Survivors

It's already November and my front yard tomatoes just won't give up! I can hardly believe it but I've got tomato plants with big ripening tomatoes and even flowers. I think the flowers are doomed, frankly, as it hardly gets above 65 degrees now. But the tomatoes that are already formed will ripen . . . slowly, slowly.

The taste isn't what it was in the heat of summer, but still. They're better than anything you'd buy at the supermarket. I'm using them for stews now, and chili. Yum!

The fall wreath

I was in Target day before yesterday, shopping for a few housekeeping necessities, when I spotted a medium-large door wreath of fall leaves. I thought it was pretty and went over to take a look. Well, I almost fainted - it was $90! And of course it was really only fake fall leaves on a circular wreath form made of twigs. $90. I don't think so.

Then I had a brainstorm, kind of born out of my stubbornness and dislike of being over-charged for something I know isn't worth that much. Michael's, the art and craft store, was just down the street. Bet I could make a wreath, maybe even a better wreath, for a lot less than $90. As soon as I was done at Target, I headed for Michael's.

Minutes later I walked out with a twig wreath, a spray of beautiful fake fall leaves, and a whole roll of really pretty wire-edged ribbon that had been on sale.

Home I went, fired up the glue gun, and 15 minutes later hung a beautiful wreath on the front door. It cost $11 and a few minutes of my time. My new wreath even has a bow, which the $90 model didn't have, plus I have extra ribbon for a later use.

Isn't life grand?!

Amazing Upholstery Adventure # 3

Just because I haven't written recently about the chair I'm upholstering (with the help - I should say he's doing most of the work, I'm learning - of my Upholstery Guru Rolando), doesn't mean there hasn't been progress. You would hardly recognize Wayne's grandfather's chair. Here are some recent photos:







                              The chair in its underwear:





The chair getting dressed:






 Here's Rolando adding yet more stuffing, even over the underwear. This chair is going to be a nap magnet!!









Here's the chair with half its dress on. Oh my, it's going to be beautiful!

So far away

Wayne's daughter Marja just left after a weekend visit. She lives in Los Angeles and is driving home as I write this on Highway 99 through the central California farming countryside - Modesto, Fresno, Chico. Marja's mom Mary also joined us and now she's gone too, back to her home in Santa Cruz. Our house is awfully quiet, and we're a little depressed after a full three days of chatter, eating, drinking, and laughter.

Two weeks ago we flew to Portland for a quick 3-day visit with my son Arthur and his family. It was great fun as they had made a lot of changes in their backyard and inside their home. Wayne helped Arthur re-wire a ceiling light in the basement. Jack, my grandson, was leaving for his first day of 7th grade as we were getting ready to go to the airport to return home. Two days later, Arthur called. "Hi Mom, I just wanted to know how you two are doing. We miss you." I think his house had become awfully quiet, like ours is today.

Why do we live so far from those we love so much? Our children have chosen to build their lives in places we don't really want to move to, except that they're there. But they're not in the same place. We live in the middle, between them. Not close enough to have day-to-day contact, but close enough that we can fly or even drive occasionally without too much trouble. It's the day-to-day stuff we miss. They seem to miss it too.

When we were young, we couldn't wait to "get out of town" and find our own lives. Wayne moved to California from New York, and I moved from Minnesota. We were really far from our families and yet we didn't feel any pull back. It has never occurred to me that my parents might have missed me in the way I miss my son, who lives considerably closer to me than I did to them.

Undoubtedly we and our children are closer emotionally than we were to our parents. Our kids are in their 40s now and we're still close. It's to be enjoyed, in the bittersweet way of enjoying something you miss and wish you could have more of.

Amazing Upholstery Adventure #2: The naked chair

We finished the first posting of the AUA (Amazing Upholstery Adventure) halfway through deconstruction. Of course, I finally succeeded in stripping all layers of the old upholstery and padding off the chair. In doing so I learned several important things:

• You find various levels of expertise when you deconstruct a chair that has been upholstered and re-upholstered. In my case the top-most layer was done by someone who was not an expert. Although I'm sure it looked good enough - after all it was used for years that way - it was not well done. The upholsterer put the new stuff right over a lot of the old stuff and didn't really know how to nail properly. Many nails were in crooked and/or misplaced on top of one another. They were hard to get out!

• The second (bottom) layer of my chair's upholstery was done by a master. Every nail was placed just as it should be. All the parts that hadn't decayed were intact and I paid close attention to how they were done. When someone years in the future pulls apart the upholstery I'm doing right now, I hope they feel the respect I felt for this person, probably living in the 1800s, who did this expert and careful work. I can only hope mine will be nearly as good.

• I would much rather be using a staple gun, as we do today, than hammering nails, as they did when both the first and the subsequent upholstering were done in the past. What a lot of work! So many nails, and having to pound each one in! Did I mention in the last post - there were hundreds of nails?!

• The original nails used in the first (the expert) upholstery were irregularly shaped, and I believe they were hand-forged. This makes the chair a bit older that we thought, maybe 1860s to 1870s. After all it was Wayne's grandfather's chair, and Wayne's mother was born in 1901, so her father could easily have bought the chair in the 1800s. It may have even been in the family before that. We don't know, but wish we did.

If I was going to spend the money to have a chair upholstered by a professional upholsterer, I would take all the old upholstery off it myself first. This is so much work, it's easy to see why it costs so much to have professional upholstery done. It makes sense that you'd save a lot of money by doing this part yourself.

Here's our chair, naked at last!! What's next in this Adventure?

Amazing Upholstery Adventure 101: Deconstruction!

My friend Rolando, who is a professional upholsterer as well as a fellow-bartender, has agreed to teach me how to upholster a chair. I am totally excited - I've always wanted to learn this skill. It all seems mysterious and difficult - obviously that's why it is so expensive to have someone else do it!

Our project is Wayne's grandfather's chair, a nice old wood armchair whose green damask upholstery is in sad shape. For years, the chair has stood in our bedroom covered with a throw. Now it's going to be liberated!! And beautified! Rolando says it will be easy - we'll see.

My first assignment has been to strip all the old upholstery off the chair. I had no idea how much was involved in this assignment, or how much I would learn from it. First thing I noticed was that hundreds of nails were used in upholstering our chair, and hundreds of nails had to be removed in order to strip it. Literally hundreds! Here's a photo of the seat in deconstruction - that's where I started.

And here's the seat with most of the (broken) webbing off. If you look closely, you can see another piece of broken webbing hanging down behind the right front chair leg. On this seat there was webbing on both the bottom and the top of the burlap cover. Apparently the upholsterer of the green damask left the original webbing underneath and just added new webbing on top.

I learned during this phase of the project that it is always better to remove all the old bits of everything when re-upholstering. Old webbing, for instance, disintegrates over time, although new webbing may last forever because of updated materials. Most chairs you will re-upholster have old webbing, but how can you be sure? Take it all off! All old chairs have cotton stuffing with the potential for bacteria and other undesirables in it. How can you be sure? Take it all off!

More to follow on My Amazing Upholstery Adventure soon!!

I learned something new today

I'm always amazed when I learn things (finally) that are so basic, it's hard to imagine why I didn't learn them before. There's the problem with the duvet on our bed always slipping off toward the foot end of the bed. And the problem of the duvet itself moving around within the duvet cover, so that it eventually all wants to bunch up at the foot end of the bed, with no duvet up by your neck where you need it. Gravity, no doubt, and also why the whole thing tends to slip off the bed.

Even worse, Wayne and I are always tugging the duvet up because we're cold, so not only do we wake up several times a night to do this, but every morning I have to re-make the bed from scratch because it's all torn up. Annoying.

Some time ago, I read of an easy way to get the duvet cover on and I said to myself, "AHA! The next time I change the duvet cover, I'm going to do this."  It was a simple thing, just reach in to the far corners and more-or-less turn the cover inside out. Then grasp the corners of the duvet and cover together, or tie the duvet in, and let the cover turn itself right side out over the duvet as you shake it a bit, holding on to those corners.

The words "tie the duvet in" stuck with me as a possible solution to the Other Problem, the one of slippage. Today I changed the duvet cover and resolved to sew ties in the inside corners of the clean cover and onto the corners of the duvet and "tie them in". I cut some cotton tape for ties. When I reached in to get the corners of the clean cover and turn it inside out, I felt ties. Hmmmph. Well, I'll be darned. Then I looked at the duvet itself, and there on all four corners were little tabs, exactly what you'd want to attach those ties to. I've had this duvet for at least ten years, and they'd been there all the time.

I felt pretty stupid, but also pretty excited. All problems solved. And when I got the original duvet cover out of the dryer, I checked it out. It too had ties. I learned something new today!

Simple pleasures

Even though we haven't had much of a winter (i.e. decent rain only in December), the signs of spring are everywhere. All this week, we've responded by tackling the back yard and gardens - a big job we've put off for a couple of years, so by now it's really a project.

In the middle of all the work, which I have to admit is also fun, I realized this morning that I was especially enjoying two simple pleasures. The first has nothing to do with the yard, it's a set of towels I bought a week ago. I just love them because they match my bathroom walls (a light pink) as well as the tiles (gray). It gives me such pleasure to see them, I'm not sure I'll be able to take them down to wash them! Just kidding.

My little herb garden also gives me great pleasure to look at. Of course that is part of the backyard project. I've finally trimmed the huge rosemary bush back so the other herbies can get some sun, and refreshed the soil with compost and chicken manure. Yesterday I planted a variegated sage to fill in the elderly sage plants I already have and use, and I planted a chamomile, which I love for tea. I also have a lemon verbena in the garden, whose leaves make wonderful tea. And an epazote, which is a common Mexican plant used with beans to aid digestion and minimize gas. We love beans, so it's real useful!

You can see I still have some space in the herb garden, and I'm contemplating. What should I plant - more thyme? Another parsley? I have parsley in the brick planter, as well as tarragon, so maybe I'll try something new. Don't know yet.

The herb garden needs a new fence, or perhaps needs no fence at all. That fence is on the list. Lots to do!

One small victory

I've been so annoyed with my dining room floor for the past year or so, or maybe it's better to say I've been annoyed with the way my floor looks. After all, it's not the floor's fault or the dining room's fault. It's actually my fault as I failed to pay attention and communicate clearly with a woman who, with all good intention I'm sure, used to clean my home for me.

A year ago or so, I noticed my dining room floor looked very worn in certain high-traffic places. Or was it just dirty? I washed it of course, and nothing changed. Would I have to have the hardwood floors re-done? Oh I certainly hoped not, because then I would have to have the floors done throughout the whole first level of my house.  Not only would it be expensive but it would be a big pain to have to move all the furniture somewhere else for several days and not to be able to use the house. I hated to think about it, so I tried to ignore it. Here's how it's been looking - yuck.

It got worse, of course, and then one day about four months ago I ran my new steam cleaner over the part near the kitchen door and some of it came up. Underneath I could see unharmed hardwood. Oh glory, it didn't need to be re-done. But how to get all this up? What could it be, it was so dirty and yet regular washing wouldn't clean it? Suddenly I realized it was wax - layers and layers of wax, and probably applied over an already dirty floor.

That's when I remembered this floor wax that I had bought for my former housecleaner to use. It was an industrial strength wood cleaner and wax, and seemed like a great thing. Unless, that is, you used it too many times and that's what had happened. She (we) used it for years.

Until yesterday my floor sat there in its sad state, making me feel like a terrible steward of my home.

Yesterday I was steam cleaning the kitchen linoleum when I thoughtlessly put the steamer down on the dining room floor for a few minutes while I answered the door. When I came back the steamer seemed stuck to the floor. When I finally pushed it forward, all the wax came off that spot along with the dirt under it and we had a perfectly clean wood floor - in need of wax, but never mind that. Yippee!

I got all the chairs up on the dining room table and otherwise cleared the floor as much as possible. In an hour or so I had most of that old wax up. It looks great! Now I'm going to research the best wax to use and I'm never going to let more than one layer pile up again! Can't wait to show off my floor!

It's a brand new year!

Do you make New Year's resolutions? I used to, when we had a neighborhood NYE party every year and we could all report on "how we'd done" with last year's resolutions. It was pretty hilarious, because none of us ever did what we said we were going to do. Sometimes we did the opposite. I was right there with the herd. Now that I'm working through most of the holiday season bartending, and most especially working New Year's Eve, the party is just a fond memory and I've decided to do away with resolutions too.

Instead, I'm adopting a New Attitude with the New Year, with the intention of enjoying life more and keeping healthy and active.

Of course I've always been active. God knows, I routinely take on twice the number of projects and interests than it would be possible for anyone to accomplish in 24 hours a day. It makes me happy to accomplish and to create (cooking, sewing, writing), but this habit also causes me anxiety. When you have five or more projects running concurrently, how can you finish? Are you doing a good job of anything? Where do the hours go? Well, they fly by. And am I really enjoying my life? Hmmmm.Good question.

So what am I doing now that will come out differently? Well, I haven't decided not to take on projects, but I've stopped making a list of everything I'm going to accomplish each day. This was useful when I was working fulltime and raising a family but now it ties me too closely to the clock. I'm finding it difficult to put something I decided I was going to do today off till another day. I get anxious when I'm not making the progress I determined I should. Why does this matter to me now? Why is it so important? It's not, and I've stopped. Because of this attitude adjustment, I now concentrate on finding pleasure in my day, and in what I'm doing. Whatever it is.

Here are a couple of the projects I've taken on this New Year. One is already finished, a plushy dog bed cover for my neighbor Par, who is a gracefully aging Akida - a large dog who is almost 13 years old, somewhere in his 90s in human years. He's such a sweetheart that my cat Nero even comes out to touch noses when he comes by. Here's Par on his new bed.


And then there are the stairs in our home.

This is a more long-term project - here's where we are at the moment. And here's a piece I wrote recently for my writing group about this project called, "At The Time It Seemed Like Such A Small Thing . . ."



* * *

At the time it seemed like such a small thing. We just tear the carpet off the stairs and it's done. No more dirty white carpet, no smell, just nice wood steps. Maybe the treads were oak, like the floors in the rest of the house. Maybe not. Fir was fine too.

            We did the landing first, as it smelled the worst thanks to a war between two male cats. Even though the main perpetrator died a few years ago, eliminating the need for the other cat to spray in response, the landing still smelled. We rented a carpet cleaner and cleaned it ourselves. Then we hired a carpet service to really detail that landing. As soon as warm weather came, it was pungent as ever. After awhile, yellow started to show on the edge of the carpet and we realized cat pee must have penetrated into the foam layer under the carpet, and maybe even into the floor under that. We thought we'd have to lift the carpet and replace the under layer. Or something.

            It took a long time to decide to take up the carpet completely. It happened when I saw that my son had taken up an unattractive carpet on the stairs in his home in Portland to expose the wood. It looked great. I came home with determination to do the same.

            When we pulled the carpet and then the foam off the landing, we found that the carpet and foam underneath were disgusting, as were the wood tack bars that had been nailed to the floor to hold everything in. This was no surprise, all was soaked with cat pee. On the positive side the landing was beautiful oak, although with paint splotches here and there and in need of refinishing. A pretty good first start.

            Then we pulled the carpet off the lower set of stairs and saw fir, covered with a truly ugly brown stain that looked like paint. Not so great, although the steps themselves were in good condition. Maybe just a little sanding and some stain and varathane, right? Wayne naturally checked for lead in the brown paint/stain on our 100-year-old stairs and it was full of it. Uh-oh. Now the sanding would take on the atmosphere of space exploration – big masks, ventilators, air cleaners, waving curtains of plastic sealing off the area. And it would take more time.

            We immediately decided to leave the carpet on the upper stairs intact until we finished the landing and lower stairs. It's called project timeline management. And we decided to paint over the stain on the stair risers with satin-finish black paint, as they were the most inferior wood and this solution would involve less sanding of lead. That's called gutless compromise.

            We started this project Sunday January 4. We gave ourselves three days start to finish. Today is Wednesday January 14 and, true, we took a few days off in the middle to get other things done. So far we've stripped off the carpet and the foam underlayer, removed all the nailed-in tack bars and hundreds of staples, sanded all the treads in our spacesuits, and vacuumed the stairs and landing countless times. In addition, I tore apart and cleaned every surface and every pot and utensil that was sitting out in the kitchen because, after all this, we failed to close the door between the stairwell and the kitchen while we were sanding. Argh, lead. All this took the three days we had allocated.

            Today we are starting again with sanding the landing, which is not lead. Then we will paint the risers and stain and varathane the landing and treads, which we hope will take no more than three days including one day drying because we will use quick-dry varathane. I can't imagine not being able to use the stairs for the almost-a-week traditional varathane takes to really dry hard. Where would we sleep? Where would we shower? Et cetera.

            Bottom line, home projects may seem like they're going to be small, but ha-ha! They're almost always not.

* * *

 

Yes indeed, isn't that the true story of home projects? Regardless, our stairs are going to be beautiful when they're finished, and I'm NOT so worried about when that will be.

 

I made a few other attitude changes too, but this post is becoming a novel. More about this later.

I hope your year is a fabulous one for you!