All posts filed under: Home Improvement

If only owning a century home didn’t provide so many interesting surprises.

Hello Toilet, Thanks for Being There.

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I’m thinking about toilets this afternoon. Yes, I am feeling just fine, thank you – don’t be crude. I mean I am thinking about toilets, not thinking about using one. I think toilets might be unsung heroes and the porcelain joy of our lives. Toilets are there for us. They are always in the same place in the dark night. Toilets are a cool and strong comfort during vile, feverish retching. With their lids down they are nice perch for filing nails, watching kids splash in the tub, resting towels on during dog baths. With one simple push of a lever or a button, everything that is distasteful just disappears. Even when not in use, toilets are witness to privacies of every individual in a household – including guests. Toilets greet us, all clean and ours, when we come home. Have you never been happy to be back at your own toilet after some kind of sickening ex-household experience? I mourn the absence of my own toilet when living in the outer wilds. I pine …

Too many socks.

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It was a problem. Gym socks. Knee socks. Hiking socks. Fuzzy winter socks. Socks more normally called stockings. Blue, pink, white, black, nude, brown, and striped socks. Hand knit. Silk. Cotton. Socks. Simply. Too. Many. Socks. The bureau drawer was a stew of tangled toes. Then, one cold spring day in the not too distant past, a miracle. A solution. We trolled through the estate sale remnants of a family’s life in Tonawanda, New York. The memories of nearly a century were laid on tables, stacked on shelves, piled in heaps for eager crowds to paw through. For a WideEyed person it is an overwhelming experience to witness a lifetime of personal items. Sad. Interesting. Somehow the stuff was too infused by another’s life for me to form a connection. The WideEyedSpouse and I fought the crowds and made it from the attics and into the basement. And there it was: abandoned among basement junk, shoved against a brick wall, hung around with faux fur vests for sale. It squatted on its turned legs with …

One year and three months in the bathroom.

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The WideEyedHousehold spent the last fifteen months without a bathroom door, shower, sink, or toilet more or less sequentially. This embarrassingly long duration of inconvenience was, of course, the fault of unadulterated laziness and winter ennui. In recent days we bootstrapped ourselves into finishing the job. More than one year ago, the WideEyedSpouse got to picking at the paint peeling off the 104 year subway tiles (see: 6 Days in the Bathroom). He peeled up the cheap sticky tiles and cleaned pink mold from the antique hexagon tiles on the floor. He stripped spray paint from the tiles around the radiator. I stripped nine to fifteen coats of paint from the woodwork, primed, and repainted. I scraped and sanded the ceilings and walls, primed and repainted. We replaced the tub faucet and shower surround. I bought a new beveled mirror for the old medicine cabinet. I broke it. I bought another one and some glass for the shelves inside because I thought that would look nice. It does. We found a 100 year old Empire …

I know I would paint better if I had a pair of Dickies painters pants.

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I own a nice brush. I bought quality paint. I sanded and primed properly. I’ve painted ceilings, walls, trim, floors in 5 different states, 6 different domiciles. Satin, flat, matte, semi-gloss, stain, paint stain, epoxy, and varnish. Interior, exterior, basement, attic, kitchen.You name it. I’ve painted it. And while I’m no pro, I can lay some paint. But you know what? I was standing in Sherwin Williams the other day waiting for my paint to shake and I saw that their Dickies painters pants were on sale. It was a really good sale, only $18. That’s a great price for any kind of pants, an exceptional price for magic skill infused painters pants. I didn’t buy them. Here we are, a little more than 24 hours later and I am commencing with painting the bathroom. I am all geared up in my ladies Carhartts and I am feeling ill-prepared. Queasy that I could do better. Don’t mistake the situation. The ladies Carhartts are good, solid pants. They lived in 3 states with me. They traveled …

Ceiling Fan of Damocles

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For a solid year the ceiling fan dangled unbalanced and clearly crooked above the Spouse and me as we slept. We knew full well that failure was imminent with this fan – one among many coming problems in the house. We knew that buying a historic structure was going to be…tense. That we’d have moments of joyful accomplishment while living under the threat of crushing large scale repairs and near disasters. Since we moved into the place last year, the ceiling fan has been the physical embodiment of stuff we didn’t want to think about. This spring the fan waggled in an increasingly catastrophic rhythm. After 13 months of lying under a 52 inch, 30 pound whirling death trap – except for a few short weeks when we graciously permitted guests the use of the room and shared with them potential dismemberment, contusions, or electrocution – the Spouse gave destiny a shake up last weekend and had a look at the situation under the fan’s cowling. Two antique wood screws wedged the fan bracket into …

You say that like beer would somehow impair my ability to be awesome.

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Actually, I didn’t say it like that at all. It was a simple query about the wisdom of the action being taken. We were having a rainy and cold Saturday evening. The husband was fussing with the 1920s ceiling light we found at Buffalo Reuse last weekend. It was tucked up in a back room of that cavernous, dark, and very, very grungy retail outlet for parts yanked out of “green” demolition projects. Stacks of tiles torn from bathroom walls (the husband is still fighting an infected cut from one of those), old toilets (I mean used toilets, really really used toilets), doors, windows, tin ceiling chunks, and other house bits are piled next to only slightly worn tanks of corrosive fluid. Anyway, the husband had just discovered that with careful use of Bon Ami he could remove the filth crust of nearly 100 years to make the molded milky glass of the light gleam like new. All that remained was to replace the dangerously inept 1970s era rewiring with new, legal, and safe wiring and …

6 Days in the Bathroom with Dental Probes and a Razor Blade

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I promise you, it is safe to read on. This isn’t about mental health. It isn’t about a hostage situation. It has nothing, whatsoever, to do with home veterinary surgery. It is about antique tiles and latex paint, achieving their disunion, and bothering with old things. Once upon a time, Buffalo was the center of the universe and Olmsted’s parks were filled with flowering vines, nannies and prams, horses and bicycles. In this 1912 world of hope and money, Mr. and Mrs. Butler built my house. Its rooms were airy, the windows numerous. The bathroom gleamed with state of the art, antiseptic white subway tiles and tiny hexagonal floor tiles. Let’s imagine it was a joy to clean – for the woman who lived in the attic room, whose own toilet was in the basement. Mr. Butler died fairly young in 1920. He spent only 10 years shaving in front of the shiny, new bathroom mirror. Catherine, his widow, sold the house within two years. As I picked latex paint from grout lines among the …