May 2004

May 3, 2004: You know, we've spent a lot of time in the last two years spewing all manner of venom at Bad Joey, and truly, the destruction he wrought upon this house makes our souls weep bitter, bitter tears.

But our fixation on Joey and his 99 Varieties of Evil often eclipses two people that really do deserve mention in this Journal-- our DPOs. "DPO," for those of you who have lives outside the immediate square footage under your roof (ya lucky bastids!) and don't hang out on old home renovation websites, stands for "D_ _ _ Prior Owner." Now, depending on the nature of the prior owners of the house, the "D" can stand for Dear, or Darling, or Damn, or DemonPossessedSpawnofSatan, or whatever you like, depending on the nature of the POs, of course.

One day, when things slow down some and I once again find myself stuck in a hotel bar with my laptop, sipping improbably-colored mixed drinks among ultra-chic urbanites, (see the end of last year's April 28 Journal entry for that story), I will tell you the story of the most immediate PO's of this house, that is, the sorry stumblef***s we actually bought the house from, and who bought the house from Joey. But just now we have much to do and much to tell, so sadly, that will have to wait another day.

So anyway, for the most part, our concentration on Bad Joey, and the sheer volume of work we've had to do to undo his creations, has forced us to forget the Damn Prior Owners. And for the most part, we have, save for the occasional wake-up-screaming nightmares at 2 am.

But the horror all comes back, full force, when we get hot and heavy into our seasonal Exterior Reclamation. See, the DPOs bought this house, freshly Joey-fied, in 1972. From that time until we bought it two years ago, they did nothing to the place except what absolutely had to be done. We are beneficiaries of that philosophy in certain respects, to be sure, because it got us a new roof, a new furnace, and a new central A/C unit. And it gave the house, poor soul, a respite from more interior "renovations" a la Amityville.

But they also extended the philosophy to the grounds of the house, which is where it gets kind of Ugly. You can neglect the house itself, and as long as it's structurally sound (which it absolutely is... we think the old girl must be positively bullet-proof at this point, considering what she's endured), and you care for the main elements (roof and main systems) which they did, she'll be none the worse for the wear.

But the grounds, ohhhh, the grounds. Three plus acres plopped in the middle of a huge wildlife preserve... and Mother Nature Wants. It. Back. The DPOs had no problem giving it up to her, and neglected it to the point that the flora and fauna were threatening to devour the house itself. We have dubbed the multi-year grounds clean-up the "Exterior Reclamation Project," and our ultimate goal is to actually be able to access all eight corners of the property.

So, since the Kilted One began channeling Tolkein last month, and despite the fact that I was completely unprepared for it, we managed to harness some Elven magic and make a successful dent in the wild overgrowth that is Sauron's answer to Fire Island (how does that happen?), we decided to keep on with it.

So this week, we hit the opposite side of the property, the orchard. Saturday morning, I send Dude out to the orchard with his chainsaw, while I went in to refill my coffee. I emerged from the house to discover this:

Yes, that's the Dude. Yes, he's kilted, and yes, he's working his chainsaw. And yes, that's a huge, honkin' half-dead pine tree that he's about to drop, right in front of the only gate to the orchard. *Sigh.*

Well, at least we know where our next burn pile's going to be...

So we hacked up that tree, and dragged a whole bunch of piled brush on top of it:

Then we set it all on fire. As we learned last month, Fire. Is. Good. The brush pile went up easy as could be, like last week, and we trimmed up a bunch of trees in the orchard, and threw the trimmings on the pile. Within a couple of hours, we had this:

The orchard was cleared, and we could actually access it through the gate if we carefully slipped through it and skated around the burn pile.

To top off the weekend's fun, our neighbor from across the lane showed up on his lawn tractor, with his kids in tow in the attached cart, and we spent some time chasing each other across the orchard on our tractors, getting it mowed in the process.

Hey, what can we say? We're easily amused, and the orchard's as clean as it's been in a year...

May 10, 2004: Wahoo!!! Happy Mother's Day to Meeeeee...

Some girls want flowers, some girls want mushy cards, some girls want chocolate. Me? I want my property cleared, in the fastest way possible. As a bonus, I want to wave a magic wand, and have it Done. With the expenditure of minimal effort on our part.

And I got my wish!

Lo and behold, Bobcat Guy pulled up this weekend in his truck, with his bobcat cozily ensconced in the tow-behind trailer. He announced that he'd found himself with a free afternoon, and politely inquired as to whether we happened to feel like working on clearing the pasture boundary. Uhhh, let us think about that for a nanosecond... Yeah!

As you might recall from last year's installment of the reclamation project, the pasture boundary's been making us crazy since we got here. It's a solid, matted mass of 8 foot high briars, weed trees, vines and assorted yard trash that the DPOs just tossed back there rather than haul away. This huge mess runs the entire length of the western property line, and is at least twenty feet wide.

It is also completely and utterly impenetrable. In the last two years, we have trimmed, chainsawed, hacked, and yanked four full 40-cubic yard dumpster loads of overgrown trees, limbs, bushes, vines and everything else out of this property, and never backed down from a fight. But this particularly horrific mass of vegetation repelled every single one of our attempts, and even our best efforts couldn't make a dent in it.

To make matters worse, the whole mess dead ends into the northwest corner of the property. Yup... Mordor.

If you click on the photo below, you can see the monster mass o'shrubbery on the far side of the pasture fence:

Here's a close up of a small part of it:

Just to put it in perspective, the tallest part of that shrubbery mass tops 12 feet, and it continues down the slope behind it another 15 feet. Our poor chainsaw cowers piteously at the sight of it.

But it's all okay, because Bobcat Guy. Is. Here. He unloads his bobcat, fires it up, and starts motoring around.

Yeeehahhh! The reinforcements have arrived, and Middle Earth just may have a fighting chance.

We may not actually have Gandalf himself, but I gotta say, Bobcat Guy makes a pretty good substitute.

He is totally ripped, and has Gandalf's tanned, wizened face, and silver hair and beard. Of course, he's only about half Ian McKellen's height, wears jeans and a John Deere baseball hat instead of flowing white robes, and well, he's a bit, ummm... manic. But he does come bearing Power Machinery, which gives him a certain edge.

Now is probably a good time to tell you that Bobcat Guy's a bit of a... Trip.

Dude's at least 60 years old, about five feet tall, solid muscle, and he talks. A lot. Very, very fast. And he's an absolute legend around these parts. He's worked for the local phone company forever, and hires himself out evenings and weekends with his bobcat for cold, hard cash. But, he does it for cold hard astonishingly budget-friendly amounts of cash, and he's amazingly good. We got his name from good friends who live just down the road, and despite a 10-year friendship, we had to pry his name and phone number out of them (and ok, we're not proud of it, but maybe we issued a few veiled threats). Bobcat Guy's a closely-guarded secret, and no one who's used him wants to share the wealth, because they're afraid he'll get spread too thin and they'll never get him back. Who'da thunk it? A bobcat operator with a client list as exclusive as Frederic Fekkai...

Now, in order to secure Bobcat Guy's services, you have to call him and get on the Project List. Depending on what he's got going on, the List can be relatively reasonable, or very, very Looooong. Trying to pin him down to a specific weekend, much less a specific day, is pretty much futile. So you call him, put yourself on the List, and then you Wait.

And then, one day... Bobcat Guy appears.

Sometimes he calls, sometimes not.

Either way, no sooner has he cut the ignition to his truck, than he drops the tailgate of his trailer and unloads this Completely. Battered. Rusted. Old Bobcat. The thing doesn't even look like it should work.

But he hops right in, jams a screwdriver in the ignition to start it, and begins motoring around like a crazed groundhog, scooping up whatever you want and dropping it in precisely placed piles. If he encounters anything too large or nasty for his scoop attachment, he jumps out, wrestles it on to the scoop's tines, and motors right back along. It's amazing to watch the whole process-- the guy's machine looks like a relic from WWII, he doesn't stop moving or talking from the time he drops the tailgate to the time he puts it back up, he tosses around tree trunks, cement slabs or whatever else twice his height and ten times his weight, and does it all with the finesse of a brain surgeon with a scalpel. When he's done, every twig, leaf and pebble that's supposed to be gone, is Gone. And everything that's supposed to remain, is untouched. Not a nick on a tree trunk, not a single shredded leaf, and only a very few small ruts in the ground to rake out and re-grade. Dude's a legend, and as far as we can tell, the status is Deserved.

This time around (as usual!) Bobcat Guy did not disappoint. We kid you not, within the space of two hours, the entire mass o'shrubbery from Hell was scooped up and deposited in neat piles to be burned:

They're rather large piles, to be sure, but we'll take them any day to end up with this result:

We can't believe it. For the first time in the two years since we've been here (and probably long before then), we can actually see our neighbor's property. For that matter, we can actually see our own property! O Happy Day.

As a bonus, we also had Bobcat Guy spread topsoil in the pool area (which had been sitting around in piles from our pool deck project last July), and had him regrade the two patches of land on either side of the steps in front of the house, to slope downhill so that rainwater no longer pours into the basement windows:

Wow. What a phenomenally productive weekend!

And one of those achingly rare weekends in which we got a huge amount accomplished, but did it with almost no hardcore, ball-busting, all-out effort on our part.

Happy Mother's Day to ME! Andohbytheway, I have to admit to scoring some kickin' chocolate too...

May 18, 2004: Weird Things happen at Brickman House.

We've come to accept the usual Weird Things that happen here-- me hollering at the Kilted One for moving pieces of furniture that he hadn't touched it in weeks, and being watched working around the property when there's no one actually there, once you actually look head-on.

We don't mind our Ghosts. Once we recognized what we were seeing for what it was, we were fine, and we got used to working under the scrutiny of an otherworldly Peanut Gallery who occasionally disagreed with our furniture placement. Lately, they don't come around much anymore, though, and we kind of miss them.

But the latest Weirdness came directly to us from the Land of the Living. In the wee hours of Saturday morning, around 4 am or so, the Kilted One (can I call him that, even if he wasn't kilted? Noooo, he doesn't sleep in a kilt...) was jarred from a sound sleep by several loud male voices, hollering like a bunch of rowdy frat boys, moving up the driveway toward the house. As he gets up to go downstairs to see what's going on, he trips over the dog, who is snoring soundly in her usual spot outside our bedroom door. A 90-pound, positively ferocious-looking Doberman... who clearly isn't worth her keep in kibble as Guardian of our Household. Oh well, she's still a Very Sweet Dog.

Anyway, they both go tumbling down the stairs in the dark, the dog wakes up somewhere around Step 9, and starts barking like a... well, like a guard dog (will wonders never cease?) at the commotion outside. They check all the doors and windows, and can't see anything outside. The Kilted One makes the executive decision to stay inside, and keep the dog inside as well, figuring that since no one was actually trying to get in the house, whatever was happening outside could be dealt with in the morning. So they both go back to bed, and of course the dog's back snoring before he is.

So, where am I when all this is going on? Well, where any sane person is at that hour... Asleep. Nothing, but nothing, pries me out of my bed before my time.

I roll downstairs the next morning at the civilized hour of 10 am, and Dude greets me with a steaming cup of coffee and poses the casual inquiry, "Do you know Art?"

Now, we all know that I Don't Play Well With Others prior to at least two cups of coffee, and so, just then, I was thinking that if Dude wanted to drag me into a debate on whether Jackson Pollock's work is the epitome of a creative process designed to achieve the ideal in pure aesthetic value, or the ultimate phallocentric male fantasy of dripping and flicking on a supine canvas first thing in the morning, I may just have to hurt him. As it was, the best I could manage out of my mouth was, "Huh?"

Dude says "Yeah, Art, who partied with Stevie last night." Now I'm really confused, and absolutely convinced that any discussion whatsoever of "Ebony and Ivory" was truly going to send me over the edge.

It all gradually became clear, however, when Dude explained to me that he'd gone out Saturday morning for the paper, and saw something whitish in our Jeep. He was at first supremely annoyed with the cat, thinking that it had, as per usual habit, climbed into the car when we weren't looking and gotten locked in (yes, we have Strange Animals).

Upon closer inspection, however, Dude discovers that the white thing is, in fact, a knee, and upon even closer inspection, discovers that said knee belongs to some guy, completely passed out, sprawled across the front and back seats of the Jeep. After several concerted attempts to rouse him, Dude finally drags the guy out of the Jeep, looking rather pathetically like Jeff Spicoli after a reeaaally late night, and determines that this is, actually, "Art."

Now Art, having been summarily awakened, found himself pinned up against the hood of the Jeep, confronted by 6'7", 240 pounds worth of pissed-off, sleep-deprived former Marine, and a Doberman who, inexplicably, has suddenly warmed to her day job of Guard Dog after nine years, and is eagerly sniffing Art's nether regions with indeterminate intent.

Finding himself in that uneviable position, Art eagerly spilled the story of what he knew of the night before. Which was, apparently, Not. Much. He remembered partying with Stevie (and presumably several other guys), all of whom ended up whooping it up on on our driveway at ungodly hours. According to Art, though, he remembers nothing and no one except Stevie, and most certainly does not remember our dog barking our walls down at 4 am as he climbed into our Jeep to sleep it off.

Art doesn't even know where he is. So after the Kilted One demands his Driver's License information and copies it down, he informs Art that he is, in fact, at the very corner of The Wedge, and that the address on his license is about 4 1/2 miles down the road. He points him down the driveway, and says "Left, another left, and after about three miles, a right. Good luck." And with that, he bid our little Spicoli good day to sweat out his hangover on a nice, loooooooong walk.

I, of course, after being sufficiently dosed with caffeine, could do nothing but laugh my well-rested a** off at the whole story. My only regret was that I wasn't actually awake to grab the digital camera to memorialize Art's Walk of Shame for the website...

May 25, 2004: We devoted last week's entry to the Story of Art, because, you know, stories like that just Have to be Told.

But it's okay, because we've basically just been puttering around, getting some seasonal stuff done around the house and grounds the last couple of weeks.

We yielded to our 5 year-old daughter's piteous cries, finally, and installed a swing for her on the big old maple tree right by our front door. Poor kid. She started kindergarten this past fall in a terrific private school in our area, but just her luck, right before she started, the school finally raised the funds to construct a huge addition to double the size of the facilities. Construction began last summer, and so this school year, the entire campus was transformed into a mud and gravel pit, dotted by bright orange plastic construction fences, ever-relocating piles of dirt, and pits and ruts of slimy, muddy water fit only for habitation by the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Guess even B-horror flick Creatures need an education. The school playground was demolished early in the year, and though the teachers did an admirable job of finding outdoor play places for the kids, it was a disaster of epic proportions for a five year-old who dreams of Castles built of pressure-treated lumber that only CedarWorks can provide.

Since we're still percolating plans for an elaborate outdoor playhouse for her next season, we weren't about to start constructing a $1000 wooden swingset on steroids in our backyard, with sufficient square footage to house the entire Swiss Family Robinson and their second cousins. Instead, we grabbed a 2x8, cut it long enough for her and a friend, primed and painted it, and strung it up with a couple of ropes:

She's thrilled. She and her friends have spent countless hours on the thing already, and we've staved off adolescent therapy bills for a while more. Can't beat a win-win situation for $15 bucks...

We also opened the pool. It's a bit early for us, since we haven't opened it until mid-June for the last couple of seasons, but a run of unseasonably hot, humid days spurred us into action.

Good thing, too, because speaking of Creatures from the Black Lagoon... We pulled the pool cover off our pool, and discovered where Mama Creature lived. We knew it had to be close by, since her kids were attending the same school as our daughter.

But, ugh, talk about a pea green, viscous, ropy Swamp. We love our mesh winter safety cover-- it's lightweight, easy to handle, and does a great job of keeping leaves, twigs and unwanted visitors out of the pool over the winter. But it does let light through, and once the weather warms up, algae grows. And Grows, and GROWS.

But after 30 gallons of bleach, two boxes of Borax, and a box of Baking Soda, and regenerating our filter three times in three days, the pool is crystal clear and ready for summer. It looks great, and feels great. Yup, we've already been sucked into our first lazy afternoon swimming, lounging around on rafts, looking at our decrepit farmhouse falling down around us as we read trashy magazines and suck down icy cold drinks:

Now that the outdoor furniture's put out and hosed down, and the pool's set for the summer, all we have to do from here on out is dump some bleach in the pool periodically, and fish out critters from the skimmer basket. The amphibious ones do just fine, and after a dazed moment or two splatted on the pool deck, hop on about their merry way. The small mammals? Eh, not so much. Lawn fertilizer, maybe.

Speaking of lawns, we decided to spend some time engaged in the sole summer task we dread-- mowing the lawn. For two people who love renovation, and love transforming old, neglected things into beautiful, functional things, lawns are the ultimate nightmare. Don't get us wrong-- we love seeing a ratty, overgrown piece of land transformed into something perfectly manicured and lovely. The problem is... it grows back. Weekly! It's like spending a weekend painting a hallway a pretty warm grey, and the trim a bright, crisp white, and then watching the new colors, over the course of a week, slowly fade back into the cruddy, horrifying, 70's teal you started with. We tell you, if our rooms behaved this way, we'd resort to application of high explosives.

But it's Mother Nature, and there's absolutely no taming her. And besides, if we threw our hands up and surrendered, we'd have a neighborhood revolt on our hands. Something about acres of 3-foot tall goldenrod they find objectionable. Allergies, or something. So we mow. And a few weeks later, we mow. And mow, and mow...

We also did some final trimming, grading, and seeding to finish up this season's episode of the Exterior Reclamation project, and started burning the huge brush piles in the pasture left from the Epic Pasture Sweep (see our May 10 entry, above).We followed our usual practice of sprinkling diesel fuel on the pile, lighting a sawdust-and-wax firestarter stick, tossing it on, and watching them burn. It's worked like a charm, so far.

Unfortunately, for these particular piles, it didn't work out quite that well. We managed to get a small, circular portion of one brush pile going, and ended up with a huge horseshoe-shaped brush pile, with a three-foot wide charred spot in the middle.

Huh. So it was back to the drawing board for the Kilted One, our resident Firestarter. After a long session communing with his Inner Pyromaniac, he took off in the truck one morning, and came back with a full can of diesel fuel, and a bag of road flares. At that point, I was kind of concerned that his communing with his Inner Pyromaniac had taken a perilous turn towards a seriously Carlos Castaneda-esque dark side. But he assured me repeatedly that all was ok, as he dumped the entire gas can on the fire, and struck the flare with intense concentration. "Just watch," he said, as he walked over to the pile, and tossed the flare in.

It hissed fiercely there for a second, and then... "WHOOMP!" The whole pile was engulfed in 10-foot high flames. It was really impressive.

Don't worry... my eyebrows will grow back, I didn't really need that particular pair of shorts anyway, and the falling embers only burned through my shoelaces. The shoes themselves escaped unharmed.

It looked like it was going to work beautifully once again, though, and we harbored visions of roasting marshmallows in the glowing red coals that were the remains of the ultimate BrushPileFromHell come nightfall. Unfortunately, well... it didn't quite work out that way, and now we have reduced, but still rather large, charred lumps in the middle of the pasture:

What to do, what to do... Why, go get more diesel fuel and flares, of course! There's always next weekend.

By the way, the bobcat in the photo is not, in fact, Bobcat Guy's legendary Chariot. When we started clearing our mess on the property boundary, our neighbor caught the bobcat fever, and decided to hire his own Bobcat Guy to clear the mess on his side of the property line. Yay, Neighbor!

This is a shot looking straight down the property line. The right half is ours, the left half is our neighbor's:

And, as you might recognize, the right side's a head-on shot of Mordor. As a huge bonus, though, Neighbor's Bobcat Guy cleared a swathe around to the back of Sauron's Summer Compound of Doom:

And now the Forces of Good can attack from both sides. With friends like this, Middle Earth can surely be saved.

By the way, we realized that a couple of weeks ago, we showed you the front of the cleared property line:

But neglected to show you the other side:

Bobcat Guy sure does pretty work. We figure if we call him to get on the List again in a couple of weeks, he'll show up around mid-summer, when the ground should be dry and hard enough to finish clearing a last low spot on the front of the property (that's currently mush from the spring rains) and to make the final, headlong plunge into Mordor.

Our final project of these last two weeks has been a small but immensely satisfying one, because we can now cook again!

The kitchen's been the victim of an excruciatingly slow dismemberment over the last six months, as we tore out the upper cabinets to install a window, tore out the ceiling to access plumbing chases for the upstairs bathrooms, tore out the pantry to get rid of the bugs, and tore out a wall to open it to the family room. Through it all, though, we have to admit, the kitchen's been a real trooper. Ugly, to be sure, and getting uglier by the day, but functional. Everything still worked, and we even managed to turn out four-course Holiday dinners for 20 in it.

Then, the cooktop died. Props to it, though. It didn't die in one huge dramatic gasp. It fought the good fight for a few months, as the first burner died, and then yet another. At that point, we were certainly nowhere near ready to focus on the kitchen, so we stacked hot plates and electric buffet burner/warmers on top of it, and kept on cooking. Then the third burner died, and we ran out of room to plug in yet another hot plate.

This? Was a Disaster, and something had to be done. Our dream kitchen involves installing a propane tank, which will fuel a 6-burner plus griddle, stainless steel, Wolf rangetop. Now that was clearly not going to happen any time soon, so we started surfing eBay for a temporary replacement. Cheap but reliable was the name of the game. Unfortunately, our idea of "cheap" was a lot cheaper than other bidders' ideas of "cheap," and we were outbid on at least 20 cooktops over the last few months. Finally, though, we scored a Kenmore glass top with solid burner elements at a reasonable price from, who else? A professional contractor remodeling a kitchen for a client who didn't want it anymore and didn't care what he did with it. God bless the Psychic Renovator's Network, paying forward cast-offs!

The cooktop arrived in perfect condition, installed in 20 minutes flat, and looks ridiculously sleek in our wreck of a kitchen:

But now we can boil water! Ahhh, life's simple pleasures...

All in all, May was a good month, and this was a good end to it. We're now done with this season's Exterior Reclamation (except for burning the remaining charred lumps in the pasture).

And next weekend's a long holiday weekend! We're planning on picking up where we left off last November, and continuing to repair and replace clapboards on the exterior of the house so that we can finally start painting! We've got quite a few looooong summer months ahead of us, and miles to go before we sleep, but we're going to focus on nothing but clapboard repair and painting for the rest of the summer and into fall. If Mother Nature cooperates, our grand old lady will be showing a new face to the world this Fall!

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