Beach House in the Burbs

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'...

...okay, better." That's a direct quote from Chris, who has been working out in the garage (top photo) this weekend trying to make it into an office. Let me give you a little background. The detached building has a large room upstairs and a small kitchen and bath downstairs, next to the two-car garage. When we first moved into the house and were really broke, we rented the apartment out. But when we had to evict our last tenant, a 55-year-old man who spent all his money on the dope he smoked in our backyard and so, couldn't afford the rent, we gave up on tenants out back. Since then, the upstairs (bottom photo) has been used has a chicken coop--a digusting use for a room with shag carpet--storage and a workout room. The downstairs kitchen and bath haven't been available for their original purposes in years, since the pipes froze and water flooded the rooms. The broken pipes are behind the fiberglass shower stall. Their repair just hasn't made it to the top of the l...

I was out of town this weekend--at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, TN (worthy of an entire blog, all by itself). When I called Chris Sunday to tell him when I'd be home, he said he had a surprise, but wouldn't tell me what it was. All I had to do was pull in the driveway to know what he'd done, the angel. Even in the dark, I could see the garage door was open--the garage sits behind the house, in a very dark part of a dark yard--and there was room for me to park inside! I haven't parked my car--an eleven-year-old Mustang convertible that I dearly love--in the garage since God's dog was a pup. It's one of the drawbacks to being married to a packrat remodeling contractor with no basement to call his own. Cleaning out the garage is the first step in the remodeling of the entire garage/chicken room building. (Chris calls it the "carriage house," but I figure until all remnants of chickens and their droppings are gone from the building, ...

When we finally put our hardwood floors down, after 7 years of living with just the subflooring (which looked great after 7 years since we had passed out magic markers to all who visited--and we had way more people who were willing to visit us than you'd think given our flooring situation--and let them go to town on the subflooring) in the living room, dining room, kitchen and hall, Chris covered up one of the air return vents in the living room. He always meant to uncover it again, but when you have completion issues--fortunately, only at our house, not at his clients' houses--things don't always get done in a timely manner. After our hallway and guest bedrooms (one had been used to store everything from the living room, dining room and kitchen that would fit in there while the hardwood floors were going down and essentially remained storage for nearly 2 years while we slowly put everything back in the right place) including all contents mildewed (again, reminding us of th...