Digging down

The intensity of the interview yesterday has led to a day of pungent self-doubt. I swing from moments of acute nostalgia for the loss of the sparkly, creative woman I remember being at Infocom, to finding myself unable to love the memory of that same self-absorbed and cock-sure girl. What banalities about the others and mortifications about myself have I now preserved in digital video? How could I have forgotten my place so much as to think, for a few hours, that I was as relevant as Steve Meretzky, or Brian Moriarty, or Dave Lebling, or Stu Galley? And how did my neck get so goose-skinned, like those too-thin older movie stars?

I did work on the pathway, for a little while. The ground under the sod is dense clay tangled with the warp and weft of decades of unaerated grass roots. Two days ago, I set the sprinkler on until the area was a grassy marsh, but the water appears to have slid off ineffectively rather than sinking in and softening the dirt. I did uncover a little "cliff" between the hard clay and a small patch where we dug up concrete months ago, where the ground is wonderfully light and aerated. Using that as a starting point, I was able to carve progressive inch-wide shovelfuls off the cliff, plowing up the packed earth for several feet.

But shoveling, or cutting the ground with a shovel, gets old fast. So I turned to removing the mortar from the bricks, which you do by scraping bricks against each other, mortared side to mortared side. The clumpy gray mortar crumbles off fairly easily, leaving smooth red brick underneath. Then you turn both bricks to a different mortared side and scour them together, repeatedly, over all six faces of the brick. It doesn't show in the photo -- the nearest line of bricks are cleaned and smooth, and will look red after a good rainstorm; by comparison, the ones behind are still gray and lumpy. But all that bending and balancing and rubbing bricks together is really hard on one's back.

A rational person would expect, as I adopted the stances associated with poor Chinese farm workers, spine aching and hamstrings taut enough to pop, that I would gain a little perspective. I'm building a brick walkway around the spacious house in which I live. I'm working on it a couple of hours every day. I'm not starving, standing half-naked in a rice pond for months on end.

But a rational person would be wrong -- perspective remains beyond my grasp. Hard labor and physical pain, however, do push to the back of one's mind the immediacy of self-pity, so in the end the same goal was reached -- I stopped dwelling.

So, after gouging out some dirt, and scouring off a few bricks, I shoved a hypothetical ramrod up my spine, and Andrew and I went to Ikea (for the third time in a week) and then to Home Depot, and then out for gelato and coffee. Sometimes you just have to enjoy where you are, and vigilantly not-think about where you were, or where you woulda-, shoulda-, could have been, had things been different.

In media res

I would have started this blog a couple of weeks ago, but I had been intending to start at the beginning of the project we are currently consumed with -- building a storage area under the front porch (for bikes and outdoor stuff, mostly). However, the disk with all the "Before" photos on it, in my camera, has crapped out, full of memory errors. I lost about 50 photos of "before" and "early-durings".

It was a setback. How could I start a blog intended to show progress on projects without any showing? But I'm past that now, and I have a new compact flash disk in my camera.

The photo above shows the area of the house we are working on -- under the porch on the right side, behind the climbing rose. There used to be a set of stairs coming up from the driveway - those are long gone. Instead, stairs (built, finally, today) will lead down, to a locked and generally air-proofed area carved out all the way to the concrete main stairs into the house.

Below are two comparison photographs (first, taken two days ago; second, taken tonight) showing sample progress. Here you can see Andrew standing in the space.


The camera is in the doorway, where the stairs-up were, and the stairs-down will be. Behind Andrew is a 14 x 10 foot span of clay at ground level. This large crawl space (which is what the whole porch under-area looked like before this project started) is a popular litter box area for all of our cats in the house and the neighborhood (spacious! convenient! outside, yet covered in the rain!). They usually enter through the "window" in the trellis at the back (and have continued to do so, undeterred by the construction nearby). That window will be closed up -- another loss of environment for the cats. We will not be digging that area out (it holds the water main and gas line into the house) but we will lay a tarp over it and use the area for storage as well.

All of the walls that you see were carved out from the clay under the porch-- we hired two teenagers (Will and Molly's baby-sitter and his girlfriend) to come dig; Andrew carted clay to the dumpster. They worked for 17 hours (over two days) and dug much of what you see here (or, as it happens, what you don't see here -- what was in the hole). It filled a 10 cubic yard dumpster of concrete and clay. In the week since, Andrew has carved out another 1/3 dumpster worth of dirt.

It's hard, back-breaking labor. Andrew has been working on this project almost literally from about 9 in the morning until after dusk every night since Tuesday 7/17 (even carrying on that schedule after reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows until 6 in the morning last Monday).

But you can see that he is, essentially, creating a new room, one that is about 8x7, complete with entrance stairs. Three walls will be wood (the concrete foundation of the house is the fourth wall), up to high-waist height; above that will be simple plastic sheeting, allowing light through the trellis that is fit all the way around the porch. The stairs went in partially tonight (wood over concrete) and will be finished tomorrow. He has some more framing to do, and then the brick floor will be installed (made with the broken bricks from the chimney we dismantled last April -- maybe I'll blog about that on a slow week). And last will come the electricity, a light inside and a light outside the door, on motion detector, to discourage burglars and allow later evening putaway of yard toys. Oh, and there's the door -- we're having lots of discussions about where the door should go, what it should look like, and which direction it should open.

We are all concerned, but not worried, about water runoff. This is an old house, with concrete foundational walls that are 9-10 inches thick. We do not have wet walls in the basement despite Portland's rain -- so we aren't much worried. But Andrew has taken much care to dig the storage room floor so that it slopes away from the house; the stairs have a lip to discourage rain water; the whole floor is brick over gravel over clay to encourage water to flow away.