Random Reason to Rejoice #3

Those glorious periods at the beginning and end of summer when there is no need for either artificial heating or cooling.

No barrier is required between inside and out.We leave the windows open all night, admitting the lovely nocturnal coolness and the unending bug chorus. Sometimes we can even leave them open all day. The breezes blow all the way through our little barn, making the sheer white curtains dance, while the cat lounges on the window sills.

Here's to those brief and precious times marking the turning of seasons. Thanks for the pleasant pauses in our battle with the elements in this part of the world.

Yeah, We Meant To Do That

Ever worked on a house and encountered surprises along the way? The photo above is the After shot of one of ours. I'm not a good enough blogger to have the Before shot, but I do have the story.

Shortly after we moved into our barn/house, I knew that the upstairs bathroom would be a priority for minor improvement. The room was not only wrapped entirely in wood (ceilings, walls, and floor, oh my!) but was also basically devoid of storage in the crucial area around the sink. Actually, there was a shelf (more wood) perched above the (also wood) mirror screwed to the wall, creating a place to stash one's daily products, but who wants to look at a lineup of floss and deodorants all the time? And sometimes retrieving the toothpaste from its high perch brought something else down on my head. This situation was not my idea of efficient or attractive. I had to come up with a solution for this problem area in order to make everyday grooming less annoying.

The obvious solution to part of the problem was a medicine cabinet. Since the existing mirror was simply screwed to the wall, I bought a flush mount cabinet to keep things simple. No worries about trying to create an opening in the wall when who knew what pipes or wires might be back there. Simple job, right? Unscrew one, screw the other up, and done. You already know that it wasn't that simple.

When we unscrewed the mirror and removed it, we found, to our surprise (but really I should have known), that there was an opening there after all. The mirror had a thick back on it, which some previous owner had recessed. Of course, the opening was nowhere near the same size as our cabinet, but it didn't matter anyway. There was also a black plastic pipe, probably a plumbing vent, dead center in the opening. A recessed cabinet was still out of the question.

I briefly entertained the option of just screwing that mirror right back up onto the wall and figuring out some sort of storage to hang on the slivers of wall on either side of the mirror. But I really wanted a medicine cabinet, and I liked the one that I had bought (at $10.00 off!). We decided to just go for it and figure out something decorative to cover the part of the hole that would be visible below the cabinet.

We got her mounted, and I took off with the necessary measurements to the local antique stores to see what I could find to fill the gap. But here was the other problem: it had to cost as little money as possible. We had just paid almost $500.00 to finally install the gas line for which I'd been waiting for two months and had over $200.00 worth of glass coming for another project (more about that later). We needed a cheap and creative solution indeed.

I considered some pictures and trays priced at $15.00 to $30.00. But when I found a basket of old door panels for $4.75, I knew that I had found my answer. They were cheap, charmingly distressed, and just big enough. With a little something applied to it (a row of old keys? something decoupaged? wording?), it would be perfect.

When I got home with my $5.03 (after tax) problem solver, my husband and I began a Google image search to decide what to put on it. We settled on the Burma-Shave logo for three reasons. 1) A grooming product logo seemed appropriate for a bathroom. 2) It's a little masculine, which makes the man who used to have to share a bedroom with pink walls and a flowered duvet happy. 3) It's also romantically meaningful to me. When we were courting, Dave once left me paper Burma-Shave signs in my house as a surprise. Clearly, it was the winner.

So Dave dug out his stored acrylic paints and not much later at all we hung up our sign with Command adhesive strips, so there would be no (well, no more) visible screws or worries about splitting the wood. The soft white background color, along with the bright white of the new medicine cabinet, certainly helped brighten up the woodsiness, while the black text was a welcome grounding note. Mostly we were relieved and pleased that our "oops" was covered for cheap in a way that didn't look too bad and added decoration to the room.

I don't know if our little project would win the approval of the Country Living design staff, but at least it's not hideous, and I can get my toothbrush out without fear of a head injury. I call that Progress.

A Floral Reunion

My first instinct upon seeing the upstairs bathroom tub was to paint over the cutsie purple pansies with their yellow throats and overly bright green leaves. The treatment was a little precious for my taste, more Gatlinburg or Branson than Country Living.

Then the mother-in-law and a friend gushed that I just couldn't, and I thought of the work that some unknown soul put into them...and I weakened. I had plenty of other challenges to keep me busy for a while anyway, so I put the decision in the mental percolator and set about unpacking.

But buried in our boxes I found something that made me change my mind about obliterating the pansies--for now. That anonymous folksy artist wasn't the only person who's painted amateurish pansies. That's right, I did, way back in 1991 when I lived in Oregon with an artist for a best buddy who helped me experiment with water colors, among other things. Mine weren't very good either. (OK, so they're not good at all. Watercolors are seriously tricky, people.) Mine were, however, basically the exact same colors, leaves included.


What kind of weird kismet is it that they should match like that? I don't artistically like either my own or the tub's flowers, but I just have to leave them together for at least a while. It's as if they're long lost relatives. Besides, there are lots of tissue boxes with purple on them once you look, and it gives me a place to put my purple bottles that I picked up at Big Lots years ago for 89 cents each and a dish of purple rocks that I bought in St Louis on a trip with my son--the kinds of things that you hold onto without knowing why, until one day you move into a funky house with purple pansies on the tub.

Then again, I'm not sure how much purple I want to introduce into the room nor how long I can live with a flowery tub when my personal aesthetic usually runs toward a simple "paint it white" cottage/beach house/farmhouse look, but for now it just seems meant to be. I'll Let the twin daughters of different mothers bond for a bit while we tackle other projects and I ponder the big question raised by this quirky barn/house: Which wins--my taste or the history? Stay tuned.

How Do I Love Thee? Part 2

I've related the fateful meeting and courtship. I've shared photos of some of this house's charms. Now, let's continue the story to the part where it gets real.

As usual, first I fell in love, seeing all the sparkly attributes and the amazing things in common. The circumstances were magical. We seemed made for each other. I felt, when I walked into this house, as if I already knew it. You've heard it all before, and probably experienced it, too. Then we moved in and, like newlyweds, we encountered some bumps in the road.

First let me state that, as stressful as moving is all by itself, it was worse for me this time. I finished twelve weeks of an internship that was the culmination of 33 months of culinary school, with a considerable commute each way, on June 25. We began moving in on June 28. On top of that, living with the in-laws had been a constant strain for seven months. To say that I was stressed out was to put it mildly. It would be three weeks after we began moving in before my stress-induced chest pain and heart palpitations would subside. I was deeply hoping to settle into my Country Living dream-home-come-true and live happily ever after.


It didn't quite work out that way. Almost on the day we began moving in, the air conditioning condensation drain backed up into the basement. Then I noticed for the first time that there were no central heating and cooling vents on the upper half story. (Apparently we missed that in all the romance.) I also noticed that the "flooring" in our bedroom wasn't proper flooring at all, just contractor grade pine boards top-nailed to the floor, some with lumber yard stamps visible. Then the first big storm blew through, and I heard a truly disturbing dripping sound. The roof was leaking around the no-longer-used wood stove pipe. All this while we were surrounded by boxes and trying to eat with only a microwave for cooking. The honeymoon was abruptly over, and all the warts were visible.

Mostly because of my stressed out state and my own high-drama tendencies, I was livid. This was supposed to be my Country Living dream house, a gift from God to begin to make up for all sorts of previous domestic deficiencies, the house that maybe wouldn't need more done than I would ever have money to do, the place that I might actually get to decorate and not just keep barely maintained! I was pretty sure that Country Living dream houses did not have leaking roofs!! And wasn't this what I had paid hundreds of dollars in inspection fees to avoid? We did try to be smart, even though we were in love and eager to be united with our very own home.

Part of me knew that I was over reacting. Nothing is perfect, after all. These were just problems to solve. In fact, the inspectors had noted that the flashing around the former wood stove pipe would need to be redone. I just needed to calm down, and surely it would get better.

But every time it stormed--and storm season had apparently decided to begin--that dripping made me furious. At least it was going into the pipe and not the house, but I was deeply affronted that it was happening at all. Yes, I'm that pathetic.

But it gets better. It took me two weeks or so to find anyone who would work on the roof. When that nice man and his assistant took a look at the job, the new flashing diagnosis we expected became a recommendation to remove the wood stove pipe and replace an entire sheet of the metal roofing, since that was the only way to ensure that it wouldn't leak again. And, oh by the way, there was no guttering on the deck roof and the house roof guttering on one side was too short, leaving a corner dangerously exposed to the water coursing down it. The job had now ballooned to an estimate of $1400.00 to $1800.00, which was most of the chunk of money we hadn't had to spend on closing costs and that I had hoped to use to buy furniture. I tried resolutely to maintain my usual position in these circumstances: I was grateful that at least we had the money to do what needed to be done.


But of course the problem wasn't solved then. Two weeks of waiting were required for the new metal to be ordered and shipped, during which I prayed that it wouldn't rain too much.

Not that it was that bad. There weren't torrents of rain pouring into our house. There were just drips into the capped wood stove pipe when it truly stormed. Not a big deal to ANYONE BUT ME!

Adding to the big deal was my lack of success in finding anyone to fix the AC drain problem or to install a gas line from our meter to the cook top of my now installed dual fuel range. But at least I now had a microwave, a crock pot, and an oven. I did a lot of roasting during one of the hottest summers in years. But hey, we had central air! (Well, downstairs.)

When friends would ask me "Are you loving it?" it was all I could do not to wail "No!" There were moments when I swore that I would never buy another "charming" house again. I would find the safest, most boring ranch house in the county, and never have to deal with such disappointments again!

Then my husband would remind me that there is no such thing as a perfect house and detail some of the "problems" his parents have had to solve over the years in the house that they built brand new. I've had friends myself who went through similar travails after a love purchase, and it's all good now. I also reread one of my books that I just "happened to find" (I think not), in which I was reminded by a successful decorator that no house is perfect but needs our love anyway. So I went on unpacking and situating and antiquing...and it did get better.

The AC drain problem was at least diagnosed, if not completely fixed. The plumber hasn't yet returned to replace the busted pipe out in the yard that was the source of the problem, but the basement is dry. My gas line was finally run by the last company in the phone book that I called, so I have full culinary faculties now. And we've done more antiquing (another dream of mine), finding affordable items to solve most of our furnishing woes. Only four visibly cheap items and one stack of boxes left to replace with more intentional choices.

While I don't think Country Living's editors will be emailing me any time soon, I still have hope that we can get our little barn/house looking mostly like we meant to do that by the time I start paying the student loan piper in December and figuring out what to do in the next phase of my life. The traumatic adjustment phase is over, and, yes, I'm loving it now--for just what it is and for what it will become as we experiment and play and love it up. And that's real love.

Random Reason to Rejoice #2

Morning sunlight on dewy fox tail grasses.

I've always loved these. Now I'm privileged to see them each morning that I get to walk. Sometimes I just have to pause and run my hand along one to feel it's delightful fuzziness. Even when I leave them unmolested, I enjoy the way they end in graceful droops that top the field with curves rather than the usual spikiness. They're soft in all the best ways.

How Do I Love Thee? Part I

I love thee for thy claw foot tubs

and skirted grandma sink.

I love thee for thy pegs and hand hewn beams,

thy graven signatures of old.

I love thee for thy open heart

and island fair.

But most of all
I love thee for thy air
of playful handmade imperfectionism
that shall be my teacher here.

Random Reason to Rejoice #1

A perfect clementine.

The skin slips off willingly. The sections separate easily. And it's sweet, almost as sweet as those canned mandarin oranges (which may be clementines entombed), except packaged in nature's perfect compostable single serving container. Grape growers may have tried to take the title some years back for their own product, but clementines are nature's candy in my opinion.

A tip top clementine like this needs to be celebrated. After all, they aren't always available, they aren't always affordable when they are around, and they aren't always this good. Sometimes they're more bitter in flavor and harder to peel, like a tangerine. Not that I have anything against tangerines. They just aren't clementines.

So here's to my darling clementines, making lunch time brighter while they last.