Playing catch-up

I have fashioned a very tenuous truce with the Shop. I am not happy with it, but it has given me the opportunity to pull together and edit a few more pictures.

Sadly, I am still not up-to-date.

As of today all of the addition, except for one narrow section, has been sided. The brick knee wall hasn't been installed yet, and the old part of the house needs to be resided to match the new, but once that's done I think it will all start to come together.

The cast iron bathtub for the hall bath was delivered today and so was the fireplace for the new family room. Skip says that Bill (the chief framer) is going to build the platform for the hearth tomorrow and then the fireplace can be installed.

We've got bids coming in for the kitchen and have decided on flooring. The thought of trying to choose lighting makes my head spin. Perhaps we will live by candlelight for awhile. :)

So here's how things looked one day about a month ago. This was a particularly busy day, with the main crew installing windows and the roofers, um -- roofing. Imagine all of the windows in and the siding on and that's where things stand today.


And here we are now. The two little windows are in the family room; right above that is Sara's room. You can see what the new siding looks like, although it still needs to be painted (Hardiplank -- love it!). I don't know why they haven't done that little strip that's facing forward. The birds appreciate it though: That little section where the Tyvek is pulled back is giving them access to the house. We haven't told Sara about this -- she would be devestated if she knew that birds were living in her room and we kicked them out!


And here's the expansion on the north side of the house. This bump-out will give us a much bigger kitchen (hooray!), a 1/2 bath, pantry & mud room down stairs and a master suite upstairs. Hard to see, thanks to the neighbor's tree.


And finally, a little reminder that Mom and Dad are never really very far away. This lone little bulb, planted by Mom I don't know how long ago, somehow managed to come up despite the digging, dragging, tracking, stacking, and demolition that dug it up and moved it several feet from its original home.

I love that.

And the verdict is...

Sara evidently likes her new room!

Skip's been here

Skip may have not-so-subtly reminded me that I've been remiss in my postings. So, in my effort at redemption, I'll start off with a post about what he's been up to this past week or so.

Think you know what he's working on?

Lovely, no?

This ought to be the give-away:

Ta-da!  A new portico!  I am quite fond of it.  He built just what we described.  He'll finish off the interior ceiling and the posts later this spring/summer (what, you don't like the treated lumber look?), but I think it looks pretty great already.

He's also been doing the far-less-glamorous but oh-so-important work of wiring around the windows for an alarm system.  Cause as you all know, I'm a bit of a wimp.

Thanks, Skip!  I'm serious:  With all the great stuff you've been doing around here for us, you could do quite nicely for yourself as the neighborhood handy man!

Whoa.

I am so terribly behind, it's pathetic.  I'm not sure what happened, but somehow in the time since my last post the builder guys have managed to fashion together something that looks quite a bit like a house.

I KNOW!

Pictures, you say?  Yes, yes.  Pictures are nice, but perhaps a bit over-rated.

No?  Not over-rated?  Well, maybe not.  But they do tend to bog down your download, right?

No again?  You have high-speed?

Huh.

But there's nothing worse than having to sit through picture after picture after picture, like you don't have better things to do with your time because after all!  You are a Very!  Busy!   Person!

No?  NO??  Geez, what do you do all day?  Sit around and read blogs or something?

OK, well -- whatever.  I'm fighting with Photoshop and currently the Shop is winning.  So no pictures.

Yet.

SOF! SOF!

So the city wants to shutter my neighborhood firehouse.

This is a colossally bad idea for a whole lot of reasons:

• While they took the engines away awhile ago, we still have an EMT team in the area.
• Warfleigh (my little slice of the world) is a part of a larger area known as Broad Ripple. If you've never heard of Broad Ripple you don't live in Indianapolis -- but trust me when I say it is one of the busiest neighborhoods you'll find in the city, especially on weekends and even more especially on warm spring & summer weekends. We host a LOT of folks.
• Why so popular? More restaurants and, unfortunately, bars than you can shake a stick at.
• With bars comes poor judgement.
• With poor judgement comes the need for a public safety presence and emergency response.
• Did I mention that an EMT team is based out of the firehouse?
• Also, the building is the oldest firehouse in Indianapolis & is of historic value to the city and especially our neighborhood.
• One guess what would go into that space if the city allowed it to be closed/torn down.

I am not one who blindly supports pet projects and special interests because generally they come with high price tags and do little to serve anyone outside a very small circle of people. But I would aruge that keeping a public safety presence serves not only the needs of Broad Ripple residents but also the thousands and thousands of visitors we have here every year. There are a lot of people paying a lot of tax on a lot of food & alcohol in Broad Ripple. I would think the city would be wise to keep it a safe and inviting place to put money back into the economy.

So. Wanna help? Go here and sign the petition to save our firehouse. You don't have to be a Broad Ripple resident, or even an Indianapolis or Indiana resident. It's quick & easy, I promise.

What are you waiting for? Go!

Danger: Sentimental thoughts approaching. Proceed with caution.

I think it would be safe to say that my mom hated her kitchen.

I mean really, really hated it. It wasn't very big and was in need of cleaning updating repair demolition renovation for years. Now that Rob and I are going through that process I think I understand (no no, I KNOW I understand) why Dad just never mustered up the strength to do it. There were big structural problems; a few new cabinets and shiny new linoleum would not have sufficed.

So, she lived with it: no ceiling, 45-year-old ugly flooring with the spots worn off from use, about 10 square feet of counter space, no room to move let alone work. Not that Mom was what you would have called a cooking enthusiast; no, she was more a reluctant meal provider. And provide she did, for nearly fifty years. Although her own mother had pretty mad cooking skills, my mom probably picked up most of her own recipes by meeting my dad's culinary requests: farm food. Fry it, boil it, cook it til it's done. If it starts green make sure it doesn't end that way. Bacon grease is the third essential seasoning. And if it dirties more than two pans? Well, it wouldn't dirty more than two pans, not if Mom had anything to do with it.

The kitchen though, despite its sad lot in life, was still the hub of the home. We probably spent as much time sitting in there, on those uncomfortable wooden chairs in various states of reliability, as we did in the living room. Maybe even more. Dad, having grown up spending a good deal of his childhood with his Depression-surviving grandparents, was rather reluctant to keep the heater set above 65, no matter how cold it got outside. Mom's solution? Head into the kitchen, turn on the oven & then prop it open for a few hours. I remember finding her in there one day with the gas burners on the stovetop going, too.

Yes, the house was notoriously cold.

But not the kitchen. It was also never very organized. Or tidy. Or clean, for that matter. But it never lacked for food or drink - or pens or rubber bands or screwdrivers or envelopes or gadgets or sunglasses or reading glasses or batteries or matches or just about anything else you could think of. The kitchen was indeed Mom's command center.

And so I had mixed emotions when the day came to gut it. A loved and hated space, but full of memories. When my mother-in-law offered to empty it for me I felt obliged to argue with her but secretly (or not so secretly) was relieved, because not only was this a big project, it was a big deal. When I went in there a few days later, so appreciative that I had somehow managed to escape the job, I opened up the cabinets -- the ones filled with her dishes and address books and old crocks that hadn't been used for decades -- and found nothing.

Nothing except the notes Mom left behind, scribbled on the backs of her cabinet doors: An eye chart she had to use when I was a kid. The phone number for our neighborhood paper boy -- from 1980. A list of her kids' phone numbers. A sticker with the code for a combination lock, long gone. The number for L.S. Ayres. Random names and numbers of people I never knew.

All the ephemera of her life, easily retrieved behind those doors.

And the ephemera, I couldn't part with.

So Rob, being Rob, offered to save the doors for me. Every last one. Those old, ugly doors so in need of... I don't even know what. But I'll figure it out. They're going to go up into my attic, where I'll put them back into use. Probably to start collecting my own notes and messages, my own ephemera.

Our project has moved along now, so much so that nothing remains of my mom's kitchen. Even the walls have been stripped and moved, and it takes a good bit of imagination and thinking on my part to remember where things used to be. Mom, I'm sure, would have loved it -- though more for its elevated role as hub of the home rather than it's improved function for meal preparation.

No, I won't miss that kitchen. But I sure do miss the cook.

Real quick

Just a couple recent-ish ones. I owe you another that shows it with the ROOF!



Second story up!


My attic is going to rock. Seriously.


A view of the master bedroom (love the cathedral ceiling) from the attic. This view won't last for long. :)