Skipping Town

We have groundhogs. For a while we've noticed large holes/tunnels under our porch, and commented idly, "Huh. It looks like something's living under there." And several weeks ago, while Andrew was out of town, I was sitting in the living room and smelled skunk so strongly I was convinced a skunk was inside the house. Last week, walking around the house with a landscaper who's going to work on our backyard, the landscaper saw the holes/tunnels, announced we had groundhogs, and gave us the card for a wildlife control company. Today, a wildlife guy came over and confirmed it. We have groundhogs. A lot of them. The skunk I smelled was probably startled by one of them. He won't kill them, but we paid a hefty fee for his services: constructing metal barriers underground all along the porch, putting in a one-way door that the groundhogs can use as they emerge to find food and water, and then returning to seal up that door once all the groundhogs are gone. They'r...

We eagerly saved and planned for this renovation, so there is no point at all in complaining about it. That said, I will, for the record, say this: 1. It is annoying to have to turn off all the lights in the basement whenever I microwave anything so I don't blow a fuse. 2. Having to journey from the basement to the attic--three flights of stairs--every time one of the girls needs to use the bathroom is tedious. 3. It is unpleasant to wash dishes in the laundry sink which is usually filled with dust and paint chips raining down as they work on the kitchen above. 4. It is dusty. 5. It is a sad fact that I actually enjoy eating and (semi-)cooking in our makeshift basement kitchen than I did in our "real," now-demolished kitchen. That is all.

A post by our guest blogger, Andrew In February, 2012, Margo and I went to visit our first house with our new realtor Maggie in Maplewood. We had taken a few trips out by ourselves and gone to some open houses, but this was the first time we were really serious about things. We’d looked online and emailed  Maggie a few listings that had caught our attention. At the very end of that first email we included a link to a house that was well over our budget and that appeared to need a ton of work. But it was charming and old with lots of character -- all things Margo and I prize above most everything else when it comes to houses -- and so we wanted to see it. I included a comment to Maggie that said “Way over budget, but this may be our dream house.” When we arrived out in Maplewood, it was the first house on the tour. “Let’s see if we can get you the dream,” Maggie said. We pulled up outside the house for the first time, and somewhere deep inside us, both Margo and I knew we...

The patio edged its way to the top of our list of areas of our house we could no longer tolerate. Andrew, in particular, was driven to distraction by the overgrown bushes and other messiness, all of which seemed to harbor armies of mosquitos. A couple of weekends ago, he cleared an entire corner of our yard of scraggly weeds and wild Rose of Sharons, and he chopped down all the bushes around the patio. We had a mountain of yard waste, many many stumps, and dirt still studded with roots. So we hired a tree guy to take care of all that. Once we were more or less back to zero, Andrew spent this weekend leveling the new clear areas, spreading sand, laying pavers, and clearing out still more overgrowth. We were doing this on a shoestring, since a professional patio will be part of our big kitchen renovation next year. Still, although Andrew nearly killed himself with many days of hard labor, the new patio is pleasant and pretty and feels more like ours than the inherited, overgrown one di...

Two weeks ago, our frustration with our still-in-progress home reached a critical point where Andrew feared I was going to burn the house down if we didn't fix SOMETHING. We decided to address the room that had become the focus of my weariness, our front living room, which has been a mish-mash of play area, random furniture, and a piano. I was sick of the foam tiles, sick of the mish-mash, sick of our old couch. With heavy hearts, we knew we had to go to Ikea. We set out in the late afternoon on a Friday, when Andrew was working from home. The Elizabeth, NJ, Ikea is almost impossible to get to. We've been there a few times now, and the only time we haven't gotten lost is when Dad and I went near Christmastime. Every single other time we've gotten lost either going or returning. This time was no different. We got hideously lost and wound up on a highway sort of in the direction of home, and nowhere near Ikea. Andrew, determined to get there, convinced me we should tr...

Our house has a lot of space. Much of the space, like the uninsulated sleeping porch and wood-walled room in the attic, is only somewhat useable. The “rec room” in the basement, though a large, appealing extra space, has been completely unusable for various reasons, namely crumbling asbestos tiles and all around dismalness. Itching for another DIY, and needing some runaround space for the girls during the winter, we decided to tackle this room as our next project last month. Painting the wood paneling and the ceiling was pretty easy. We also painted the bureau thing that covers up the water and gas meters, which stick out of the wall. But then we had to address the asbestos-tiled floor. First, we talked ourselves into just carpeting or tiling over it. But some research led us to believe that this wasn’t the safest choice, since many of the tiles were already broken. Andrew sent a sample away for testing, and the asbestos was confirmed. So we decided we had to have the tiles profess...

When we moved in, our house was pretty much left as nice as it could be. Everything was freshly painted, and the wood floors had been refinished. There wasn’t much the sellers could do about the ancient kitchen or second-floor bathroom, which need to be gutted. But you got the sense that they’d done what they could to make this house appealing to people like us—ready to fall in love with a real gem of a home, and willing to put in some work. Then…you get to the attic. There, you get the sense that the sellers just threw up their hands and prayed the rest of the house would carry its deadweight. The attic is kind of a mess. There’s one really great wooden room, billed as a bedroom and ideal for an office or playroom someday, once it gets insulated. There’s a large raw storage space. There’s also a guest bedroom and guest bathroom, and it’s in these rooms that Rochester would have found ample comfort for his insane wife. The guest bedroom is a DIY project for another time, so I’l...

We have no DIY experience. We own a small toolset, a drill with a cord, and a cordless drill. That’s it. Our house came with an elaborate workbench in the basement, along with a large selection of nails, bolts, and other misc., but it has yet to be used for anything but piling things on top of. I say all this by way of introducing the next few posts I’ll write here, highlighting the DIY projects we’ve completed so far. I’ve taken lots of before-and-after pictures, but I haven’t yet put them together. So, here we go, with DIY #1: The Sleeping Porch, which we undertook at the end of the summer. “I didn’t expect this part to be so…difficult.” If we’d been featured on the HGTV show Renovation Realities, this comment from Andrew would have flashed onto the screen, immediately after an arresting image: Andrew and me in our painting clothes, winter scarves tied tightly around our mouths and noses, the “sleeping porch” we were attempting to renovate barely visible in a swirl of whi...

Monday: new stove arrives. Tuesday: new boiler. Glorious heat. Heating guy called our old boiler "medieval" and a "carbon-monoxide machine," for which parts aren't even made anymore since they don't meet any safety standards. Probably good we got a new one. But Lucia now cannot go to college. Thursday: Andrew discovers pool of water under basement stairs. Plumber comes at 6pm; says we should turn off water for the night. No water, no heat. Also, some tubing thing from the (ancient) dryer, which Andrew had duct-taped, fell down again. We're ignoring it. Friday: Plumber finds problem pipe behind wall in basement bathroom. Replaces pipe. No more leak, and we have heat and water. But now Greta cannot go to college. This is why some people are happily lifetime renters. I finally get it.

Before Thanksgiving: our ancient oven died in a dramatic burst of flames. After Thanksgiving: our ancient furnace died in a quiet and brutal lack of heat. We are now ovenless and heatless. We've been cooking things on the stovetop, and tonight we bought space heaters for the girls' rooms. And Andrew leaves tomorrow, early in the morning, for a week-long business trip. Homeownership. Wheee....

This weekend, thanks to the kind offer of a friend of Molly and Ian’s, we spent three days in Bethany Beach, DE, at a lovely house just steps from the beach. Somehow, all six of us—Molly and Ian, Andrew and I, Mom and Dad—managed to be free for this weekend, and we were all looking forward to it immensely. Andrew and I planned to leave early Friday morning. In the wee hours, however, Greta threw up after nursing. Around six-thirty, she threw up again. For some reason I decided she must then be hungry, so I gave her a piece of toast, which she promptly threw up. We hadn’t showered or packed the car, and I was already covered in vomit. We knew Greta was the latest victim in the crazy bug that had already gotten Lucia, Andrew, and Robert. Greta was falling asleep on my shoulder by nine, so we decided to set out anyway. Then our third-floor bathroom sink, which usually leaks, began to gush water, and Andrew tried to wrench a bolt, but made it worse, and it was rapidly filling a tr...