This is from the front lawn. The GoPro was set for video and not timelapse, so it crapped out before the job was complete.
This was shot from across the street. I used the suction cup mount on the front of the street sign and cropped in on the shot from there.
The difference from this distance isn’t that dramatic. In person, it’s a gigantic change.
In the days since all of the electrical has been hooked up in the bathroom, I have to say a heated floor after getting out of the shower is AWESOME. It’s only set for 90˚ between 6-7AM, but it feels great to walk out onto toasty tiles. I’m going to turn it off completely tonight until the weather starts getting cold but I can’t wait to test it out for real this fall.
Jen and I picked a bunch of tomatoes from the vines yesterday. There were a ton of Romas waiting to be pulled, and two handfuls of cherries from all four plants. They all looked happy and healthy. The second Roma plant is still battling blossom end rot, as is (sadly) the Pineapple heirloom plant in back. On Monday there was one fruit turning a beautiful variegated shade of yellow/orange/red. Yesterday it went deeper read with streaks of orange, but the bottom was squishy so I had to cut it and a neighbor off the vines. The spray I bought doesn’t seem to be doing shit so I think I’ve got to add bone meal to the soil and try to salvage the rest of the season.
We are due to sign for our home equity loan on the 15th, the same day the long-awaited tree crew is set to arrive to remove the big silver maple next to the driveway. Both of these events mean big changes in our lives. The tree throws a hell of a lot of shade on the house and that shielding from the sun will be missed, but I’ll be happy to have a flat driveway and cleaner gutters. Having the loan in place means we can get a lot of projects finished, but I’m not looking forward to the monthly payment. Change always ramps up my anxiety, but I know these two things will benefit us in the long run and I’m itching to get them both done.
Here’s a second visualization of the bathroom, looking from (approximately) somewhere in front of the closet. I have to tape out the cabinet depths to confirm, but this looks pretty good to me. And the quote is lower, too!
We’ve had a giant rhododendron in our driveway since we moved in this house. It’s a pain in the ass because it was allowed to grow for too long unchecked, so its footprint reached out into the door-swinging space of an already narrow area. Originally it was one of three, but I yanked the other two out after they died.
2003, before I pulled the dead ones out.
There was a whole section of parking that really wasn’t parking because of this. We noticed it was getting sickly this spring, and one of two main branches died off before springtime. Jen and I made a deal that we’d let it bloom one last season and then I’d yank it out. On Saturday morning, its time was up.
I worked on it with a pair of clippers and a shovel, clearing out the bottom of the two branches and digging down about 2 feet with the aid of a mattock, and gave it a couple of shoves to see how well it was clinging to Earth. Then I put the Scout in 4lo, wrapped my snatch strap around the base, and goosed the accelerator. POP!
It came right out. No drama, no fuss. I used the chainsaw to section it up into smaller bits and filled the hole back in. It sure does look different over there now.
Saturday afternoon we made time to run to a showroom to look over some cabinetry for the new bathroom. After perusing all of the styles and colors, we settled on a nice white design that’s not too far away from the kitchen pattern, and will look good with the tile/wall combination. My big concern has always been cost, and after the consultant drew up some plans that we both liked, he clicked and clacked on his calculator and showed us a number that made me sigh with relief.
Then we did the same for the front wall, which will have a large cabinet for linens on the left and two lower cabinets under a counter for other items, with a cutout for a chair in between. We hemmed and hawed over the placement and drawer setup, because the windows are lower than standard counter height, but I think we settled on something everyone likes. I braced for a much larger price tag but after he clicked and clacked I sighed with relief again.
Don’t judge based on these shitty scans of shitty prints; I think it’ll look really good when they’re in there. The cabinet brand we’re going with is one our friend Brian recommended, and it’s quality stuff. It’ll even have fancy soft-close hardware, which I’m told is an HGTV requirement.
So I applied for a home equity loan and we’re waiting to hear back from the bank on that. With the balance of that loan we have the room to do a bunch more things (or one big project) and Jen and I talked over a couple of possibilities:
- New dining room windows to replace the outside pair and the inside pair, which are still roughed in.
- A new gutter on the roof of the new bathroom, which wasn’t replaced with the main roof and is a sagging, clogging wreck
- Caps on the other gutters so I don’t have to climb up and possibly fall off and break my neck
- Some kind of heat source in the kitchen
- Siding: we’re dealing with the original sheathing on this house, which is solid 3/4″ wood, covered in ancient crumbling tarpaper, then covered in cedar shake. Over that is the aluminum siding, which dates back to the Johnson administration, I’d wager. Having the house wrapped in Tyvek and covering it in a faux-shake siding would go a long way to lowering our energy bills, making the interior feel more cozy, and improving the curb appeal of the house.
Even though beer is off my menu for another month, I brewed my first batch since October at a friends’ house yesterday. He’s the guy I walked through brewing last fall, and since then he’s made a couple more batches. He’s also the father of one of Finn’s friends, so we wrapped an entire day around the opportunity.
First, we picked up Finn’s friend and made our first visit to the neighborhood pool as new members, picking up our passes and staking out a spot under an umbrella. The girls jumped in the water immediately, while we sat back and got some sun. This pool is one of several in town and feels less clique-ish than the others, and we know a bunch of families who already belong, so there should be some built-in opportunities for Finn to find people to play with. The weather was just right and the sun felt wonderful on my skin.
From there we headed home to rinse off, I loaded the truck up with brewing gear, and we headed over to brew beer and hang out. I had an IPA kit I’ve never tried before and my friend had brewed five gallons of butter toffee-flavored coffee for a stout recipe. We set up and got our boils started while the ladies sat under the umbrella on the patio, and we killed the afternoon talking and laughing while the girls had fun together. It was hard to stay away from actually drinking beer, given that we were brewing it and there were two taps open in the kitchen.
I think that beer will taste better at the end of this diet than it has in a long time.
My batch went together really easily; I used one of my Dad’s aluminum pots to boil in, and I found that a good temperature was difficult to dial in at first. (Aluminum heats up faster than stainless steel). Once I sorted that out it was smooth sailing, and I was able to chill it to 70˚ perfectly. I may try the other pot (a shorter, wider one) next time but I’m happy to have a dedicated brew kettle now, and I’m glad it was my Dad’s.
We stayed out on the patio and talked until 10PM, which was lovely.
Sunday I fired up the chainsaw in anger for the first time and started working my way through the rounds next to the woodpile. Most of the smaller pieces are now split by saw and by maul. I’m working my way up to the biggest ones which will take some time to work through, but once they are slivered into shorter pieces they should split with the maul quickly. I also did some maintenance in the greenhouse, sprayed the roof of the garage with moss killer (just in time for an overnight thunderstorm).
What alarmed me was how tired I was at the end of the day, up until I got some dinner in my stomach. For someone who carb-loads as a standard method of operation, I found myself grabbing fistfuls of nuts—we got cashews back on Sunday—but I guess I was burning through those pretty quick. I’m trying to tell myself it’s due to diet and not to low blood count (I’d only had some hash browns, a smoothie, some nuts, and a minimal lunch) but I’m not feeling able to do my normal amount of labor, and that bothers me.
We have shower door glass!
And we have grouted floor pebbles! I’m told we can shower in this thing today, but I’m going to wait a day for the inaugural test run.
That’s the shower tile as it stands today. Brian is coming back to finish the area down to the floor and around the bench, and then he’s going to grout the walls. Then he’ll lay the floor in and grout that. We have a rough quote on the glass door, which is not cheap, but it will highlight the interior of the shower perfectly as you walk in the door.
Jen and I spent another weekend almost completely consumed by grading student work. We did get out here and there but it wasn’t at all what I hoped we’d be doing, for the second week in a row. We’ve been trying to line up things for Finn to do while we’re busy but it’s hard to stay focused when there are kids running around—who inevitably come to us to help them find something to do.
I’m at the point where I’m doing twice as much work to teach than I did my first semester; as we’ve gotten more involved in refining the rubric and syllabus and have striven to offer constructive, helpful feedback (going so far as to add a third project into my syllabus to give students an earlier idea of how they’re doing) the workload has quadrupled. Jen and I are conscientious about how we grade our work, so we double-check each other’s grading and notes, which adds more time to the process. And Finn sits idly by, bored out of her mind. Saturday was a mixture of rain and sunshine, and even though it was cold and damp we should have been outside hiking somewhere, not stuck inside.
I turned to Jen Sunday night and told her I’m thinking about quitting teaching. Finn’s life is flashing past me, and I’m not spending enough time with her right now. It’s breaking my heart.
One thing we did do as a family is go to see a matinee of How to Train Your Dragon 3. The three of us have been hooked on the series since Finn was old enough to appreciate it, and it was one of the many things we shared with the Morrises (I can’t hear the phrase “DEPLOY THE YAK” and not think of Rob and Zachary). The final movie in the series was good. It hit all of the main plot points and character beats as a good movie should; there were callbacks to the original movie that old-school fans appreciated, it definitely hit us in the emotional core (my family is pretty heavily invested in these characters, after two movies and three TV series) and it wrapped things up in a solid way that felt right.
But it was lacking the careful pace of the first movie, which took time to slowly show us the wonder of the relationship between a boy and his dragon, and how that in turn affected his relationships, as an outsider, with his community and his father. The first movie (I rewatched a bit of it last night as I cleaned up my desk) moved slower, took time to develop the stakes, and also let us breathe. It showed us how wonderful the world it created was, asked us to notice the details, and gave us time to appreciate them. I felt like the new movie was following a producer’s note that simply read, “MORE DRAGONS”. There was so much going on in every frame that it felt hard to keep up with what was happening. The only time I really felt like it was slow enough to let me appreciate the story was at the very end, and if I hadn’t been so familiar with the characters from my previous experience I wouldn’t have cared half as much.
The IPWhatever is kegged and carbed, and I tapped it on Saturday afternoon. In terms of taste, it’s pretty nondescript. Even after I’d dry-hopped it for much longer than I’d intended, the flavor is still pretty bland. But it’s got a hell of a kick–I never did a final gravity reading on it (because, after I’d fucked it up, what’s the point?) but it definitely hits me when I finish a pint of it. And that’s good timing, too, because the grapefruit IPA is just about kicked.
Our neighbors on the right side, who have been in the house as long as we’ve lived here, recently moved to an assisted living community and put their house up on the market. We were in New York when they held the open house, so we didn’t get to walk through it, but we told a bunch of friends and our brother and sister to check it out. Having walked through the downstairs a few times I didn’t see any huge problems, but everybody we know said it was more work than they were willing to take on. As it turned out there was a bidding war on the first day and it’s going to settlement this Friday. Apparently the buyers have kids a little younger than Finley, and they’ve had several people come by to look at the place, who we can only guess are contractors. I hope they’re normal and we can get along with them.
Here’s the surround in place with two coats of paint (ignore the kickplates at the bottom; that’s a whole other thing) and the clock recentered.
Here’s what the new wall tile looks like in the bathroom. Brian has the front window blocked off so you can’t really get the daylight on it yet, but it looks beautiful to me.