The things we carry along with us

"Moving", such as it were, has begun. The children and FemmeDommi are at a family reunion up north, so those of us left behind are taking advantage of their absence to pack (if asked, every crayon would be needed -- this way, we can filter out a lot of the broken and less-played-with stuff). They return on Thursday. On Friday, we will load the rented moving van, and on Saturday morning, early, the AffinitusDommus will set out on their new adventures in a new house, a new city, a new state. (I shall have to find a new name for them, as well, because they will be living in a complete absence of cats; pets are not allowed by the landlord.)

In the meantime, I am emptying my storage unit. With only two people in this house, we will have room in the cellar for my stuff, and room in the studio for FemmeDommi's office furniture. Also, AffinitusDommus will need a deal of kitchen furnishings at their rented house, so I'm pulling out my own, for the Texan and me to use here. We have borrowed a friend's truck, and I am single-handedly moving all my things. That is, I'm moving all the boxes and liftable furniture -- the couch, some desks and a large bureau will have to wait for Thursday when we'll have friends helping us.

Sooooo, today and yesterday I moved 34 boxes from the storage unit to the basement, as well as five pieces of light-weight furniture. All of those were carried downstairs individually, so I reckon I've climbed at least 350 steps up (and down) today, carrying weights (yeah glutes! Frankly, I ache all over). The unit, 9 feet by 11 feet by 20 feet high, is about half empty.

So, what have I been paying to store since September 2005 (and which I also paid to bring out to Oregon in late 2006)? About a third of the boxes are books. Some of these books I have missed -- an entire box devoted to multiple copies of Dorothy Dunnett novels (some of which I've had to buy additional copies of, in the intervening years). Or my copy of Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman, which I purchased again to read again last year. Or my hard cover edition of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which I have prevented myself from purchasing several times because, for Pete's sake, I have the hard-cover version in storage! Sadly, this also means I have not yet read that novel. Presumably it is packed away in the large, leaden, box marked, Books I Do Still Intend To Read. Someday.

Others I have not missed -- what could be in the preposterously heavy box labeled, Books - #3 - Living Room? I'm guessing that holds the picture books -- a history of rally cars (with early Mini Coopers) and I dimly recall a photographic chronology of World War I. These and a few others, although outside my usual interests, were too fascinating not to buy for Less Than $9.99 on the Bargain Table in the entrance to Borders Book Store. And maybe that box has the exhibition books accompanying the show I saw at the Uffizi in 2003? I will enjoy looking at them again, but I didn't miss not having them.

About half the boxes are kitchen stuff. Some of that is because kitchen stuff is large, and thus fills a lot of boxes. But have I needed to store twenty (nice quality) Rubbermaid food storage boxes for four years? What about the cheap pots and pans -- cast offs and filler pieces when I got them? They will be handy now, but I'm noticing the scratches in the teflon, and the permanent stains -- should I just buy some new, less toxic pans? I've got spatulas and wooden spoons and mixing bowls and three sets of measuring cups. Did I really need to keep all this?

Did I really need to own all this in the first place? But I felt a rush of pleasure to rediscover my ivory wire fruit bowl, and my Italian tea towels. Doesn't that rush -- especially when it is sustained over four years -- justify the cost? (That is, the cost of purchase and the cost and hassle of storage.) The Rubbermaid containers elicited a feeling of familiarity, but no rush. Yet, frankly food storage containers are something I use -- a lot more frequently than linen tea towels. Instead of storing them, should I have discarded the containers, necessitating a new purchase now? Is it more wasteful to have had them in the first place, when they are not something I cherish?

What about things that are of no practical use, nor are they lovely? Should I be storing the suitcases, long outdated and mostly worn out, given to me by my parents when I went to Cambridge U. in 1983? I carried the little one across Europe for three months, but it is sagging, tattered and torn, and I doubt I'll use it again. Is the sentimental value of that well-traveled gray case worth keeping it in the basement for another six months?

These thoughts dogged me today. I would park the truck next to our rose bushes, so the scent of roses overwhelmed the dust that puffed up from the boxes as I unloaded them onto the dolly. In groups of two and three, I wheeled them up the steep driveway, past the cats lying sprawled in the August sun to the side door of the house. There, each box was carried down the wooden stairs into the cellar, and stacked neatly according to label, kitchen, books, textiles, other.

These are only my things. These are all my things, the total. Every one of these things, in all of these boxes, is going to have to leave the dark, cool cellar, someday.

Update: Linen Closet, redux

The upstairs linen closet is done. Well, mostly -- the contractor's part is done. We still have to caulk the inside of the doors, prime, and paint it, which will lead to repainting all the woodwork and the walls of the upstairs hallway. HomoDomi is going to strip the hardware and buff and re-age it, but that will come early next year. And later, we will add a laundry chute. But at least now we have the feeling of lots of storage space. (The box in the lower right covers the hole that will become the chute.)
Today we had to find a latch for the new closet doors, to match the old. We went back to Rejuvenation House and combed through their piles of old fasteners. It's dirty work, but fun to do -- you feel like you could discover treasure at any moment. (But Rejuvenation House is not run by dummies, and the true treasures have been pulled out already and the merely valuable pieces are priced accordingly). (photos taken with mobile phone)


We found two matching latches (with a bigger handle than the one which had been on the closet), for $10 each. Not bad, when they were asking $30 for new reproduction.

Shockingly icky work

I've discussed the electrical issues we've been facing, opened up by the removal of the chimney. We have live wires trailing from attic to basement in that open space, and they had to be tucked behind the linen closet on the second floor. More broadly, the causal chain is that we need to fix the electric wiring in the attic because:

• It would not be safe to lay floorboards over the current wiring, because some of them are bare exposed wire (50-80 years old)...
  
• We want floorboards in the attic, so we can store stuff currently in the basement...
• We want to store stuff in the attic, so we can use the basement as the temporary kitchen when we gut the kitchen...
• We want to gut the kitchen, so we can remodel the kitchen.

We also want to fix things up so that we can put proper, or at least improved, insulation in the attic. What's there now is a lung-filling dusty mess of 4+ inches of grey material, like old packing material, or the stuffing from chairs you find abandoned at the back of sleepy antique stores. We aren't sure what the R-value is of this stuff, or even how old it is -- when did people start insulating? It looks a little like the bolts of stuff friends gave us after insulating their house a few years ago (they had extra), which is about R-7 for 4 inches -- which is about the same as 4-inches of the fiberglass pink stuff you buy in huge fluffy rolls. (We should be aiming for R-38 in our climate, but old houses, unless you fill the attic to the brim with insulation, are lucky to get to R-30.) At any rate, we want to slow the rate of heat loss now that wilder weather and expensive heating oil is here.

The third reason we need to fix the attic wiring is to free up some circuits to add light and power to the new kitchen. The garbage disposal and (I believe) the dishwasher will each need dedicated circuits. In addition, we will be going from a current total of two ceiling lights and three outlets to:

• two hanging lights,
  
• a stove vent,
  
• a recharging station for all our mobile phones, iPods and batteries (a kitchen for the 21st century!),
  
• a handful of task lights,
  
• another handful of electric outlets for appliances, and, if I get my way...
  
• a series of small white LEDs accentuating the tops of all the cabinets.

For all these reasons, we are working on the attic. It's icky work. You can't stand up; you have to wear a mask. Even with the mask (and safety glasses) you get insulation fluff embedded in your hair and clothes and eyes. There is, ironically, no power to the attic itself, it merely supplies power to the floor beneath it, so we working in the dark except for a headlamp like a coal miner.

The wiring itself has -- some of it -- been patched together poorly (with wires spliced together and then spliced again, and again, for chains of 6 or 7 splits; with no to-code junction boxes, only electrical tape wrapped around the splice like a temporary bandage). Some of it is in good shape -- some original knob and tube work from 1915 is still safe and better left alone than "fixed". We don't yet have those floorboards installed, so HomoDomi has to balance on the edges of 2x4s, whilst avoiding those occasionally live wires and the holes in the middle -- one left by the chimney (under the hammer in the center of this photo) and the entryway to the attic (out of which I am poking my head).

HomoDomi has done it all -- I have been quite willing to be the runner, from top of the ladder on the second floor down to the far end of the basement to turn on and off circuits, or to pick out some screws, or to grab a newly recharged battery. And back again (58 steps plus 10 ladder rungs plus two crossings of the house laterally. Who needs a Stairmaster?). I have an odd fear of heights: I have enjoyed the landscape view out, and down, from the Seattle Needle, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the top of The Arch in St. Louis, or the tip of Köln Cathedral -- but I do not care for internal holes, surrounded on all sides by building but empty for many feet directly underneath you. Perhaps it's not heights I'm afraid of, but depths. Long empty depths of space, below.

Update: Linen Closet

Day Two: Michael installs shelves, and hangs one door (built from scratch, of course). The wood is beautiful, old-style fir. HomoDomi has suggested leaving it as stained wood, but that would require stripping the other closet and the other four doors in the small hallway. Also, I think the white paint looks nice and is appropriate for an upstairs hallway of the time.

Mike said he hadn't built for exposed wood, and there were touches left in that were intended to be covered with paint. I think that convinced HomoDomi more than my opinions about required extra work and appropriateness.

So far as we know, the woodwork paint is original -- so in order to match, we will likely have to repaint all four doors and the other closet. I want to get a quart of pale blue-green paint and update the walls of the hallway, as well. The existing blue-green is a pretty color, but has faded and gotten dingy over the years.

Here, for fun, is the view from the bottom of the closet down through the kitchen (the light glowing in) to the basement. You can just make out, behind all the wires and white pipes, the blue line that is the curtain-wall of my room.

The Upstairs Hallway

We've been really busy the last several days, and I've been too tired to blog at the end of the day.

Michael, the poet who installed our attic fan last month, freed up some time for us this week. So we've got him fixing the hole on the second floor where the chimney used to be. We love Mike and hope he will have time to do many other projects for us. But first, the New Linen Closet.

Here is the progression: Last April, we had an over-crowded linen-closet and a wall in the upstairs hallway. The plan is to have, by next week, two gently filled linen closets in the upstairs hallway, side-by-side, looking as if they had been there all along.

In the meantime, if you recall, we removed the chimney behind that narrow space of blank wall. We sawed through the lathe-and-plaster wall, exposing the chimney and a large hole. You can see, in several of these photos, the back of lathe-and-plaster walls around the sides and back of the hole, and a gap that has been considered useful for running electric lines. The whole second floor is electrified by five wires that run from the fuse box in the basement, up this hole along the chimney, into the attic, across and then back down between the walls of the second-storey rooms. Some of this electricity is original knob-and-tube, which actually is in pretty good shape. About half is a slapdash job from the remodeling done in the 1950s.

By the way, also run up the hole from basement to the floor of the second-storey are the water pipes for the upstairs bathroom. That is, water comes in through an underground pipe into the basement on one side of the house, across to the middle of the house, up the chimney hole, and then, between the ceiling of the first-storey and the floor of the second-storey, back across the house again to exactly above where the water enters the house.

This talk about electricity and plumbing will become relevant in future blog entries, when I talk about the work going on in the attic and the kitchen.

We took down the chimney bricks in April, and since then, the hallway has been an over-crowded linen closet and a drafty hole extending from attic to basement. For seven months, we've had a large plastic sheet roughly taped over the hole in the wall, but really there's been nothing to prevent a boisterous child from jumping/falling/being pushed from the second floor down to the hard concrete floor of the basement. In fact, for a while there, towels were being dropped (but they fell into an area almost impossible to reach behind tables and bookshelves and things, so that was discouraged).

Anyway, there's nothing like getting things done. Mike took measurements Monday, started building yesterday, and except for waiting for glue to dry and painting, will be done tomorrow, I think. He started by closing in the box with plywood yesterday, and today he did the frame and molding that will decorate both old and new closets, so they look like a set. Tonight, the glue holding together the grid decoration (false panels) for one new door is drying; tomorrow the other will be set. HomoDomi and I scrounged through piles of antique and junk hinges today at Rejuvenation House in order to find four hinges that exactly match the original hardware (nothing so grand as shown online, which have been cleaned up). I just realized, writing this, that we forgot to pick up a latch. Darn, another trip to one of our favorite stores that we'll be forced to take.

We asked Mike to leave the holes to the other floors -- both the ceiling up to the attic, which we will block from above, and the gap downward. You can sort of see his shop vacuum blocking the hole in the floor in the last photo. One of the projects coming up will be installation of a proper laundry chute down to the basement -- complicated because it passes through the kitchen, and we haven't finally decided where exactly it should be located yet (wiggle room of two feet or so).

Doors or Gates - what's the difference?

There hasn't been as much tangible progress on anything in the last couple of days as we would like. Much of yesterday was spent shopping for minivans (and in the evening, some of us went to hear Jasper Fforde -- he was marvelous, and I highly recommend going out of your way to hear him, not to mention reading one of his books, of which the latest is First Among Sequels). And much of today was spent in PTA interactions.

However, that is not to indicate that no progress has been made. Andrew has Hung A Door. (Technically, it's a gate, but we're referring to it as a door.) This was not insignificant to do (problems with less than 90 degree angles and gravity and tiredness -- the first door he made was 7 " too long due to an oversight). And now the frame is causing problems: it is wonderfully straight, but it is 3/4 inch offset from the house "wall" beside it, so it sticks out a little. Andrew has a 1/4 inch tolerance, so this means Measures Must Be Taken. What they will be, I'm not sure yet.

Let me back up. The picture of Andrew in a red shirt was taken last Sunday. This photo predates the stairs; I (the camera) am standing on the edge of the porch, at the head of where stairs up used to be (you can see the outline of them in painted concrete slip along the house wall next to Andrew in the photo).

The second photo was taken about 9:30 tonight. Andrew is in a black shirt, and much sunburnt (it has been hot and dry; it was 92 degrees today). The stairs down are sort of visible -- they are red, Andrew is standing on the top one. The door is framed in properly -- the hefty 4x4 his left hand is resting upon is the lintel. You can see the skeleton of the door hung in the space (the black hinges are a giveaway). The two struts stretching from lintel towards my feet are the props that will support the porch floor when we put it in. The door will be trellis on the top half (to match the trellis elsewhere on the porch) and solid on the bottom half.

We've also decided (one of those Royal "we"s) not to encase the whole unit in plastic as originally intended. Someone pointed out the plastic might be quite noisy in a wind storm, of which we get many; and the winters aren't so bad here that we need to keep the contents of the space warmer than they will be next to the house anyway. The primary need was secure, covered, space, and that we'll have.

Tomorrow: The Porch Floor.

Continuing Under-porch Storage

Today was the last wall, the stairs, and a start on the brick flooring.

Andrew slipped down the hole a couple of nights ago, so the stairs have been rather high priority -- but have needed lots of work and waiting time. Concrete on the back; supports on the back; fitting and painting the treads with sandy paint so it will offer footholds in the rain.

Today's pictures are of the floor (half done) and of Andrew cleaning the mortar off the bricks. The bricks are left over from the chimney, and thus still coated with lots of mortar. You rub two mortar-covered bricks together, however, and the stuff dusts off. Andrew likes to do it dry, with a respirator on (it can't be good for the lungs) -- I prefer to soak the bricks the night before so it comes off as a heavy wet sand. To each his own.

The floor is already more advanced than shown here -- Andrew worked again until there was no light left. It is simply the broken bricks (with a sinuous pattern of a couple lines of unbroken bricks) laid down , with sandy gravel poured over and between. There is also a layer of larger gravel on the dirt hidden behind the walls, again to slough off any rain that comes in.

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.