The house: a timeline

I think there are some new readers around here and I think they are confused by the we-built-our-house thing.  As I’ve mentioned before, there’s an old blog, with lots of broken picture links, covering the entire episode in exhaustive detail.  If you want to know what a rat slab is and why we have one, go there.  This here is the short version.

October 2003 Michael and I get married.

2003-2005 We lead a blissful, simple life in a centrally-located, completely affordable rental house with ample amenities and generally pleasant landlords who like us. Naturally, we decide this situation must change.

Fall 2005 We look for houses in our area. Everything is either 1) twice as much as we can possibly get a mortgage approved for or 2) thirteen seconds and one strong wind from collapsing into the basement.  We decide building a house is the most brilliant idea ever and plus it will be so much fun. We can’t imagine why everyone doesn’t build a house!

January 2006 We buy a 3.5 acre parcel on a wooded hill with a lot of granite ledge.  We take the first picture of our house.

We are young and stupid and it still hasn’t occurred to us that this is a really bad idea.  Even though it was about ten degrees that day.

March 2006 Foundation is poured.

Yes, that’s me. I have no idea what I was doing.

April 2006 Exteriors walls are up.

That’s our friend Mark. I have no idea what he was doing, either. Look, I kept a blog. I didn’t keep notes.

April-September 2006 We work unbelievably hard, hemorrhage money in a spectacular fashion, and fight almost daily.

September 2006 We move in. Most of the house looks like this:

We eat, sleep, hang out, and generally live in our bedroom, which looks like this:

Basically, we are camping in our own house.  These are grim days, as you can tell from the dog’s expression. Grim days, indeed.

September 2006-February 2007 We steadily chip away at making rooms habitable. Gradually, we have a fully functioning kitchen, a bathroom with an actual sink, and a guest room that serves as our living room.  We are still living almost entirely on the second floor.

February 2007 Uh-oh. Cherie’s pregnant. The kid’s probably going to want a living room, eh?  And it’s probably not supposed to have a table saw in it, right?

February-November 2007 Hurry, hurry! Get the downstairs finished! Hang drywall, install floors, make a nursery!  Other women buy fluffy crib bedding when their nesting instinct hits. I shingled.

November 2007 Annabel is born.

November 2007-October 2008 Nothing happens. I mean, we make a few kitchen drawers, we put up a few more shingles, we tinker here and there, but for the most part, there is no significant progress.  It turns out that having a baby makes building a house nearly impossible. We probably should have thought this whole thing through a little better.

November 2008 We install the woodstove.

That may not seem significant, but that’s only because you aren’t me. Trust me. It was significant.

November 2008-May 2009 Nothing happens.

May 2009 Uh-oh. Cherie’s pregnant again. Hurry! Hurry! Finish the larger spare bedroom and move Annabel in! Except not really, because who can summon that kind of energy with a two-year old around?

May 2009-January 2010 Nothing happens, but we talk a lot about doing something.

February 2010 Sam is born.

Not coincidentally, Annabel gets a new bedroom.  I don’t have a picture of that for some reason.

February 2010-October 2011 Nothing happens.  Well, you know, shingling. That happens in fits and starts like always.

October 2011 The shingling is done!

October 2011-January 2012 Nothing happens.

So! There we are.  I plan on doing a little tour of the house soon for those interested in such a thing.  Also, if you would like to see the vision for the house, how the house appears in our heads and not in reality, I’ve added a tab at the top for it.

There’s the full story to date. Now you know. And that twitch in my left eye is fully explained.

The pants of our fathers

It’s been a surprisingly warm winter. Just the other Sunday we had our lunch at the picnic table. A picnic lunch in January? Unbelievable.

But, yes, a picnic lunch it was.  That’s how warm it has been.

As a result, I haven’t been able to wear the pants very much this year, just twice so far, actually.  They are so thick and heavy that I can only save them for the coldest days.  It’s getting colder again, so I have hopes to pull them out again. But I wear them when I can because they are warm, comfortable and my dad’s.

That’s weird, isn’t it?  For a 36-year-old woman to wear a pair of her dead father’s old pants?

I suppose it is.

Yes, I suppose it is.

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My dad (“Ralph,” he’d tell people. “My name is Ralph. You know, like everyone’s dog on television? Yeah, Ralph.”) joined the Navy when he was 17 years old.  A November baby, he was always one of the youngest in his class and he graduated from high school five months shy of his eighteenth birthday.  I’m not sure how being younger affected his school days, but it worked in his favor in the Navy.  As a result of his below-18 enlistment, he only had to serve three years instead of the usual four.  He was happy about that in later years.  He thought that was a good deal.  I don’t think he loved being in the Navy.

Why the Navy, anyway? He was from the western slope of Colorado. He loved fishing, camping, and walks in the woods.  He liked horses and wide open spaces.  My whole life I don’t think I saw him in a boat bigger than a canoe.  He liked to be alone.  Why in the world would he be drawn to the Navy, right after the close of the Korean War?  Why would such a man commit to cloistering himself on a ship, in close quarters, with hundreds of other men?

I don’t know why.  Like most things having to do with his Navy time, like most things having to do with his life, my dad didn’t have much to say about it.  It just was.  It was a thing he did and by the time I came along he was doing something else and he didn’t really see the need to tell me much about it.  Why didn’t I stop bothering him and go weed the tomatoes?

*****************

A while ago my sister went to my grandmother’s house and brought back a stack of letters my dad had written during his time in the Navy. She spent hours transcribing his illegible lefty handwriting.  They are sweet, straightforward letters, practical to a fault.  Blankets are cheap here, can I buy you some?  I have to go see the dentist; they say I’ll need that tooth pulled.  Do you have some money to spare? I hate to borrow it but I’m in a bind.  I’m bored; didn’t make it to the show.  Tell the folks I’ll try to write soon.

He ended up as a mechanic on an aircraft carrier.  That’s not a surprise.  He was handy.  He could fix anything.  “I scored the next to highest score in mech,” he wrote from boot camp. “I hope I can get in a school for mech.” He did.  By 1955 he was in charge of a plane.  He didn’t want to be; too much responsibility.

He went to Japan.  The boy from Colorado was in Japan and all he had to say about it was that the way they took their shoes off sure did help keep their houses clean.  He went to Hong Kong, too. It was crowded. What else, Ralph? What else about Japan?  What else about Hong Kong? Isn’t any of it interesting to you, Ralph?

For god’s sake, man. Why the Navy?

We’ll never know.

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I have more than this single pair of zip-front pants, of course.  I have his full navy uniform: the button-up pants, two wool sailor shirts, the seabag.  No coat, though, I think my sister has that. She absconded with it in high school, when a vintage Navy peacoat was just the thing to go with your combat boots.  I was terribly jealous that she got to it first.  The rest of the uniform was mostly forgotten about, until one day when we all dug it out and I put it on as a joke.  It all fit me perfectly, this uniform intended for a 17-year-old boy.  It still does, mostly.  The button pants and shirts are tucked away in the seabag in the attic.  The regular pants hang in my closet.

They are, even after 50 plus years, the warmest pants I’ve ever seen.  The wool is dense and a bit stiff.  In the days before fleece and Gore-Tex, wool was all they had to withstand storms at sea.  This stuff can withstand.  Once, for kicks, I put them on and went for a walk when it was -20 degrees.  I was warm.  I was plenty warm.

His name and number are stenciled on the inside in white.  He scrawled his initials on the tag in the back, too.  At one point he repaired part of the fly by stapling it.  The staples are still there.  They make me laugh, thinking about teenage Ralph stapling his pants back together.

I love those pants.

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I only ever got one semi-full story from my dad about the Navy. He told me once, apropos of nothing that I can remember, about how much he loved being on the aircraft carrier.  In particular, he liked going to the back of the ship.  He would hang out at the stern and watch the wake from the engines stretching off into the distance.  Back there, he was surrounded by nothing.

Once in a while a plane would take off.  He would watch it race down the length of the ship and launch, dropping suddenly down below view as it left the ship, and then climbing up, up, up into the sky.  “That was really neat,” he told teenaged me about teenaged him.  “I really liked watching that.”

I love that image of young Colorado-raised Ralph, sitting on a random crate in his stapled pants, smoking cigarettes and watching planes take off from a ship.  I love that image because even packed in tight with hundreds of other men off the shore of Japan, he found a way to be alone.  I love that image because it sounds like something I would have done.

Some people have family heirlooms, ancestral estates, and elaborate family histories.  They have gravy boats with pedigrees and stories about Great-Aunt Victoria’s scandalous affair with the count.

I have a pair of stapled-together Navy pants.

I’m okay with that.

As I said, they are very warm.

Meanwhile this morning…

Annabel: “Don’t turn the light on, Mom. We have to keep all the lights off for the show.”

Me: “I’m very glad that you are having a show, but I have to get dressed for work so I need the light on.”

Annabel: “I’m going to have Sam come in here and shoot you.”

Me: “What?!?!?!”

Annabel, heading down the hall: “Sam, I need you to come down here and shoot Mom with your turtle.”

******************

Basically, I have lost all control of the situation. That’s the point of the story.

No, he didn’t shoot me. But he did have a turtle.

And the winner…

with a whopping 52% of the vote is…

Annabel looks like Michael and Sam looks like me.

Which means 52% of you are brilliant because that’s exactly what I believe.

Sam looks like Michael, Annabel looks like me received 19%.

And the debate that started the whole issue remains unresolved, because 13% think both kids look like Michael and 13% think both kids look like me.  Still tied, that one.

And, of course, we had two complaints (and one protest vote) because I didn’t give the option “They both look like a blend of the two parents.”  Which is fair.  I suppose.

Anyone lose any money on the deal?

I think, if nothing else, we’ve learned that we’ll never have one of those unfortunate incidences you hear about occasionally, including in yesterday’s comments, where the parent with the weaker genetic influence gets mistaken for the nanny.

Or, in the profound, pithy words of my sister: “You blue-eyed blondes all look the same to me.”

Fair enough.

Decision 2012. The other one.

This is what happened in the comments section in the last post.

“Hey, the kids look just like Michael!” said one person.

“Are you crazy? The kids look just like Cherie!” said another.

We get this all the time.  The kids are my clones, it seems.  Unless they are Michael’s.  They couldn’t look any more like him, except when they look like me.  Opinions vary on this and, boy, do people feel strongly about it.  What to do in such a conundrum?  How can we rest until we know exactly whose genes are dominant?

Obviously, we can’t.  So here we are.  Internet, it’s… decision 2012.

[Does anyone have any dramatic election night music I can borrow? Oh, never mind. Just pretend you hear it right now.]

[Also, there's a fancy, swooping graphic. Pretend you see that, too.]

This is Cherie:

I need about a 30 day stay at a spa with every treatment they can muster.

This is Michael:

He needs a wife with less invasive hobbies.

[Now, just a brief aside here, in the interest of fairness I must admit that more than one person has commented about how Michael and I, er, kind of, um, look-alike. It is icky to admit, but those people do have a point.  It's not like we are two radically different-looking people here.  So that adds to the complexity of the problem.  Just wanted you to know that we are, sadly, aware. On with the show!]

[Oh, and the twin poses were not planned. It just happened.]

This is Annabel:

“Are you done taking my picture? Can I start talking again?”

This is Sam:

“Heeeeyyyy, guys! Sorry I’m blurry! I wouldn’t stop moving long enough to take a decent picture in these low-light conditions!”

There you are. Fresh new headshots to help you with this tough call.

But wait! There’s more!

It’s hard to compare adults to children, don’t you think?  So to help make things  a little easier:

This is Cherie, at age 2 1/2:

I know, right? I want to pinch my little cheeks, too.

This is Michael, at [we think] age 4ish:

Feel free to correct us on that age, Bubba. None of these pictures were dated, so this was our best guess.

And that’s it. Scroll up, scroll down, make your comparisons and then…

VOTE:

!

I’d be a zillionaire momblogger if my kids were more cooperative

“Hey, come here.  I want to take a picture of you.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to take a picture of your hair.”

“My haaaair?”

“Yes, your new haircut. Why are you making that face at me? Come here and let me see your hair.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“But you asked to see my hair!”

“Not the back of your hair. Who cares about the back of your hair? No, really now. Cooperate.”

“Seriously? Are you serious right now? Just stop being a goofball for two seconds, look at me, give me a normal smile, and let me take a picture.”

“THANK YOU.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Yes, Sam. What do you need?”

“Ikshu.”

“Oh, sure, baby, I’ll take a picture of your new haircut, too.”

“CEEEEESSSE”

“Well, that’s just about perfect if you plan to try out for a Junior Newscaster position. Do you plan to be a newscaster, Sam?”

“No! MAMA!

“You know, you two are so lucky that you always redeem yourself in the end.  Really, really lucky.”

[Personal aside to Annika: Sam loves that shirt. No, really, he LOVES that shirt. Thank you!]

The Carpenter’s Wife

I have a lot of complaints about the trials I undergo as a result of Michael’s job.  I’ve joked about beginning a support group for other carpenter’s wives, tentatively named “The Carhartt Widows.”  I’ve written, in theory only, sadly, a country song entitled “Drill Bits in My Dryer and Sawdust in My Sheets.”  I mutter obviously as I sweep up yet another full dust-pan of job site gravel. And the eyerolling I perform during the eight-hour cleaning process (drills, receipts, scrap wood, saws, architectural plans, three bags of trash) that is required whenever someone needs to sit in the passenger seat of the truck will, in all likelihood, injure me someday.

But there are some positives.

Like when I say, “Hey, don’t you think it would be nice if we had another cabinet here? Maybe something with a plate rack?”

Then he says, “Yeah, that could work.” Out comes the measuring tape and the scrap paper and then, two days later, this appears:

Yeah, that part’s pretty awesome.

I still hate the drills bits thing, though.

 

They shall call me the “Fifty-buck Saint”

I have fifty bucks.

I did the budget, crunched the numbers, paid the piper, accounted for the accountable, and what I have left at the end of it is fifty bucks.

It’s fifty bucks that I told Michael I wanted.  Fifty bucks that I was hoping to find.  Fifty bucks that I don’t want to go to groceries, or day care, or the mortgage, or new socks.  Not to new toys or hair bows or the hospital for the birth of the kid who is almost two (yes, there’s a lien on Sam).  I want fifty bucks to give to someone else.

I’m tired, you see, of not having fifty bucks.  I’m tired of passing by opportunities to help a family, help the food pantry, help some woman across the sea with a starving child.  We give to nonprofits, but our giving is scheduled, planned for, considered, and frequently not cash.  I want to have the opportunity to just give as things come up.  To say, “Hey, that’s a really good idea.  Here’s fifty bucks.” Or maybe, “I’m really sorry this is happening to you. Here’s fifty bucks.”  Or possibly, if I’m feeling frisky, “Fifty bucks! Woohoooooo!”  But I live and die by our budget and our budget didn’t have fifty bucks.

I’m not, in general, much of a spontaneous person but there are some kinds of non-spontaneity that are rather soul-killing.  At least that’s what I’ve found.

So I figured it out. And now I have fifty bucks every single month.  If nothing comes up, I’ve got some favorite stand-by charities that can have the $50.  But it will be nice, for me and my soul, to be a little spontaneous about my fifty bucks once in a while.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Not-so-daily photo #1

I know quite a few people who do the “daily photo” thing. I wish I had the discipline for it. I don’t.  While I might be able to take a photo every day, there’s simply no way I’ll be motivated enough to upload, edit, and post a photo every day.

Even weekly is too much of a commitment. I’m not gonna lie. I’ve got a whole boatload of mental problems, but delusion is not one of them.

But every once in a while? Yeah. I might be able to do it every once in a while.

And with that, I introduce the not-so-daily photo:

I call it Girl With Chickens.

Enjoy.

And it only took five-and-a-half years

Brace yourself, folks.

This is my house:

Here’s what you see: a slightly sad little cottage surrounded by tools, scrap wood, and things that are “going to the dump this weekend, I promise.”

You see crap under the porch.

You see crap on the porch.

You see the skeleton of scaffolding on the roof.

You see a mishmash of paint, some faded, some not, some nonexistent.

You see a landscape that looks like a bomb site.

You see a chicken.

Here’s what I see:

The shingling, people. The shingling is done.

There are no more shingles to be put on my house.*

I mean, yes, it took us so long to finish shingling that the stain has faded in some spots to the point of needing to be redone. But you know what? We were going to redo it anyway once all the shingles were up.  So that totally does not count.

Somewhere on here I promised to start writing about the housebuilding project again once the shingling was done.

Say it with me: the shingling is DONE.

*Actually, the shingling was completed in October. But I didn’t want to write about it until the rest of the barn board on the dormer was stained. It appears that is not going to happen until summer.  I can’t wait until summer. I’m declaring it done.