Hay Mary Anna
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Hay, Mik! The house is, in theory, finished. We are still sweeping up after stupid contractor tricks, but that may be an ongoing situation. (Why didn't they insulate under the kitchen floor? Why does the insulation the kitchen wall stop a foot above the floor, causing the water line to the dishwasher to freeze up? We will never know, and we have washed our hands of them. We've got somebody who will fix these things properly.) Overall, though, it's lovely and it's comfortable to live in. We love it, and we really love being in a town where we can walk to groceries, the bank, the dry cleaner, restaurants, the playhouse, the jazz club, yadda yadda yadda.
Quirt is ridiculously busy with work. It really is 24/7 for him, whereas I'm going to be able to smear my retirement over the rest of my life. He will probably have to work full-out until he turns it off like a switch. I stopped teaching a year ago this month, although I'm doing some freelance online classes now and then. I've got four book projects in various stages of completion--final editing, drafting, proposal, proposal--but I'm in control of my schedule, so I spend a lot of time traveling to friends and family or having them come here. It's all good!
How are you?
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Hay, Mik! The house is, in theory, finished. We are still sweeping up after stupid contractor tricks, but that may be an ongoing situation. (Why didn't they insulate under the kitchen floor? Why does the insulation the kitchen wall stop a foot above the floor, causing the water line to the dishwasher to freeze up? We will never know, and we have washed our hands of them. We've got somebody who will fix these things properly.) Overall, though, it's lovely and it's comfortable to live in. We love it, and we really love being in a town where we can walk to groceries, the bank, the dry cleaner, restaurants, the playhouse, the jazz club, yadda yadda yadda.
Quirt is ridiculously busy with work. It really is 24/7 for him, whereas I'm going to be able to smear my retirement over the rest of my life. He will probably have to work full-out until he turns it off like a switch. I stopped teaching a year ago this month, although I'm doing some freelance online classes now and then. I've got four book projects in various stages of completion--final editing, drafting, proposal, proposal--but I'm in control of my schedule, so I spend a lot of time traveling to friends and family or having them come here. It's all good!
How are you?
(Why didn't they insulate under the kitchen floor? Why does the insulation the kitchen wall stop a foot above the floor, causing the water line to the dishwasher to freeze up? We will never know, and we have washed our hands of them. We've got somebody who will fix these things properly.)
Why are there contractors who do stupid things? It's so frustrating. I'm glad you have someone else to deal with it.
How is your piano room? Am I remembering right that you were trying to decide whether or not to keep it in a 2nd floor location??
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We decided there was room on the first floor for the big piano, after all, so I was able to keep it instead of trading it for something smaller.
I am trying to upload some photos to share, but I can't for the life of me figure out why PostImage can only see my whole Photos album and not the House subalbum.
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They do it because cutting corners increases profits. We've settled on a local contracting firm that is quite expensive, but the customer service, project management and work are all first rate. Of course you don't know that for sure until you hire them!
I'm doing great, Mary Anna, thanks! Down 68 lbs over the last year, lifting weights 6 hours a week and a similar amount of cardio. I'm still consulting part time as I found that while we didn't need the money I needed the stimulation and outside involvement. I'll probably continue that until we have to take RMD. Between that, helping our daughter move from Vegas to Lancaster PA (very interesting area), my two charities I stay pretty busy.
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Here's a test photo. If it works, this is what you see when you come in the door. We are in mid-restoration of the kitchen door at the back, hence the blue tape. Quirt is working too hard to focus on buying some art, hence the blank walls. But there's a lovely stained glass light fixture overhead, just out of frame, the plaster has been redone, the electrical work has been brought up to modern standards, the plaster nd original woodwork has been painted, and the fir floors (a century-plus years old, but not original) have been refinished. One day, it will be finished....
postimg.cc/xJkw7nXf][img]https://i.postimg.cc/xJkw7nXf/IMG-0040.jpg -
You can copy the image from Postimage and just paste it in. There used to be a size limitation but that seems to have gone away.
The house looks great, and I love the back door.
I remember someone telling me about when their house was all done they'd <fill in the blank> . I just laughed and laughed. "You keep using this word "done". I do not think it means what you think it means!". There's no such thing as "done" regarding a home.
Last year was the basement, the year before the kitchen. This year we got a new sidewalk and are refreshing the landscaping.
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Wow, 68 pounds! That's great, Mik!
You are correct about the corner cutting. Also, our contractor is approaching retirement and his nephew-successor couldn't be bothered to be onsite, so their subcontractors also cut corners. And stole things. And damaged the irreplaceable fir floors and stair treads.
Also, the movers stashed our stuff in a warehouse for three weeks, lost some of it, damaged the irreplaceable fir floors and stair treads, and damaged the piano (not the playing parts but the case).
Also also, GE has had to replace two of our appliances (never buy from them, truly), but it took months of dealing with their incompetent service contractor for this to come to pass.
Since Quirt works the above-mentioned 24/7, I had to run point on a lot of this. Hence the fact that I won't have a novel out this year. It's a good thing we love the house, which is a sturdy beast that will stand long after we're gone and has shrugged off these indignities, and the town. It was listed as being built in 1886, but we've since learned that it was built at least as early as 1869, and some parts of it may be older. You should see the size of the beams in the basement. Trees like that barely even exist any more.
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View from the kitchen sink.
Piano at Christmas. We have some art up in that part of the room now. Same as entry hall--paint, plaster, electrical, plus window treatments chosen so we can enjoy the outdoors and have privacy from the street.
Also, we now have a better-looking chair.
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I took that last photo standing in the double pocket door between the living room and dining room. (The pocket door still works great after all these years.) Then I turned around and took this one.
Front of house
Back of house
At some point, I'll take some pics of the kitchen that was a big focus of the renovation. None of the pictures really capture the thing. The tall ceilings, slate mantels, porcelain doorknobs, etc. just don't photograph well, or I don't have the skill. I'm working on a new Faye story, so I reread the old ones and was struck that the house I created for her in 2002 had plaster ceiling medallions, faux painted mantels, double door topped with a palladian window, plaster walls, moldings...I gave all those things to Faye, and now I live with them. It's kinda cool.
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We decided there was room on the first floor for the big piano, after all, so I was able to keep it instead of trading it for something smaller.
I am trying to upload some photos to share, but I can't for the life of me figure out why PostImage can only see my whole Photos album and not the House subalbum.
We decided there was room on the first floor for the big piano, after all, so I was able to keep it instead of trading it for something smaller.
Oh!! This makes me so happy!!! That is a glorious piano, it would have been awful to have to let it go.
(Getting rid of my Yamaha U1 upright when we left Japan was hard enough!
re postimages... I usually post links to individual photos, so I'm not sure about posting a link to an actually album within Postimages.
But I selfishly hope you're able to figure it out!
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@mary-anna Whoops, scrolling up I see that you have shared some photos. It looks fabulous! There's not much I like more than a room with a piano and Christmas tree in it!
(Although you seemed to have shared the thumbnails rather than the full photos)
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@mary-anna It looks lovely! Lots of personality in those old homes. Not cookie cutter!
I know you're are super busy with other projects, but the "g" in "wtg" is wondering if you are planning a veggie garden.
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I think I'll leave the thumbnails for now. Every time I start to post pictures, I fall down into a rabbithole of user error. lol
wtg, I haven't done any serious gardening, because there are a lot of deer in the neighborhood (plus voles, squirrels, bunnies, and there have been bears seen elsewhere in town) and I'm afraid of investing a lot of time and effort, only to get my heart broken. Also, we have a lot of shade.
So I've been getting my gardening yayas out with my indoor hydroponic gardens. Right now, I've growing tomatoes, eggplants, jalapeños, cucumbers, and lettuce in quantities large enough to use (now and then), and I'm experimenting with collards, mustard greens, banana peppers, snow peas, fenugreek, and squash.
However, I noticed that one flower bed, which had nothing planted in it, gets more sun than I thought, so I threw a few seeds out there to see what happens. We had a very cool spring, so I'm only now seeing seedlings, and I really don't know whether anything will survive the shade and animals. But seeds are cheap! It's a big experiment. I've got a few plants each of okra, trombocino squash, carrots, garlic chives, lettuce, and peas, and I've got quite a number of tiny seedlings of arugula, mustards, and swiss chard. And one potato plant. If they continue to survive, I'll post pics of my experiment in gardening in the north under pressure from predators.
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That's quite an assortment!
I feel your pain on the critter front. It's a never-ending battle.
Potatoes are really easy to grow in pots. Critters seem to pretty much leave them alone, though a couple of years ago my neighbor found a bunch of his potatoes harvested by some enterprising chipmunk and hidden in its den under the front porch, quite a distance away from the pots in the backyard where they had been growing.
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A potpourri of thoughts:
Pet pictures are never gratuitous. My biggest challenge at work these days is access to my laptop. Cosmo has decided I pay much too much attention to it.
The house looks great. Victorian? Will look forward to the kitchen pics.
What's got Quirt so busy? Must be interesting work or I can't imagine he'd stay at it.
I'd have a garden if we, like you, didn't have so much shade. We're also under constant attack from the local fauna, and some of the flora. Deer, coyotes, bunnies, squirrels, chipmunks, woodpeckers of all types (cedar sided house), snakes, mice, bees, ants.... I suspect the yield would be minimal, but I'd still try if I had the sun. As it is I just grow herbs on the deck. Janet grows Anthuriums and Begonias, and beautifully.
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Awwwww, Cosmo looks so sweet! Loki, Muffin/Amanda, and Rogue say hey!
Quirt does securities law, so he's working with people who want to get their businesses listed on the stock market. On the whole, they are very anxious for him to do things yesterday, and they wish he weren't so persnickety about following all the rules and regulations. However, it's very challenging and interesting work for him, and I'm glad as a person who owns stocks that he's on the job, keeping the people who issue it on the straight and narrow.
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Oh, and yes, the house is Victorian. The only question is when in Victoria's reign it was built and whether it was all built at the same time. The front door is off-center, as if about half the house is an addition that isn't quite the same size as the original house. We are pretty sure it was built without electricity, water, gas, or a sewer connection. Some of that history is visible. There's a huge fireplace in the basement where we think the servants cooked, and there are flues for potbelly stoves that make us think they also lived down there. The house itself would have been heated by fireplaces in the four chimneys on all floors. There's an added room that's just out-of-frame in the pic above of the front of the house, and I feel sure it was built when they got indoor bathrooms. We're told that somebody ran a boarding house here at some point, and there are five rooms on the top floor that are finished, but not luxuriously, that are probably where the boarders lived. I guess with all that history, it should feel haunted, but it really doesn't. It's very bright and sunny and has good vibes.
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