Beach House in the Burbs

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'...

...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...