An unblogged adventure: happy ending

Actually, the end isn't quite yet upon us, because of course there are a few little details that need fixing up. (When you live in an old house, are there ever no repairs that need to be made?) Not to mention the rehanging of most of our artwork and photos, which is proceeding very deliberately on our newly beautiful walls.

But for the most part our redecorating adventure is over, and not only am I glad of that, but also very glad that we had professionals do the work for us. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to stand on the scaffolding you see on the right, the apparatus needed to paint our stairway walls.

You can see on the left that they did a wonderful job, in spite of the precarious working conditions. (Note new, functioning doorbell under the vent—when it rings, I still wonder at first what it is, since we lived for so long without one.)

Here are some other glimpses of our not-quite-but-mostly-back-to-normal new rooms (technical note: blotches are a camera artifact—paint job is flawless).

newly re-finished floors in the living room waiting for the return of the furniture

living room with furniture and most of the knick-knacks returned from exile in the garage
(note un-pretty fireplace: a future project, along with Henry's home theatre)

dining room with unpacked and re-displayed glassware
(note re-hung pictures in the hall—one of the only spaces to have pictures back in place at present)

To the sincere delight of future guests, we're sure, the powder room (on the right) now has an appearance in keeping with its name. Although the drain fixtures of the sink need some adjustment, and we're still debating what to hang on the walls. Plus we need to find a sufficiently elegant-looking toilet paper hanger, towel hook and soap shelf. We have a funky antique mirror that we plan to use in there, but its placement is still a matter of some dispute. And because of this, we can't really select a light fixture yet. But it's quite an improvement over its previous life!

I really love the color of the walls, and have voted to have the front door of the house painted in this color. But, that is also still up for discussion.

Moving upstairs, our guest room doesn't look quite like this anymore, because it's full of guests and their stuff. But they like it, and we're looking to hang some art work in there tomorrow:
One of the most wonderful aspects of our "new" house is much less obvious than the painted walls, the shiny floors, and the functional plumbing. We have plugs! Everywhere! Here is a rundown of the before and after numbers of plugs in each room:

• master bedroom: 2 vs 6
• tv room: 3 vs 4
• study: 1 (!) vs 3
• guest room: 2 vs 4
• living room: 3 vs 8 (plus untold goodies hiding in the walls waiting for the home theatre fantasy to become a reality)
• dining room: 1 vs 3

Plus, new safe plugs in all bathrooms! Lights in two closets where none were before! I feel like we've been brought into the twentieth century—and within sight of the 21st.

Saving the best re-decorating story for last, below is my study, where the blogging magic often happens. The floral pictures are sentimental favorites, painted by my grandmother and dated 1944. (Another of her pictures, featuring the plane my father flew in World War II, got a new frame to celebrate the new wall it resides on in the study. You can see it here.)

The lovely photograph in the white frame (a rather blurry closeup of it is on the left) was a present from my sweet and very talented daughter-in-law. The palette in the peaceful scene looks like it was meant to go with my new wall color, don't you think?


The only other item of special note in the picture is the part of a "Peace Now" sticker you can see on my sewing machine at the right. It was placed there in another era, when the machine was new, referring to another war, but, sadly, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, n'est-ce pas? I can't quite bring myself to take it off, even though it's yellowing and torn. Maybe someday.

Wordless Wednesday: hometown icons

An unblogged adventure, part 2

The Secret Life of the Home

This is the title of an extra fascinating section of the totally fascinating London Science Museum*. But it could also serve as a sub-title for this collection of photos.

During the repair phase of our repainting project we were treated to some behind-the-scenes looks at our house's structure. Some of what was discovered was perplexing and made upgrading more difficult (like the zany original wiring that's now been made all modern and safe). But most of it was just really interesting.

Beginning with the wooden skeleton. The very experienced guys we had doing the work were impressed with the solidity of the basic construction. Our house's bones were put in place back in the day (mid-1930's) when 2 x 4 meant a board that was really 2 inches by 4 inches. Here's a look at some of these beauties, in the living room walls where they were awaiting new wiring to be strung amongst them.


Another "they don't build 'em like that any more" aspect of the house is the sub-flooring. The guys pointed out that not only are the sub-floor boards individually nice and thick, but they were installed diagonally over the floor joists for extra stability, which wasn't always done. You can see this technique here, where the flooring had to be removed in the powder room. (It had become warped from—guesses? anyone?—toilet overflows.)


Of course this extra solidity made it extra hard to put the new commode in there. The sub-flooring had to be cut away because new commodes have to be placed a different distance from the wall than old ones. One of the delightful details I would have been just as happy never knowing about. But I'm glad I didn't have to do this work!

Upstairs the walls are as solid as the floors. The studs in these rooms have shiplap boards nailed to them, over which, originally, wallpaper was then hung. On the right you can see what these walls looked like before being sheetrocked over in the guest room. (Click on the image to enlarge.)

The goofy folks we bought the house from in 1980 "fixed it up" by putting 8' paneling (the ceilings are 9' high!) on all the bedroom walls over the shiplap. We wished so many times that they'd just left the wallpaper and let us redo it the way we wanted. We really wished they'd left the popcorn texturing (complete with 1970's disco sparkles!) off the ceilings. But it's all gone now, finally! Except in the 2 undone bedrooms.

The guys worked fast taking off this paneling (which we had simply painted) and putting up the sheetrock, but I was able to catch my study, on the left, with its wallpaper still intact. What a lovely green! Not!

Although we didn't redo the bathrooms (saved for another day, and perhaps another lifetime!) we did have new GFI plugs put in. Doing that in our bathroom required the removal of our medicine cabinet, revealing another good example of very sturdy construction. Not to mention a collection of used razor blades (already cleared away when I took the picture on the right) that had been slipped down the convenient slot at the back of the chest. A little bit of americana right in our walls, from the days when flat razor blades were the only home shaving option.

Finally, below is perhaps the most amazing behind the scenes glimpse. I got to see how our windows work! Who knew!?

I only knew that most of the windows in our house didn't work—that is, they wouldn't stay up without props. Once, I even came close to seriously injuring fingers between the top and bottom sash of one of these antiques. But how are they supposed to work?

We got all the windows repaired in the repainted rooms, since in order to do this, the molding all around them has to come off. Best to do that before you paint, right? And when you take the molding off, this is what you see:


The weights suspended by these ropes (the breaking of which, by the way, causes all the problems with windows crashing down) are really heavy! They move up and down in these little channels, one pair on each side of the window. Who thought this system up? It just seems so quaint to me and I was very pleased to get to see the mechanism revealed.

Next up: "finished" product photos.

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*Read about my visit to this wonderful museum last fall right here. And you can see a bunch of photos I took there in this Flickr set.

An ironic anniversary

Isn't the first anniversary supposed be the paper one? So how funny is it to have a first anniversary in the paperless blogosphere!

One year ago today my Hometown Tourist blog was launched. Thanks to all my readers who've made this a very rewarding and fun 365 days. I hope to be able to continue churning out occasionally interesting little chunks of prose [perhaps an unfortunately connotated metaphor?] as regularly as possible in 2010.

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Home redecorating blog posts are being readied and will be posted shortly.

Wordless Wednesday: new use for boats

An unblogged adventure, part 1

For the last 2 months, I've been unable to share with my reading public the most important features of my day-to-day life.

We have been redecorating (thoroughly!) a bit more than half of our house, but since I wanted the finished product to be a surprise to our globe-trotting son and daughter-in-law , I couldn't blog (or tweet) about it! I was about to go nuts!

Finally, they arrived Sunday and were suitably amazed and impressed with our efforts. Here they are, along with Austinite daughter, playing an insanely complicated BSG board game in our newly elegant and luxurious dining room—to what better use could it be put?!

So now I can share the saga with the world!

To give you an idea of where our starting point was, here is a picture of our "grand" entry hall before the project started. The cool LOTR poster was covering up a hole in the wall. Note peeling paint around the archway. Paint was peeling all over the downstairs. But this wall was especially bad because of damage caused by overflows from the bathroom just above it.

And here's the downstairs powder room, complete with non-functioning sink (the drain pipe had rotted away—note the "do not use" sign). Getting this vital space fully functional again was a major objective of the work.

Amazing things happened during this project. For example, on the left you can see Henry actually mopping the living room floor after he and his brother moved out the furniture. "Henry" and "mopping" were two words I never thought to have seen directly connected in my lifetime, at least outside of the fantasy/science fiction genre. In this photo the baseboards have already been removed to allow new wiring to be put in place.

He really got into things, especially in the living room, where his dreams of a home theatre system have yet to be completely realized. But the wiring is in the wall!

In the background of the photo on the right you can see that the damaged wall below the LOTR poster has been removed. Here are some better looks at it.

with poster still in place over the hole...so long, Aragorn!...

...and with hole made bigger for repairs. Sound insulation (to keep embarrassing tinkling sounds in the powder room from disturbing diners) has been added to the wall

Here's the work a bit further along, with the walls in the entry all patched and ready to be textured. You can imagine how yucky they must have looked before when I tell you how beautiful they appeared to us at this stage!

To give you an idea of how thoroughly our lives were disrupted, here are a series of photos showing how various rooms looked at various points in the process. The guys that did the work were very accommodating and—given what all they were doing—friendly and easy to have around. But I can't believe now when I look at these pictures, how we survived with (mostly) sanity and marriage intact.

living room full of building materials, painting supplies and other implements of destruction construction

guest room full of stuff from my study while study was being worked on (bed is still in garage)

my study full of stuff from guest room while guest room was being worked on

dining room full of supplies (the giant buffet eventually had to be moved to refinish floor but here is only covered for protection)

that's how you paint a ceiling! note cheerfully-colored scaffold. That's my piano, well-covered in front of the fireplace; it eventually also had to be moved out when we decided to do the floors

half of the garage made unusable for cars (although boats & bicycle stayed at home) while used for storing non-essential furniture

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As you might be able to tell from the photo at the top of the post, things are not yet completely back to [the new] normal. Nothing's been hung on the beautiful new walls, since I don't want to be as cavalier about such things as I used to be with the crummy walls. I need to give these decisions more thought. And some of the furniture has yet to be moved back from the garage.

But we can actually inhabit all of the rooms of the house, and sit down in the living room, which are simple pleasures I had no idea were so precious.

In my next post you'll see some of the secrets of 1930's domestic architecture that were exposed in the course of the project, and then I'll show you what the rooms look like now.

Spousal shout-out

Back in November, the very weekend I was taking it easy in the Big Easy, my husband and some friends took off in the opposite direction from San Antonio. They headed west for a 3-day paddle on the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park. If my New Orleans plans hadn't already been made, I'd have gone with them—hopefully they'll want to go again sometime and I can join them.

The next best thing to going, however, is looking at Henry's wonderful pictures and reading his detailed and often humorous account of their adventure.

He doesn't believe in labelling his blog posts, but if you go to his main blog page now, you can see the last of seven posts about the trip. And the previous six are in reverse order going down from there. If you'd rather see the first one first, it's here.

I'm sprinkling just a few of his fabulous pictures here to give you a taste of what he's been working on the past month or so. (The versions in his posts are bigger; I didn't want to upstage him.) Visit his blog or his Flickr pages (linked at the end of each post) and enjoy the desert scenery.

Wordless Wednesday: my private pool

Blogging ennui.....?

I have been a very bad blogger lately. And I relate this to being a very bad Hometown Tourist as well. But, realizing you have a problem is the first step toward recovery, right? And I've been doing some thinking about why this has come about.

[in the meantime, I've dotted this post with some select photos from my 2009 travels, to entertain my readers and—hopefully—to get me back on track]

Classes start today at St. Mary's, bringing to an end a long holiday break that saw me

1. staying home a lot and
   
2. working very hard on my London photo project

These are two reasons for my lack of material for, and even lack of interest in, Hometown-Touristing. Staying at home means catching few interesting sights around the city to inspire blog posts. And, perhaps more importantly, my head—and heart—have been in London, rather than here at home.

I've realized—duh!—pretty clearly that you have to be open to current experience to be a good tourist or a good traveler, whether your current experience is happening around the house or on the other side of the world. And my intense concentration on London has closed off my eyes and ears to what's going on here.

Two examples:

1. I intended, at the beginning of the holiday season, to make a trip downtown so that I could take a photo like this one of our lovely Riverwalk at Christmastime and show you how San Antonio dresses up for the season. But I just never managed to get downtown. (Thanks to nanpalmero's Flickr photostream for this great picture.)
2. When I did have an errand last week that took me to a part of town I don't usually frequent, I could have gotten some neat photos and shown you some of my hometown's diversity. But I forgot to take my camera with me! If I had been in proper Hometown Tourist mode, that never would have happened.

So. Now that I'm back in the working world (more practice for retirement will have to come this summer) I should see more things around town to inspire me to write. Plus, my globe-trotting son and daughter-in-law are coming to town for an indefinite stay starting next week. I'm sure they'll get me out and about to new places and new experiences.

AND, my London photos are almost all done! Web pages need proofing, and some technical difficulties with Flickr are slowing down the process, but the end is in sight! So hopefully this project, fun as it is, will be bogging me down less and less as 2010 progresses.

Wordless Wednesday: soon to be frozen over?

Twenty-ten* !

One of those years is actually here! I mean, one of those years that used to make you think of something else, when you said the words. In this case, it's one of my favorite sci-fi movies, 2010. (Turner Classic movies lets you watch the trailer here, which really made me want to see it again, badly!)

The last time this happened was in 1984, in one of many coincidences—see below—the year 2010 came out. This date had always had a very sinister connotation. Before January 1, 1984 dawned, I wondered what it would feel like actually to live in that iconic year. (The environment of which, thankfully, wasn't much like that in the book.)

As it turned out, what happened wasn't anything mystical or life-changing (at least, not anything to do with the date). It became just another year and the syllables that make up the words nineteen eighty-four sort of lost their original power. I suspect that will happen pretty soon with the syllables that make up twenty-ten, too.

However, something very special did happen in 1984, and it's actually related to the movie 2010, which is, of course, related to today. Bear with me a minute.

My daughter was born that year, and all the previous years that I'd spent dreading the coming of 1984 (ever since I read the book, which was probably in high school) melted away in the joy of adding her to our family. Now 1984 just became the year I entered as her birth year on all the school forms to come.

The connection with 2010 comes from her name. Everybody knows the computer in the original 2001, HAL. You might not remember that there's another computer appearing briefly in 2010, whose name is SAL. (The review I wrote for the movie, since this was back in my movie-reviewing days, was even written from her viewpoint.)

Now, HAL's name in 2001 was, according to some scifi geeks, a little joke on IBM (just move back one letter). But our son's nickname was chosen for its Shakespearean connotations, not to call to mind psychotic computers, as a way of distinguishing him from his father and grandfather, for whom he was named. Our Sally was named that because we liked the name and there are other Sallies in the family. How funny to find out later that year that we'd named our kids after two of Arthur C. Clarke's computers!

My SAL and HAL visiting me in London last year

I wish that the hopeful message of 2010 will infuse our new year in reality, in spite of the fact that we're a ways behind the movie, space travel- and home decorating-wise. And I hope it's a happy one for all my kind readers.

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*I don't think there's much of a contest between saying two-thousand-ten and twenty-ten, as was discussed in a recent NPR segment. I just don't have enough excess energy to spend some of it putting an extra syllable into the date every time I say it. Now, if I can just remember to write 2010 on those first few checks of the year....