Patty and Mike (Briggs) and Sparky (Ann) joined us for an overnight—afternoon at pondside, dinner on the water (all you can eat salmon and roast), with drinks, back to a little sit by the pond at night—dinner cruise on Lake Coeur d’Alene, and breakfast at pondside this morning…we had a very lovely time, the weather was perfect, and the impending company got us to actually put the gardens (front and back) into apple-pie order, and also finally! to get the detritus of the construction projects sorted into order and put away—(wild cheering here!)
Our new resolve is to undertake each new project and clean it up and put it away before taking on another, and we have finally figured how the bathroom project got us so deep in piles of bits and pieces—most projects, eg, installing the new back door, require a certain set of tools (drill, screwdrivers, shims, carpenter’s level, door, hardware and molding, paint and spackling, sandpaper, plus generate a certain amount of crud: powdered wallboard, scraps of wood, spare shims, old screws, and scraps of sandpaper, used paint trays, etc—and you put in the door, put away the tools, throw away the waste, paint, toss the scrap, and you’re done.
Not so the bathroom. Finding a soft spot in the floor required floor repair, a soft spot in the wall meant pulling tile, new wallboard, patching holes, in flooring, leveling new flooring, replacing floor tiles, plumbing to fix the leaks, removal of a wall in Jane’s closet, new plumbing for tub drain, shower, faucets; new countertop, removal of sink, new plumbing, wall plaster, paint, new sofit, wiring, new sockets, new lights, hole in ceiling, work in attic, installing exhaust fan, creating wiring, changing receptacle boxes, new faceplates for the boxes, including creating one where there was none with that combo of switch types, tiling, murals, curtain hanging, window repair…I mean, it was all layered, so you couldn’t just finish a job and put the stuff away. It was do part of this job so you can do job 2, then do part of another job so you can get this far, but you haven’t even gotten to the grouting and the curtains and all… So it was a never-ending, deepening pile of tools (buy a new bit to replace the one that went missing somewhere at the bottom of the pile) and discover that the whole commode has to be taken apart, and you need a special wrench to get the drain out of the tub…and install the new one. Not mentioning pipe wrench, pliers—well, you get the picture. We hired done not so much the job we COULDN’T do, but the guys with the EQUIPMENT we didn’t want to buy, like a watercooled tile cutter…for those monster thick 12″ tiles. Not to mention the mural.
Anyway, say that one end of my kitchen counter was piled with boxes of assorted bits, drivers, sandpaper, you name it, and the mudroom had stacks of other stuff, and the dining table had stuff on it from the garden…
So Jane started cleaning in advance of my birthday, and I joined the cleanup, and we worked our tails off, right down to filling the birdfeeders, coiling the hose in the front garden in neat stacks, Jane got the moon gate repaired and up again, got the garden chairs reassembled from their takedown for reworking, and the paths groomed and the clippings added to the mulch pile and the gate leveled, and created a proper guest room out of the OTHER scene of chaos in the house, the basement…all this in a couple of frenzied weeks.
We were ready for that cruise. We really were. And ready for some party and good times, which we had, out watching the stars by the pond, and feeding the fishes at dawn, with the little sparrows, my rowdy crew that I love even if they are sparrows, having their baths in the waterfall, and finding out that the feeders are full again—I have a strict ethic about birdfeeders: if you’re going to do them, you prepare to do them through the hard season, so you don’t get them to depend on that food and then take it away during the big storm. So the feeders, idle for the last whole year, are now active again, and thus will be available no matter what winter throws at us.
I have a clean kitchen, well, once we mop up after the waffles this morning—and all’s well with the world.
Waffles! Can I come visit? I haven’t had a waffle in …
I am so pleased that you had a happy, peaceful time. And that the upcoming occasion led to the great tidying. Parties are so useful that way.
Lol—ask Jane. She has a real good waffle recipe, that starts by beating eggwhites into a froth and blending them very delicately into the batter.
I’m going to start a recipes section on the blog! I’ve got that one, the pineapple upside down cake, cookies….how come it’s all fattening stuff? Hmmmm…..
Separate the whites and beat them, and add them at the last minute — that sounds like my father’s recipe! I’ve never known anyone else who did it like that.
OK, a simple non-sinful recipe, a breakfast juice that is better than either of its ingredients. Mix 2/3 orange juice with 1/3 fresh carrot juice. Mmmmmm! And a tall glass of it counts as both a fruit and a vegetable, if you’re counting.
From the sound of their house ‘rebuild’ Mike and Patty Briggs would have totally understood the dominoed piles of tools. The accounts in their blog were epic.
And that’s the PG version! Those poor people…They’re the sweetest couple you’ll ever meet and DO NOT DESERVE THIS KIND OF TREATMENT! Grrrr….
We do a seed/lard feeder for hard winters, but even the deer know that the chickens much prefer the wheat and oats, so there’s always a bit corn to be had…
I love having a bird feeder and watching all the juncos, chickadees, sparrows, and occasional guest birds. I have even been known to enjoy the antics of an obnoxious jay or three. But I had to give up my feeder when I realized I was also feeding the neighbor’s cats. Sigh. Somehow its just not fair to chum in entertainment for half a dozen spoiled cats!
A happy belated birthday and may the two of you have some peace and quiet and good health and good weather for the foreseeable future.
And…my computer’s fixed. Fan problems, 4 year old laptop…Dell sent out a repair guy, heat sink and new fan, and a good thing: the thermal goop needed a change-out, and the fan, well, say that Seishi’s affections bestowed some cat-fur. But he told us how to clean it out: you put a house vacuum’s hose under the ventilation on the bottom, blow from the other direction (the normal out-vent) with canned air with the machine turned off, whoosh! cleaned out. But with the computer 4-5 years old, pretty good condition. One of the things I’ve done, because this machine is so important, is getting the in-house service policy, and this means Dell doesn’t mind a little preventative care like this: it was making a racket, it wasn’t right, and here we have a nice new setup on which the safety of the chip relies. I’m happy.
That is a useful bit of info. Our area is prone to collect a lot of dust and spooge, even without a cat in the house; good cleanout trick!
Cleaning up after a major project inevitably takes a while, but it sounds like you had a good incentive, and a well-deserved party.
We’ve always done that with our computers (desktops all). Take the covers off and use compressed air to blow out the cat hair – gobs of it.
Nothing like having a party to make you get your house sorted out. All the hard work you put in is over. Now you can kick back and take it easy.
I’ve decided that St. Catherine (the one that was martyred on the wheel) is the patron saint of setting up email on computers — I spent from 4 pm to a little after 9 pm trying to get a friend’s email set up, and went round and round and round and round (on St. Catherine’s wheel) with tech support. Took four calls and five hours just to set up one email address in Windows Live Mail get it to talk to ATT’s servers and vice versa. One of them decided the program was corrupt and uninstalled and reinstalled it, and then gave up. One set it up and it worked once and then refused to work any more. Another one said Windows Live mail and ATT’s servers were incompatible (DUH! It works on my machine!) and tried to sell us $45 of computer assistance or the same service for $15 a month. The last person we talked to accomplished in about 5 minutes, for free, what the other three could not do in 5 hours.
A birthday week end, good company, and a clean house and garden! You hit the jackpot! More happy days ahead!
The way to clean out from under laptop keys, from our repairman—a rabbit fur brush, the sort used by artists. Jane says she has one somewhere in her brush stash belowstairs. I’ll have to give this a try.
I was at the Dollar Tree store, and found a cosmetic brush, the very large kind used to apply blush to the cheeks. Inside of the handle are several other brushes, and one eyeshadow applicator. The large brush makes a dandy keyboard duster, and I keep it in my laptop case for just those annoying times.
Couldn’t find the rabbitfur brush, but I did find a gem-dandy, Joe, as you say—cos-me-tic brushes. There’s an odd little brush you can find at a cosmetic counter, a cone-shaped brush that’s bendable, bristles in a spiral of wire, about half an inch long on the business end. That little bendable brush can get under laptop keys. 😉
I think they maybe make that brush for eyelashes???
Un peu tard, mais bonne anniversaire!
Oh, auto-correct did very bad things to that, didn’t notice the non-English-ness of it…very bad for multiple languages….
My AC is temporarily down with what I think is something quite simple, but which I can’t fix. This led to my desktop throwing a fit from overheating, but the ext. HD is fine, so my data’ everything important is fine. But I’m going to crack the case on the desktop and clean it.
I started reading Lynn Abbey’s Out of Time two nights ago. I’m enjoying it, though young Jennifer rings all sorts of alarm bells for me, despite some sympathy. Emma, however, starts off in a mindset a bit like mine lately. And what’s not to like about a uni library or computer lab? Enjoying the read.
I finished the audio of Cuckoo’s Egg recently. Very much enjoyed that, it had been too long since my second read-through. And before, I hadn’t gotten a couple of puns based on anime/manga literacy. Enjoyable.
Hmm… A puffy rabbit fur brush should be readily available at most art stores, if suggesting such does not overly tempt certain artists. 😉 (Yes, I have trouble with book stores, art stores, and office supply stores. One understands.) Though the cosmetics brushes are a good idea too, probably the same materials. Joe is a brave soul for having undertaken such a mission. LOL.
CJ, Barge Boy and I are so happy you got to have the Lake Coeur d’Alene dinner cruise again for your natal day. And we are both fans of Patty’s work, so it was doubly nice to hear that everyone had a great time. On the home front here it will take at least a week to get anyone to come out to do the wallboard work due to our recent evaporative cooler mishap. I can’t get up on a ladder to fix it, and Barge Boy just isn’t as handy around the house as you ladies are. (Plus, I’d be left to put all the tools away and do the clean-up) Hopefully, our homeowner’s policy will pay for the disruption, but in the meantime I’m going to have to find someplace for us to rest our weary heads while the vanity (directly opening into the master bedroom) gets fixed.
Dear me, Ready, we so hope we haven’t sent the Renovation Fairy to YOUR place! We shooed the baggage out of here, but hope she has not landed with her accompanying clutter of sheet plastic and paint cans!
Maybe I just haven’t been propitiating the bannik enough lately. With retirement just around the corner for both of us, we’ve been slacking some on home maintenance because we could take care of things once we are home full time, but this can’t wait…
Holy cats, I just started reading some of Patricia Briggs’ older blogs, and boy did she get whacked with the 10 pound Home Improvement Maul! I can easily imagine her eyeballing the stripped studs and speculating how to make a house fire look like an accident.
After more interaction, I believe Zorro might not be ‘he’, but ‘she’. Oops. The way she’s been behaving lately, it’s more like ‘Diva’, or maybe ‘She-who-must-be-obeyed’.
Patty and Mike are the souls of sweetness and generosity: play them fair and all’s good. They were patient, even in the point of not being able to occupy their own house…but…and but…
The general contractor from the insurance company came by yesterday and will submit the appraisal to our insurance. The bad news is that we will have to find someplace else to sleep while the contractor performs “mold abatement.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy my homeowners will pay to have it done right, but I will have to speed up my long-delayed whole house clean-up and clear out in order to find someplace to move our bed. Thank goodness we have more than one bathroom in the house because not having access to our bathroom vanity area would be disasterous. The contractor says the more work we do ourselves, the more we will be re-paid from his estimate of the abatement costs. We might even be able to “earn” back our deductible. I love my insurance company.
I like — or at least am amused — by the concept of the Home Improvement Fairy. I have taken the last week off work and have mostly spent this vacation, once the Labor Day weekend and family gatherings were over, finishing stripping wall paper off our dining room, spackling/joint compounding any nail/screw wall holes and corner cracks and washing all woodwork in sight. Tomorrow is finish painting the woodwork and Sunday we Paper (definitely deserves capitalization).
All this because to get rid of the huge, old air conditioner which the prior owner had cut out a window frame to insert (!!!), we had to replace one window and therefore lets do both in the room and while we are at it, lets get fancy and “box them out” 8 inches to make extra deep sills, which meant taking off the old molding which necessitated damaging the wall paper nearby and so stripping it, adding new molding, painting that and the new windows and so while we are at it, let’s completely rewallpaper with nicer stuff than the old owner had, and let’s do the adjacent hallway and oh,. wouldn’t this paper look good in the bath and…
In some ways, the most immediately daunting task has been moving all the furniture (bookcases stack high with tidbits and hutch stacked very high and wide with pewter, pottery and lots of treasures) from the walls time and time again to get at said walls. The wallpaper store woman strongly recommended we start papering the wall our backs are normally too: make mistakes (re)learning (it’s been 30 years since I last papered, with an old roommate) on the wall you won’t look at often. Well, that’s behind the hutch and Tv/Video player with stacks of cds and dvds.
I’m afraid the fairy will be staying with us for a while, propitiated with all the tools left out. What with replacing the kitchen counter (and a walI paper job in the back hall/kitchen wall because we found a frogs on lilly pads border we fell in love with) and adding a bathroom fan + new window, I don’t think the house will be back in order until our annual Yule party, but gee it’s really nice to customize one’s house (after 14 years) the way one wants it to look!
I believe the Home Improvement Fairy carries the previously mentioned 10 pound maul instead of a wand.
Lol—got that teeshirt! 🙂