August 2004

August 4 , 2004: It's been raining every evening for the past week (typical late summer thundershowers) and we've been frustrated by bees, Mother Nature, and, as usual, Bad Joey.

Since the rain kept us from painting, we decided to get to work on a related interior project-- moving the TV antenna wire from outside the house, Inside.

Some 40 years ago, Joey installed a TV antenna in the attic. Believe it or not, the antenna itself still works just fine, but in his usual Joey-esque fashion, he installed the antenna in the attic, but installed the wire by drilling a hole through the attic wall to the outside, ran the wire outside the house, and back in through another hole drilled through to the family room. He did the same with the telephone wire. After all these years, the insulation around the wires and the connections has degraded so badly that the TV signal is getting fuzzy.

Since we were already tearing off the siding and had dislodged all the wires from their clips, we decided it'd be a good time to actually replace and re-run the wire inside the house, where it belonged. A rainy weekend afternoon provided a perfect time to get started.

The most efficient way to get phone and antenna wire to the rooms we wanted to wire with phone and TV was to go from the attic, down through the wall separating one guest bedroom and the master bedroom, and continue down the same wall, which also separates the parlor from the family room. Two holes, four rooms wired. Gotta love it.

The problem is, as we discovered, drilling down from the attic involves going through not only some gargantuan top plate (easily 6 X 6 solid, if not more) and then through a closet Joey framed when he added the master bedroom addition. Being Joey, however, the closet framing exhibits his usual creativity, and the header for the closet door sticks out one side far past the king and jack studs. As always, we know not why.

After an entire afternoon drilling several holes, in several locations, both up from the closet and down from the attic, using our longest (17") drill bit, we couldn't get through the framing, and gave up. Time to start hunting for longer drill bits.

We could insert our usual joke about Joey and his med cart here, but we're just not in the mood. Right now, we're tired, we're hot, we're frustrated, and honestly? We really just want to hit Joey with a bag of quarters.

August 15, 2004: Veering away from Joey and his particular brand of misguided evil for the moment, we are reminded once again just why we bought this property, and why we love it.

We wandered by our dining room window one afternoon, looked out, and saw these guys, who came by for a bit of a visit, and decided to have a plop down in our front yard and stay:

Yard Art! Too cool. Much more realistic than the fake cement ones, and we didn't have to pay $59.99 each, plus shipping.

Unfortunately, they don't stay for more than a few hours or so, and they eat all the shrubbery, but hey, we'll take it.

It's not like we've had any time to plant shrubbery to begin with....

August 23, 2004: Compounded by our recent spate of frustrations, our annual case of the August lazies has hit us with a vengeance. Renovations? What renovations? Our daughter's away with her grandparents for a couple of weeks, and there is wine to be drunk, friends to party with, a pool to be splashed in, and the Olympics on television.

Motivation? Derailed.

In our defense, though, we're not as bad this year as we were last August, when we decided to bag it all and take off for Scandinavia for a couple of weeks, and then spent the last two weeks of the summer reading six months worth of People magazines amidst white wine bottles littered on the pool deck. Ugh. Schwartzenegger running for governor, Becks playing for the first time with Real Madrid, Brittney Spears continuing to dissect her defunct relationship with Justin Timberlake, and endless Bennifer. It's a wonder we survived.

We weren't about to take our chances at a second headlong dive into quite those depths of depravity (the Flaming Nuns probably shepherded us through those fiery pathways, and why push our luck?), so in the last couple of weeks, we have managed to get some things done.

After being stymied in our attempt earlier this month at running wires from the attic to the family room by Joey's creative framing, we decided that he was not going to get the better of us. We got a huge honkin' 36" drill bit, and plowed through the gargantuan top plate and Joey's closet framing to get antenna wire, speaker wire, and telephone wire down from the attic, through the guest bedroom, into the family room:

We'll finish running the phone wire down to the basement, the speaker wire into the audio system, and the antenna wire into a splitter when we tear out the family room walls later on this year, but right now, we're happy we've been able to get them coiled up where they are.

Hah! Take that, Joey. We wave our 36" drill bit in your general direction. And oh, by the way... At 36"? Ours is bigger than Yours.

We've also been slogging away at the exterior.

We finally got the front exterior clapboards replaced, and ready for paint:

The detail trim under the window drip edges, which had been lost through time, has been re-installed:

Why yes, it is that teeeeny little strip of bare wood at the top of the window, that you can barely see in the photo. (clicking on the photo to enlarge might help a bit). And why yes, we have now reinstalled it on all 24 windows we've re-trimmed so far, and we're planning on installing in on the couple or three windows we still have yet to refurbish.

Why? Just because.

Because we knew that it originally existed on all the windows, since it was still on the third floor windows that Joey hadn't touched:

And even though it was long gone on most of the windows, and maybe it wouldn't have mattered anyway, it's going back. This house has lost most of its original character, but we'll take the opportunity to put back the few bits that we can. It may not be huge, but the details make a difference. Take a look at this new window with restored trim:

Consider it Jewelry. Doesn't matter a whit for the structural integrity of the house, but ain't it pretty?

We also gritted our way through edging the doors and windows in the final paint color, so these sides of the house are DONE!

More priming and paint edging:

And on to filling old nail holes, sanding, and prepping the original siding:

The house looks like it's contracted a bad case of the pox, but we gotta tell you, feeling those old clapboards once they're sanded down... they feel like velvet.

But really, our crowning achievement of the last couple of weeks has to be the smallest one... we replaced the aging flourescent light fixture in our laundry room:

Sadly, the running betting pool on whether the aging fluorescent light in there would actually turn on when we flipped the switch has ended. It's really all for the better though. Sorting whites from colors in the dark really sucks.

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