Home Again Home Again, Jiggety-Jig

I had been writing this post in my head almost since we started the remodel in earnest just over one year ago.  At that time we were packing and moving to go, thinking about all the temporary structures.  Once we moved back in, 3 months ago, for some reason, all my energy suddenly dispersed in directions that did not involve writing blog posts. So my triumphant final post has gotten postponed, delayed, and put off.  I had thought that once this was over there would be lots of extra time... but life and priorities whoosh in so quickly to fill the void.

first dinner at home!

So the short version:  Our final inspection was on August 9th, not late June as we had hoped, but early enough that we could get in before David had to be back at work for teacher meetings and the kids at school.  Since our school district started in mid August this year, that didn't give us a lot of time, but we weren't complaining.  I left our usual week of camping early without the family and, with the help of my mother and two day workers, we unloaded the storage pod and got settled in, with David and the boys joining us a day later.  There was no gas hook-up yet for the weekend, so we used our neighborhood laundromat and showered at the YMCA which boasted the luxury of hot water.

New digs

So much has changed and so much is still the same- all those changes that we hoped for, and the sameness that we yearned for in the last year.  We are back home in our neighborhood, back to the familiarity of our surroundings and stuff (my salad spinner! my paring knife!), yet the newness of the remodel makes everything different.   I vividly remember some hard moments, like early on when our initial loan fell through (mostly our fault).  One of the worst, though, was last winter when we were living in our rental.  I was driving Gil home at night but inadvertently drove to our recently demo'd house without thinking about it.  After realizing my mistake, we drove to our temporary house.  In to the driveway, Gil started crying and wouldn't go inside  "this isn't my house," he said over and over again.  In the end, I convinced him to come inside, but I felt as heartsick as he did, and guilty for having put the kids through so many changes.  Fortunately, these memories are feeling more and more distant.

I've noticed a sort of a Give a Moose a Muffin spiral that happens with changes on this level, even these months after moving back in.  We did the house, so the yard was trashed, we removed old hedges to find that our fence was rotting, so we replaced the fence, in doing so, we see additional items that need fixing and adjusting.  In the words of the immortal Kurt Vonnegut... so it goes.  But this is all extra icing on top.  The newness of the house, the light, the extra storage, the upstairs bedrooms- these are all still thrilling to me and I hope that I always appreciate it the way I do now.

fixing up the back yard

It is fitting that I am writing this on Thanksgiving day, belated though it is.  I am so thankful for all the support and love that we got from our tremendous family and friends, to the creative genius of Jessica Resmini for her vision and beautiful design, to Mark Lamar and his stellar crew for their solid professionalism and workmanship in making this a reality.   I am thankful to my resilient kids and to David, who soldiered through everything with me and always gave my his shoulder to lean on.

And finally, thank you for reading and joining in on our adventure.  This was hardly a hero's journey as the title implies, but an enlightening process for sure.

Now, a break in our scheduled programming

At the Duomo. Florence, Italy

Last month, through a series of extremely fortunate events, we (David, the kids, and I) found ourselves in Italy for two weeks, half of that time with extended family. On one hand, it was a terrible time to get away, as we were still ticking down our list, and the endless decisions were not letting up. On the other hand, it was also a perfect time to go, since we were in house limbo regardless. So, arrivederci California and buongiorno Italia.

Changed my mind. I want our front porch to look like this

Wow. Nothing like getting away to put things in perspective. As we laid eyes on so much magnificent architecture that abounds all over the country, we happily took leave of the contemporary craftsman, and gazed in awe at the villas of Tuscany, the cathedrals of Florence, and the palazzos (and prisons) of Venice. The first was the incredible Duomo in Florence. This was apparently started in 1296 and completed structurally in 1436, not including all the fancy finishes. 140 years.  Maybe nine months from start to finish isn't so bad after all. At least we can hope to be around to enjoy our house when it is done.

Gelato on the  Ponte Vecchio

The remodel never strayed far from our minds, obviously, as the transatlantic emails bounced back and forth between us and our contractor Mark.  There was always lingering stress about this decision and that, but we were easily distracted by the delicious gelato (dubbed Vitamin G by my sister and her family).

No wonder there are so many beautiful buildings in Italy.  Isn't it obvious?  I bet this scene played out all the time in the Renaissance:

Antonio the architect  "No no no!" (gesticulates wildly)  The gargoyles are supposed to face THAT direction!  

Roberto the builder  "Sorry, the city won't allow it.  There needs to be a sewer line running this way.  By the way, this will cost another 10,000 Euros."

Antonio  (turning red)  What!!!  Another 10 thous... hey, look, here's the  gelato cart!   Oh well, let's talk it over later.  I'll have a double cone of your finest, signore" 

the real reason for the Renaissance

This was also the summer of the souvenir.  My prayers were answered when my boys finally developed a tolerance to gift shop browsing, especially in Venice, where the famed Murano glass is everywhere. With our offspring happily poking through glass trinkets, we had time to find some cool Venetian glass pendants to light up the dining room.  This was one of the last purchases and the one we had agonized over the most.
Now back to reality and the final stretch.

Starting to Finish

view from the back

Lately, time seems to be going so fast.  As close as we are, all my lists are starting to cross pollinate in my brain.  We are turning into whirlwind consumers these days, as the hypothetical decisions of the past months are coming down to the wire.  I drift off to sleep with images of major appliances in my head, and wake up mentally comparing towel racks.  Our credit card is in tatters.

shut the front door

 I catch myself muttering perseveratively -brushed nickel!  mail slots!  fluorescent, no halogen, 18 inch...12 inch, no 24 inch... while wandering around hallways.  I have become the remodeling equivalent of a bag lady, with the quasi-homelessness for added authenticity.  My colleagues have gradually learned to avoid asking me about the house, lest they set off a tirade about the latest snafu at the lighting store or the 36 inch cabinet that I drove 70 miles to pick up.   I bitch incessantly to my family about the terrible hardship of finding the right porch tiles.  Even David, my partner, has moments of poorly hidden embarrassment as I whip out my measuring tape  (a now constant fixture in my purse) on our recent trip to Ikea.  "um, Evi?  the dimensions are written right here."  I wish I could help myself, but I can't.

pondering cabinet hardware

choosing exterior color

Once I get immersed into something, it's hard for me to extricate myself mentally.  I was still flipping through those awful bridal magazines for months after I got married.  Not because I wanted to, but because I couldn't resist the compulsion.  I'm sure some of that will linger, even after we move back in.  But I'm also anticipating that the death grip of these obsessions on my psyche will slowly loosen and allow our normal lives to seep back in.    Even the friendly carpet guy, who showed us samples out of his trunk early this morning, said reassuringly "you know it's almost done when you're at this stage."  Thanks carpet guy.  Music to my ears.

Shelter

Our earthly belongings, in the storage pod

all packed and ready to go

Life gets in the way, sometimes.  I've been meaning to add to the blog for over a month now.  Around last November I wrote a cheerful post about moving and how fun and interesting it was to go through all our junk as we were clearing the way for our demo.  At the end of April, our lease ran out on our rental house, with no extension offered (despite some pleading on our part), so we found ourselves moving for the second time in 6 months.  This time, it was just tedious and exhausting, and astounding how much junk we STILL had after just clearing everything out within the last year.   But we made it.

And all the while, things were changing at the house...

       

Living room of studs and plywood

Insulation

Drywall!

As the summer approaches, everything seems to be moving at an accelerated pace.  Our contractor Mark has kept the juggling balls up in the air, mostly out of our sight.   When we were interviewing contractors last year, one thing Mark said stuck with me: "there will never be nothing happening for no reason."    

Our contractor, Mark, tries to move heaven and earth to finish

Looking back, I'm grateful he said that- driving by an empty worksite on a weekday can feel very deflating, only to find out later that they were waiting for an inspection, or materials to arrive or some other reason.   In fact, most of the time, the opposite has been true- there's usually a large crew of people working hard, and we can see the results.

Front entry, from inside

After drywall

Three weeks ago the insulation went in, and drywall started a week later.  What a difference this makes!  It's really starting to feel like a house, and I can relax a little more as each component falls into place.  When the demo was in full force, initially it was exhilarating, then as the roof came off, I was surprised at how vulnerable I felt.

I could also relate a little more to how devastating it can be to have something terrible happen to your home.   Looking at photos of houses (and their owners) after tornadoes ripped through the Midwest this year, I got a small sense of how catastrophic it was for those families to have lost so much.    Let me be clear- I'm not comparing the two situations.   We planned this remodel and always knew, intellectually at least, that there was an end in sight.   Having gone through this experience, though, I understand the insecurity and the fear (even of the elements) a little bit better.

Getting there

Closer

Even closer

But as the house gets rebuilt from the outside in, I appreciate even more how insulated we are, now in a literal sense, but in many other ways too.  We have been so lucky for our community, especially the secure safety net of our wonderful family.   David's parents have graciously taken us in, my parents, who may yet do the same,  have helped us in innumerable other ways.  We are so grateful for our shelter of family and friends, and could not have made it this far without them.

Almost there!

A Goat, a Bulldozer, and a Few Matzah Crumbs

I stopped by the house on the way home from work a couple of days ago. There was a big bulldozer on the property, chugging loudly and spewing exhaust as it cleared the area for our new driveway. My neighbor Sarah was outside, and I stopped to say hi, sheepishly apologizing for the noise. In our 1950s era neighborhood, the houses are built very close to each other, and so our neighbors have gotten a lot more exposure to our construction than they would probably prefer. Sarah responded cheerfully "it's okay. When the noise stops, it's SO great." She really said this. With neighbors like that, is it any wonder that we didn't want to leave?

It reminded me of a well-known Jewish story about a man who is fed up with his life. He goes to his rabbi in the village and complains bitterly about living in his tiny house with unruly children, complaining wife, in-laws, and a passel of other unpleasant relatives. He wails that with their constant fighting and bickering, he cannot stand his life one minute longer.

The rabbi thinks for a moment, and says "Try this: bring your farm animals into the house to live with you." The man is puzzled, but does as the rabbi says. The next week he comes back and says "It's not working. Everything is ten times worse- no one has any room to sit down, there's cow poop everywhere, and the noise and smell is unbearable."

Rabbi: "Did you remember the goat?"

Man: "Huh?"

Rabbi: "Don't forget to bring in the goat. And the chickens too."

The man is understandably skeptical, but reluctantly goes home and does as he is told.

He returns in a few days. "Are you INSANE? Not only is there no room to sit down, no one can even stand UP with all these animals, chickens squawk all the time, and the goat... that f**ing goat is constantly butting my children, smashing all the dishes and eating everything in sight. No one has any peace! This is a hundred times worse than before. "

The rabbi thinks for a moment, then says, "All right then. Maybe this was not such a hot idea after all. Put all your animals back outside."

What happens next is not hard to guess. The man returns later, all smiles, gushing about his fabulously transformed home, so spacious, clean and fresh, and full of happy people who all get along with each other. The moral of the story... things could always be worse.

The festival of Passover started last Friday, and like many Jewish families around the world, we are commemorating it in part by not eating leavened products- breads, cakes, cereals- substituting mostly with matzah, a woefully inadequate alternative, that, to add insult to injury, can't be eaten without creating piles of crumbs throughout the house. After eight days of matzah, that morning bagel never tasted so good.

There is nothing like losing something, be it peace and quiet, space, or a favorite food, to make you appreciate it when it returns.

It occurred to me that we could have avoided a lot of hassle and expense by simply setting up a temporary petting zoo in our living room. Even so, I have no doubt that when this project is finished, we will appreciate so many things that we took for granted- our understanding neighbors, wonderful neighborhood, newness and space of our soon-to-be finished (fingers crossed) home, the security of not having to move and the opportunity to settle in and relax. Maybe we'll even get a goat.

Let There Be Light

There's something called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, where, when one learns, hears, or starts thinking about something new, suddenly it's everywhere. Lighting is my current obsession. I pay attention constantly, now that I'm considering which fixtures to buy and how they will look. On the face of it, it's not so complicated. Most of the new lighting in our house will be recessed, with some ceiling mounted lights and a few wall sconces. Perhaps it's because so many of the remaining options seem largely indistinguishable that it's hard to hone in on exactly what we want. Our thought was that we will choose mostly neutral lighting, but try for one piece in the dining room with a little extra oomph. To that end, I've been trawling online lighting stores at every opportunity and feverishly adding pictures to my houzz.com idea book when I can't sleep.

David and I watched The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo last night (the newer American version) after the kids went to bed. As I watched, I was distracted from the plot by the nifty lighting in all those Swedish buildings. So sleek! So modern and minimalist! My mind kept returning to those geometric unembellished fixtures- I must have them. The obvious next step was to venture to Ikea, done today (check), on a rainy Saturday no less. The waft of Swedish meatballs notwithstanding, results were a little disappointing. Maybe absent the muckraking journalist, mohawked antiheroine and Hollywood set designers, they were just regular inexpensive lights, only with names like umlaut and bergwenstrom.

perusing options at Ikea, above

In my online searching I did find one modern chandelier that was kind of interesting- round crystals forming a pyramid. David liked it too, but as he rightly pointed out,we could hardly host any future Passover seders with such an eggregious symbol of our oppression hanging over the table. Point well taken. The $2K + price tag didn't help much either.

We'll keep looking. Soon, everything will be illuminated.

Winter Pays for Summer

I love the HBO fantasy series "Game of Thrones" based on the George RR Martin books. I love the stoic Stark family, their home in Winterfell, the way they go around saying ominously to one another, "Winter is coming." The story also involves a Knight's Watch, a monkish group of outliers pledged to guard a humongous wall of ice in the North. Everywhere, cold dark characters, cold dark landscapes, brutal, cold, and more cold and brutal. Not for nothing, winter (not just in this series, of course) is associated with discontent, hardship, challenge, wanting and waiting for the fruits of spring and summer.

Here in Northern California, we've had the driest, sunniest winter on record.

The good news (and this is huge) is that our house is progressing well. The roof and framing are nearly finished, and it looks and feels like a house. The downstairs kitchen cabinetry, floors, and countertops that we wanted to preserve have remained intact and damage-free. Rough plumbing is completed and the electrical wiring will start next week. In every room there are views to look at and places to sit. All but one of the windows are framed out and await installment. That jumble of beams and rubble that faced us at the beginning of the project has shaped into a sturdy structure that no wolf can blow down (though on second thought, I'd better save wolf metaphors for the next post). We are getting close.

Despite the mild weather, however, this winter has been rough. In December I had a jarring bike accident on my way home from work. In January, a household lice outbreak had us laundering for ages. February brought a meniscus tear in my left knee, followed by surgery in the beginning of March. And the real doozy: a week later, we were told by our current landlords that they wouldn't extend our lease, as we had hoped, ironically because they are anxious to start their own remodeling project. We have to move out by the end of April, well before our projected completion date. Now that's cold. The thought of moving again, especially our entire household's worth of belongings, makes me physically ache.

But...

Have I mentioned that we are getting close? Knowing that warmer days are coming and this winter of winters is receding is a thought that will buoy us and help us power through for these last few months. We are waiting for the fruits of summer, and shit does make good fertilizer.