Who said feng shui is calming?

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 at 10:38 am (Cottage Industry)
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Here I go again. Deep in the throes of fixer-upperhood, kicking and screaming all the way.

After 5 years of really, really not liking my bedroom-turned-home-office, I’m finally trying to fix it. Like every room in this house, it’s less a matter of freshening it up with some paint and more a matter of hard labor.

Here’s where it started. I didn’t clean up before taking the pictures (which were an afterthought), so they are particularly messy and I had already begun moving and packing things. (Oddly, while I pretty much can’t stand clutter/chaos in certain rooms, I am quite comfortable working in a mess, and my desk is usually a shambles — go figure.)

I inherited the not-quite-sage/not-quite-jade walls, woodwork, and carpeting, which actually was the best color scheme in the house. The carpet is in good shape, but has a few stubborn stains in prominent places that just won’t come out despite repeated attacks with everything I could think of.

I don’t even have a decent “before” picture of the other window wall, facing my neighbor’s house. How dumb was I not to take pictures before diving in? But here are a couple views after I had already moved furniture and taken down the roman shade.

My desk unit was purchased to fit my office 11 years and 3 houses ago. Believe it or not, there really weren’t a lot of home office furniture choices back then. This one worked great in that house and even the next 2 houses, but it’s all wrong here. The reddish color matched the woodwork perfectly then…now, it’s really off. It’s also quite big (6’x6′) and made to fit nicely in an open corner, which this room doesn’t have. So it has to float in the middle of the only wall big enough to hold it. That alone bugs me to no end.

This is the fourth wall — and geez, it’s embarrassing to post such messy pictures, but you know I’m not kidding when I tell you my office is usually a mess.

But you may remember that I did clean/organize the closet a couple years ago…let’s look at that again just so I don’t feel so bad.

So, back to my version of home-office “feng shui” (which will reflect none of the principles of actual feng shui).

I started with the windows. We’ve been trying to expose the wood sills in every room (because some were left exposed and some were painted over). But of course, like every other room in the house, the idiots painted latex over oil so the top coat of paint easily chips/scrapes off — except when it sticks like glue — and you’re left with the oil-based undercoat, in this case, a dirty-looking creamy-tan color. I’m not sure whoever painted this primed it first, because even this layer can be (mostly) chipped off.

After chipping as much as I could, I attacked the old finish underneath with stripper. Unfortunately, all I had was the “safe” environmentally friendly stripper, which really doesn’t work well at all.

Here’s what I ended up with after a lot of scraping and sanding — ready for stain & poly.

My philosophy for the rest of the window frames and woodwork in the room (and in the entire house) is to scrape off as little of the bad latex as possible — some has to be scraped, for sure, and all of it sanded to death, but my goal is to spend as little of my precious time on this earth scraping paint as possible. This yields woodwork that looks like this.

I’m sure the purists out there are all tsk-tsking that I haven’t fully stripped the wood (my husband for instance). But trust me, after a coat of Zinsser Bulls Eye primer and a couple of topcoats of our “house white” (Crumb Cookie), it’ll look just fine.

So now, with the windows almost ready to prime, I’ve also started working on the walls. Did I mention they must have had the C-Team plasterers when they built this house? I’ve never seen such a sloppy plastering job — full of scrapes and gouges and divots that previous owners haven’t helped at all. So, in addition to filling the nail holes I made, I’m also trying to fill in some of the worst of the wall flaws — again, without making it my life’s work.

So, that’s where it stands. Still so much work to be done before I can get to only part I really want to do — pick colors and redecorate. Next up is sanding and painting the ceiling, which is probably my least favorite fixer-upper chore ever. Next to scraping woodwork. And painting woodwork. And sanding walls. And pulling down plaster. And inhaling plaster dust. Oh, and breaking up ceramic tile and scraping the mortar off the underfloor. And pulling out and bagging filthy attic insulation and carrying it down 3 flights of stairs to throw away.

On second thought, fixing the ceiling really isn’t so bad in the grand scheme of things.

Here are some other things I’m planning and still pondering:

  • The floor: I’ll likely pull the carpet out, even though it’s in fairly good shape, because the color is so limiting and there’s those stains. Depending on the floor underneath, I may just try to paint it and get a pretty area rug (my overall vision is “cottage”) or Mike may hunt down a nice (neutral) commercial carpet remnant at a good price and we’ll redo the wall-to-wall.
  • The desk: It’s huge, but it cost a lot 11 years ago and is still perfectly serviceable. But it doesn’t fit well in the room. I’d sell it if I thought I could get anything for it, but it’s so big, and I rarely have luck with selling stuff like this.  I’m thinking of painting it — and the lateral file — a cottage creamy white or possibly black!
  • The other furniture: Definitely, some of what I had in here isn’t coming back. But what? The cedar chest? The big wing chair and side table? The oak library drawers? (Where will it all go? Our house is full!)
  • The accessories: After 10,000 hours of HGTV watching, I know what looks good — clean, uncluttered spaces. But I am a collector at heart and have 7,000 chotchkes that I really like. I’m considering installing shelves or getting shallow bookcases along the whole back wall to hold all my pretties in one place and keeping all the other surfaces clear.
  • The window treatments: I’m thinking floor to ceiling drapes on nice chunky poles (translation: expensive and expensive) and some kind of blinds on the windows. We’ll see.
  • The wall color: Green is my favorite color, and it surprises me that the only green in the house is what I inherited with this room! I’m thinking of a nice soft, spring-y green. But I also like that soft robin’s egg cottage-y blue (that Martha made popular a while back). Or a nice latté color?
  • The lighting: Every HGTV designer will scoff, but I’m considering a ceiling fan. (You’d think they’d change their snooty tune due to the green, energy-saving factor of a fan, if nothing else.)
  • The future: Will I go to all this trouble to make my home office my favorite place to be, and then have to get a full-time job because the economy sucks?

On that note, I better stop blogging and start working (on a paying project for a change!). I hope to have a transformation to show you before the snow flies, but I’m learning to be somewhat patient/realistic about such things. Feng shui is, after all, all about the Zen.

Thank God every morning when you get up, that you have
something to do that day which must be done, whether you like it or not.
Being forced to work and forced to do your best will breed in you
temperance and self-control, diligence and strength of will,
cheerfulness and content, and a hundred virtues which the idle never know.
~ Charles Kingsley

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Not quite $64

Monday, August 9, 2010 at 2:02 pm (Heavy Clay)
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I waited weeks for it to ripen, never thinking it actually would, having lost all manner of tomatoes over the years to fungus, rot, rodent, ruminant, or insect.

Weeks to ripen, minutes to eat. It was delicious, but was it worth it?

I’ve had a book in my shopping cart at Amazon for a long time, called The $64 Tomato — one man’s humorous account of trying to grow an organic garden at his Hudson Valley “farmstead.” He came to the conclusion that each tomato he harvested cost him $64 because of all he’d had to invest in the effort.

This year, I planted a dozen tomato plants — 4 in my upside-down 5-gallon bucket experiment (they’re doing terribly); 1 in last year’s “topsy-turvy” commercial upside-down planter (it finally has a few blossoms and little squirts on it); 1 in a big planter (this tomato came from that); and the rest scattered in the garden amid the shrubs and flowers — wherever I could find space. Some of them have nice-looking green tomatoes on them; some lost what they did have to said fungus, rot, rodent, ruminant, or insect; some didn’t have a fighting chance because I stuck them in the ground and forgot about them. Some are supposed to be gold instead of red, but since all of them are still green, I’m not sure which is which.

All told, I probably have $44 invested in those tomatoes this year (plants, buckets, soil).

I contrast this to my friends’ lush garden I had the pleasure of visiting last week. Beautiful raised beds chock-full of healthy plants laden with fruit & veggies. Awe inspiring. Mouth watering.

Did I mention all 5 of my pepper plants withered and died? And 2 of 5 jalapeno plants? (The other 3 are laden with peppers, but iffy looking.) Apparently the dreaded blight that devastated last year’s gardens also affects peppers — and petunias of all things (every one of the petunias I planted in the top of my bucket planters to pretty them up died within a couple weeks). Experts advise rotating crops so you’re not planting tomatoes or peppers where you planted them last year — in my limited space, I won’t have that luxury, ever.

Even Mike said, after hearing and seeing me lament my blasted tomatoes for the 237th time, “Are you sure it’s worth it? They’re not expensive to buy.”

After years of disappointment, I’m starting to agree. Yes, there’s nothing quite like a tomato right off the vine. But every tomato came off a vine somewhere. And sure, fresh eggs, fresh milk, fresh juice — they’re all better, but I’m not obsessing over raising chickens, cows, or oranges.

It may be time to give up. To keep my gardening dollars and energies focused on growing things I know I can grow and leave the fruit & veggies to the experts (i.e., pretty much everyone else). There’s some nobility in knowing when to say uncle, right? In quitting while you’re (sort of) ahead?

Our business in life is not to succeed, but to continue to fail in good spirits.
~ Robert Louis Stevenson

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Dog days

Wednesday, July 28, 2010 at 12:21 pm (Writing by Ear)
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Do you believe in coincidences? There’s a whole school of thought that doesn’t. I haven’t decided.

So what do I make of my recent dog days?

On a scorching late afternoon walk on Monday, I was just about to start up the hill when I noticed Rufus, my neighbor-2-doors-down’s Great Dane, sitting on the road by the gate that’s not supposed to be open.

Sigh.

Clearly my neighbor’s grass-cutter hadn’t shut the gate. But it’s a fancy automatic gate, so I wasn’t sure how or even if I could close it. So I led Rufus back up into his yard, hoped he’d stay there, and went looking for my next-door neighbor to see if she had gate-savvy. She did, and though Rufus was now safely contained, I lost my energy in the 10 minutes or so that all took and abandoned my walk. (Is this why Good Samaritans tend toward chubbiness?)

This morning, another dog coincidence, also involving Rufus. I made it a little farther up the hill this time and noticed a cute little dog sitting by the other (side) gate to Rufus’ house. He looked pretty dejected and didn’t move at all as I cautiously approached. Well, gee, the poor thing had his collar stuck on the gate! I didn’t know how long he had been there, and the collar seemed awfully tight. He patiently waited while I loosened the collar a bit before putting it back on him. I was just about to try to give him some water from my water bottle, when he very confidently trotted back down the hill, a dog on a mission. He ended up at my neighbor across the street’s front door. So I knocked, waited for Nancy to appear, and learned it was indeed her dog (well, her daughter’s dog she was watching for a while). Seems she had taken Ginger up to play with Rufus, and Ginger somehow managed to escape and get caught on the gate.

Poor Rufus, he lost his “sister” Daisy, another Great Dane, a few weeks ago when she had to be put down, and he’s been heartbroken ever since. We hear him howling nearly every morning after his “mom” goes to work. It’s so sad. Makes me wish we had a fenced yard so I could bring him over here to hang out during the day. (He’s so big he can sit on your lap with his feet touching the ground — it’s a hoot.)

This time, even after another 10-minute delay “rescuing” Ginger and consoling Rufus a bit,  I had the oomph to continue my walk. At the top of one of the hills (a dead-end), I saw yet another dog I’d never seen before, this one a sheepdog-looking cutie. This one apparently lives in the last house on the street — thank goodness, because I really wasn’t up for another rescue mission.

Three dog encounters in a short time. Is it meaningless coincidence or kismet? Is it telling me I should volunteer at a shelter, or maybe get a dog of my own? (I’m pretty sure it’s not telling me I should abandon walking around the neighborhood.)

Time will tell.

In the meantime, do you know where your dog is?

Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.
~ Albert Einstein

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