history. And in the next block is the old Gulf Building, Houston's tallest skyscraper at 37 stories until 1963, on the National Register of Historic Places AND still a functioning office building. I'm glad other folks are loving their new/old stuff like I am.

Old-new Promises

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Mon, 16 Feb 2015 02:06:00 +0000

I've promised you twice now, dear reader-friend, a grand tour of the whole house. I'm here to tell you that I don't think I'm going to do that. Before you get too heart-broken over my false promises, let me tell you about my new plan: I think I'm going to do a detail of each room as it gets a little more settled. A few things have occurred to me as I've settled in to write over the past month: 1. A grand tour of the house would be a giant (and probably boring) post. 2. There are all kinds of wee details that I'd want to know about if I were a reader of this blog that I've heretofore neglected. And 3. Even though the house is finished and this chapter of the story of the house is done, I'm not done telling you about it, so I need a way to stretch out the narrative a bit. So here you go: chapter infinity. For those who are interested, here begins a new story of our old house: some details about bits of the house, room by room (including "before and after," because those are the best), what I'm putting in it, and of course, more about how to protect your home from dead people. That's clearly my thing.

No dead people today, though!

To start, a small and relatively un-intimidating space: the downstairs bathroom.

This is what it looked like before:

It was pretty nice before. I love that big, cast-iron tub. If you've never taken a bath in a cast-iron and porcelain tub, I highly recommend it. The metal keeps the heat so you can keep the water really hot for a really long time. However, I hated that baby-poo brown, but I was too lazy to paint all the beadboard because I'd have to figure out how to paint behind the tub. Also, the water pressure was for the birds, and the floor was stick-on paper linoleum, which didn't hold up well to the two wee children I shared the bathroom with (Lots of splashing, poor aim). Also, possums liked to hang out inside the wall behind the toilet. I highly do not recommend sitting on a toilet in the middle of the night and hearing something large and hairy scrabble up the inside of the wall behind you.

We wanted to keep this bathroom, really, but just make it better.

It's so, so much better.

Strangely though, it feels like the same place. Both kids prefer this bathroom to their own, and I think that's partly because they're familiar with it (and partly because they take after their mom in that they get easily freaked out when alone because: dead people? Probably). It seems like the old bathroom finally got it together, threw out the possums, got a new paint job, and returned to its original 1920s sanitary-chic finishes.

You'll notice that it's bigger--there's a double window rather than a single, and the wall between the bath room and the guest bedroom has been bumped in about two feet to give extra room for a decent shower for our guests (you're welcome, guests!). But it feels the same, partly, because it is the same. Same sink, freshly re-porcelained: check.

Same bathtub, also refinished so that it's no longer painted a yuck color: also check.

I even hung stuff on the wall for you!

The beadboard wainscoting is new, but the same height and style, just finally painted a lovely, shiny white (Sherwin Williams "Snowbound"). Notice that the shelf that topped the old wainscoting is gone, since I whacked my head on it more times that I'd like to count. Even the window and door trim is new, but substantially the same as it used to be. The bathtub fixtures are new but are almost exactly like the old ones (just not crudded up with gunk from ancient pipes, yay! If you've never de-gunked a faucet filter, high-five! It's not a fun job, even if you remember exactly how to put it back together the right way).

Why do I have so many crooked pictures?

And even the door is one of our good, solid, five-panel doors from the old house. The things that are new are so right that they fit right in with the old-new stuff. New faucets, and new subway tile in the new shower (by the way, Andrea from 329 Design helped me pick these out, and helped me feel good about going all-in with white subway tile EVERYWHERE):

A new medicine cabinet that's so lovely and right at home because this bathroom SHOULD always have had a medicine cabinet, complete with a neat little milk-glass, beehive-shaped knob that I found in the antique hardware place:

An antique milk-glass interior knob with chrome backplate to go with the rest of the white and chrome/nickel inside the bathroom:

Some neat do-dads that look old fashioned-y even though they're shiny new (and they're useful):

And the best thing of all, white ceramic hexagonal tile on the floors.

So. Dang. Beautiful!

Just after we originally moved into the house the first time, I was poking around in the garage and found some of the renovation supplies the original owner had left for us. Tiles for the kitchen counter, a few bricks, and some spare stick-on linoleum floor stuff, I think. And there in that pile were chunks of white hex tile set in mortar, like someone had hammered out that old floor to put in plywood and paper. I don't remember if I cried, but that's the feeling I had, mourning for such a pretty, durable, and easily clean-able floor that someone decided wasn't fashionable enough (though to be fair, maybe it was gross. But I doubt it). Not only is this absolutely the prettiest kind of floor in the world and my favorite, it feels like I've set the house right again by putting the proper floor back in the original bathroom.

I had thought I wanted to go all in on the oldness of this room, and I looked really hard at rewired period light fixtures. They would have looked really good in here, I think, and I'm sure they PROBABLY would have been safe, but in the end I couldn't trust my house's safety to rewired stuff just because old stuff is so cool. I just rescued it from frayed knob-and-tube (and possums), after all.

So I got these lovely new guys and the pretty vanity light you see above as well as LED can lights in the ceiling:

Add plenty of towel bars, my stacks of fluffy towels, and it's a bathroom fit for real visitors! I'm not actually responsible for ANY of the things that make this bathroom so nice, but I'm pleased to see it look so much like I dreamed. It's just beyond awesome.

Home for Christmas

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Tue, 30 Dec 2014 23:40:00 +0000

And Happy New Year!

I hope you've had as lovely a winter holiday as I have. We've been in the house for four weeks, and though I've been a little harried by the cardboard specter of boxes-to-be-unpacked (ALL must be unpacked! NONE may stay!), I'm a little awed at how at home we've been in our new-old house. Because let's be real: most of this house didn't use to be here. Even so, I'm so happy and not a little surprised to report that the whole place feels like somewhere we've lived for 10 years. Boxes underfoot and a surfeit of furniture, for sure, but home nonetheless.

Welcome home flowers and wine from our nice contractors helped.

So, let me tell you about my favorite stuff so far, glossing over the fact that the living room is full of stuff to be atticked and the landscape is...well, it is NOT.

Our "yard."

Though I planted some flowers in a pot. It helps me feel better.

Though the yard is still grim, the porches are highlights. I'm still eyeing possible furniture for the back porch, but all you really need for the space to work is a fire and a place to sit, and I've got that wrangled.

A bird never hurt, either.

The kids' rooms were instantly homey, and neither one has had a problem with having his or her own room. Can you blame them? I think they definitely got the best deal in the house.

Even messy, as they instantly were and are, they're spacious and cozy at the same time, and SO full of sunbeams.

The library is the only room still full of boxes, but it looks great anyway. Books are their own decoration.

My favorite rooms are the working rooms of the house, perhaps because they don't really need much furniture.

I've done three weeks' worth of laundry now, and having a counter to fold on as well as a pretty room to do it in is even better than I anticipated. Our trees are full of migrating birds at this time of year (Yay! for having a garage to park in!), and I feel like I'm in a tree house with all the flitting and tweeting going on right outside the window while I'm working. I like doing laundry, you guys. Amazing.

The mudroom is perfect. There are shoes and coats everywhere, but that stuff is not all over the house, and that's amazing. I think it looks functional rather than messy, right?

I think the pantry is my personal masterpiece, though.

I love some well-organized shelves! These may not be that, but I love that I can give all my random stuff space to breathe so that it looks purposeful rather than as haphazard as it really is. "Cozy chaos" is my actual decorating style so far.

Here's my little baking station at the back of the pantry. I've made sweet rolls, and dinner rolls, noodles, cookies and cake, and it's all worked out pretty well. I think I need a mini-fridge to keep eggs and cream handy, but I'll get more use out of this than if it were a desk.

This is my favorite part of the kitchen--the hot drinks zone. I wanted to keep the open shelves we had in the old kitchen in this corner, and again, orderly-but-not-perfect vibe makes me happy. I'll never be allowed to be on Houzz, though, because I failed to heed a friend's great advice about the plug strip and let them put it on the underside of the cabinets so there are visible cords all over the place.

And the banquette will be a little more bare when the Christmas decorations go, but it's been awesome. Eighty meals so far, and I haven't broken it yet.

Picture next to the banquette--lovely housewarming gift.

So the kitchen is awesome. I've had a lot of fun with it. I can show it to you because it doesn't require any furniture. I'll leave you with a montage of stuff we've cooked in it, and I'll get to work on showing you the night-before-move-in tour of the finished house, because it doesn't need furniture, either.

And a Christmas tree.

Pièce de Résistance

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 03:52:00 +0000

There are a lot of things I'm really excited about in my house. I love lots of stuff, for sure, and I've had the pleasure of being able to choose things for my house that I think are really cool, and I've enjoyed telling you about them. I hope it doesn't diminish any of the other things to tell you this one might be the most exciting.

I ordered this beautiful thing in March. They built it to order (in France!) and shipped it here on an actual boat in August. They call this color Griotte, or "cherry."

Some folks dream of cherry red sports cars and wide open autobahns, and though I tell you I would not turn down one of those, I dream of cherry red stoves with an 18,000 BTU gas burner and electric and gas ovens. I dream of rolling layers of pastry on my marble counters and baking up croissants (one day!) in this shiny beauty, of simmering caramels and gravies and roasting giant hunks of meat.

This is the centerpiece of my kitchen. Every decision has centered around how it would work with this range, and now it's here. This is my big "Voila!" and even though it will probably take me a while to build up my skills to drive this beautiful machine, the fact that it's here feels straight-up miraculous. I'm off to lose sleep looking at these pictures. Bonne Nuit!

Final Countdown

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 03:29:00 +0000

We have a move-in date. We will be moving in to our new-old house on December 3, whether it's ready or not (it will be [fingerscrossed]). Did you know, by the way, that movers are cheaper on Wednesday? Now you do.

This feeling I'm having about moving in, I know it. Not the crap-crap-crap-I-hate-moving feeling, though I'm having that one and I know it well, but the crazy-giddy-with-anticipation feeling. I haven't felt it in years. I think I felt it as I realized that I was going into labor with my son, and the morning of my wedding, but I know it best from childhood. You know it, too, I bet. The feeling you'd first get on Thanksgiving, when it would pop into your head, "Next comes Christmas." Tummy butterflies and a little dizziness. And the same wobbliness as the joy washes over you every time you think, several times a day, that Christmas is coming. You can't help thinking it, and every time it almost knocks you out how excited you are. Remember that? Yeah. That's how I feel about moving into my house.

I drove by (stalking patterns well-established) today and realized that two weeks from this minute I'll be sitting in my shiny shiny wonderful house and I made some kind of weird beeping noise. I don't know what it was, but it was a happy sound, and I couldn't help it. SO EXCITED.

Here's some stuff I'm excited about:

New water line! Ok, this is a picture of a ditch that I took in the dark. But there's a shiny new PVC water line in there, and that's super awesome. 100-year-old cast-iron supply and drain lines sometimes break, you guys, and then some poor plumber, who even at $85 an hour is underpaid for this kind of job, has to come fix what's been escaping when you flush your toilet and it makes a really terrible smell in the yard. Not OK. This is SO exciting.

Shower glass! Super sweet.

Appliances! An actually functioning dishwasher is so amazing. I can't wait.

Shiny floors! They're actually curing right now. I took this picture through the window, and they'll get another coat of whatever (shininess?) after Thanksgiving. So pretty.

So soon I'll have to take you room by room to show you all the goodness, but not until the floors dry. Do you feel a little of my Christmas-is-coming butterflies now?

Let there be lights

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 03:08:00 +0000

There's just something about a porch light that says you're home.

These are my porch lights, and this is my home.

They got all of the lights installed a few weeks ago, and it's amazing how much different proper lights make in the homeyness of a room.

We got all LED lights for our can lights, and we were a little nervous they'd have that industrial, fluorescent quality. They totally don't, in my opinion. I'll have to keep you posted about whether the cost of the LEDs is worth it, but all of the Internet reviews make it sound like they'll last until the kids are in college.

As always, there's one light fixture I particularly want to show you. I saw it in a magazine about three years ago, decided it would go in my dining room, and never wavered from that decision.

Not when the super-nice guy at the light store told me it was too big for my dining room.

And not even after looking at roughly forty zillion crystal chandeliers in various sizes, shapes, and price ranges. And who can resist a crystal chandelier?

Evidently, I can. I don't think this chandelier is for everyone, but the day it went it I spent about an hour laying in the floor gazing at it and taking lots of pictures. I think it's perfect for my family and perfect for this house.

So my awesome chandelier is made of blue bottles. They're supposed to be "vintage," but I'm not sure I believe that they are. No matter. I do think they're pretty. They're hung on some artfully rusty chains and metal that I also think is pretty. I like to think of them as my own indoor bottletree.

Here we go again! I don't think I'm crazy superstitious, or anything, but I like stories. I think the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are, and as a nomad growing up, I kind of adopted stories I liked to give myself a background I didn't really feel like I had. A lot of what I like about Southern culture is the way it shamelessly appropriates bits and pieces from "mother" cultures and spins them into a new thing. The South takes the refugees from every diaspora, welcomes them, and makes them at home.

So bottletrees are one of those things that are folk art now because people think they look cool (and they do!), but I guess they've been around forever in people's yards. They're another protection story; the Internet says that in Africa, centuries ago, people believed that an empty bottle hung outside the home would capture roving evil spirits (like a genie) and keep the home's occupants safe from harm. So when people were brought here as slaves, they preserved their own culture as best as they could and started putting bottles on trees here to protect their homes. You'll see them all kinds of places, (like my favorite college-town bakery, where I first learned about bottletrees), but the story is the same everywhere: put up a bottletree in your yard, and the evil things or haints that drift by in the night will get trapped in the bottles and will be burnt up by the rising sun. I know, people were totally obsessed with keeping the haints away. No one really knows why it became widespread; the Internet also links the practice to witch balls as a Northern European tradition, evil eye amulets near around the Mediterranean, and even the Native American story of the dreamcatcher, so there's somethings about blue and glass and circles that speak to people everywhere of protection.

This is what I love; the idea is universal; no matter the culture. There are bad things in the world. As my favorite, favorite writer (Stephen King!) puts it, "The world had teeth and it could bite you with them any time it wanted." I think slaves in antebellum America knew that well, not to be too glib about it. Fortunately, home is an antidote to the bad things, a guard against the teeth, and pretty things make the antidote stronger. Especially blue glass things. Especially shiny, milky blue glass bottles hung in concentric circles in one's dining room, bright against the darkness, yes?

Full Circle

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Thu, 30 Oct 2014 02:31:00 +0000

I had an itch to see my house today, you guys. I clearly don't hold back from stalking the house, but mostly I limit my hovering to drive-bys. In one of today's slow, creepy, drive-bys, I saw a big box in the front yard, and after a moment's consternation guessed that they finally brought my bathtub. I've been dying a little, since, to run in and check it out, but I didn't really get a chance during the day today and was waiting until after the kids' bedtime to go visit.

Imagine my grouchiness, if you will, when my husband came home from work and said that the keys in the lockbox were missing and he couldn't get in to the house. It's happened before that someone pocketed the keys for the evening, and it's not really a big deal, except that I wanted to see my bathtub RIGHT NOW. Like the stubborn goat I am, I went to the house anyway and scowled at the empty lockbox. Then I figured out how to get into my house. I'm not going to tell you how, but I'll assure you that I didn't break anything (on the house or myself). I'll also assure you that my method of entry was not a dignified action for a middle-aged mom, but it was more dignified than the gymnastics I had to do yesterday to slither into our stuffed storage unit to extract the kids' Halloween treat bags. I'll finally assure you that there was no way I was going to be denied entry to my own house, and that's that.

And y'all, my hijinks and resulting loss of dignity were so worth it. First of all, I did get to see my BEE-YOU-TEE-FULL bath tub.

Cue angels singing, etc. I almost didn't come back to the apartment.

So comfy.

Lovely as my awesome bathtub is, it got upstaged tonight. This is not what had my clapping my hands, jumping up and down, and shrieking a little with delight (alone, in an empty house, deranged fan-girl stye). Before I tell you what did, we have to go back a little.

Remember this?

When they first started to destruct the house, they uncovered this old wallpaper in the bathroom, and I was so overwhelmed by its awesomeness that I became a little obsessed. I started googling "pink bird wallpaper" and hunting vintage wallpaper sites, convinced that I needed this in my new house. I never did find anything even remotely close (probably a blessing that I didn't), but I did come across a zillion "pink bird wallpapers."

I found one I particularly liked, and as I kept searching I found myself coming back, again and again, to this whimsical and happy "Early Bird" pattern. It wasn't hot pink water birds and giant water lilies, but it spoke to me. I decided I NEEDED a whimsical and happy wallpaper in my house. I kept searching, but I knew as I looked that I had found the wallpaper for me. I finally screwed up my courage to buy it, no mean feat given that I know beans about wallpaper in general, but in the moment of decision, I noticed a tag on the thumbnail of my wallpaper: "No Delivery Outside NL." NL? I thought. Dangit. The Netherlands. I had become convinced I needed a wallpaper that I'd have to go to Holland to purchase. I called Holland and spoke to some super-nice Dutch folks, who assured me they were unable to ship to the US. Thwarted. At the eleventh hour. I put it out of my head and started looking for other "pink bird wallpapers."

That wallpaper was meant to be with me and would not be thwarted by anything like the Atlantic ocean, however. My beloved college roomie's beloved sister is currently living in Holland due to a military posting! I hatched a plan.

I ordered the wallpaper and sent it to Sista, and she kindly agreed to accept shipment of the wallpaper and send it to me. No customs issues, no delays, no nothing! And tonight, you guys, tonight I got undignified and scratched an itch to get inside my house no matter what, and I walked up the stairs and saw this in my laundry room:

There are no pink birds on my wallpaper, but it's pink and it's got birds, and it makes my laundry room just about the happiest place in the entire universe (which is pretty impressive for a laundry room!).

Cue clapping and jumping and shrieking. This calls for even more than angels singing, but I can't think what that might be. It's just awesome.

I picked my blue knobs while the wallpaper was still making its trans-Atlantic flight, and I hoped they'd look right with the wee blue birds on all that pink, and oh, it makes my heart happy to see that I think they do. This looks like a room where I can fold endless boring piles of laundry and still sing. This looks like a room where I'll want to sit for hours and sew curtains for the roughly 8 million windows in the house. It looks like a new room with functional plumbing where I won't get whacked with the back door or the pantry door that nonetheless belongs to my sweet old house. It's worth breaking in, and clapping and singing, and I hope there's a little happiness in the house, too, that it has some pink bird wallpaper again.

Solid Surface Materials

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Sun, 19 Oct 2014 05:11:00 +0000

I've mentioned before that we took a loooong time planning for this house-fixing. Two years for architectural plans alone. I'm not naturally a patient person, though I'm working on that, so those two years were making me pretty stir-crazy by the end. So I started picking stuff out. I picked out all my plumbing fixtures, for example, LAST September. And all the tile I picked just before the start of 2014. You know, three months before we even got started.

With the plumbing, it seemed my advance work served me well. Everything was handled, and I didn't have to get stressed under a deadline. With the tile, my impatience got the better of me. I picked some stuff that ended up being outrageously expensive (5 times! the cost of the less expensive stuff I found to replace it). I picked some stuff that came with a 10-week lead time. And I picked some ridiculous stuff that I think no sane person would put in their house but that I love.

The problem with tile in particular is that it is so permanent. Yes, you can take it out, but it's expensive, and messy, and hard work, as one of the tile guys likes to tell me every time I see him ("Trabajando duro, Señora. Para usted." Reproachfully. I know! I'm sorry! I'd say I'll pick easier tile next time, but I hope there will be NO next time. I've just started hiding from the tile guys.).

The other problem with tile is that a wee sample can look so different from a whole room full of tile. So as the tile has started going in, I've been holding my breath. I peek around corners, one eye closed, ready to hang my head and admit my failure in choosing a tile, ready to live with the consequences of my impatience for 20 years.

You guys, so far, so good, as far as I'm concerned.

Laundry room

Kitchen backsplash

Guest Shower

Guest

Master

Master shower floor

Boy's shower nook

Girl's shower nook

Kids' floor

So you really can't go wrong with white subway tile, as far as I'm concerned. And I love that we've restored the hex tile that was originally in the downstairs bathroom. And you'll just have to wait with me to see that floor for the kids' rooms revealed. I think 99.9% of everyone who ever sees it will think I have lost my mind, but I think it's spectacular. And the stuff in the Master bath just fills me with joy. This floor is everything I hoped it would be, and I am pretty good at hoping high.

Seeing the tile go in feels like a reward for all of my patience, as well as a reward for all of my impatience. Like everything in the house, it feels like a reward that I don't deserve even a little bit, but I'll enjoy spending the rest of my life trying to.

A Teaser

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Sun, 19 Oct 2014 04:41:00 +0000

I can't wait to tell you more about these things:

Pretty Things

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Sun, 19 Oct 2014 04:39:00 +0000

I still drive by the house several times a day because I can't help myself, but I try not to go inside when dudes are there working unless I have a real reason to be there. I'm sure people see my driving by and stalking my house, but I don't want to interfere with anyone's actual work or make them think I'm critiquing or spying. Or getting in the way. But occasionally, happy day!, I have an excuse to be inside the house, and I get to see things like this happen:

IT'S A MARBLE COUNTERTOP!

I know, we already established that I'm excited about it. But still. LOOK! It's IN MY HOUSE!

I may or may not have gotten a little weepy about how pretty it is. I definitely resisted the urge to lay down on top of it and refuse to move ever again. I swear!

The timestamp on these photos say that was September 25 (I've been running around, you guys. This week I thought it was Thursday by Monday afternoon. I've got to rely on my phone for stuff like this). On October 1, my stalking allowed me to catch this:

That's my island. It got covered up for it's own protection pretty quickly, but it looks like this up close:

Honed marble feels like dreams come true. It just does. Come pet it with me and see for yourself.

DI(Sort-of)Y

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Sun, 19 Oct 2014 04:04:00 +0000

I like to think of myself as moderately handy. I can change a tire and use a drill. I assemble my own Ikea and Target furniture happily, and once I built some shelves (of my own design, even!) that were only kind of wobbly. And I don't even need to mention the masterful caulking, spackling, and super-gluing that was holding my house together before we started the renovation. Old houses take a lot of goo. This renovation, however, has been strictly a pro job, from design through execution, which is super good thing when I take an honest assessment of my tolerance for mess, stress, and hard work (virtually nil for all three). I've not been sad that we're not doing it ourselves, especially since the dudes who are doing it are super, super awesome.

But I'm not someone who will reject a gift that falls in my lap, even if the gift is a little bit of work on a hot day. That gift was the fun afternoon of doorknob wrangling that I mentioned last time. And here's how that went.

Roughly four million old screws

So the deal was that I had a collection of doorknobs, spindles, escutcheons, hinges and screws that all came from different places, and I had to find a way to make them all look like they belonged together. I could have just polished them all up, and I would have liked that, but some of my pieces had been "aged" (with a belt sander) by the lady who lived in my house before and THEN lacquered. In order to make them shiny, I would have had to either strip them and then polish whatever brass was left, or strip them and then have them re-plated. I like old stuff, but that was a bit much. And I liked how they looked as they were, so I decided to make everything else match their level of old-ness.

So after sorting everything out, I made them all clean and shiny.

I used hot water to get the last bits of paint off, then used toilet bowl cleaner (recommended by the dude at the antique store!) and some 0000 steel wool to clean everything up. See how pretty these are shiny? It was a little hard to do what I did next, but I was spurred on by something you might notice--though all that brass is lovely, it doesn't all match. Some of my brass is "rosier" than others (look at that really pinkish one at the back right). The Internet says that before the 60's there was no standard amount of copper included in brass even from the same manufacturers, so there's pretty wide variation in color. I wouldn't mind the non-matchiness, myself, but I like where I ended up. Stay with me.

I dropped each bit in something called "Brass Ager." Truth in labeling, there. I don't know what it is. I googled the heck out of it, and I still don't know. Here's what happened in about 30 seconds when I did that.

Shiny...Dark. Magic. Or chemistry. You know. But I wasn't going for super-dark "Oil-rubbed Bronze," so I used some more of my super-fine 0000 steel wool to back the finish off a bit.

And there you have it--matching finishes.

Here's some before and after, because nothing's better than that. And here's some before and after on my hands, because I DID use proper gloves and safety equipment (until my hands got really sweaty and that was TOO gross to bear). This did not wash off. I had to get a manicure to cover my zombie nails, and even then it was a good week before all the skin on my hands PEELED off and looked kind of normal again.

But here's the after that matters:

Those are the doors to the library. This room was built a few months ago. Those doors have only been hung for a few weeks. But with those knobs, don't they look timeless? Don't they look like they belong to the rest of the house? I think they do.

And here's another knob on a door that requires a mortise:

That backplate is what I was trying to match. And here's the other kind of knob. We used all of those downstairs. They're just so pretty it hurts.

Totally worth some peely fingers and black nails.

Something old, something new

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Sun, 21 Sep 2014 02:24:00 +0000

The whole rhyme applies, you guys. I'm wrangling hardware for the house, and old, new, borrowed, and blue actually all apply. I've read that the tradition as applied to marriage helps connect the new bride though the institution of marriage to her ancestry (old), her future (new), her community (borrowed), and the creativity it takes to make a marriage work (blue) OR the sorrow attendant any life, you know, if you want to get all depressing about it. And we have all four in our hardware choices--entirely unintentional, but no mean feat.

I've told you about the doorknob store. I didn't mention that while I'm choosing brand-shiny-new doorknobs for the exterior doors (the better to thwart crooks, my dear), I'm using old knobs for the interior doors. Before the contractors smashed parts of our house to bits, they kindly took the interior doors off of the hinges and saved them and the hardware to use again. I knew I wouldn't have enough doorknobs and hinges to manage all of the doors for the new house. My nice contractors also explained to me that the hinges I had (they have ball finials, or top-bits) were old and hard to match, and that if I wanted to use old doorknobs, they'd probably have mortises, which are boxes that fit into a space inside the door that contain all of the twisty and lock-y bits. And while they'd be glad to help me source standard stuff, I'd be on my own for finding antiques. I wandered around antique stores, as I'm apt to do, but doorknobs in good condition are expensive as well as hard to find.

Enter my sister-in-law's parents, the heroes of this tale. Mr. and Mrs. C had a box of glass doorknobs, with all of the mortises and escutcheons (which are the flat bits that are the pretty parts behind the doorknob on the outside of the door) that they had rescued from an old house years ago. Y'all, they let me have them, and now I have beautiful glass doorknobs for my house. I can't even wrap my mind around how wonderful this is.

So now I had a box of old hardware from my house that my contractors kept, and a box of old hardware that Mr. and Mrs. C sent me, so of course I emailed my contractor and asked when he wanted all of it. He told me I'd better do some wrangling first; put together clean and working hinges, mortise, knobs, spindles (the rod between the two knobs) and escutcheons for each door and deliver them to him ready to go. Eep! I know that cleaning and matching old hardware isn't exactly standard house-building work, but I'm for sure no expert.

He did send me to a nice dude at a nice antique place who helped me put everything in order. And while the nice dude was not interested in cleaning and refinishing my hardware, he did teach me how. Tomorrow I'll wander over to the house, bag of chemicals (from Home Depot that make me feel like I belong in an episode of Breaking Bad) in hand, to scrub and polish and age all of the metal bits so they look like they belong together. I'm both terrified and excited, and if I don't die from the fumes you'll get a nice DIY entry for once.

So there's your old, for the knobs and hinges that lived in my house from 1914 until this Spring. And new, for the shiny deadbolts from the store that should be called Wall-o-Doorknobs. Borrowed covers the beautiful glass knobs from my family's family, though I do think they're letting me keep them. Blue could cover the glass knobs as well, as my antique doorknob guy was excited to tell me that my knobs were the rich, sparkly glass made with manganese and lead, rather than the crystal clear selenium glass made after about 1915. These manganese knobs will change color with lots of exposure to the ultraviolet radiation of the sun and turn "sun purple," a pretty lavender shade that some collectors love and some abhor, believing it's ruined the original piece. That's not my blue, though.

I could have blue for the interior paint that's going up inside the house:

"Jetstream" for boys

"Jubilee" in the library and master bath

(Here's some pink, too, just because):

"Loveable" for girls

But that would be a stretch, because it's not hardware.

Not only does my nice antique place have a doorknob guru, they also have tons of old and reproduction glass cabinet knobs, and some of those, for sure, and blue-milk glass, which I'm going to put in the laundry room. Blue glass knobs, for whimsy or sorrow, put the cap on the blessing I hope for my house. Now I only have about 90 more knobs to pick and source, but the important part is clearly handled.

Bonus Post Script:

Look at the attic of this antique store that's in an old house. It's the greatest. Go here if you're ever in Houston.

Il est arrivé!

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Sun, 21 Sep 2014 01:32:00 +0000

Doorknobs of the Universe

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 02:06:00 +0000

I've been spending a lot of time in hardware stores lately, and since I have not been able to drag you with me, I have some stuff to show you to help you share in the joy and agony of these places.

I don't actually think a crystal butterfly as a sink knob fully qualifies as craziness, but I do think that whoever has to clean it will probably cry every time. I'll pass.

I kind of like this one, too, but I think you'd have to love dolphins A LOT to get a faucet shaped like one. Twenty bucks says everyone who gets this also has a dolphin tattoo.

This is even better because it's pretty terrifying. I cannot imagine a small child encountering this faucet without screaming a lot.

And the coup de grace:

It's a monkey cabinet handle. You have to wrap your hand around the monkey to open the cabinet. This is a thing that people pay money for to put in their houses. They choose to wrap their hands around a little brass monkey shinning down a pole holding some kind of jug with his tail every time they open a cabinet. And they probably pay a whole lot for the privilege. People.

So this above is what I do while I'm waiting for the helper people to help me with stuff--walk around taking pictures and snickering about stuff that I think is weird. But really, a trip to the hardware store is all about this:

That's a (kind of blurry, sorry!) WALL OF DOORKNOBS. Seriously, did you know that there are so many doorknobs in the world? This is maybe a fifth of what there is in this ONE store. Today I made my second trip to this particular doorknob store; I planned to just do all of this picking in one go the first time, but I had to go in, wander around, and run away because there was just too much. Today I returned, armed with Consumer Reports reviews and my own opinions from driving around looking at doorknobs for a few weeks.

I discovered that doorknobs are something you have to try out.

NOT the doorknob I chose.

Maybe I'm an outlier, but it really matters to me how a doorknob feels in your hand. So I have about a zillion of these shots, both as a test for myself, and to show my husband, who won't be testing the knobs himself, the relative sizes of all of the hardware.

Also, bin pulls. And cabinet knobs.

And hinges, and doorstops. I didn't even know I had to choose stuff about hinges, you guys. These three below have different radii--which is how relatively sharp or curvy the corner is. That's in addition to the size, number of screws, type of bar thingy holding the hinge together, number of hinges per door, and finish of the metal. And brand.

I knew I'd have to choose stuff, but it does seem at a point that you could just go into the one doorknob store and say "I'd like a doorknob that works, please," and BOOM, there you go. It's a delightful chore to have, I know, to be able to choose from among a zillion nice and exciting doodads, but in this moment, I kind of wish I had that dolphin tattoo to narrow my choices for me.

Or, you know, this:

Drywall sanding

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 00:57:00 +0000

That title is unfair, I know it is. There is much, much more going on at the house than drywall sanding. BUT, every day when I drive past, it looks the same. Now that everything that happens, happens on the inside and I have to actually walk inside to see what'g going on! I know, cry you a river.

Here's something exciting, though: The outside is mostly painted! Check it out:

No, we're not leaving the porch steps green. I promise.

The main house color is "Jersey Cream," which I think is lovely, but to be honest, I just think "Sunshiny Yellow!" It may be too much sunshiny for some, I guess, but for me there's no such thing.

SUNSHINY!

The trim color is called "Rain," which I also love (am I the only person who completely rejects colors I would otherwise like if I don't like the name of the color? I refuse to have any "Taupe" in my house because it's a dumb word as well as the color for pantyhose. Yuk.). All of the stakeholders are not fully on board with the blue yet, so we'll see if it needs changing later.

It's blue.

And of course, we have porches with properly haint blue ceilings. I've read all sorts of things about blue ceilings on porches, and I think, in the end, that it's just what people like to do. It looks peaceful, I think, and I can see that the light color likely helps make the otherwise shaded porch reflect more light, but people love to make stuff up. The more reasonable explanation is that the blue tricks pest insects, especially wasps, into thinking the ceiling is an endless sky, and they won't build their gross-looking and bothersome nests in the corners. The internet is full of people who claim to have proof that this works, and if it does, I'll take it. I've spent enough hours of my life whapping dirt-dauber nests and running for my life. The less reasonable explanation, which is of course the one I give credence to, explains that spirits will avoid a house will blue porches because they think the blue is water. And ghosties of all varieties can't cross water or iron, which everyone knows, right? Really, I like to believe I'm a logical person, but I spent a lot of time growing up with a grandmother who believed she had "the sight" as her grandmother did, so I'm not going to reject anything that keeps scary things away, even if it's totally illogical.

It keeps the dead people out.

Inside is where it gets a little frustrating. They ended up painting the outside of the house SO fast, that when they said they were ready to start the interior paint, I'll admit I expected to show up one afternoon to a finished interior. Instead, they're being very thorough and careful, and priming and sanding every bit of everything until it feels like well-washed cotton sheets and I find myself cuddling a doorframe.

They did the insides of the cabinets first, which was pretty exciting, but it's been days now and there are stacks of primed shelves, drawers, and what-have-you everywhere.

Kitchen!

Shelves!

Drawers!

Somethings!

I feel like there's kind of a doppler effect going on in the house--I look at the time when I expect the house to be finished, and it's approaching dizzyingly quickly. Then I look back to how quickly the time has passed since they first knocked in the old bits of the house, and that, too, has screamed past. But where I'm standing right now, gazing at trim work that's been being primed for 6 million years, and time is moving very slowly. Which is really for the best, because I have to choose a lot of hardware.

Lost My Marbles

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Mon, 25 Aug 2014 02:26:00 +0000

I have a terrible secret that I've been hiding from you. Ready?

I've planned all along to use marble countertops in my kitchen.

I've likely left you shrieking in horror, I know. Marble in a kitchen will STAIN! It will ETCH with even the tiniest bit of acid exposure! I'll have to forswear red wine forever!

So, I probably haven't actually left YOU horrified, I know, but there are plenty of folks on the internet with a serious case of the vapors at the mere mention of the teeniest thought of marble in a kitchen, for the above reasons. I've read them all at this point, I think, and I still want marble countertops in my kitchen. I'm clearly a madwoman.

I'm also a woman who wants a beautiful home, and folks, marble is achingly lovely.

Look at this and try not to cry at how pretty it is.

Here's what I think: I use my kitchen, a lot, and marble seems delicate in some ways, but it's very durable, and apocryphally useful for a lady who likes to bake. More than that, it's so classic--you can't get more classic, really, than the stuff Augustus Caesar used to renovate his capital. I do love to emulate the Caesars, you know. And because it's classic, all that stuff about etching and staining shouldn't really bother me. If you walk through the Forum Romanum, all that marble on walls and floors and pillars and statues is etched by roughly a zillion years of rain and dust, and, let's be real, wine and blood and pee. And not one bit of all of that goop mars for an instant the beauty of the stone that the Greeks called the "shining stone." I think from this starting point, marble ends up being a very reasonable choice for someone who hopes her house will be her home forever.

So I spent the past week or so driving around to various stone places, looking at their slabs of marble, trying to figure out what the different kinds of marble are, and begging someone, anyone, to give me even a ballpark figure for what a piece of stone costs. These stone guys, they aren't telling. They don't even like to give prices to my contractor. It's like a grown-up game of telephone--the salesperson can have their ordering manager call my contractor's fabricator, to whom they MIGHT indicate a price-per-square-foot. That's not an exaggeration, that's just the actual facts. It's silly, and infuriating, and given that it was finally Houston Hot this week and I had to drive pretty much out to Saturn to get to these places, I'm glad to tell you I picked a slab. But how to choose?

These are some slabs of Carrarra marble. This is the stuff that's been used for years, and I think it's still pretty darn lovely, but what they're quarrying now has much more grey in it than white, and that's not as in-demand, so it's also significantly less expensive than the others. Pretty and pretty cheap--sounds good, right?

But then there's these pretties--the popular choice, and the priciest--Calacatta. They're also from Italy, like the Carrarra (though a different place?), but they still have more white in them and have the "cloudy" patterns and movements in them that people are into. That top one is Calacatta Oro, and is known for having golden or copper streaks in it, and the bottom was called Calacatta Luna. I still don't know if that's a real thing or just a name that particular warehouse was using to charge an unknown but huge amount of money. It looks like fluffy clouds, and I like it. It's so pretty.

And this stuff, like the one at the top, is called statuary (or Statuario, if they're trying to charge you more money by convincing you it's extra fancy and reminding you it's from Italy). The Internet has not really been successful in explaining to me exactly what Statuary marble is, but I gather it's from Carrarra but its more white and has little grey lines in it and it's somehow what sculptors have always used. It's like having your own wee bit of Michaelangelo in your kitchen.

So picture me: I'm driving out to edges of Houston that feel as far away as the rings of Saturn several days in a row, wandering through giant, un-airconditioned warehouses when it's about 100 degrees outside, looking at roughly 752 slabs of white and grey stone that probably cost a lot though I don't know how much, thinking, "Pretty. Pretty. Pretty." And I took about a million pictures of different slabs, and when I got home I couldn't tell them apart. And my contractor's designer emailed me pictures of more slabs. I knew it was time for me to make a decision, and I didn't think I had the information I needed to make a decision, and if I chose wrong it would be something I had to live with until they bury me in my backyard, hopefully many, many years from now. I just kept thinking about how they're all so darn pretty.

And that's how I decided, I guess. I went back to the one place where they'd tell me a price, that conveniently was also the one place not located on Neptune's smallest moon, and I picked two slabs (one of them is that pretty guy at the top!) because they were pretty. They put stickers on them with my name, and some day soon, I reckon, those slabs will show up, cut to size and honed, in my house. And they'll look spectacular. I had a couple of anxiety dreams about picking wrong, but in the end they're all pretty, and that's the point, isn't it? I don't think I COULD choose wrong. It's possible Augustus marked every stone he used to clad his new-old city with a sticker, but it's more likely he just decided, "Let's go with marble," and called it a day, and that's good enough for me, too.

Oathbreaker

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Mon, 25 Aug 2014 00:23:00 +0000

I clearly can't keep a promise. I got back from our little trip to the country, stopped by the house before we even went home to the apartment, and took pictures with the intention of updating you guys. Then we got back to the apartment, and this happened:

We had been incubating some eggs from guinea hens that roam our neighborhood (guineas are terrible mothers), and we came home to find three chickies had popped themselves out of the egg! Between finding a cozy spot for them and nurturing what was eventually seven keets (baby guineas) in a 1100 square-foot third-floor apartment until we gave them to a local farm, blogging fell by the wayside.

Somebody had a very nice pool party, before we knew it school started, and here we are, a month later, rather than a few days. I make no excuses! But here's what's been going on:

Living room subfloor

Upstairs hall subfloor

New beadboard on the back porch ceiling

Floorboards

Living room floors in process

Kitchen floors and extra boards

KITCHEN FLOORS! (don't you think close-ups require all caps, too?)

Breakfast nook

Living room

Giant lumber-holder

LUMBER HOLDER!

Sample trim on a window

Beautiful, beautiful kitchen cabinets and island.

RECYCLING BIN DRAWER! (That's not because it's a close-up, I'm just excited.)

Mud room lockers (with shiplap behind)

Library in process

Laundry room

Master closet

There's been some amazing carpentry going on in the Houston Heights, you guys. Some of those lovely, lovely floorboards are ours, saved from parts of the house that got demolished, and some are reclaimed boards of the same species (red pine). They're not sanded and stained yet, but they are lovely, and totally non-creaky, which is a new experience for me.

The stacks of lumber in the living room contributed to the trim work that's been going in, making the house look more finished each day, and a master craftsman named Jesus has been in charge of building all the cabinets and shelves for the kitchen, bathrooms, laundry room, pantry, and library. It's a lot of stuff. It's all unspeakable beautiful. It's poplar, which I didn't know was such a pretty wood, and like everything else, I'm going to hate to paint it (though that won't stop me). They pretty much brought all the cabinets in in one day, and it has been amazing to see. Coming soon: countertops and paint!

Spicy Popcorn

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Thu, 24 Jul 2014 20:35:00 +0000

I'll have another house update for you in a few days, I promise. For now, I've mentioned a couple times (more? Ok, more.) that my obsession this summer is spicy popcorn. My friend Julie also blogs about her house (Follow this link! It's a great read), which is in the woods in North Carolina and which she is spectacularly renovating, and she very politely asked about this spicy popcorn business. Because I really enjoy and appreciate her blog and her general awesomeness, and because I thought you might all like to know, here's how to do spicy popcorn.

Really, my kids are pretty obsessed with popcorn. I make a giant potful at least once a week, often more, and they destroy it utterly before we finish the movie we're watching. I like good popcorn, but thought it would be fun to play with it. I started first with just sprinkling a little paprika on top, and that was pretty nice. I get smoked paprika from Penzey's, and that was even better, and regular chili powder was also ok. All of these were missing some zing, though, and I couldn't figure out what to do until I had a snow cone from a stand downtown.

The stand makes Hawaiian style shave ice, and I ordered their fresh mango. It was awesome, but what made it transformative was that they asked, "Chile on that?" and I was all, "Why not?" They put some kind of chili-limey-salty stuff on top, and in between thoughts of , "MMMMM!" I also thought, "This is what I need on my popcorn."

So this is they key to spicy popcorn:

I do not know exactly what's in it, and I'm not sure I want to know. It's chiles and spices and citric acid, though, and it's delicious. It's easy to find in Texas at Fiesta grocery stores, but I bet in other places you can find it in whatever your Central American section/market is. If not, I will gladly send you some. PS--this stuff is generally awesome. As the name suggests, you can sprinkle it on sweet juicy fruits (I really like it on mangos and watermelon), and I bet you could make some other-worldly chocolate stuff. But for now, here's how I make spicy popcorn:

Start with a big, heavy pot and put it over medium-high-ish heat (about a 6, I guess).

Put three tablespoons of coconut oil in the bottom. If you don't have or want to use coconut oil, safflower and canola also work for me, but I like coconut the best.

Put three kernels of popcorn in the bottom and let the whole thing get hot, giving it an occasional shake, until all three kernels pop. Fish out the popped kernels, dump in 1/2 cup of fresh popcorn, and hold the pot by the handle and shake it for a few seconds until you hear some good sizzling in there.

Dump in 1/3 cup of sugar. You can use unrefined or white sugar, but full-on brown sugar doesn't work that well, and I think succanat wouldn't really either. Either shake the pot super vigorously to distribute the sugar, or give it a quick stir, but be careful to not destroy yourself with hot popcorn. Quickly pop on a lid, leaving a little room for steam to escape, and let the popcorn pop, giving the pot a little shake every few minutes.

You'll know the popcorn is done when you've got two or three seconds between pops. Take off the lid, dump the popcorn into a big bowl, and sprinkle your steaming hot popcorn with lots of chile para fruta. Stir to distribute the spices, and keep sprinkling until it looks all spicy. Then eat a bunch of it and share it with friends. It is not called spicy popcorn for nothing, folks, so also grab a giant glass of limeade or a margarita to cool you off.

So I don't believe in microwave popcorn; it's cool if you do, though. I bet you could just sprinkle Chile Para Fruta on top of whatever popcorn you've got and it would rule, but this is how I like it, and I promise it's not hard. I also think that if you can't get your hands on some chile para fruta, you could melt some butter, add some lime juice and zest, and dump that over the popcorn, then sprinkle some good chili powder and paprika on top, and that would be pretty awesome.

No, I didn't take a picture of the finished popcorn, I ate it all in about 3 seconds. That's how good it is. I bet you can't get a picture of it, either. It's like the Loch Ness Monster of deliciousness.

Addenda

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Sun, 20 Jul 2014 22:08:00 +0000

I realized today that I've taken several pictures of our new exterior back porch doors, but haven't shown them to you.

The top is the set of doors going into the house (through the mud room into the kitchen/family room), and the bottom is going into the garage. We'll definitely stain them at some point, but for now they just have a sealant on them. They're so pretty the way they are. I love the way they bring light into the house, but still look substantial.

Item B:

This is clearly not an updated picture, but you can still see how fluid the transition is between the house and the back porch (I hope). It would be nice if it works out for the back porch to be an extension of the living area of the house in a meaningful way.

Also, I went by the house today in hopes of getting some better pictures of our shiplapped areas. Some of the pictures worked,

But some didn't.

I do NOT know why I'm totally unable to take a clear picture of that shiplapped wall. Maybe I'm subconsciously wishing to have some kind of super-fabulous reveal. Anyway, you get a good impression of it from this picture. I love it. Love love lovey love love.

And the middle shiplap picture above is our mudroom area (note the lovely doors to the left, kitchen to the right). That shiplap will be the back wall behind our cabinetry "lockers" and bench, and I'm super excited that it will be there first thing I see when I come downstairs each day.

Number 3: One more update, and kind of a teaser. I'm contemplating exterior colors real hard.

I may or may not have gone a little nuts getting paint chips at the store. The swatches are just so pretty! I've narrowed it down to five, and I'll show you those once we get samples up on the siding. I will never not want to paint the house all of these colors, and I will never not have a secret (not so secret now) impulse to paint a house the color of a whole card--darkest color or the bottom, lightest color on the top, all the shades in between in the middle. Perhaps when I am old and wear purple I will.

Moving on

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Sat, 19 Jul 2014 19:50:00 +0000

Thank you so much for the blessings you sent. Even though the drywall dudes were eight thousand times speedier than I expected, I've been able to add some scripture, verses, and bits of text here and there all over the house, and those I didn't have room to write I tucked into a mason jar and squirreled away in the walls. Our friends and family are our greatest blessing, and the house knows it as well as we do. Hugs to you!

Those drywall guys--like I said, speedy.

By Monday afternoon, whole rooms smelled of freshly sweaty socks and looked like a modernist's dream of stark architectural purity (WHY does drywall smell so weird, you guys? I'll try to find out, and I'll report back if I do).

The put extra-specially awesome boards in the bathrooms

SUPERIOR.

And they even wire-meshed and mudded the wet areas of the bathrooms.

I'm a big fan of niches right now.

Some rooms were still in progress, but it was pretty clear they wouldn't be for long.

Our hundred-year-old shiplap, both the wretched (see those old termite trails? UGH!) and the sublime, was slipping back into its hiding place behind easily paintable, functional gypsum boards. The whole house almost instantly took on a different character; a drywalled house, even if unfinished, feels like a house. Ours feels like home, to me, but now it is just a house. When it was just old shiplap and framing, the house had a cathedral-like quality. The openness and purity of the structure was art, and I can see that part of the cause of the doldrums of the drywall phase is the loss of that sense.

Fortunately for me and you, the previous week I sent and impulsive e-mail to our contractor. I admitted that it might be too late, but I asked him if we could leave one wall of shiplap in the living room exposed.

I haven't gotten a good picture of it yet because it's at the eastern end of the house and by the time I go by in the evenings the light isn't good enough, but it looks beautiful already and I can't wait to show it to you. Before we started our house project, I had visited houses in the neighborhood that had left shiplap exposed after a renovation, and I have to admit I scoffed. I thought it was silly, and too dark. But I've gotten used to all this delicious oldness being on display in our house, and when it came down to it, I didn't want to give it up. We'll probably clean it up and leave it unpainted, and I think it will end up being almost an art piece in itself on that wall.

And because my architect believes in the rule of three (read this *RULE OF THREE* with stars and sparkles) like I do, here's a little more shiplap hanging out in the garage waiting to be put other places in small quantities. CAN'T WAIT.

Blessings

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Mon, 14 Jul 2014 02:20:00 +0000

I think I told you long ago that our contractor gave us a chart at the beginning of our project to warn us about the psychological process of renovating a home.

And my veiny hand.

We're about to enter the valley of the shadow, you guys. They start hanging drywall this week. I would have thought that I was unique in being super excited about roofing and windows, but it looks like that's pretty standard. It's also pretty standard to increasingly float in a sea of "Meh" about mechanicals. Since the chart has been right so far, I'm steeling myself for some pretty serious doldrums over the next six weeks. I think I'll have some choosing to do (exterior paint?) in the interim, though, and there will be trim and tile when we're through, so I guess I can muddle through.

For now, I have some small progress news, and a request.

Y'all know I'm bookish, and I'm a big believer in the power of words. It's not that I believe in magic spells, but I think intention, especially spoken or written, has a power of its own, for good or ill (and yes, I talk to my plants). So I've been thinking for a while that I'd like to kind of vacuum-seal the good things and good thoughts we have about the house inside the walls with a house blessing. Our church has had a party when they're finishing a new building to have people write prayers and blessings on the walls, so I thought we'd do the same thing.

Tonight, our family wandered over to the house with some sharpies, admired the fresh fluffy insulation, and spent a while thinking about our hopes for our home and our future. We sang a few songs, said a few prayers, and we wrote blessings on the walls of our house. It was private and homey, and lovely, and I really hope and really believe that the love and happiness we shared tonight will nest in the walls and help our house continue to be the place it's been for us for nine years, and for others for ninety more. None of these prayers will be visible when the drywall is up, but I think the Power behind our intentions doesn't need to be seen to have strength.

So this is a terribly awkward thing to ask, like I'm wanting you to give me more than just your attention with this blog, but I also believe that love is infinite and bottomless, and the more you give, the more you have, so I'll ask for more anyway (I will also demand a high-five if I see you in person and I do something I deem to be awesome, like arrive kind-of on time, because you can never have too many high-fives. That's just the kind of person I am). If you have a good thought, a blessing, or a prayer you'd like to share with my family and my home, I would value the heck out of that. You can write it down and send it to me, or comment, or e-mail or Facebook-message me--whatever works for you. I'll print it out, or write it on some wood, and your message will be part of the unseen fabric of our house forever (or until the bayou takes back civilization, you know, whatever comes first). Thanks for reading, and thanks for the blessing of your friendship in spoken and unspoken ways.

Fantastic Voyage

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 04:24:00 +0000

There are a bunch of descriptive words that real estate agents and contractors use to sell houses; "original" hardwood floors are the best, but "reclaimed" from another, presumably old place is also pretty good. A "vintage" sink means it's special-old, though maybe a little worn, and "antique" is another standby that tells you that it might not work but it looks great. I'm clearly a sucker for these buzzwords, and always have been; people like me are looking for an "authentic" old house. It's been important to me in doing this expansion that all of the new parts of the house fit with the old parts of the house, so I keep using words like "authentic" and phrases like "in keeping with" the old house. To be honest, though, I HAD an authentic old house. I also washed in authentic cold water and authentically feared that the old wiring was going to cause a fire. That wasn't for me, so I'm putting in all new stuff, and I'm mostly okay with that. I can see that it doesn't necessarily make sense to want stuff to be old and not old at the same time, but maybe it's not so strange to want a house that looks nice and feels homey but works like it's supposed to? Maybe I only think about this stuff because I was a teenager in the 90's when the worst thing you could be was a poser (or poseur?) and I'm still much too worried about being "real" (Shall I stop with the quotes? Nah. I have an English degree. Quotation marks are my jam). Anyway, explore some authentic stuff with me.

We've been making some decisions about the detail work on the outside of the house. You've seen how we decided to use Hardie siding on some parts of the house because it's practical, and pressure-treated wood siding on other parts because it looks like the original siding. It's nearly all on now, and I think the combination looks nice.

It doesn't look original, if it's even believable in the first place that a house in this size and shape could be "original" to the time the front of the house was built (I don't think it is), but the shape of the roof, the brackets, and the trim work that echoes the original house all work to make it look "authentic." It looks like someone took his time with it; it looks pretty. That's what's authentic about an old house to me.

And someone did take his time with it, for sure. They designed these little soffit vents to let air in and out of the attic:

Each one of those little rectangles is a piece of coated metal, framed with lumber, hand cut and hand assembled, fitted perfectly to the space between the walls and the roof. They even added them to the old part of the house, and since every thing there is kind of wonky with oldness, our guy had to measure each individual space and then cut and make a vent to size. We used to have some little tacked on metal vents that fit so poorly we had to constantly stuff steel wool and expanding foam around them to prevent squirrels from having a party in the attic. This kind of perfect craftsmanship, especially in contrast to what it replaces, blows my mind; I don't have the character for that kind of detail work (but I'll write you a poem about it once it's done!). So there's another detail that's not original or vintage but shrieks of being authentic to me.

Here's another side of this issue:

This is the wood roof-y bits on the front of our house (I think the real name is the fly rafter). See that little circular notch in the end? Our architect thinks that our house probably had a detail on each end that a lot of other houses in our neighborhood have, so he included it on the other fly rafters elsewhere on the house:

It looks really cool, right? That's the kind of little detail that makes a bungalow a bungalow, and that defines the whole Craftsman design. It's pretty, simple, and deliberate, and it's definitely authentic to the style and probably the history of the house.

He offered that we could replace the fly rafters on the front with new fly rafters that match these, and I think that would look pretty awesome. But I refused, and I know my thinking here is convoluted. The detail on the rafters is probably original; the house used to have something like that there, and at some point, some one cut it off because it wasn't fashionable or was in the way of gutters or it rotted off. If we put the new rafters on, we'd be restoring the original look of the house. BUT we'd have to remove the actual original pieces of wood to restore the original appearance, and I just couldn't feel right about that. Is that too first-world problem for anyone else to follow? Are you appalled that I just wrote a zillion words about the tiniest dilemma in the world? I am, a little, but maybe it's interesting to you--is the original more authentic, or is a replacement actually original? Anyway. Detail work. I like it.

And here's a little bonus teaser for something I'm excited about:

My seats for the island came in from Chicago! They're not original to the house or even authentic style elements from our era of houses, but they are authentically old! I ordered two cast-iron and wood swing-out seats from old industrial cafeteria-style tables, and we're going to attach them to the island for seating. I'm excited that they're old and awesome-looking, and I'm super excited that I'll never have to move stools to sweep or trip over stools because they're in the walking path after my children have gotten up and run off--these puppies will never touch the floor, but just swing coolly out to be a seat then tuck back in when they're done. Hopefully they'll look even awesomer when you see them in all their glory.

Going to Hogwarts

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 02:40:00 +0000

I fear that the HVAC, plumbing, and electrical wiring in our house are the Harry Potter in our muggle family. It's all so useful, and special, but I just don't appreciate it enough. And before you know it I'm going to lock it all under the stairs (or inside the walls, you know, whatever. Don't spoil my analogy with your logic).

I know that this is the stuff that's really accomplishing what I wanted out of a home renovation, but I have to admit, I just keep looking at it and thinking, "Eh. Wires."

"Hm, more ducty things. I wonder when something exciting will happen."

Really, I know, this is about as exciting as it's going to get. Air Conditioning?! I'm not sure how they guy who brought that to Houston didn't get a Nobel Prize. I'm also not sure how people lived here before he did. I would have to lay around like a puddle, groaning in misery, if I had no A/C.

So I take art-y pictures of wires and pipes. I'm not the greatest arty-picture-taker for sure, so making an image that I can find beauty in takes some doing. And while I'm framing what I see, I lost a little of first-world ennui.

"There's the thing that's going to make my house NOT smell like fish for three days after I cook fish."

"Wow, insulated pipes! So THAT's how other people don't have to wash their hands in 35 degree water on 35 degree days!"

"That looks legit. I may not have to worry about my house exploding due to a gas leak (as much)."

Everything is in order, inspected , permitted, and approved.

I'm not certain what all the wires are for, but they'll be covered in insulation and then walls before I know it, and I'll magically have a functioning house.

In the words of Dumbledore the Quotable, "It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live." Here's my moment of pausing in my dreams of pretty tiles and paint colors and schoolhouse lights to find some joy in the stuff that will make my everyday awesome without getting any credit. And I will hopefully not end up with a pig's tail for not appreciating it more.

Time to Sit Back and Unwind

noreply@blogger.com (Christie) — Sun, 06 Jul 2014 00:13:00 +0000

We spent two years in the planning phase of renovating/expanding our house, as I've mentioned before, and after all that time, we certainly were able to work out pretty much everything with our architect to everyone's mutual satisfaction. Everything except the front porch. Our plan called to expand the porch beyond its original footprint and move the front door, and I'll admit that I just took a deep breath on this one. For some reason all of the other changes to the house really seemed to make good sense, but I just couldn't be sure we were doing the right thing.

I think my hesitation came because a house's front porch is like its face. Above all, I want our house to remain the home it's been to my family for the past 9 years. All of the other addition and expansion is some pretty drastic plastic surgery, for sure, but I accepted it more easily because sculpting or changing a friend's figure doesn't seem to change who they are or how you engage with them. If you change a person's face, though, they may seem like a different person, and I think I've been suspicious of this figurative nose job on my house's beloved face, even if I can be ok with some lipo and butt implants elsewhere.

Tell me that's not what this metaphorically is. Really big implants.

I couldn't imagine how I'd use this big porch, and I thought it might change my house's face too much, and you might remember that I was nonplussed when they took out my former master closet to start the expansion. I'm not a person who reads the ends of books first, I swear, but I can tell you that they're substantively finished with the porch, and I am so pleased with the loving and skillful surgery that's been performed that my fears are dismissed. When everything is done, my house's face may be different, but it's still right, you know? It's still my house, new porch and all.

To start, the back wall of the porch was gone, and the floor was mostly gone. It was not a good place for anyone but my children, who loved to give me extra gray hairs by sprinting along the springy lumber that bridged the gap in the floor.

When they put this siding on the wall, it helped. One of the things I love about old houses (besides their awesome oldness) is how well made they are. It doesn't seem like people put a lot of time or care into making anything anymore, so to get something well-made, it needs to be old. But for this porch, the guys put in the time. They took care to get things right.

This is some old siding from our house that was saved, stored, and carefully moved to make the siding on the side of the porch where the front door is (south wall) seamless and original.

I'm so sorry that I only have a poor-quality picture, but I promise that if you had looked at that wall in person you would be unable to tell that that siding was not originally in that place. I had to remind my husband, even, who lived here, that the siding used to stop just to the left of the window, because that's where the right angle was to make the other wall of the porch. They cut and moved and reinstalled that siding so seamlessly that it nearly wiped my memory of how the porch used to be.

And just look at how beautiful that new siding is. Do I need to sing an ode to 117 profile lumber? Better yet, should I write the epic ballad of the awesome carpenters who made sure the old siding and the new siding lined up at the corner so beautifully that the corner piece (another something that probably has an actual name, but I don't know what it is) looks like a sculpture? Because I can. I look at these pictures and pet the actual house and practically break into song a la The Sound of Music, but with less actual talent than Julie Andrews. But this siding starts to make me feel like I'm in a gazebo in the rain holding hands with this porch. It's real.

Then, while I'm still weak-kneed over the walls, they took out the old floor and built a new one. It's even prettier.

Shiny new pressure-treated joists resting on top of solid, 100-year-old-possibly cypress beams is art and music in itself. You'd think that smooth tongue-in-groove planks lined up to make a diagonal between the post corner and the wall corner would be just gilding the lily, but it's not. It's just extra pretty, like a cherry tree at sunset. It might be so pretty it hurts, but it's not too much. And they're not even done yet.

There's the beadboard ceiling, with the spot for the ceiling fan ready to go.

And rails, to fill in a gap where rails used to be, long ago, and to bridge the gap between old and new.

Doesn't it often happen this way at least in movies? You encounter a new acquaintance guardedly. You don't plan to spend time where they are, but you keep running into them, and each time you notice something new about them, something interesting, something lovely. Before you know it, you're totally in love.

I am totally in love with this porch. They've covered the floor to protect it, and it wants paint to make everything match, our porch swing is still in storage, and soon it will also have some porch lights and a pretty fan (and maybe a new vintage letter box door?), but it doesn't need those things for me to love this place and the face it will be for my house. I almost can't believe I wasn't fully on board with this place from the beginning, and I look forward to spending many rainy afternoons together.