house

Rock Or Not

Some awesome things have the word "rock" in them.

For instance...

Rock and roll.

Or even, The Big Rock Candy Mountain

And of course, Hugh Jackman's rockin' body.

You're welcome.

Yeah, especially that.

But not what I am about to show you.
Gold Bond Rock Wool.

Not awesome.
Particularly not when it falls out of the ceiling onto your head.

Y'all probably noticed that Charlie's been missing from my posts for awhile. He's been missing from my life for about that long, too. I wanted to tell you about it before now but...well, some things are easy to write about, and some things are not.

His arrest last May on felony DWI charges changed everything. It shattered forever my belief (in spite of ample evidence to the contrary) that he was working on bettering himself, it drove a considerable wedge between my police officer son and me, and it turned Charlie into a bitter recluse who blamed everyone but himself for his troubles. We were both holding onto a lot of simmering anger that occasionally bubbled over into screaming matches in which I called him stupid and he called me snooty. We were both right: getting arrested for drunk driving for the fifth time is incredibly stupid; saying "I am better than you" when a guy accuses you of snootiness proves his point. And so that gulf between us widened until, eventually, we just couldn't cross it any more...or maybe we stopped wanting to. We quit talking at all sometime in January. I found out through the small-town grapevine that he's in prison now doing a 120-day sentence, so his lawyer must have been successful in pleading down the charges to a lesser felony.

It does occur to me that railing at someone for not learning from his mistakes while simultaneously making the same error is the worst kind of hypocrisy. The last three men I've been involved with have been alcoholics. That is more than coincidence; that's intentional. I have a pretty good idea of why I pick drunkards. Having had my heart ripped out and stomped on in the worst way about three decades ago, I'm now careful not to give it to anyone who might actually take care of it because the risk is too great, so I pick men who I know are not worthy of my affection, only pretend to give them my heart while actually keeping it safely tucked away untouched, and then when they treat me badly I get the satisfaction of knowing I was right all along. (That was difficult to admit.)

The other, simpler, thing at work here is that I like to fix what's broken. That explains healthy decisions, like buying an old house and being an emergency services dispatcher, and also not-so-healthy decisions, like men. The trick seems to be recognizing what I can fix and what I cannot. I'm better at that when it comes to houses, so I'll stick with that for awhile.

A Two Day Job

One of the unfortunate things about sleeping during the day is that sometimes you're still in your jammies when a friend knocks on your door at 5 pm. Wednesday was one of those days, and when I shuffled to the door in my pink plaid flannel jammie pants, LifeFlight t-shirt, and fuzzy gray slippers, I saw Mare at the door. (Brief backstory for anyone who doesn't remember Mare: We dated a very long time ago, he taught me pretty much everything I know about old houses, when I'm not feeling murderous towards him I consider him one of my best friends, and he helped me rebuild the front porch a few years ago.) You know what happens when it's 30-some degrees outside and a woman is wearing a t-shirt and no bra and she opens the door? Yeah, that. And you can bet Mare noticed.

"Well, hello there!" Mare said. "You look happy to see me."

"Hey, creeper, my eyes are up here," I said, and grabbed a coat off the hook next to the door.

For almost 15 years, Mare and I have had this sort of ESP thing going on. I think about him, or more precisely I think about a project on which I could use his help, and the man mysteriously shows up at my door within the next day or so. It wouldn't be so unusual if he still lived down the street, but his house is two hours away from mine.

Anyhow, I showed him the ceiling in the Room of Shame.

"Holy Moly!" he said.

"Ain't it pretty?" I asked.

"Yeah, pretty awful!" he declared.

So I explained how I wanted to tear the dropped ceiling out, and the asbestos, too, and put something else up and Mare said, "Meh, that's nothin'. It'd be kinda fun. A two day job."

On the way into the Room of Shame he noticed that I finished the bathroom and told me he thought it looked nice. "Is it really, really done?" he asked. (The man knows me too well.) "It is, mostly," I said, "but I really need a vent fan in here, it still doesn't have any HVAC, and I lost the only outlet when I removed that old light fixture." Mare pondered this a minute. "We could branch off from the ductwork in the basement for the HVAC, add an outlet from the back side of the wall since you're gonna tear up the other bathroom eventually anyway, and it wouldn't be that big a deal to put in a fart fan. A two day job."

Then conversation turned to my plans to scrape and paint the rest of the west wall of the house and the whole back of the house (if it ever warms up enough so I can) and I said, "But before I can paint the back of the house I have to tear out all those uneven clapboards on that door patch and replace them all the way across from the end of the addition to the edge of the back door. I'll need your help for that." And Mare said, "That's not that much. A two day job."

While we were standing outside on the patio (me with my winter coat well wrapped around my, um, chest) Mare said, "Whatever happened to the floor on that side porch? You fall through it yet?" I explained I hadn't yet fallen through it, but since it's in very bad shape that's a real possibility, and he said, "That porch is pretty small. It wouldn't take long to replace the floor." Y'all know what came next: "A two day job."

Now I'm not very good at math, but the way I figure it, I'll be spending eight work days with Mare. If past history's any indication, it oughta be interesting. Stay tuned.

Ain't Got No Alibi

I was never a cheerleader, but the ceiling in my back bedroom (aka the Room of Shame) inspires me to break out a cheer.

Ready? Oh-kay!

Wait. I gotta show y'all something first.

Look at that dropped ceiling. Pretty bad, huh? Nice water stains over there on the side too.

Ready? Oh-kay!

Wait. You gotta see this, too.

Above the dropped ceiling, guess what? Another yucky ceiling! I think it's acoustic tile, probably asbestos.

Ready? Oh-kay!

Wait, wait. One more. No, really, y'all have to see this.

A close-up of the second ceiling. Part of it's gone. That's what makes it really special. Alright, now we're ready. Pick up those pom-poms.

Ready? Oh-kay!

U-G-L-Y! You ain't got no alibi! You're UGLY! Hey, hey, you're ugly!

Geeked Out

I'm gonna get all geeked out here for a minute, so bear with me. I'll try to keep it short.

For those of you who use Google Reader to keep up on this blog and others, you may have heard that Google Reader will be discontinued as of July 1st. What that means for Google Reader fans is that you'll have to find another reader service to keep up on your favorite blogs.

I used Feedburner, but rumor has it that they might not be long for the world, either.

So, I'm changing over to Bloglovin. I'd appreciate it if you'd follow me there, if you use a reader to keep up on your blogs. Just click the link below. Easy peasy.

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

Thanks for following me!

The Room of Shame

Well, it's snowing here again. Spring officially began on Wednesday and it's twenty-some degrees outside and snowing. In March. This is unacceptable. I have half a house to scrape and paint here, for goodness sake, and I don't want to miss too many baseball games to do it, so Mother Nature needs to get her stuff together. Since it appears she's not going to do that any time soon, I'm having to find things to do on the inside of the house.

So I started cleaning up the Room of Shame. That's proof these are desperate times, indeed.

Several hours and five trash bags later, the room looks a whole lot better:

Just try to imagine how bad it was before.

A whole lot better than what, I'm not sure. A landfill, maybe? Most of this stuff is destined for the family yard sale in May, so it's really not as bad as it looks. Those curtains are staying though. Nothing like foam-backed, pinch-pleated curtains from a 1970s hotel room. No really, they are from a hotel room. The people who owned this house before me also owned the Lexington Hotel, and most of the curtains that were in the house when I moved in probably came from there. These are the last of the hotel curtains. What's extra cool about the curtains to the left in the photo is that the curtain rod is like seven feet long, so the curtains cover not only the window, but most of the wall too. At least they cover part of the craptastic paneling on the walls.

I'd planned to take several pictures of the other awesome stuff in this room, like the dropped ceiling and the gap between the floor and the wall, but then I saw this:

And I got the heck out of there. Maybe next week.