• goodbadi

    Culmination

    September 10, 2012

    Sometimes things just seem to come together all at once in a really dragged-out sort of way.

    Over the last month we’ve moved into our new kitchen (although a few details remain to be polished off), we have a new (our own!) water line from the spring (although a few details remain to be polished off), and our band’s new CD is at press (and but a few related details remain to be polished off).

    Our little coffee maker now commands from a permanent spot on our new kitchen counter. In the absence of having to take it down from our old kitchen’s begrudging shelf and cluttering the old, limited counter space, I’m making coffee nearly every morning (and refrigerating some for lunchtime, too). It’s quite luxurious, the new kitchen–even if I do have to empty the mouse traps before I can truly enjoy its ample perks.

    The water pressure from our new system is spectacular, too, though I take credit only for stressing about how long the plumber took–rather, is taking–to finish the job. This weekend I smoothed out the gravel in our parking area, and gathered stones to fill in a mis-dug hole near the spring, and otherwise tried to put things on the return path to normalcy. I’ll need to wait until the man comes back early this week (supposedly) to move some of the pressure tank gadgetry so that we can put our drier back in place, but in the meantime, at least passé is my impatient bath-time wondering if the water trickle that fed our upstairs bathtub faucet would be able to muster the courage and fortitude necessary for keeping afloat all the way up to and out of the shower head, to unsatisfactorily drip over my scruffy head. Our shower now demands reckoning.

    And finally, the CD: We’re in love with it, even if it isn’t a professional product, and we can’t wait for other people to hear it. My nightmare of last night–that every song sounded terrible–was but a dream; I happily confess that in real life and I very much enjoy the album.

    Read More
  • goodbadi

    Of Note

    August 6, 2012

    The derecho earlier this summer has left N quite anxious about any breeze or sign of weather or possibility of sign of weather, and our dog has been affected similarly.

    When thunder rumbles, she cowers and even worms her way inside if we open the door, despite our stern admonitions to stay outside. When she came in a couple days ago, I put down a sheet for her to rest on, and the girls quickly outfitted her like the Buddhist monk she’s always been meant to be:

    Last night we had a picnic on the kitchen floor, since everything was in disarray in anticipation of the kitchen move that was slated for after the girls went to bed.

    M and I worked until about one o’clock this morning to get things in pretty good shape. Not quite everything’s done, like trim and such, but at last we’re using our new kitchen. Here’s a silent tour:

    Read More
  • goodbadi

    A Great Date IKEA Idea

    July 22, 2012

    On a recent Friday, while the four of us were visiting my little big-city brother, he and a friend escorted us to IKEA to scope out kitchen options and eat the trademark lunch they offer for $3.99 (fifteen Swedish meatballs, mashed potatoes, and lingonberries).

    The following Tuesday found me puttering along in a borrowed truck to a less distant location of the household superstore, where I loaded up a sink, cabinets, a microwave, and more–about 148 items, plus the requisite fifteen Swedish meatballs, which I am still assembling into the promised kitchen of our dreams. 

    As soon as the day after my travels, even though I was still reeling from the PISD (Post-IKEA Stress Disorder) I’d picked up along with our dreams fulfillment, I knew I’d someday go back. There are always more household outfitting needs, after all, and so at the breakfast table I laid out a Great Date IKEA Idea.

    I said, “Let’s save up $500 and go to IKEA and buy–.”

    N’s interjected ending to my sentence was immediate: “Eighteen hundred meat balls.”

    N in her uncle’s Ivy League Statistics PhD-candidate office.  She wasn’t too far off: At $3.99 for a plate of 15, 1,800 meatballs would cost $478.80.
    Read More
  • goodbadi

    Floored

    July 8, 2012

    Last Thursday I awoke from an afternoon nap to overhear a phone conversation that has changed the course of my recent history.

    My dad was on my porch scraping gunk off of the old maple flooring that my brother had gleaned from a work site then given to him and that Dad had passed on to my brother-in-law J, who didn’t want to clean it up and so gave it to me to clean and use on our new kitchen floor. My nephew and I had sweated it out of the cramped “second floor” of J’s workshop and I’d stacked it, bought a scraper, and had put in hours’ worth of cleaning the boards laid atop some upended trash cans.

    I don’t really enjoy dirty work of the painstakingly slow stripe, so I was more than grateful for my dad’s willingness to jump in on the project while J was practicing tourism in the big city instead of working on my parents’ new house.

    And since it was a day in general and a summer day in particular, I’d gone up to my bedroom floor for an after-lunch snooze, my timer dinging just as Dad on his new cell phone was saying words like “hickory” and “good price” and, “Does C know where it is?”

    Someone had called J in the city to tell him about a good deal, and he called us. I jumped, and our speedy trip to town netted us a store-closing deal of some three hundred square feet of new hickory flooring.

    Notice the fine trapdoor to our root cellar: the work of J. Also notice the commercial-grade finish on the floor (I’ll add one more coat, yet): J hooked me up with a professional flooring guy who sold me the stuff and even helped me put down two coats, and buff it.

    (The partially cleaned maple is still on my front porch, waiting to be reclaimed by either my dad or by J, who my dad thinks regretted giving it away.)

    Read More
  • goodbadi

    Dump Save

    April 8, 2012

    It was my second load of old-living-room-turning-new-kitchen debris of the day. While certainly weighing less than the first–that one was right near half a ton–it was still aiming to cost me $15 to unload at the landfill. I dutifully backed up our aged Accord and too-big trailer and readied my tired back to throw those floorboards complete with their FDR-era newsprint remnants overboard.

    Three young men in a small pickup with had just disposed of an old carpet when I got out of the car. The driver looked at my load and then asked the attendant, “What are the rules about asking other people for their junk?”

    The attendant shrugged; his weekend shift was set to end in half an hour.

    “You want the lumber?” I asked the man. “You’re welcome to it.”

    “It seems I never come to the landfill without leaving with something I didn’t bring,” he said.

    We crossed back over the scales, I explained to the lady my undiminished load, and the three guys helped me stack the old boards into their pickup.

    “Building something?” I asked.

    “Yup. I’m adding onto my building.”

    I don’t know who was more tickled–the treasure finder or the unburdened me, fully aware of my own love of free scraps.

    Here’s my shed I built over the last couple years, almost entirely out of other people’s cast-away materials:

    Read More
  • goodbadi

    The Hole Thing

    February 5, 2012
    Neither this photo nor simply looking at the hole conveys how large it really is, or at least how tired I am, but after about five hours of digging yesterday, the first couple with a friend helping, one little corner of the six-by-six-feet hole is only three inches shy of my six-feet-deep (below the joists) goal.
    Once I’ve lugged the rest of the clay out and whittled back the sides, and framed it in, and replaced the floor joists and sub floor and flooring, and cut a trapdoor, we’ll have a tidy little, shelf-lined root cellar directly below what will someday be our new kitchen.

    I’m thrilled by this whole idea–a root cellar through a kitchen-floor trapdoor!–but if its novelty fails, I have a backup plan: Because our house is pre-Civil War, I can always try to pass off the submerged box as an Underground Railroad depot.

    Read More
  • goodbadi

    Snowy View

    October 31, 2011

    The snow storm stole our electricity partway through the afternoon Saturday, so we didn’t finish putting in the windows. But the big one on the south end, above where the kitchen sink will be, is making me want to just work my butt off until the whole kitchen is finished:

    Other wintry highlights:

    Read More