Happy PHEW Year!

We’ve never started off a New Year quite like this. After 10 hours of painting downstairs and patching upstairs, we felt like we had been trampled by the crowd at Times Square. For the outside walls of the basement, we used "Dryloc" – paint with the consistency of glue mixed with sand, kinda like when I try to make gravy. For the inside walls, we just used a concrete primer. As you can see (and compare with "before" photos on the side), it’s already a big improvement; it actually enlarged the basement. I know this for a fact, because I made at least two trips to the Big-Box Store for paint.

The aged masonry sucked up that goop like Ray Milland in The Lost Weekend. For all of the past 97 years, the only attention that’s been paid to those walls were a few segments where it appears someone’s child made a half-hearted attempt to give it some color with a type of green usually reserved for the Sunday comics, stopping when it got complicated around the hot water heaters and the stairway. The best that I can determine, they used something akin to Easter Egg coloring. When I was washing down the walls to prepare it for the Dryloc, that icky green whatever started to come alive! It turned my hands, my rag and my wash water green not to mention started running down the walls like some kind of alien plasma. Even when we painted it with primer, that stuff would reactivate; and the green would ooze through the thick white paint. If I didn’t aggravate it too much, it would stay in one place. I’m hoping that it’ll stay sealed in and not permeate the next color we put on. (Anyone have a clue as to what this weird stuff is?)

We plan to give the ol’ gal a little rouge in her cheeks, and go back on the walls with a light, light, light rose color. That should give it a nice, inviting atmosphere.

We took out that mysterious sink down there (the one that appeared to have a garbage disposal attached to it – see picture on the side.) Now, once we patch that open cavity that was formerly the coal chute, it’ll be a nice, neat area for setting up grow lights for the outdoor plants we want to keep going through the winter.

Rob spent several hours patching cracks in the plaster upstairs. One of his earliest ambitions was to vacuum the tops of the window and doorframes. Since the previous occupant had several cats (and, apparently, little time for housecleaning), their hair made a soft carpet in the most unlikely of high places. Honestly, there was enough hair up there to knit together a Cats revival. His artful repair to the varicose-vein like cracks in the plaster make the walls look like interesting maps with little white roads leading off in all sorts of directions.

I should mention that New Year’s Eve was productive in its own right. Brother Rob came over in the afternoon and worked for 3 hours rehanging the front door and installing the dead bolt lock. (If this were a client/attorney relationship, I would have been broke by the end of the afternoon.) The previous owners had so much weather stripping on that door that it wouldn’t go shut entirely. Rob took that off, reset the doorjambs, and now it goes shut with a satisfying thwump.

On the day after New Year’s, I was actually able to spend some quality time with an employee in the Kitchen department at the Big-Box Store (okay, I won’t be too cagey, it starts with an L). They have a special promotion for all of this month – buy at least 2500 square feet of Corian countertop and get a free Corian sink. The sink that we really like – normally $650 – is included in that free offer. The only problem is, we will probably have to special order the cabinet base units, as we have some funky dimensions in our old house. We also insist on having the kitchen sink rest precisely in the center of the two huge windows. ("I don’t think I could handle it if it wasn’t," Rob confided in me. "I’d feel off kilter the whole day.") This special order wont be in for another 3 to 4 weeks, pushing back our anticipated completion date for the kitchen. In the meantime, the contractors will have to get the kitchen floor ready before anything else (that is, after they call us with a little, minor detail known as ESTIMATES).

Now, I know Corian isn’t "authentic," when it comes to redoing an old house; and we risk the consternation of the purists among us. However, it’ll be a room we spend a lot of time in; and, on this point, we’re willing to sit glumly in the corner with the rest of the apostates.

For added countertop space, we plan to incorporate a base unit of an old kitchen cabinet that I restored several years ago, with the help of my Dad. At that time, we added a top to it and it’s currently used as a Fiesta hutch. We’ll remove the cabinetry on top, slap a Corian countertop on it, and it should make a dandy island with plenty of workspace and storage.

Of course, when there’s nothing else more pressing, there’s always the little matter of stripping three layers of paint off the baseboards, window and door trim in the guest bedroom. We actually have a handy little setup in that room. Since we’re redoing the floor anyway, we don’t worry about the mess. Let the gunk fall where it may! Now that I’m regularly using the respirator when I’m in there, the conscience-altering fumes don’t bother me nearly as much. However, I do miss not being able to channel Elvis like I used to.