Changing it Up: pt.1

Monsters aside, there’s a lot of stuff that the homeowner has to do herself, getting ready for the launch of a new space.  Like take all the stuff out of the old space.  Stuff she’d forgotten she had.  Stuff that hasn’t been moved for decades.  Stuff stuck to the walls with spider webs.

And books.  In our house, if there was an earthquake, the books would do us in.  Mountains of them.  Mostly marginally respectable stuff: popular novels, translations of Beowulf and TinTin, picture books, English poetry, how to do everything, how to sing everything, how to find your way around the inside of a pyramid, ancient books by people like Nevil Shute and Rumer Godden and Elizabeth Gouge, tear-jerking Christmas books, bird and tree identification books, odd leftovers from college – like grammar style books and outlines of literature, fishing books.

Anyway, lots of books.  Fine when they are corralled into their shelves, but dangerous if they get the wind up their tails and come out after you.  And no fun to unload, carry, and pile in temporary places – like in front of cabinet doors and drawers and in passage ways that were too narrow in the first place.

And glass.  Old glass.  Grandmother crystal and things Gin bought in Finland.  Odd bits of the stoneware and ceramics that make up our mongrel table settings.  And couches and shelf units and chairs.  This house was getting smaller under the weight of thirty one years’ worth of saving memories and things we might need someday.  The choice was clear: either get rid of the stuff (WHA???) or build another room.

So my house looks like this:

and this:

and this:

The old room is stripped down to bare walls.  You know how your used car starts to look really great when you clean it up to sell it, and you start wondering why you’re getting rid of it?  Yeah, the empty room started looking plenty big.  If Char had bought a house before we started this room thing – necessitating that she take all her stuff and furniture to another location, maybe we would never have started it.  Too late now.

Then they took the drywall off the bottom of the walls so they could sheer off the bolts that hold the room to the foundation.  Then they made holes in the walls so they could pass huge belts around the framing and back out again.

They they built a wall inside the room to hold up the ceiling once it came loose from the house.

This is the end of part one.  This all happened last Friday.  The rest happened today, but you will not see it till tomorrow.  Or even the next day.  I’m sure you will be rabid with anticipation.