Now you tell me

Our gardener dude Duane (first mentioned here) came by to do a little work. I think I should mention now that (we just learned) he is a bit of a legend in the northwest plant community. We're somewhat lucky to have found him because we met him at a party and he works with a friend and we happen to live in the same zip code, etc. He's talented and we're thrilled. Anyway, it has been a while so I was happy to work on the lawn with him. I had a lot of pent up frustration from the tiling episode and I needed to do something physical that in no way was limited to staying inside the lines.

About six weeks ago, Duane came by and killed a third of our front yard. Yes, on purpose. He sort of cleansed the palate. Apparently he follows the starting from scratch methodology of urban jungle creation. Our front lawn has been one-third dead and dry and two thirds green yet dying with extensive clover. We've been answering the neighbors' questions of what our plans were for the dead dry strip with pithy responses such as: "oh, we just like that color better" or "we're going to pave it" or "it's a landing strip." A few replies like that and your neighbors will stop asking you what you're doing. I guarantee it.

On yesterday, Duane came by to roto-till the landing strip. I offered to help. My frustration over the tiling debacle made the prospect of swinging a pick very enticing. I picked all the sod and ripped it up and Duane ran the tiller and—voila!—in about four hours, the dead dry strips of grass became overturned strips of dirt with dead grass sprinkled throughout. And this is an improvement.

While we were taking a break, I mentioned to Duane that I was thinking of painting a runway or parking stripes or something on the dead grass just to tease the neighbors. He said there is paint meant for use on vegetation. It's used to mark out pathways or bed locations or somesuch and will degrade over time without harming the plants. In fact—get this—another client has been painting some ground cover green because it died almost immediately after he planted it. He went on to say, "yeah, but now even the paint doesn't look that good. (pause) I'm not a very good gardener."

Well, that's bullhockey and was very humorous because it is so exceedingly self-effacing.

I'm going to go rub some ben-gay on my sore pick-swinging muscles and look out over my strips of dirt on the front forty.

Permission to do anything

It seems as if The T and I have managed to overcome our blockage regarding the Remodel (I capitalize it because it is going to be with us a long, long, long time). After not making any progress for many weeks, we've managed to cross four items off the list—the least of which was to make a list of tasks we have to do. This circular referencing has done the trick and I think the ball is rollin' now, baby.

Item #1 Make a list.
Item #2 Determine which of us will do what on the list.
Item #3 Make sure at least one of us is home when the contractors show up.

So far, so good. After much deliberation, the future woodstove has completely circumnavigated the first floor of the house and is going to be installed in the spot we originally picked out. Are decisions decided like this for all remodelers? I kid you not when I say the stove started in the middle of the southwest wall, slide to the north east to act as a room divider, perch in the southeast corner for a bit to admire the view, and then scoot over to the southwest corner to catch its breath before settling back where the journey began in the middle of the wall.

Now that that is settled, we can call Brien to start pounding out the construction documents and get a little more detail on paper.

We also asked a contractor to {cough cough} submit a bid for the bathroom out in the Taj Garage. Since we are so anxious to get the bathroom done out there that we're going to go with this gent who is a worker for our architect's father's construction business. He's a bit of a known quantity by Brien and we're anxious to have the plumbing room completed so we're going to accept his bid unless it's off by a power of 10.

We also met with our gardener. Didn't know we had one of those, did you? Well, we didn't know either until we realized he had us pegged perfectly after about 20-30 minutes of circling our lot with us. Our gardener, whom we'll call Duane, summed us up in one fell swoop when he pointed at me and said I like chaotic splashes of all kinds of color all mixed up and then pointed at The T and said structured color was more her speed. It was that accurate assessment of our design, er, styles that won him the contract to turn our drab city lot into a northern amazonian jungle, complete with wild felines.

We asked him where we should locate the outdoor cat enclosure. The grrllzz want to be outside and I want them to be contained and safe from traffic and the fleabags across the street. The T voiced her concerns over having the pen near the front of the house where its addition might make the house look "white trashie." Duane slowly turned and looked out the front window and across the street. He drily said, "You have a pink house across the street. What are you worried about?"

Point taken. Where's my shovel? I see some ground that needs a breakin'!

New Adventure

We have started down the path of our home remodel. It is both exciting and terrifying. Exciting because the end will be glorious—I only hope to live long enough to fully enjoy it (more on that in a moment). It is terrifying because the scope of the work we want to do is, uh, massive.

Step One was to call in a designer to help us determine which items on our wish list are feasible and which are fantasy. To his credit, designer one whom we will call George, did not laugh at my wish list item of a firepole from the upstairs bedroom to the fridge. In fact, he claim to have integrated one in a previous proposal which was ultimately rejected by the client. Score one point for George. While reviewing our wish list—which is a huge poster-size post-it note hanging in the living room, btw—he asked what we meant by "babyproof the house." I told him that item could be disregarded since none have gotten in yet. (Actually, it was added by a visiting friend who didn't seem to think our random piles of straightpins were safe for her young 'un.)

We knew the remodel fell into the category of massive undertaking when George said he was "ethically bound to tell you it would be cheaper to raze the house and build new rather than try to retrofit" our wish list.

This is where the question of my mortality comes in to play. The T and I do not see ourselves taking out a loan to pay for this all at once. Rather, we have a pile of cash now and we will use it as best we can to pay various tradespeople like carpenters, electricians and plumbers to do major things like take out a bearing wall, rewire the house and possibly move a toilet or two. Then we will jump in with our own tools and do as much as we can while our cash reserves build up again. Taking this approach, it may cost us more to then call the electrician to come back and rewire another section of the house rather than doing all the wiring all at once. But to do all the wiring may mean having all the walls open at once and I don't see us able to live in the space during the remodel.

When we sat down with designer two, whom we will call Brien, he asked us up front what kind of money we wanted to spend on this project. He asked this while scanning the previously mentioned poster of ideas. We said we had 20 years to spend on the project since we're not going anywhere. I'm not sure how he took this. Either we're adventurous or completely insane. It was tough to tell what his eyes were saying.

Both designers are off pondering what they can do with this space. Stay tuned for when the results start rolling in.