Sebastian's Quiver

So, as all three of you know, we bought a house about a month ago. The plan was simple: pull up carpet, tear down wood panelling, paint, renovate the kitchen, and a month later, we’d move in.  Of course, the Fates had something else in store for us. I pulled up the carpeting and the oak floors in the living room were fantastic. The floors in the dining room, on the other hand, were disasterous.  The carpet in the bathroom revealed the original hexagonal white tiles, but the carpet glue was attached securely to the tiles.  The cabinets came out, but the soffit removal required some rejiggering of the ceiling joists. We discovered fir floors in the kitchen, but only under 2 layers of linoleum and a plywood subfloor, which was secured to the fir by approximately 5000 nails.  The previous owner had converted much of the house into a jail cell by securing metal security bars to a number of the doors and windows, including the all important sliding glass doors in the kitchen (which was/is used by a number of the contractors since it opens onto a sizable concrete patio).  Oops, sometime during renovations, someone lost the only key.  Out came the sawzall to cut away the steel prison doors.  Oh yeah, behind the wood panelling?  Four or five layers of wallpaper (and some lead paint for good measure).  The plasterer was called in to give all the walls a double skim coat.  I could go on and on about the trials (trolls?) and tribulations of what should have been a minor renovation, but parts of wound are still a bit too fresh.  Did I mention that we ended up moving in before the kitchen was ready?  And not even ‘not ready’ – the floors are still unsanded, the walls were unplastered and unpainted. We don’t have cabinets picked out, though we have the countertops ordered. No gas line from the new gas line that the gas company provided, so we won’t have a way to cook for another 10 days or so.  Oh yeah, we pulled the sink out of the bathroom, too (it was a disaster), so we have no bathroom sink and no kitchen sink right now (though we do have a downstairs laundry sink, but no washer and dryer).  The basement is full of boxes with hardly anywhere to walk, the garage is packed full of stuff, there is dust everywhere, and we all tread lightly because the floors were refinished almost to perfection.

There are a few good things to come out of all this. We are forced to go out to eat a lot, so we are exploring the neighborhood, meeting people, and trying out a lot of restaurants. We will eventually have the kitchen that we want (if a bit small) with a kickass refrigerator, gas range, counters, butcherblock and fir floors.  The walls were painted and they are fantastic (let me know if you need a Portland painter).  We learned that just about everyone who lives around us had a friend or relative (or both) that was interested in buying our house, but we ended up snatching it up before anyone knew it was for sale. We’ve met more neighors and talked to more people (in restaurants, walking down the street, in the park, etc.) in the past couple of weeks than I met in seven years in Decatur. Sebastian loves the new house and has adapted superbly to the move. I think he might miss the stairs a bit from our rental, but we have lots of stairs outside the house for him to get his fill from. I can go on and on about how wonderful a place this is to live, but I don’t want to make you all TOO jealous. Did I mention the amazing refrigerator that I found on Craigslist?  I showed up to look at the fridge and I ended up talking to a complete stranger for almost an hour about kitchen renovations and refrigerators and countertops and a host of other things. Me. Talking to a stranger. I put a down payment on it (just as someone else was calling to set up a time to look at it), then showed up a few days later with my hauling/landscaping guy (who also builds fences, and does a whole host of other things, like play congas in some local bands). Well, I told the woman who I was buying the fridge from about how wonderful James is, so he gave her his card and now I got him some more business (after getting the fridge moved for chump change, because that’s how James is).  It’s a small world when everyone is so friendly.

So, the move. The Day of Dread. One day to move a house filled to the brim with stuff. And by stuff, I mean junk. We had probably 50 boxes in our basement that we never emptied out after our move from Atlanta to Portland. I went down there to tape up and label the boxes last week and I realized that most of it is just plain junk. Some time in my past most of these things were sentimental to me. I tend towards nostalgia. But after looking at all these things, I realized that I am the owner of 50 boxes of mostly junk.  Sure, the photos and mementos from my grandparents are very important to me and I’ll always keep and cherish them, but those things really are a small percentage of the whole. I know that when we finally start to go through them it will be difficult to throw a lot of the stuff away. How about my old bowling trophies from when I was in high school? My father kept his bowling trophies from when he was younger (oh yeah, I have those, too), so why shouldn’t I? I’ll probably keep them (on the off chance that my son will one day find them cool enough to want to carry them from house to house to house).  But crap from old jobs? Ancient, decaying paperbacks that I read in high school that probably weren’t even good back then?  Is there any reason to keep these things? It’s hard to throw away books, but I think a large majority of these will be taken down to Powell’s or some other used bookstore and sold off for 10¢ on the dollar (if I’m lucky). And it’s not just the sentimental stuff and books that are clogging the tubes, it’s every room in the house. How many pots and pans and dishes and bowls and knives and forks and glasses and mugs do two people need?  Whatever that amount is, triple or quadruple it and you’re approaching the number of that we have. Luckily our kitchen is small and the storage space smaller – we’ll be forced to make choices on what we are able to keep.

Oops, that was supposed to be about moving day.  OK, moving day.  One day to move a house filled to the brim with junk.  We did the best job we could to pack the house up. Of course, the more we packed, the more it seemed we needed to pack. The first half of the boxes are easy: books, LPs, clothes. But as you pack more and more, the stuff you have leftover suddenly doesn’t really fit neatly into boxes. Ugh, just thinking about it gets me angry (and anxious). Then there’s the piano. And the motorcycle that hasn’t been started in over a year (since Atlanta) that doesn’t have any brake fluid. Thinking about those two things kept me up a number of nights. I’ve had the piano moved a handful of times and every time I tell them that it’s probably the heaviest upright piano that they’ve ever moved.  I get the same response from everyone: “Pianos are our specialty! It won’t be a problem. We move heavy pianos all the time!”  Then they try and move it.  Oops. “Wow, that’s the heaviest piano I’ve every tried to lift.”  No duh.  This time, the mover’s ramps didn’t extend all the way to the top of the stairs so six of us (SIX!), only four of which were movers (James was the fifth and I was the sixth) managed to lift the piano up several stairs. Twice. A piano that probably weights close to 1000 pounds. Crazy. But we did it. It will never move from it’s living room position for as long as I am its owner, which is as long as I own this house. I’m through lugging this piano from house to house to house. It will be sold with the house (and probably the humungous safe in the basement, too, since that probably weighs about the same, if not more). I was also worried about them not finishing in time, since we had to be out of the house the next day. Little did I know that they worked until they were finished. The movers said that they’ve worked past midnight on occasion. “We work till we’re done,” is what they said. I wish I knew that before I spent nights worrying about it. They showed up at 8:30am and wrapped up by 7:00pm. They ended up making two trips, which actually was a huge boon, since I got them to put the motorcycle on the truck with the second load so I wouldn’t have to spend all day Sunday trying to get the brakes working and then have to drive the four miles with an expired Georgia tag. Crisis averted! Then Juli spent most of Sunday cleaning the house and packing the last things that were strewn around the house. After the landlord had the gall to complain about a little shmutz in the oven (after they didn’t even clean the house before we moved in), Juli talked her into giving us our full security deposit back, all thanks to her single-minded cleaning frenzy and her ability not to curse at the landlord (two skills I have yet to master).

Slowly but surely things are shaping up. I will celebrate the day when we’re done with this initial phase and we can settle in and start unpacking in earnest. It’s a wonderful house in a fantastic neighborhood.

And one last thing: we have three new additions to our family to announce: chicks!