Beach House in the Burbs

When your beach house is in the ’burbs, rather than at the beach, sometimes you have to hit the coast for some inspiration. While the house I’m staying in on St. George Island, Florida, offers little in the way of home décor inspiration, the view more than makes up for the serviceable but unremarkable place. From the comfort of a screen porch (an essential for any beach house, whether in the ’burbs or not) overlooking the beach, I have watched storms roar through, enjoyed the perfect beach day (yesterday, it was breezy, sunny, low 80s, the Gulf was like glass) and nearly been blown to Timbuktu. St. George Island is off the coast of Florida, east of Panama City. I first came here as a Florida State student. It’s about an hour and a half from Tallahassee. The island is long and narrow, with a state park taking up about a third of the east end. The rest of the island is houses, a few shops and restaurants and a couple of inns and motels—all low-rise. It looks like the Myrtle Beach I remem...

One of the best things about getting most of the remodeling work done on your house is that you can finally invite people over. We went for 5 years without an oven, 7 years without floor covering in the living room, dining room and kitchen, and more years than I can count with exposed studs and crumbling drywall. Now, most of those things are taken care of (There's still one room with no floor covering, just the subflooring, but it's looking really nice with the magic-marker drawings on it.) So this past weekend we had a party. About 40 people, lots of good food--we do pot luck here, we may have an oven now, that doesn't mean I know how to use it--great music and interesting conversation. We even got lucky on the weather. It rained all morning, but quit about 1 p.m. and didn't rain again until just before dark. Long after people stopped getting in the pool. So, how's this related to remodeling, you might ask? Well, it's one of the things to keep in mind when you...

My mother-in-law called recently and asked Chris if he'd travel to west Alabama to pick up a family heirloom--for lack of a better word--that one of her cousins has had custody of for years. The cousin's moving and doesn't have room for it in the new house. And it needs to stay in the family, Chris's mother said. That's how we became the proud, but concerned, owners of something that may or may not be illegal to own. I don't know. When Chris was very young (back in the late 1960s) his family traveled from Alabama to the Petrified Forest in Arizona. And brought back a 600-pound souvenir in the form of a petrified log. Said log is probably a couple of feet long and a foot or so in diameter. As I was trying to find room for the dog--a Pomeranian, for heaven's sake, not a Great Dane or anything--in the back of the Exploder (I mean Explorer) I thought I'd just slide the log over a couple of inches to make room for Princess Prissy Pants. But I couldn't bud...

Pets add so much joy to your life! Especially when you have a dog door. It is the portal through which all manner of surprises can come enter one's life. We have a very large Pomeranian, as Pomeranians go, the 10-pound Princess Prissy Pants, who is quite as prissy as her name implies. But don't let that sleek, elegant, black (with coy touches of white on her chin and legs) fool you. She's a hunter. We don't always leave the dog door open. We also have a cat who brought in a live, tail-less chipmunk (The tail was on the floor by the refridgerator; obviously Kitty was saving it for a snack later.), a dead mole and a dead baby bird one day when Chris was out of town. But that's another story. But because of Kitty, we only leave the dog door open when we have visiting dogs because Kitty is a scaredy-cat and won't come out when Leroy, my parent's killer shitz tzu, is visiting. So, there I sat at my desk, writing a magazine article, when my precious little Prissy ...

All that's left of the chicken room, our room above the detached garage where Chris once raised chickens on the shag carpet, is a picture drawn on the floor in black Sharpie that says "Welcome: The Chicken Room." All wildlife, except my husband, has been evicted. The wall is repaired where the bees lived for a couple of years. No signs of the chickens remain, thank goodness! The room is supposed to be my husband's office. He's a remodeling contractor. But you see the pictures. It's every little boys dream office with musical instruments and musicians, (Chris is playing the drums) a couch, and a floor that nobody cares about. (We'll get floor covering one day, but given that it took seven years from the time the carpet came up in the main part of the house until the new flooring went down, I'm not holding my breath.) I'm afraid to ask how much work he's getting done up there. He moved his desk in last week. Then this weekend we moved a couple of...

Okay, so maybe calling the Miami Beach lifeguard huts architecture is a bit of a stretch, but I loved them! Given my inclination to move all things beachy into our suburban ranch house, I'm trying to figure out where to put one of these things. By the pool is probably the best spot. We could use it to store all of the pool junk--nets, vacuum, chemicals, floats, etc. But it can't be too close or some of the adreneline junkies who use the pool will be diving off the platform, and the deep end's just not deep enough for that! The Art Deco architecture was fun to see, too. But everybody talks/writes about that, leaving those cute little beach huts feeling completely ignored. I've included photos of my three favorites. I was in Miami Beach for Sleuthfest , a mystery writers conference sponsored by the Florida Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. I've written a mystery, Redneck Tarot, and was at the conference to pitch to agents and editors. I have one of each who woul...

This was the week of biology lessons in our chicken room. That room as been home to lots of wildlife, from the human to the non-human variety. First the chickens lived there. Then a hive of bees moved into the walls. This week we finally got the bees removed--and discovered the walls had become home to carpenter ants and these disgusting beetles that look like ticks, except when they're in the larval stage and look like maggots--blech! Thanks to Georgetown House who provided a tip about finding someone to take our bees alive! Chris, my husband, found Cindy Bee, a woman who has been ridding homes of bees for 11 years! She came out on Thursday and took ours away--and let me watch, take pictures and learn about the process. She doesn't need to worry that I'm planning to horn in on her business. It looks scary as hell! The first photo shows the outside wall of the chicken room. This is all we could see of the bee hive until Cindy exposed it all. We could occasionally see the ...

Honey bees have been living in the wall of our garage for several years now. They go dormant or hibernate or something in the winter, but spring has sprung in Georgia and they are back. One day--after the yellow-pollen haze is gone and I can safely leave the house--I'll take a picture of them to post. They mostly live inside the wall, but they also come out and huddle close together looking like a big, black blob on the side of the garage. So, they've been there several years. Chris has looked for a way to get rid of them without killing them--he's a nice guy, rescued a neighbor's dog that had fallen in another neighbor's pond at 1:30 yesterday morning and couldn't get out. But he's having a hard time finding one, that doesn't cost an arm and a bee wing! He's also cheap, so when the humanitarian side and the cheap side conflict, he just does nothing. And the bees haven't really been a problem. It's kind of cool to see them hanging out on the ...

When we bought our house, which looked nothing like a beach house 13 years ago, we decided that the woman who sold it to us had a strong streak of vanity in her. The house was full of mirrors. Full-length mirrors hung on backs of all the closet doors, every one in the whole house. Another full-length, double-wide mirror hung on the master bedroom wall, despite the one on the master closet door. And in the room above the detached garage, an 8-foot square mirror stretched from floor to ceiling and covered the space between two windows on one wall. She obviously didn't want to have to go more than 10 steps anywhere in the house without being able to see her reflection. We got rid of most of the other mirrors as we painted or moved closet doors. But we left the huge one. The tenants we had up there when we first moved into the house didn't seem to mind it. One was so stoned all the time he probably didn't notice it. After he left, we used the room for storage, then as a chicken...

So last year we made a little more money than in previous years. Which seems like a great thing, right? Now we can finish the chicken room into an office and I can stop having to write on the kitchen table (the only place to eat in our house). Except that the taxman is going to take all of the money we had budgeted for said chicken room. I knew we were making more money last year and thought I had sent enough in estimated payments to cover the difference. But since math is not what I do well. And, really, all I did was say to myself, "Oh, I think I'll send in a little more money this time. This should be plenty." Rather than try to find out exactly how much I should send in, like, if there's a formula or something, which apparently there is. So, now we have to pay, and I have to keep writing on the kitchen table, carting my work life around in a red plastic basket that threatens to break and spill out all of my work everytime I pick it up. And I can forget updating t...

Our new roof is on! The roofers were here most of last week, including one really, really cold day (for Georgia) anyway, when the very steep front half of the roof was slick with ice. Fortunately they didn't tell me that until the next day, when it was warmer and not slick at all. I'd have told them to go home had I known. Of course, the problem with getting work done is that it begats other work that needs to be done. Now, for example, we need to paint the new siding around the dormers--see photo. So, do we just paint that the same color as the rest of the house or do we figure out what color we want to change the house to--it's been this gray color for quite a long time and could use a paint job. And if we do decide to repaint, then do we get the rest of the work finished on the outside first? For example, we've never put in front steps. You have to leap over a good-sized crevice at the end of the driveway or else step up an impossibly tall three feet to reach our fro...

Nine years ago--I can remember it so specifically because it was the same summer we had my dad's 60th birthday party here--we put a green standing-seam metal roof on our house. It's been great! It looks good, it isn't too loud when it storms--lots of insulation in the attic--but if you want the noise of rain on a metal roof, we have a screened porch. Just don't go out in a hail storm, you'll go deaf. Anyway, we also have this detached garage and for reasons I'm not sure of now--probably lack of money--we didn't reroof the garage when we did the house. So for 9 years it's had the old brown shingles. Well, two years ago it started to leak pretty badly, water running down the back wall everytime it rained. We started talking seriously about getting the roof then. But Chris put up a blue tarp--which looks really good with the brown roof, gray-sided garage and green-roofed house--and that was as far as we got. (Chris has completion issues--only around here, n...

Well, we bought a new couch, chair & ottoman for the living room as our Christmas present this year. They just arrived and we love them. However, Chris says they aren't really very beachy, though the chair and ottoman are great for napping. You can see for yourself in the photos. When I look at our old furniture, though, all I see is old furniture. Not anything beachy either. It's more the whole atmosphere of the place, as far as I'm concerned. Anyway, beachy or not, the furniture we replaced had to go. The off-white leather sectional sofa had been bought 12 years ago at a garage sale. It officially entered the "got-to-go" category when Prissy, our giant (10 pound) Pomeranian, puked a river from one end of it to the other last summer. I didn't know such a small dog could throw up so much. I discovered that cleaning leather with bleach cleaner, which seemed like such a good idea in the face of all that stuff, didn't really do it much good. The scratche...

Once again I have resolved to get and stay more organized. And if only we would stop bringing so much crap into the house, it wouldn't be that hard. We don't have kids--only a small dog and smaller cat, and, really, they don't require much in the way of possessions, the ocassional bone and fishing-rod-feather toy, but that's it. So, it's Chris and me. But this holiday we brought home a piano. It was my piano as a kid--I was the one who took lessons--and my parents have been trying to get us to take it for, like, three years. But everytime we'd go to Alabama it would be raining or we couldn't get anybody to help load it or we just didn't want to deal with it. But this last trip, the weather was good, we took the trailer and we found help. Now, bringing home a piano isn't like bringing home another shirt. You can't just fold it up and put it in a drawer or hand it in the closet with the other shirts. No, it requires a lot of space. Space that we do...

Well, it's been too long since the last post--I blame some on being too busy during the holidays and some on a lack of work in the chicken room. But, part of being busy included getting some work done! The new beam and posts are up--which means the ceiling and roof won't fall down on anyone--a good thing by any standard. Also, the new closet has been framed up. After much discussion, we've decided against a tongue-and-groove wooden ceiling. (Chris, who is not as in love with the beach as I am, has declared he wants a "lodge" theme for the chicken room--I swear, I'm trying to stop calling it that, but old habits die hard!) The frugal part of Chris, always in competition with the "what do I want" part, won this fight and we're going with drywall for now. It will still be pricey--it's a vaulted ceiling, with several nooks and crannies due to dormer windows, the new beam and a weird little flat space in the center. But, cheaper than wood. He'...