Taking Recycling to New Heights

Well, ladies and gentlemen, the forecast will not be calling for springtime deck parties or barbeques anytime soon.  I'd hate to jinx myself and give the summer forecast too, so I'll side on the optimistic and leave it alone.  Why the doom and gloom report?  Drum roll, please.

We no longer have a deck attached to the back of our house.

It now resides in two piles:  one pile of timbers too rotten to reuse, and another pile stacked neatly with posts and beams that my husband hopes to make into a fence.  How quaint.  This little hippy - smile - is changing the world, one person at a time.  All of my years of digging in the trash to retrieve coke cans and water bottles, yelling at my husband when I catch him in the act of throwing said items away, and generally waving my hippy flag proudly in front of him have finally paid off.  My husband has taken recycling to the extreme, and painstakingly removed board by board from our rotten and dilapitated deck, storing nails in a large tin, and separated the reusable from the not so reusable.  It pleases me to no end that 1) my husband is handy like that and 2) he has more patience than an audience at a snail race.  It took him a few days to remove what would have taken others mere hours to sledge hammer their way through the crumbling pieces. 

Am I proud?  I'm positively beaming.

As for the doors on the back of our house that beforehand so conveniently led directly onto the deck now open to nothing but air.  I've considered selling tickets to our show, so that everyone can experience the mystery of the doors that lead nowhere.  The new deck will hopefully be complete before the bulk of summer is over, and I'm so excited for it because the plans that Justin has drawn out look wonderful.  It will still be a simple deck by design, but it will be able to safely hold more than two of us at a time. 

Oh, and by the way, nothing is scarier than an owl flying into your window in the middle of the night.  Apparently lights are attractive to screech owls.  As one of my good friends put it, it means I'm going to Hogwarts.

Belated Snow Day

With the impending snow being forecast for Sunday, I thought I'd back track a little to show some pictures of our first big snow back in January.  We accumulated six inches of snow and spent the following off days sledding down hills and chasing the doggies in the back yard.  Here's Beau, taking full advantage of the dog run. 

The snow was so beautiful and tranquil.  The trees surrounding the property held snow, and it added a heavenly air to our little piece of the world.  I always think of our little red house as such a magical place, and this next picture really lends itself to the belief.  Anyone else think of Narnia when they see this?

Wallpaper is a Pain

We bought the house because we loved the wallpaper... well, some of it.

The rest, while still beautiful in its uniquely patriotic way, is smelly and splotched with age. Our Master Bedroom, for instance, was covered above the chair rail in red and white New England themed toile, with a Quaker House, a Town Hall, and other revolutionary meeting places, all dappled with brown mildew spots. Beneath the chair rail was a tiny red almost paisley print, which had turned pink with age. Needless to say, it was sexy.

 

Like all virginal wall paper removers, we blindly believed that it would be a simple process, led to such conclusions by propaganda from HGTV. But no, like all things in life, it was not as easy as scoring, wetting, and peeling. Justin slaved over the tedious task of stripping the wall paper little inch sliver by little inch sliver for around two weeks. Then he spent another week mudding and sanding, his art for precision never failing him, only slightly lagging as curse words would fly through the house. I helped a little.

It was during this maddening period of our life during which we lived out of our den, mattress in front of the fireplace, that we came to realize just how similar we are to the old owners (now passed).  Apparently, he had an air for the meticulous as well.  As we uncovered more and more wallpaper, we discovered the pencil marks he had made on the dry wall to make sure every piece lined up correctly.  All of the little red buildings were alined exactly, and nothing was out of place at all.  Absolute perfection.  Each day we live here, we find more and more exhibits of this attention to detail, and we praise the designer/builder/owners of this house for all the wonderful gifts they've given us. 

Anyhoo, sappiness aside, Justin was able to finish the dirty work. Then came the hard part: choosing a paint color. My mind sees the grand scheme. My husband's only sees pieces, when it comes to interior design. So apparently, a very dramatic and halting minnow gray would not suffice. Tan it is, then. As if choosing a tan were any easier, it took another two weeks just to decide on which shade of tan would be best. I did, however, get the final say after realizing that all of his choices were merely shades of my own skin tone during different times of the year (can't handle that, as I don't want to be a chameleon in my own home). So my darker choice won out, and now we have a dramatically... tan master bedroom. It doesn't scream high fashion, but it's a cozy place to sleep.

Playing Catch-Up

Well, it's been a few months since we purchased our first home, which we lovingly call the Little Red House.  I first found this house almost two years ago on a realtor website.  It took me five months to convince Justin to go out and have a look at it - upon said visit we spotted a herd of deer, and he was hooked.  A month later and our real estate agent was showing us inside the house for the first time.  It smelled old and fussy, having been uninhabited for so long.  Almost every inch of the walls were covered in either fading wallpaper or some kind of panelling.  And of course, the cherry on top was the trailer park that butted up to the property and the rock quarry down the road.  Not to mention the price was a little out of our full-time student range (cough).

Of course we were in love.

Our friends thought we were insane.  Our families ignored us.  But we persisted quietly, taking weekly trips out to visit the house we wished would one day be our home (how about that assonance?).  That went on for about a year.  We watched the little red house morph before our eyes, the scenery changing with the seasons.  We waited and waited for the day when we would drive by and the For Sale sign would be missing.  It would crush us, we knew, but still we waited for the inevitable.  Surely a little slice of heaven like this place would sell quickly and for a high price.  Over a year later, we were still making our trips out, going slowly down the long winding driveway, windows down.  We'd park, get out, and walk around the house, all the while oohing and ahhing, pressing noses to windows and dreaming of life in the little red house.  After about 20 minutes, we'd sigh and return to the car, saying to each other, "One day we're gonna buy this house."  That was our routine. 

The price continued to drop, and it looked like Justin was going to get the job he'd been hoping for.  We got all of our finances in order and decided to go for it.  Aftert a month of excruciating back and forth negotiations, we got the call we'd been praying for:  the little red house would be ours.  Another month of paperwork later and after signing away our lives and our first born, we were given the keys and even a garage 'clicker'.  The weekend after Thanksgiving we started moving in, and by the end of that week we were sleeping in our new house, albeit on our mattress on the floor in the den.  Even now, every time we drive up to the house together, we look at each other and say, "One day we're gonna buy this house."  And then we smile and turn the key. 

This is the story of the little red house.  This is the story of making a house into a home.