Sebastian's Quiver

Sorry (again) for the lack of updates.  Lots has been going on since my last post.  Sebastian is talking (sort of).  He has a whole slew of words, most of which we can’t understand, and the ones that we can understand all sound the same.  Thank goodness for context.  He has stopped using his signs for the most part (which makes me sad) and instead either uses his version of the spoken word or he just points and grunts.  He loves chasing the chickens around the yard. (Still no eggs. Any day now…)  And he likes picking the vegetables before they’re ripe.  Of course, the tomatoes and eggplants have pretty much given up the ghost by now since autumn has settled in, so all we have left are some lettuce plants that we planted very late and a green/purple pepper plant that is still holding on (my first successful sweet pepper…..ever).  Sebastian also loves to dance when we play music.  He starts to dance and then immediately asks to be picked up and spun around in circles really fast. No circles for me, thank you.

We went to Yachats on the Oregon Coast for a three night stay a few weeks ago – we all needed the R&R (including Misha, who got to come along, but not the chickens, who had to stay at home).  We got a house right on the beach and pretty much just alternated between sitting around relaxing in the house and running and digging in the surf and sand outside the house.  Fun was had by all.  Sebastian did much better than we could have hoped for both the drive to and from Yachats (3+ hours away) and staying in a new place.  He even slept for over two hours on the drive home, which made the whole trip a breeze.

For all you all who are sitting on the edge of your seat waiting for our kitchen to be finished, you can (almost) rest easy.  The butcher block counter top was installed (reclaimed wood from African shipyards – talk about recycling) and the shelves were built and installed (no upper cabinets, just shelves).  All that’s left is installing trim around the windows and doors, and baseboard moldings (mouldings?). Oh yeah, and picking out light fixtures.  We also might switch out the door to the basement (which is in the kitchen), but maybe not.  The next project will probably be starting on the basement.

Here are some photos from the trip.  If you want to see all the photos, check out the photo blog.  Also, don’t forget to keep an eye on my tumblelog, which has random photos and such from here or there.  It’s more of a quick post site.

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!

Before you comment on how big a slacker I am, remember that I’m one of the core constituents of Generation X.  Slacking is woven into the very soul of my being.  My default setting is ’slack’.  That might explain why it’s been months since my last update.  Then again, it could be because we’ve been busy.  Apparently, once a kid starts walking you have even less time to relax than before.  Who knew?  The other thing that we’ve been up to is house hunting and house buying.  As of this very moment that I’m typing this, we are the proud new owners of a new (old) house.  More on that in a bit.

Sebastian update!  He’s walking like a crazy man.  He has four teeth and he’s cutting two more.  He love eating blueberries, Swiss chard, Italian kale, risotto, beets, oatmeal, bananas, sand, turkey pastrami, pancakes, and, most of all, peaches.  Food he doesn’t like: mashed potatoes, any turkey that isn’t turkey pastrami, chicken, beef, and fish.  He still has his mother’s eyes and his father’s dimple.  His light brown hair is starting to get curly in the back, but it’s still mostly straight like his mom’s.  He got totally freaked out by a couple of ants that he saw while he was taking a bath and he occasionally gets offended by a stray piece of food that is sitting too near his foot.  His signing vocabulary is around 30 words or so, but he hasn’t spoken anything more than mamamama and dadadada.  His tormenting of Misha has picked up of late, much to Misha’s chagrin.  He loves playing ball, which consists of him running around with a ball and sometimes handing it over to one of us, or sometimes just swatting at it randomly around the room.  He gets very frustrated very easily when he can’t do something on the first try (I have NO idea where he got that trait from…).  He has slept through the night several times over the past month and has been better in general about sleeping, but with him cutting new teeth, his sleep progress has been interrupted.  He is definitely moving in the right direction when it comes to sleeping, but it’s a slow process.  He loves airplanes, and signs ‘airplane’ and looks up at the sky every time he hears one (which is often, since the airport isn’t more than 15 minutes away).  He’s pretty good at sharing with other kids, though he also thinks it’s totally within his right to go up to a kid and take whatever they have away from them.  Sebastian is a very active kid; he doesn’t sit still for too long (remind you of someone?) and he has to touch EVERYTHING.  He is, as the music teacher noted at the music class that he goes to, a kinesthetic learner.  If you look at the traits of a kinesthetic/tactile learner, it pretty much describes me to a tee.

For the past four months or so, Juli and I have been house hunting.  The housing market crashed, the interest rates dropped through the floor, and we had already sold our house in Atlanta and renting in Portland.  The only way we could have timed it better was if we sold our house 6-9 months before we did, otherwise, it was prefectly timed.  The houses we were most interested were in the worst school districts, so we started looking in SE Portland (as opposed to N or NE Portland, which were our first choices).  The only reason why we weren’t looking in SE is that we weren’t familiar with it.  It’s not like it was far away, it was only one mile south of where we live now, but if you lived in Portland, you would understand about how the five different quadrants of Portland are very different – North, Northeast, Northwest, Southeast, Southwest.  East and West are separated physically by the Willamette River, but also separated by a lot more psychically.  So we started investigating SE and found out we really liked it.  In addition, it seemed that all the school districts were top notch, plus they had some great charter schools (an environmental charter school and a Japanese charter school, for example).  We eventually found a house in a nice, quiet neighborhood that was owned by the same woman for 40+ years.  The main floor is about the same size as our house in Decatur.  In fact, there is a lot about this house that is reminiscent of our house in Decatur, except better.  For you geeks out there, it’s Decatur++.  So, the main floor is about the same size, but it’s a three bedroom, one bath.  The kitchen is smaller and crappy, but we’re tearing it out and renovating it before we move in.  It has sliding glass doors onto a concrete patio in the backyard.  The living room is much bigger than our old one, and the flow of the house is much better than the Decatur house.  The big bonus to the house is that it has a full basement with excellent height (7′6″ or so).  It has a two car drive under garage, but one of the garages was turned into a workshop, so there is no garage door there anymore.  The rest of the basement is partially finished, but our big plan is to tear everything out and renovate the basement into an office, a bedroom, a media room, a bathroom, and….drumroll please….a sauna.  We should be able to get 900 sq ft or so out of the basement.  The office will be where the old garage was and we’re actually going to put a garage door back into it (since the opening is still there, but just roughly closed in with plywood and framing), but we’re planning on putting a glass garage door that will eventually open onto a little garden area.  That’ll be my office (since I work from home).  The yard is smaller than the one we had previously, but we’ll have room for the chickens that we’ve been wanting and a nice vegetable garden and space for Sebastian to be able to play.  The other great thing about the house is the neighborhood.  The Decatur house was half a mile from Oakhurst village and a mile and a half from the Decatur square.  This house is 1/4 mile from an area like Oakhurst, but with shops and restaurants that we’re actually interested in going to.  And best of all?  Two record shops!  LPs!  Vinyl!  BOOYAH!  Another 1/4 mile past that is another group of shops, including the best grocery store in town (New Seasons) and a grocery co-op with a weekly farmers market that goes all year round.  The house needs a little work (thick carpet and crappy wood paneling abound), but it will be fun to shape this house into Our Home.  (Did I mention the carpeted bathroom? CARPET IN THE BATHROOM!  That’s up there in Top Three Disgusting Things You Can Find in a House.)  The bones of the house are excellent – thick 6×6 beams, solid concrete foundation, and one of the driest basements I’ve ever been in.  We even had the sellers put on a brand new roof as part of the sale.  I’d post photos, but until I have before and after photos, I think I’ll hold off – with the carpet and panelling, it’s pretty scary looking.

Oh! I almost forgot the two most important things about the house!  The semi-finished basement has a built in bar!  We need to spiffy it up a bit, but it’s a bar!  It’ll go in the media room.  The other thing is that I got the sellers to throw in the safe that is in the basement.  Safe, you say?  Yeah.  A 120+ year old large steel safe with hand painted interior doors.  It doesn’t lock, but it is COOL!  I included a photo at the end of the below gallery.  After I extricate it from the closet, I’ll take some better photos.  Well, I’m going to remove the closet from around the safe – I don’t think that safe is really ever going to be moved.  I think we’ll build the office around the safe since it’s pretty close.  The thing probably weighs well over 1000 pounds, but that’s just a wild guess.

That’s really about it.  We went hiking a couple weeks ago (photos below), but we’ve mostly been staying close to home.  The next month will be taken up by house renovations and packing, with maybe a weekend trip to the coast to celebrate our May 9 anniversaries (6 years since we met, 5 years since we got engaged).

Here are some photos: