House Made

halloween kitty
Originally uploaded by merideth.

new coffee table
Originally uploaded by merideth.

Because today we decided to go shopping for a new coffee table because our current one finally fell apart.

We’d been thinking about it. We’d done research. Beth wanted something lighter (as in less weighty) looking and less rustic than our current table. I also wanted something less rustic with a slight Asian flair to it.

We’ve shopped catalogs. Shopped online. Shopped national chains. Today we went to the Wooden Duck–a cool store here in Berkeley that makes furniture from recycled wood.

We found exactly what we were looking for. We bought it. It’s awesome. It meets all the criteria, plus it’s made from recycled California Douglas Fir taken from a demo’d building. And it was 30% off. Nice.

Here’s the part where we aren’t like my sister and brother-in-law: It took one day. Even if they’d been looking for something specific, found it, LOVED it…it still would have been mmmmmm 3 months maybe? before they actually brought it home. I love them. But they are nutty.

Additional cool thing: It has a little drawer in the front just big enough to fit all the remotes and a few other random things.

total scaffolding
Originally uploaded by merideth.

All of the scaffolding is now in place and I just want to climb around on the whole big, grown-up-size, monkey bar mess. It is made particulary “grown-up” thanks to the added danger of the slight rickityness and the possibility that I could tumble off it with one unbalanced move.

The wood stops (basically temporary trim around doors and windows that don’t have any) are in place. The paper and wire are almost completely up, and the real muddin’ starts tomorrow! I cannot, cannot wait!

Thank GOD the rain has stopped.

Dig on our scary pumpkins.

porch lights
Originally uploaded by merideth.

Yup. We are now officially close enough to having the house mud on to order the exterior fittings. We got our house numbers from Ravenstone tiles after seeing the article on them at Hewn and Hammered. They will be awesome. And these are the lights for the porch…well one is for the porch and one is for the bottom of the stairs. We went with the circular rather than the traditional craftsman-boxy style to mix things up a little. And we thought that this is a good opportunity to bring a little curveyness to our very square little house.

scaffolding
Originally uploaded by merideth.

That’s right! The scaffolding is going up. The rear of the house is becoming rapidly covered by builder’s paper. Parts of the front have already had their first layer of stucco applied. We are ecstatic!

Saturday the scaffolding guy started getting all that hardware up. Sunday the stucco crew and our kick ass head stucco guy showed up and started cranking. We hammered in all the remaining pokey outy nails and tore off the few remnants of siding that we couldn’t reach. Today one of the crew is continuing the prep work on the back and sides of the house.

Beth is currently suffering from the plague and has been all week. But that has not dampened her excitement over the world’s most expensive mud!

wedding
Originally uploaded by merideth.

Yup! Today is our anniverary. We were married three years ago today in Glen Ellen in the lovely Sonoma Valley wine country. It was the best wedding I’ve ever been to with hands-down the best food and most deeelicious cake.

As year three is the year for leather gifts, so we got each other this neat leather vase and a suede finish chair (we faked the leather on that one because we knew the dog and cat would destroy the real thing).

I’m happier than I ever thought possible and look forward to a good 150 more years of bliss with my girl.

Oh, and it’s no longer hot enough to melt the house. It’s officially autumnal. Lovely cool weather, leaves falling, and we’ve had two fires in the fireplace. I love fall.

ceiling_leak
Originally uploaded by merideth.

So the rains have come. They’re only slightly early, but early nonetheless. And this is bad. It’s bad because the house is still un-stuccoed, riddled with holes, and the roof has a big leak in the kitchen. We knew about the leak and even have the guy lined up to fix it, but he can’t start fixing until the stucco is on. And, as previously mentioned, the stucco is not on.

We love our stucco guy and have hung in there with him even though he’s been so busy he’s had to push our start date out. But Beth called him on Saturday, after the rain bucket on the kitchen counter was full, to see how things were looking. His response was, “Oh shit. I forgot about your roof.” But now things have started moving. We picked out a color for the stucco top coat, and the scaffolding guy came over yesterday to take measurements. The place might actually look good by the xmas season!

On the upside, in its current creepy, delapidated state, it’s one big Halloween decoration (according to Beth).

Yup. The house melted a little bit. It was really hot out. The sun was beating on the west-facing wall of our house. We tried to stay away from the rooms on that side of house. The sun went down. All better.

Wrong. At about 10 p.m. we hear a huge crash which requires investigating. We walk into the office (a west-facing room) and see that one of the shelves that was holding lots of solid, hardcover design books had fallen. Fine. Add that to the stuff to fix list. I’ve come to terms with the fact that it will never end.

But I go to pull the remaining pieces out of the wall to start patching the plaster and damn if the dry wall anchors that had held the shelf up weren’t fully melted. Softened. Mushy. Melted.

When hardware gets melted out of your wall, you feel like less of a candy ass for walking around panting and trying to hog the fan breeze from your loved ones.

suffrage demonstration 1917
Originally uploaded by merideth.

I just watched Iron Jawed Angels on HBO. Aside from the fact that it was a great movie and DAMN what those women went through for suffrage, it occurred to me as I was watching it that the woman/women in the first family to live in our house had only been allowed to vote for two years and had not yet had the chance to vote for President. Holy Crap! Sometimes history just sneaks up on me when I’m least expecting it.