A Material Girl

 

Congratulations on surviving Easter and International Trans day of Visibility falling on the same day! I hope you all fought off what was apparently the 300+ attempt by Joe Biden to turn us all Woke Gay and Cancelled. Truly this will be a sane election year that certainly won't end with a bunch of angry white men, bloated to Michelin Man proportions through hangover sunburns and military vests, with thoughts of manifest destiny via Chik-fil-A and genocide, taking rifle shots at minorities, because their ineffectual, doddering would-be despot, existing solely to absorb conservative self-loathing and billable lawyers hours like some loosely shaped sentient cow pie hate sigil, managed to choke out world salad glossolalia during a non-concession speech. 

But enough about the thoughts that come when sitting quietly, without a screen to distract me. We've made great home renovation strides!

Allow me to draw your attention to this post back from December 2022. This was the entry where we installed fence posts prior to the winter freeze so we could finish a privacy fence in the early Spring 2023. THAT DID NOT HAPPEN DUE TO REASONS.

However, we did at that time order the cedar wood necessary to make the fence and ended up tucking it away in the workshop for over a year. Well it turns out that with The Room in a stable condition, it was time to free the wood, sand it down, and give it a good shellacking.

The fronts were smooth, so Brie sanded smooth all the board backs and then stained them to bring out the natural grain and color while adding an extra layer of water resistance.

We then took the angle grinder to the posts, finally bringing them all to the proper height. I was keenly aware that for a year we just had metal rods sticking out of the ground beside our house, but no one really seemed to care or even notice. That's just kind of the vibe around here.

We've upgraded all our ear/eye protection over the past year along with a number of our tools. Brie has a friend who shares a toothbrush with a professional tool guy and we got some sweet deals out of the arrangement.

The bracket solution allows for boards to slide down these side loading channels, which in theory is a great and easy way to construct your own fence. In our case we discovered that the lumber we ordered over a year before was thinner than the channel so after we screwed in the boards there was a small gap between the wood and the front of the bracket. A small issue, and not even a structural one, more about aesthetics. Apparently Brie had to make this call at the time and that's literally a person in the past at this point, so no regerts. Here's a picture of Walt for scale. 

Here's where the math gets fucked up. The fence is divided into bays, the four main bays are not quite equally sized, because we had to drill the posts where the roots would allow and led to 1-3 inch drift. There's a fifth small bay at the very end where we meet the neighbor fence. With the large bays at around 60-64" wide, it made sense to purchase 12 foot cedar boards so that each board cut in half would cover 2 bays. Simple, clean, economical! Well it wasn't to be. When we cracked open the boxes, we only had 10 foot planks, which means half as many boards. Well shit. Whose fault? Shipper error? Ordering error? Who cares, it happened in 2022 and it doesn't matter now.

So, with 1/3 of a fence up (more a tripping hazard than an obstruction, honestly) we placed an order for a lot more lumber that had become a lot more expensive in the year since we started. So I'll show you what else we did while waiting for that to be delivered.

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Like many couples, Brie and I have many a running disagreement. One that comes up frequently is that I relish the opportunity to leave the house, enter a store, and physically peruse, touch, and perceive an item before purchasing it. This is a way to ease my nerves regarding the likelihood the item will fit the current need. Ho Ho Ho, I am but a silly mortal, tied to my material perception of time and space. Oh what fool this mortal be!

Contrary to this correct, reasonable, and time tested practice of pragmatism is Brie's preferred mode: to just order stuff for delivery and return/exchange anything that doesn't work. She finds the extra cost of delivery and the occasional inconvenience of returns to be a far better state of being than to invest time on the front end. She vexes me and I bite my thumb at her. 

Case in point, we needed new filters for the HVAC system. She asked what kind we needed and I told her the dimensions, but that I wouldn't know what kind until I saw them in person. Before I had relayed all of this to her she declared that it was ordered and we wouldn't need to go to the store. Gentle reader, I wanted to go to the store. Desperately. We live and work in the same house. Our hobby is renovateing that same house! To leave the house is to be free and treat myself to the refreshing cool water that is a change of scenery. I can't remember how many she ordered, I think it was meant to be 2. When they arrived a few days later (more days than zero, which a trip to the store would have facilitated) they arrived in two mammoth boxes, each one filled with a shrink wrapped bundle of 4 filters. Why we received 8 filters across two boxes was unclear to all parties, but of one thing I'm sure: this never would have happened during a trip to the store.

Another side project that ended up stretching on longer than intended due to delays beyond anyone's control was this custom glassware celebrating a year of the Strange Tapes Club movie group. Brie's sister Blaine was kind enough to print out some adhesive cutouts on her Cricket (not a sponsor) and then Brie acid etched the pattern onto the wine glass cups. Tedious work; a perfect compliment to a season of Love is Blind and many seasons of The Traitors. Each household gets their own glass; the front is the logo and the back is all the films we watched in 2023 in calendar order. 

Other fun stuff included helping our friend Brandon pick up this old school pinball machine on his father's behalf for storage in his garage. His father now has three machines stashed there while he works in Germany for a few years. Good to plan ahead I suppose!

Walt is starting to get back to normal (HAH). He may be the only person who really loved Daylight Saving kicking in. He's getting the Spring sun in abundance which has done a lot for his temperament and energy. About 2 weeks ago he started playing with his toys again regularly, which he hadn't done since we lost Ramona. He brings us his babies to play tug with him. This was not a game in his arsenal before Ramona taught it to him.

He's also adjusting to having more solo freedom. Brie has been making an effort to work more out of her office and in the dining room, leaving him the task of independently managing the front room without us. Here he is early in the process laying in the hall outside of Brie's office while she's on a call.

The yard is both under control and a GDCF. Lot of rain, but nothing near the house. Lots of flooding in the far part of the yard. In the below picture the item sticking out of the mud is a piece of vinyl house siding buried easily 100ft from the house. How did this get here? Why is it buried? 

Brie also ordered a second set of these fence pieces since they worked decently well in the back corner of the yard where the weird home school Christians and their shitty dog Gemma live. This set will go in the other back corner so Walt isn't able to easily hop over the low fence to chase the granola home schoolers' chickens.

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You may remember that a year or so ago we bought a handmade, solid mahogany door from a British octogenarian named Alan. Brie finally made a connection with a local woodworker (and we had the disposable income) to go ahead with replacing the old interior door with the new exterior door. We swapped the sidelight and changed the swing of the door. Here's the best "before" picture I could find followed by process pics.

We ordered some custom glass for the sidelight and he came back and installed that as well. His name is Erick Caballero and we will most certainly be using him again!

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We also spent this Spring outfitting the room with some furniture that pushes in the warm, eclectic club house direction we're hoping to capture. Obviously there's no decor or finishing done yet, but you can start to get the vibe.

The flag is meant for the front, but we need to replace the bracket for one that matches the pole size.

We also picked up this sweet lounge couch for the bonus room off the bedroom. Now we just need to get my office clear, me back into said office, and there'll be plenty of room for it!

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While all this was going on the new lumber arrived, brie broke her back sanding and staining it, and we finished up the side privacy fence. Look how freakin' tall the right size boards are. You could see them over the house when you pulled into the driveway.

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So we're finally caught up on projects from 2022 and early 2023! Which means it's time to build to the big project of 2024, which is opening the breezeway so the mahogany door is finally the front door (again).

But that's not for a couple of months, in the short term we're knocking out a list of 10 or so small chores so that there are no outstanding tasks when we demo the breezeway. I think that means that we're due for a design post where I share some of the colors, patterns, inspiration, and furniture we have our eye on as the house begins to come together.

-S.