Ibidem ("in the same place")

I've changed the look of the blog -- just because I like to rearrange things now and then. (What do you think? I may change it again next week.) It seems appropriate to refresh now -- it has been a year (more than a year, actually) since I started this blog. Now, as then, I staved off writing for a few weeks, awaiting the "perfect moment", or the completion of something, or some unknown milepost that it would make for the right post. And finally, last year and now, I just gave up and wrote something (this, in this case).

We have changed, or rearranged, quite a bit in the last year. I'll start with a summary of the front yard, and move (in other entries) to the back.

Before Today

The car isn't new, but in the last 12 months we've installed a bike cellar under the porch, repaired the rotted porch floor and increased the usable size of the porch in the process. We've changed the look of the front steps by masking them with a decorative box and a hand-railing, and growing a wisteria greenly up the middle. We've ripped up the dying clover and weeds on a steep hill that constituted part of our front lawn, and replaced it with more formal wooden terracing. (I'll plant that with perennials and spring bulbs later this fall.)

Off to the north side of the house, the changes have come this summer, mostly, and in their own way are more dramatic.
8/2007 9/2007


4/2008 Today.

The flowers include, from left to right, a rhododendron (moved from the back yard), a volunteer pumpkin which is aiming to take over the world, an azalea, dahlias, marigolds, snapdragons, an hydrangea, and rhubarb, and a rose in the middle (which I fear I killed in transplantation). We've also moved the fence up to the front of the house -- right behind the rhododendron, off the left side of the last photo.

It has been a lot of work, much more than we anticipated, with less satisfying than-we-expected results. No, that's not right -- I get great satisfaction from simply staring at the garden. Rather, checking these off the list of projects has not led to any sense of completion, merely another project pops to the top of the list to do.

The Attic: Completed

This entry is way overdue -- HomoDomi actually finished the attic in May, before we went to Minnesota for our niece's wedding. But I've realized recently that I'm having a lot of troubles finishing things, ending them, completing them, polishing them off, putting things behind me, wrapping things up and tying the bow, crossing the t's and dotting the i's... including this sentence apparently. But I am stiffening my resolve, so be prepared to see a few endings cross this blog in the next few weeks (or at least some really rigid resolutions).

Meanwhile, back to the attic. We started in December cleaning it up, correcting bad wiring, and improving insulation. Then not much happened, after those first couple of weeks of hard work, until early May, and last time I wrote about it, we had just finished installing a ladder for ease of access.




But now we are through. The attic has been re-powered, floored, and painted, and lit with vivid light strings. We had an eleventh hour setback lasting a week, when it looked like the ceiling of the Texan's bedroom was going to fall in (a deep sag in the joists around her ceiling fan, worsened by the weight of the floor boards) but after using some scrap wood to reinforce the original sagging joists, and installing a new, lighter-weight fan, all is well. HomoDomi and Girl-Child together made signs to direct new storage. The ceiling of the upstairs hallway has been finished and painted, and the light shade in the hallway (which I broke during some clumsy ladder-handling) has been replaced with something nicer, from Restoration Hardware.

Kudos belong entirely to HomoDomi. I was at best an occasionally reluctant cheerleader, and documentarian.

Fixing a hole...Fixed.

Nothing like johnny-on-the-spotiveness. We've had a hole in our roof since April. Today, we got it fixed. (The photo, hard to parse even for me who took it, is a view from the basement up the space left by the chimney removal through to the roof; that black square at the top center is the blocked hole. The arc-y things are electric wires and flexible plumbing carrying power and water to the second floor.)

We had a party last week; a friend mentioned he knew a contractor he could recommend; the friend actually followed up and introduced us. The contractor, Mike, turns out to be a poet who just published his first book, and is the builder of the Poetry Kiosks that appear around Portland (little windows on stands with poems in them). That alone was enough to get Mike hired, but then we found out he lives less than two blocks away and had been previously recommended by two other friends but they hadn't carried through as thoroughly as this latest friend. Networking and follow-through: the keys to success.

Mike is great. In one day he closed up the hole, re-shingled, and then cut another hole and installed a solar-run heat fan to suck the hot air up and out of the house in the summer. His efficiency is counter-balanced by our lack of it -- for him to get everything done, Andrew and I had to go to Environmental Building Supply (an eco-friendly building supply company, for the solar-powered fan), Home Depot, Lowe's, and Oregon Roofing Supply (for the shingles and plywood).

I took a picture of Mike and Andrew and the fan (which is so efficient that it was spinning while sitting half-out-of-the-box on the workbench on an overcast day), but my camera appears to have broken. The display shows only fine stripes of gray and black, and two out of three photos are unidentifiable files. This happened between Photos #3 and #4 this morning, while the camera sat in my pocket.

Apparently we are going to hire Mike to finish the closet on the second floor (in the hole left by the chimney removal) and possibly to finish the railings on the front steps, since Andrew is more mystified by how to building angled railings than he had let on before. I obviously had better get cracking on getting my camera repaired or replaced!

The "new" porch

Somehow I'm feeling very relieved, like I just got something off my chest. Maybe it's the "new" porch.

It isn't actually new, of course -- just the floorboards, and the yellow paint. I suppose technically the corner where Andrew is sitting is new, because it didn't exist when the stairs were there. And those are new rugs on the floor (Ikea throw rugs). And the furniture was bought in May, so it's newer than any other furniture in the house.

We find ourselves sitting out there quite often now -- usually in the afternoon, when the sun filters through the oak tree and the space just glows. This photo was taken this morning.

The cats in particular love it. Abby is shown here in her customary spot (we turn the cushions over to sit on them ourselves, because they are grey with cat hair). Boris and Natasha have been known to spend the night sleeping there, each on a chair (Abby comes in at night).