Focal Point

I am avoiding the kitchen.

Actually, I am avoiding the kitchen, the garage, the upstairs bathroom, the entire third floor, and my bedroom. But mostly I am avoiding the kitchen. Which makes it hard to cook, I will admit, and since I am the primary preparer of food for the four of us, this has created some interesting and somewhat sparse meals as of late. Let's just say that our crock pot is seeing more use than it has in years and we have had sandwiches...a lot.

I am avoiding the kitchen because it is such a mess of boxes and packing paper and the ephemera of our indecision about what to keep and what to get rid of for the last ten years that every time I dare enter its space I feel unhinged, perhaps even a little dizzy. I don't know where to begin to find order in there, so I keep one section of counter cleaned up for dinner-making activities and once in awhile I make a stab at opening a box. Ah, there are my cutting boards! Hooray! But beneath them lies a sea of kitchen gizmos that we barely use and they don't fit in any of the kitchen drawers because none of the drawers are deeper than 2 inches (no joke) and then I don't know what to do with them so I close the flaps of that box and move onto another. And so it goes, such that the kitchen now contains about ten half-unpacked boxes.

I don't believe in aiming all of my crazy in one direction, so I have also pulled down the front of the wallpaper border in the living room, leaving behind the white paper backing which makes an odd stripe above the chair rail. I did the same to the powder room and I am tempted to tackle the third floor bath border as well. I move from room to room, attacking whatever suits my fancy in the moment, leaving behind a trail of missing borders, stripes of nail holes where chair rail once resided, and the occasional clean surface where once only dust seemed to live. But I have yet to get my clothing unpacked, yet to find the box that hopefully holds my winter wear and sweaters. I have patched holes in our bedroom but I cannot focus on a color to paint so it remains a patchy pink that hurts your eyes to awaken to. I took the doors off the bathtub upstairs weeks ago, yet they still sit there waiting to be discarded. I think I have ADD when it comes to my house and the only cure is to keep working, just keep unpacking and finding places for unlikely belongings and trying to make it work.

It feels like nothing is getting done, but there is one bit of respite in my unpacking despair: the front half of the formerly divided living room (perhaps what would have been known as the parlor?). In that one space we have order and calm, even an area rug to keep the chill off the floors, a table lamp to read by, and books on the book shelf. That room, right now, feels like an oasis of coziness amidst this storm of cardboard and stuff and I find myself sitting there often, just wishing the rest of the house would come to order. I focus myself on the living room as I work through the boxes and try not to make Brendan crazy with my flitting around. He's a good sport, mostly, and I think he understands my need for tangible, visual results that the unpacking of boxes does not always afford. Even if he does not understand, he tolerates me well and for that I am thankful.

Where have you been?

Ok, so you haven't heard from me since early September. Well, as you may have guessed from Sara's posts, we are in our new house! We have had no shortage of things to do since day one. So what have we been doing?

The first day we spent getting a valve in the basement to stop leaking. Luckily, it was leaking into a sink. We spent the first few nights sleeping on air mattresses in the dining room and living room with pretty much nothing else in the house. We made attempts to clean, clean, clean. We're going to need a lot more elbow grease. After a few days we had our first POD delivered and were able to sleep on real mattresses in the dining room and living room and had a couch to sit on. We also managed to get the kids rooms painted. So far, those are the only rooms painted.

We then had the wood floors refinished on the second floor. While this was being done, we opted to move out and stay at my parents house for several days. The dust and smell was a bit much. Coincidentally, the person I hired to refinish my floors was the same person that had just refinished the hardwood floors at my fraternity house. I had no idea I was hiring the same guy. The owner's son, who was one of the guys actually doing the work, noticed my Clarkson Alumni plate on my car and mentioned he was friends with some fraternity brothers and he finished the floors of the house for free.

Last week we had all the windows on the second floor replaced. All but one anyway - apparently the window guy can't measure. The last window should be replaced within the next couple of weeks. We currently have the last of three PODs in our driveway and it's mostly empty. This Monday we'll be having the 40+ year old furnace replaced.

Outside we finally got the pool closed, did some tree trimming, and did some raking. I have to say one of the best aspects of this place was the playground. The kids can spend all day on that thing.

There is a lot of chaos in here right now but, everyday it's feeling a bit more like home.

Ceiling Paint

I'm painting our son's room today and, like any good do-it-yourself-er, I started with the ceiling. I don't think ceilings are generally thought of much when people set out to paint the rooms in their homes, but what a difference a coat of paint makes! It brightens the room incredibly and it just feels good to have a fresh, clean layer of paint overhead. In our first house I was meticulous about the ceilings and painted each one two shades lighter than my chosen wall color. This was a fine idea and looked great, but must have been a pain for the woman who bought our house when we sold it just one year later: all of the ceilings had the popcorn-type of finish and were incredibly hard to cover the first time, perhaps worse when she tried to recoat them. I am not making that mistake again; all of my ceilings will be flat white this time around.

It should be stated that I do not like painting ceilings much at all. Cutting in is a pain because I am on the short side and cannot reach the ceiling well with a paint brush, and rolling the paint on involves much guesswork until the paint is dry and I can see all of the spots I missed. And today, to top it all off, a spider that I didn't notice jumped onto my nose as I was cutting in and caused me to emit a horror-film-worthy girly scream that was, ahem, a little embarrassing. Thank goodness I was the only one in the house at the time and was able to catch myself before I fell off the ladder. All in a day's work!

Moving Along

The hardwood floors on the second floor have been refinished and we can start moving things up this weekend! I cannot even describe how good it will be to have accessible living space somewhere other than the first floor. The first floor is spacious, but realistically we are tripping over each other down here and trying to get kids to sleep while we're still awake ten feet away has been a challenge.

Next items up on the Big Things To Do list are windows and furnace. The existing forced hot air furnace works seemingly fine, but is powered with oil and is older than 60 years; we're nervous that in the midst of a deep freeze this winter we'll be left without heat, so we're taking advantage of the rebates and tax credits to install a new, high efficiency furnace that will be powered by gas. No more having to call up the oil company for delivery, no more chance of sooty walls. Anything we can install that increases the energy efficiency of our Old Lady is a good idea.

Windows...can I just say that there are 29 windows that we wish to replace, and that is leaving off all 3rd floor and basement windows, plus most of the kitchen windows? All of that lovely natural light comes at a price! We had an estimate for all 29 windows which came in at over $15,000 so we decided to start with the second floor where the bedrooms are. The new windows will be installed in mid-November, just before the really cold weather hits. The house might look a little funny until we can get all of the windows done, but we will gladly trade funny-looking for being warm. I like to be warm.

As the various workers and estimators have been in and around the house I find myself wanting to over-explain, to tell them that we do not normally sleep in our dining room, that our kitchen is not always overloaded with boxes and packing paper and the constant sea of papers and projects that trickle home from preschool. For a long time now I have had this feeling of slight panic at not knowing where things are...having no idea where to find a pen, no less a sweater now that the mornings are chilly. Slowly we are unpacking this second PODS container, slowly we are regaining both our belongings and our sense of belonging. The pieces in this giant puzzle that we began last spring are finally starting to fit together, one funny shaped bit at a time. And I refrain, for the most part, from explaining to the workers that we do not sleep in the dining room all of the time. I just tell them we've only lived here for a couple of weeks and then their faces light up with a sympathetic, knowing gleam: we have all moved at one point or another, and I guess we all know how crazy it can be.