May 3 week: pt. 3

A new word:  hecti.  What could it ever mean?

(By the way – you know that dust you see in the header?  That’s about one third of the dust we ended up with by the following week – and what you see on the floor got all over the house – ALL over everything.)

You may remember that, when we left our heroine, she was awash in tears over the terrible green that had been slapped on the walls of her long, long awaited bedroom?  “But what happened?” you may well ask, having been left, most heartlessly, hanging.  I know you have all been biting your nails to the joint, worrying over this.

Worry no longer, for here is the tale:

We are now up to Wednesday (lucky for us all).  And G had broached the suggestion—“We could repaint.”  But the finish carpentry was scheduled for Thursday, so we had to make our minds up pretty darned quick.  Once again, we brought our favorite strategy into play: we side-stepped the question all day long till it was almost too late.

Then we ran to TWO (count ‘em) home centers, hunting a green that would truly serve.  Found it at Lowe’s at last.  I think it was an Eddie Bauer color (of course it was).  Darker than G had ever feared (he had preferred a sort of nice middle-green khaki), but less blue.  More character.  We bought two paint samples (the Martha Stewart one at Home Depot was this little tiny glass bottle, while they give you a really cool miniature paint can full of color at Lowe’s) and smeared them both on the wall—the wall we knew would be behind my dresser (since it was the only wall my dresser would begin to fit against).

I don’t remember what it was that G was doing after that, but it was so important, I had to run BACK to the home center all by myself to get the paint and another roller and a bunch of roller covers and masking tape.

And in the end, here was G’s brilliant idea: we only repaint the bottom five feet of the room.  Dark on the bottom, lighter toward the top, neutral at the ceiling.  YAY!!  So we used an orange chalk line (G let our friend, April, snap it twice, but I only got to hold the end), marked up the old paint and started slamming on the new—just about the time the sun was going down.

I got up early next morning and touched the whole thing up a bit.  You can still see the tiny orange chalk line on the wall because it turns out I like it there.  Somehow, that thin orange between the greens seems to me well and truly Eddie Bauer-ish (in the most camping outfitter sense).  I don’t know why, but then there are so many things in life I do not understand.

My bathroom in mid reconstruction.  See the little bare naked bit on the floor there, connected to that wing wall?  I had them decimate that little bit of wall, and it made all the difference in the world.  If I’d realized it would be so nice and open this way, I’d have taken a sledge hammer to that wall thirty years ago.

New Carpet.  No more holes in the floor.  Just a nice big room you can bend over to pull your jeans on without sticking your head in the sink.

Les and Galen came Thursday morning to do the finish carpentry. They started upstairs with the planed cedar trim,

Above: Les playing with his machines.  Below: Galen, evidently dancing with joy at the beautiful magnificence of our paint job.

then they spent the rest of the time putting up the pine bead-board downstairs, turning cold caverns into rooms.

Below: what was happening outside all this time—

Big Foot, heading for the front door.

Dog and man, estranged.

But all’s right with the world.

Below: what was happening INSIDE (in the garage)—

Donna Smith, doing jazz with her husband, playing string bass.

Les had taken us out to look at the bead-board while it was still on the trailer, just giving me a chance to reject the boards that had a slight green bit of grain.  But I loved it all, and now we have a lovely, eclectic mess of colors and woods that suits us just fine.

We’re still trying to put everything we own in perspective (read: “Where did we used to keep this thing? Well, it was just over—but it’s all different now”).  So the rooms are not near ready to look at.  We have no blinds and the windows are dirty, and there are no doors on the storage cabinets.  But I wanted to show it off anyway, because I find it all so amazing.

So this is how it all looks just now:

Just a few of the 54,672 books that have to find a home somewhere in this house.

I think the bead-board really warms up the space.

My bear rug finally has its own place.

The bed is lumpy looking.  There is a story behind this, but I’m not going to tell it now.

Another angle.  Note the dog jail in the foreground.

Yeah, objects in this lens may be smaller than they seem.

The view out of the north-ish window.

And the west.

And the south.

Bathroom with breathing space.  YAY!!  You have to get old and spend half your retirement before you get breathing space.  Remember, please, that this whole project came about almost by accident.  And that we’re spending the retirement we’ve been saving for three decades, our thinking being that, the way the Fed Gov is going, we’re better off with some rooms we can actually use than with money that we’re going to lose, long before we get a chance to spend it.

The way into the bathroom.  In case you should ever have to find it.

And into the bedroom.

I made this window before we were married.  G broke it with a guitar and a long living room drape.  Don’t ask me how.  Hey – it’s provenance.

Self portrait with dresser.

Still life with dresser.  The quilty stuff you see on the rocker? These are the last blocks I made before I quit to do genealogy.  I should do more of that stuff.

The new storage cabinets in the old bed space.  We live in a house with no basement, no attic and not so big closets.  Thirty years of stuff has to go somewhere.  The full shelves?  Christmas decor (with some Easter and Halloween thrown in – literally).  Doors will come.  We just know it.

Les Allen is the BEST CONTRACTOR IN THE UNIVERSE.

And finally, in the vase my sister sent me, our lilacs, amazingly still blooming, ditto the lily of the valley.  Both are usually gone by the first week of May.  But it’s still cool and rainy, and we still have blossoms.  My two most romantic, heart-breakingly sweet and mysterious harbingers of spring.  Two of the loveliest scents ever.

Now, I gave you another odd security word:

hecti

It’s gotta be a latin derivative, don’tcha think?  Can you come up with a meaning?  Because there really should be one.