A Dusty Sort of Place

About a decade ago the siding was crumbling off our house, necessitating replacement. My friend Vikki, now more-or-less retired but then a full-time bookkeeper, had several construction clients, and she recommended a guy named Dusty. She called him a “good man, and an honorable one.” I found Dusty just down the street from my childhood […]

A Happenin’ Place

If there’s an explosion in a house, that’s generally a bad thing. Unless we’re operating in figurative terms, and the house in question is the one we have under construction. And there the bang means things are happening. This week alone, stucco supplies have materialized in the yard, solar panels are all in place, the […]

Snappy Decisions

Do you know how many people have told Lynn and I, during this house-building process, about how building a house leads to divorce? Well, I don’t have an exact head-count either, but it’s been a lot. A lot. No, I don’t have any startling announcement to make, but I would say the tension is at […]

All Hands On Deck

Nothing — and I mean nothing — about having a house built is simple. Even things that sound and seem innocuous. Don’t believe me? (Or maybe you do. Play along anyway.) Examples abound. Flooring. When I spoke with Cynthia from Green Building Supply, the oak hardwood she assured me was sustainable was supposed to be […]

Cornered

I have had this on-going problem that isn’t really a problem yet but setting up to be in the All Things To All People Room in our new house. We keep calling it the “laundry room,” and it is where all the laundry action is scheduled to take place, but this is everything going in […]

Be Our Guest

As part of our House Math, we are (voluntarily) losing one bedroom when we shift locations. [House Math, addressed many moons ago, is the perplexion (shouldn’t that be a word?) whereby we go from 1,600 square feet to slightly more than 1,700 and can’t fit anything we own.] Currently, we live in a house with […]

Bamboozled

I don’t know if it’s with the same frenzy as paint, mostly because there’s no local store to go stand in front of a display and then buy little samples, but Lynn and I have been consumed by floor issues for the last couple of weeks. Here is another large difference between paint and flooring: […]

Outside In

Today is Marrakesh’s foundling day, and the sun has decided to, at long last, celebrate with us. (We so rarely know our pets’ actual birthdays that we instead celebrate the days they arrived to live with us.) It is also graduation day at Western No Longer State, so I imagine several hundred graduates, faculty, family […]

In Neutral

Another weekend, another fervor of paint. How can there be this many shades of non-color? Lynn and I of course had more plans than weekend once again, and once again absolutely nothing got packed up or moved to our storage shed. Once again we spent hours and dollars getting little cans of paint and slapping […]

Make No Mistake

Lynn’s brother may have made a mistake yesterday when he sent a short e-mail wondering how our new house is coming along. See if you can believe this: I barraged him with a multi-paragraph reply. Amid those paragraphs, I may have worked in a commercial for this blog, the inaugural purpose of which was to […]