The Secret Garden

I've traditionally considered greenery to be a luxury. While plants are nice to have around, they're not something that I'll often think to miss. (For that matter, when plants are around, they're not something I'll often think to water. But that's another story.) Perhaps it's unfair, but I tend to think of plants as scenery – a sort of singularly needy sculpture. Consequently, I never particularly noticed our previous building's complete lack of ground-level greenery.

No, the dumpster doesn't count as "ground-level greenery."

When Landlord B showed us around our future domicile that first afternoon, though, the flower beds around the entryway were sufficiently striking that I both noticed and commented on them. "I like landscaping," B explained. "I've planted beds of flowers out here and in the back garden."

What a garden it was!

Deskwork

'ELLO! You've discovered the secret hidden message!

My desk was among our first moving day casualties. I'd honestly never expected that it would survive as long as it did – its warped particle board construction and $20 Craigslist sticker price didn't exactly inspire confidence on the durability front. Sure enough, no sooner had we begun moving it from my old room than it began ejecting its components across the floor. A few of them left a trail of sawdust all the way to the dumpster.

I did keep the base and even used it as a surface for placing expensive and fragile things. In retrospect, this wasn't the best idea, as the truncated surface proved wobblier than a three-foot aspic perched upon a teeter-totter. But don't take my word for it.

Utterly unacceptable! Even so, I didn't even start looking for a replacement for three months. As a good friend likes to say, why wait to procrastinate?

Varnishing woes

Upon deciding that staining was unneccessary and taking several days off, we resumed our flooring quest. It was polyurethane time! Before getting started, we decided to read the directions on the can. Unfortunately it's black, size 6 font on a brown, curved background. So there was no way we were getting any info out of that.

It was a dirty job, but somebody had to get soaked in oil, covered in sawdust and stuffed in a garbage can. RIP cookie monster towel!

But instead of the natural inclination to just go ahead anyway, we decided to consult the Home Depot website to check on timing of coats. We browsed around for a few minutes but could not find the item we purchased. Apparently they had dissavowed all knowledge of Minwax 2.5 Gallon (or any other size) High-Build Polyurethane Semi-Gloss since our purchase. After much hunting we found something we thought comparable that claimed one could put down a second coat after 5 hours or when no longer tacky. Thus we set out: start varnishing at 3PM, put down second coat by 9PM and be done by 10.

Macho

Apparently, heavy use of power tools causes a cascade of unrelated changes in one's life. Here's an overview of the process:

Tools → Appetite → Testosterone → Raging masculinity

I think I now understand what it's like to be a college athlete. I used to watch football players load up their trays with cereal, grilled chicken, eggs, bacon, and ice cream, and that was only for lunch!

After a few days of manual labor, my metabolism had ramped up to nearly the same level. When it's 10 at night and your body needs about a thousand calories right now, one food group keeps surfacing into your consciousness. Meat. But where does one get huge servings of meat late at night?

So began a beautiful friendship.

Mineral Spirits

So it was really important to us that we get the varnish down as soon as the sanding was over lest dirt become fused to the near-white floorboards. But now that our timetable for finishing the floor had long been flushed down the crapper, why obsess about this detail? What's the difference between one or three days between steps?

Well, probably good we waited at least for all that sawdust to settle because upon our return to the house we found quite a bit that escaped the reach of the shop vac. P was really pushing hard for the use of mineral spirits to clean the floors, and so we set out to find some. I had never used the stuff, but I was familiar with the concept of the paint-thinner/cleaner. Hijacking an unwitting linksys network with my ipod, I began hunting down a store that a) carried it and b) was open during the evening.

Sanding party

On Sunday the 21st, we should have been ready to go. We'd carefully calculated that the sanding process should take exactly 3 hours and 40 minutes, leaving just enough time to return the tools without incurring Home Depot's hefty 24-hour rental fee. We were so sure of this that J didn't bother getting to the store until 3:30, four and a half hours before their stated closing time.

Upon arriving, however, he learned that Home Depot had done some calculations of their own: they had determined that by closing at 7:00, they could screw us over. Royally. Fortunately, they had left a loophole: tools rented just before closing time could be returned the next morning at no additional cost!

With 14 hours of tool rental secured, it was time to get this sanding party started right.

With vacuuming.

Home Depot

(We apologize for the lack of updates. Now that the biggest tasks are more or less complete, things on this front should start picking up again.)

In my mind, a Saturday trip to Home Depot is something of a rite of passage for the modern American youth. You get up early; you sit through an interminable drive across scenic suburbia; you stand around for hours while your parents argue about measurements, heft cans of combustible chemicals, and compare identical pieces of tubing; you have to help hoist the haul back home. Horrible!

Now that I have my own place to remodel, those strange adult activities seem a bit more understandable. Wood stains, sanding belt grit, wool versus synthetic applicator pads: all these details matter once it's my choice, my home. It's an interesting new perspective.

I still don't see myself spending twenty minutes comparing identical faucets, though.

Okay, technically it was twenty seconds, but the point still stands.

The Old Things

[Travels beget more travels. Misadventures in rehabbing a house sometimes branch off into other smaller adventures along the way. This is one such related adventure.]



Growing up in Virginia, I used to take many walks into the woods near our house. I had many adventures in that place, just me and nature. It was on one such excursion that I stumbled upon a curious surprise. An old, collapsing cabin. No roads, no neighbors, just this ancient home dropped in the middle of a large wood. It was certainly mysterious, showing no signs of life for many years. But it did have more than first met the eye. Since the day I discovered it, I spent many a day journeying back and finding treasures, the old things that once belonged to its tenants. It was like being let in on a secret, the home life of nameless families, with clues to their lives that were at the same time tangibly concrete and impossibly esoteric.

I have always had an intense fascination with old, broken down things. Whilst in Ohio, I loved driving by barns, houses and factories that had long been out of use, imagining what sorts of things happened in those places, the people that lived there, then reflecting upon the relentlessness of time, the inevitability of decay. And this, I suppose, contributed to why our basement so intrigued me.

The front door saga

Landlord B showed us around the place for a second time on Saturday morning, and upon trying to enter, one problem was glaringly obvious.

See that place where the key goes? Yeah, me neither. Purple smiley faces notwithstanding, it's no laughing matter: what's the point of having a hip and swanky joint if you can't even get inside?

After obtaining the keys and grabbing my toolset from the other apartment, I got to work. It's just a doorknob, right? Unscrew it, remove the old lock, swap in the parts from the lock replacement kit B kindly provided, screw it all back together, and that's one more dumb doorknob down, right?

THE INSTRUCTIONS ARE IN CAPS BECAUSE LOL NOT LISTENING

Oh, okay, hum. That's a lot more gizmo than I'd expected. I'll just start unscrewing things and see what turns up. Good plan.

Background

Despite an often entertaining three years in our current apartment, J and I recently decided we'd like to live someplace more like a home and less like a piñata. Our walls are paper-mache and our upstairs neighbors are a bunch of kids who routinely beat on their floors and cave in our ceiling for fun. No, seriously, they did that.

Here's our bathroom ceiling after months of repairs. I wish I'd had my camera the day water was pouring down a piece of insulation into a 5-gallon bucket on the floor.