A Shoebox & A Shop-Vac

Those of you who know me know that we moved to This Old Purple House from a brand new home that we custom designed and built from scratch. On the darker days, it's easy to wallow in memories of climate control, modern appliances (plugged into three-prong outlets) and everyday cleaning that didn't involve a Shop-Vac. Sigh.

When we built our last house, it was B. K. (before kids). I spent oodles of time reading and cutting up magazines, surfing and pilfering photos from the internet, visiting home expo centers and kitchen design emporiums. Not to mention the weekends spent going to yard sales and estate sales, plus impromptu curb picking on big trash days and field trips to architectural salvage warehouses. And, of course, there was property porn -- haunting open houses and skimming virtual tours of on-the-market houses I found on purpose or by happenstance.

Our second meeting with the architect we chose involved the purging of a large shoebox of clips, print-outs, brochures, samples, swatches, catalogs, feng shui analyses and, of course, cocktail napkin sketches. On alternate days I think we made his job incredibly easy (Why did we pay him when I did all the work?) or incredibly hard (That man worked a miracle. He captured the essence of all things shoebox!)

Rooms and walls were designed around heirlooms and trash-treasures. Lighting was placed just-so to highlight personal collections. The space fit us to a tee. Heck, we lived on the lot for 3 full cycles of seasons before we tore the old (vintage 1960s blek) place down and started over. So we knew exactly where the views were, where the sun and moon rose and set, where the storm water went (and didn't)... The place was frickin' perfect. Sigh.

So, now, here we are in a house with approximately the same square footage, but nothing fits. Between windows (small, but plentiful), doors and hallways (a veritable warren), radiators and fixtures and built-ins (more about these later), there isn't anyplace to put furniture in this place!!! Except the bunk room, of course, but that's furnished with an homage to master carpentry, which is entirely bolted to the floor. Everywhere else, the floors slope and roll. The ceilings and walls meet at corners that are square-ish. The walls are "textured". The "white" ceilings chronicle the history of weather and plumbing the way the rings in a massive tree trunk tick off the years. God, I love this place. Gah!

For now, I must remind myself that it took four years to compile my "shoebox" the last time around. And I didn't have the "help" of two 4-going-on-14 year-olds. And I was starting tabula rasa and building an "eclectic" collection. Whereas here, I am literally tying to fit massive (and beloved) Jacobean oak into 1700s colonial (aka Munchkin Land).

For now, I must find my happy place and soak up the orientation of all things. I must find ways to make this house a home, both now and in the future. I must get better at shimming. And sanding. And, perhaps most importantly, I must learn to love the Shop-Vac in the middle of all things, because it's on casters and it helps me to figure out which way the world is tilting. Today. And today is like no time in shoebox years.

Rosy Cheeks & Butterfly Wings

When we first moved into This Old Purple House, we set our kids up sleeping in the bunk room. Our furniture was not to arrive for a couple of weeks, so it made sense to put them in there, where the built-ins would make it feel a little less like camping for them. Plus, it was close to the only reliably working bathroom in the house.

The (hyped) excitement about the new house, though, was that our twins would, for the first time, have their own rooms. So, once Clem the Plumber and Kenny the Electrician were set to their tasks replacing the major systems in TOPH (more on this later) and the sump was hard at work on the primordial ooze in the pool, I was left with no choice but to actually deliver on two finished rooms. Sigh.

I started with my daughter's room since it was the least intimidating -- an all-cosmetic job. I spent hours in the wee hours of several prior mornings online in the dark reading horror stories about the removal of old wall paper from plaster walls, so I was prepared for the worst. And then it peeled right off. In large sheets.

As it turned out, the impossibly-original plaster walls behind the 1960s strawberry-fields-through-a-kaleidoscope wallpaper were crazed with an intricate and complete system of hairline cracks that allowed the walls to "breath." The hot air of summer, the cold air of winter, the dust of autumn and the damp of spring over 60+ years had turn-turn-turned the wallpaper paste into a thin, brittle layer that mostly came off with the paper. Nice.

So, this was not going to be your typical spackle-and-sand, baby-smooth scenario. Any pressing pressure on the walls caused alarming shifts in the network of cracks. Sanding was definitely out. But, as a mother, I owed it to my daughter to stem the drafts that clearly permeated every surface of her room-to-be. And, as an antique homeowner, hoped to find some way to stabilize the potentially-crumbling walls without resorting to the wallpaper-as-Band-aid approach. So I bought 3 quarts of DAP Fast N Final Interior and Exterior Spackling and a very wide blade. Time will tell, but this product (consistency of super-lite meringue with a bit of chalk dust in it), filled and spread perfectly. I also used DAP ALEX Caulk with Silicone to run a finger bead into the gaping cracks at the corners of the room and window trim. The theory there was to, again, block the drafts, but also allow the walls to move with the house. Time will tell on that one too.

The texture of the walls was still akin to that of aging Mexican stucco, but there are people in the world (somewhere) who pay BIG bucks to faux-finishers for just that effect. So I decided to embrace it. However, my daughter had chosen a coolish shade of lightish pink for her room. Looking at the swatch and looking at her "authentic" walls, I had to beg to differ. So I visited our local Benjamin Moore store to look for alternatives. And right there on the mis-mixed $10/gallon rack was this gorgeous, warm melon color. And right there next to it was a can of butter-yellow porch and floor paint. It was meant to be. Paired with a nice warm, matte, hides-everything linen white on the walls, it was perfect!

After a generous roll-slathering of a non-low-VOC, oil-based primer (forgotten the name, but it's a brand now owned by Benjamin Moore, not Zinnser or Kilz) with the consistency of Elmer's Glue, the web cracks and crazing disappeared. (My apologies to my chemical-free friends, but sometimes you've got to bring out the big guns. You know you use chlorine bleach when all else fails.) Only the gentle hills and valleys of the walls remained, along with the "layered look" of past patch jobs around the windows remained. The one truly smooth and flat area was where a fireplace was professionally concealed sometime in the last century. If you squint, you can see the outline. Charming and mysterious, I think.

When I finally began to paint (waited 8 days of room-closed, windows-open, and fan-on for the primer to finish its off-gassing), the color choices came alive. No second guessing here.

Then my daughter peaked in. "Mommy, that is NOT lightish pink."

Think fast, think fast, think fast.

"You know what? This color is EXACTLY the color of your rosy cheeks," I said convincingly. "When I saw it, I knew it belonged in your room."

"Really?" She grinned encouragingly, trying to picture her own cheeks without the benefit of a mirror.

And I, feeling encouraged, added, "And the floor is going to be exactly the color of butterfly wings. Remember the ones that used to flutter by in our garden in Annapolis?"

"Perfect!" She was beaming and gazing around the room that was to be all her own.

Perfect.

From the Primordial Ooze

When we first toured This Old Purple House, it was under four feet of fresh snow. In fact, our showing was delayed a day for the blizzard that dumped said snow. Although the house was as sad and cold as any I had seen in the collection of "old houses in need" I had collected and tracked online, I must admit that TOPH looked colder and sadder for its blanket of wet, heavy white stuff.

We made some assumptions from what we saw that day, one of which was that the pool was a goner. First of all, the words vintage and pool generally shouldn't go together. Second, the pool "deck" (poured concrete slabs visible from summertime satellite imagery) had some disconcertingly extreme highs and lows around the edges that could not be attributed to drifting snow. Finally, the location of the pool placed several hundred square feet of non-permeable area above the grade of the house, which was less than 15 feet away. The words drainage and nightmare came to mind.

Although the idea of summer fun and fitness were tempting, TOPH had many more pressing priorities than a pool, especially if was going to be a money pit and time dump unto itself. So, the quick-final task of digging out and/or filling in the pool were on the to-do list before we were even under contract.

So, imagine our surprise when we came back for our final walk-though (in June) and saw that the pool was tightly covered by an expensive custom, albeit older, cover. The seemingly heaved deck was actually stepped up in places to accommodate a higher "mosaic" wall on one side. And there appeared to be no water damage or drainage issues from the improbable grading -- still puzzling about those hydrodynamics...

Still, it remained covered. We closed on TOPH and began the initial tasks of debugging the kitchen, sorting spaghetti-esque "vintage" wiring (that's another pairing you never want to see: wiring and vintage), and bracing for exorcistic plumbing failures.

While we toiled on priority tasks of food, water and Wi-Fi inside, Mother Nature embarked on a scorching heat wave that made us long for the uber-air-conditioned comfort of the Mid-Atlantic. Suddenly, making that pool work, whatever the cost or effort, became a priority.

Local sources told us it was covered for seven years. In that time, a hearty mix of compost and carrion collected and decayed. Let's just say we avoided skin contact with the resulting liquid.
We did not add chemicals to the soup, knowing that we would be pumping it off into the woods, which run downhill almost directly to Great Bay. To that end, we found an old sump pump in a dark corner of the basement and set to the task of removing somewhere north of 10,000 gallons of primordial ooze. (On what grounded circuit, you ask? Excellent question for another day.)

It took about 10 days of running (and regularly unclogging) the pump and 150-foot hose. We were down to about 14 inches in the deep end when I started power washing at 2700 psi in areas where I could reach or stand. We used a gallon of Simple Green on the nastiest areas. And then pumped some more. And thenm the pump gave out leaving the nastiest of the nasty at the very bottom of the deep end.

My hubby fashioned a manual rope tow for a 16-gallon shop vac out of an old halyard and scaled the slope in a pair of old knee-high off-shore boots. From the shallow end, together we lifted the full vac into a huge wheelbarrow which he carted out to the woods twenty times. And, at the last, at the very bottom, we found... a central drain. Hunh.

Well, from there, it was easy. Six gallons of Clorox and a hose filling 3 hours at a time off the well, it was full in 9 days. Clem the Plumber fashioned a replacement for the missing bleeder valve on the obsolete pump. Plugs were pulled. Switches were flipped. And it started on the first try. And the light even works!

The icy artesian well water is NICE. And I, for this season, shall avert my eyes from the crumbling "vintage" tile and weed-choked phlox border. Ideas for the mosaic wall are welcome. Next Spring.