Browsing Archives for February 2008

We seem to be stuck in this strange in between place. A half finished house. A house with three almost, but not quite, finished rooms. All bedrooms.

A house where the end seems to be in site and yet is not arriving.

I have unpacked everything I can and there are still boxes everywhere full of things I can’t unpack because there is no place to put things. No cabinets, no closets, no pantry, no shelves. It is deflating. For three weeks there was so much hub bub. So many spasmodical spasms. Painting and packing and cleaning, and moving, and now there is just wait. Wait wait wait wait. It has made me question the entire project. Why did we do this? Why didn’t we just stay in our old house?

I have started to wonder if we could sell this house. Maybe we should buy a house in town. There are a few really neat old houses in town for sale. Houses I would have loved to buy two years ago. One of them is my favorite house in town. And it going up for auction in two weeks. I could move in and put all my stuff away immediately! I wonder if I could sell this house in two weeks?

I mean hey it is 5:20 in the morning and I have been up since 3:20 am. I can’t sleep. Surely there is a name for this disorder. Post traumatic construction spastic little miss whiney whine whine seizure disorder.

I just want to make some curtains! And buy a new bedside lamp! I just want to hang some pictures and figure out how to solve the troubling hall paint color.

But I am stuck in this weird purgatory of stuckness. I can not proceed until others proceed. So I linger. Every day fading a little more. Everyday dying a little more. Every day a little less untill…until…untill… Does untill have one “l’s” or two?

P.S. please do not try to cheer me up you all too chipper blog readers of the universe. I am happy in my bleakness. I prefer it this way. Bleak is my favorite color. Maybe I should re-paint the hallway in bleak.

A switch from boring to bleak.

I would much rather be bleak than boring.

PPSS

After writing the above post – I wearily climbed the stairs around 6 am to try and go back to sleep for a few hours. It was then I noticed this strange reddish haze coming thru the windows. What in the world…? Aliens? Terrorist attack? Pesticide? Fungicide? Armageddon???

Holy Crap – Sunrise!!! I haven’t seen one of these in years. Gosh maybe we should hang around a while. It might be worth the trouble.

Dennis has been working on the railing for the stairs that go to the loft in the boy’s back bedroom.

It is turning out better than I ever could have imagined.

I say that not because I am some sort of puffed up over confident egotist. Although at times… well…nevermind. I say it because the loft and subsequent stairs were a last minute addition to the house. We have such a ridiculously steep roof and there was all this left over space. So we decided to put a loft up there for a playroom. Then we had to decide how to access it. We thought about a sort of secret ladder in the closet (which I still think would have been fun) but it seemed sort of difficult to access and hard to come down, which makes you wonder if it would ever actually get used – so eventually we decided to put in the stairs.

Staircases, as you may know, come with an enormous bill. The treads, the risers, the labor, the wood, the railing, the newels, the balusters, the posts. It goes on and on – so for a last minute addition it doesn’t come cheap.

As a result, I tried to make these stairs as cheap as I could. The cheapest way would have been to carpet them. But I just didn’t want carpeted stairs in this spot. Therefore, we thought we might just paint the risers and treads and Dennis thought he would trim out the space where the stairs meet the sheet rock. But finally we decided to cover the “rough” stairs in pine boards and let them overhang the sheet rock a bit and trim out the cricks and cracks that are left behind.

I bought paint grade balusters and newels from L.J. Smith. The paint grade option has a much lower price tag than a hardwood species like oak or walnut. The newels are nicely primed so we probably won’t need to add another coat. The hand rail and balusters however will need to either be painted or stained. I am really leaning to paint – even though stain would be much less maintenance.

The country doctor has been working on the roof of the barn since he came home from work on Friday night. This particular man may occasionally frustrate me for a multitude of reasons, but laziness is not among them.

He has been hauling both the long sheets of metal roofing and the pieces that fit over the peak, one at a time, up the ladder, caulking them together, and then screwing them down.

It is a monster of a job and I have not even been here to help him. Instead, I drove back out to western Kansas to pick up the boys from camp.

There are a lot of stories I need to tell you about that trip, the most important being how grumpy April gets on long car trips. Her normally tolerable level of bossiness, becomes practically unbearable.

This is a picture of her probably saying something like – Rechelle move your knees to the right, hand me some licorice, don’t drink so loudly, turn down the radio, lean further back in your seat, give me my chapstick, where do I turn, etc, etc etc… She is not a good choice for a road buddy. She also does not tolerate crumbs in her car very well.

I felt obligated to try and teach her some tolerance by sprinkling a few crumbs in the driver’s seat and elsewhere.

You can see by the way she is angrily wiping down her van, that my little experiment failed.

She is just not ready to admit that she has a problem. Only then can the healing begin.

Oh and by the way, our barn is not bleeding to death. The country doctor sprayed three coats of barn red paint around the top edge, to keep the roof from getting splattered when we paint the rest of the barn.

I didn’t want you to lay awake all night worrying about it.

Thanks you God for my in-laws, who are always willing to come for a visit, leaving behind their garden, and their comfortable home, to sleep in our lumpy guest bed, in our noisy house full of rowdy grand and help us with our crazy projects, bringing homemade bread and a helpful hand to do a load of laundry, cook a meal and babysit. What would we do without them?

Their most recent visit was to help us work on the barn. The Country Doctor and his dad built the barn sills and trimmed out the barn windows.

Here is a brief account of what the Country Doctor and his dad did to create these beautiful sills.

Snap a chalk line on the siding to create a guide of where you want to cut the window out. The window is already framed up on the inside of the barn, but the country doctor brought the siding all the way down over the window openings to save a little time.

Next – cut the opening.

Joe stood on the inside and yelled to the country doctor when he was off course.

Then place the sill in the opening. This step takes FOREVER!!! There is a lot of fussin’, and cussin’, and whittlin’ and fiddlin’ to make it fit just right.

Then cut the remaining trim pieces to size.

Now look at those sills! Have you ever seen anything prettier than that? It’s like we are Amish or something. Thanks Joe and Rita for coming down and helping us out. Now…next weekend – we were thinking about putting on that barn roof…

Little Bit of Building…

Little Bit of Jigging…

Little bit more building…

Little Bit of Partying on the Porch

We decided to save some money and build the garage ourselves. Except that we aren’t calling it a garage – we call it the barn. I guess it is because it is as big as a barn.

And no, we didn’t build all of it ourselves. Dennis and his crew framed it. But the country doctor and I and the country doctor’s brother Jed – but mostly the country doctor have been doing everything else – which includes the siding and the roof and a lot of other things I would never have imagined. Like nailing up these super long 2X4s on the gabled ends.

The siding consists of twelve inch wide boards of cottonwood, a tree native to our area. You put the boards up tight together and after a few days they start to shrink and “cracks” appear between the boards. Then you take a long thin board and nail this over the “cracks” – thus you have board and batten siding.

The design for our barn was inspired by the barns at Country Carpenters They build beautiful post and beam barns with a real classic look. Hopefully when we are finished we will have something similar.

Our library has arrived.

I was at first, somewhat mystified.

Evidently, I overlooked the small box at the end of the order form that said…complete library.

Though everything seems to be in very good order, with plenty of nooks and whatnots, and bins and cubbies, and higglyjoints and sputknacks…it seems that it did not have any…

BOOKS!!

I sprang into action!

Searching for the perfect book, the exact right one, to bless this humble library. The perfect book to first grace the shelves. To set the tone. To determine the character of this space for all time memorial!

I knew exactly where to go. A book of immense wisdom…unerring moral fiber. A book that nurtured me as I grew and taught me right from wrong. A book… actually many books…assembled into a flawless, seamless, whole. Where I still look for guidance and support and courage and fortitude. And I am never disappointed.

Nancy Drew

Of course.

This is my favorite cover.

Now that I have the sacred texts in place, I can move onto the lesser titles.

Two years ago, I began a long and winding process of making a new record. I recorded the CD in Kansas City with dear friend and master musician, Steve Phillips, whose Celtic Rock band The Elders totally rocks the house!

Before Steve was the scorching lead guitar player for The Elders, he was the scorching lead guitar player for The Rainmakers. Anyone remember that band? They had a few hits back in the late 80′s. Anyone remember the 80′s? It was a strange time period in US history known mostly for the height of women’s bangs and the vertically striped shirt dresses with wide cinch belts worn by men and women alike. Oh…and stirrup pants.

I had to record this CD with Steve, because not only is he a scorching guitar player, he also plays just about every other instrument known to man. This allowed me the flexibility of having the sound of a band on my record without all the troublesome drugs, alcohol and unwashed greasy hair of an actual band. Although, Steve and I did occasionally partake of the illicit narcotic known as almond croissant from Napoleon’s Bakery, we did not inhale. Okay, I inhaled, but Steve did not.

Over the course of about nine months, I drove to K.C. every two weeks and worked on the new CD. It was so fun and such a wonderful break for me to get away and do something musical. I was lucky enough to talk a few old songwriting buddies to sing and/or play on the record as well. Forrest Whitlow and David Hakan both appear on the new record, as well as a chorus of impromptu writers from the area on the tune “Happy Birthday Me.”

After many deletes and overdubs, and places where Steve carefully pieced together the vocals of Celine Dion on top of my guitar playing so that my vocals could at least sound good in a few spots, we finished the CD. I brought the master recording home and tenderly placed it on a dusty shelf in a dark closet for the ripening process.

And there it sat, waiting for me to get my act together, create a cover and get it duplicated. Except that we had started to build a house. And I was kind of distracted by that project. And then I lost the very necessary element of MOMENTUM. And then I felt stupid that I had put it off for so long. And then I started doubting. And then I got distracted again. And then stupid. And then doubt. And then distracted. Stupid, doubt, distracted, stupid, doubt, distracted. This is basically the pattern for my entire life. In fact – maybe I should change the name of this blog to STUPID… DOUBT… DISTRACTED… But with the record it was a wee bit harder.

First there was Steve, who knew about the record and who wondered if I was ever going to maybe actually finish it. Then there were the other songwriters who were on the record and who thought they at least should get a copy for their trouble. And then there were a few people who I had promised copies of this record to, years ago when I first started thinking about making one. So a few weeks ago I took another crucial step towards the completion of this record.

I contacted a graphic designer named David Gnojek. Mr. Gnojek (Guh Noy Yak) is related to me by marriage two or three times removed. It is like he is married to the daughter of the sister of the Country Doctor making him my “nephew in law”, but since I am far too young to have nephews that could be old enough to be professional graphic designers, something is clearly messed up. ANYWAY – Dave is one of those extremely talented, nice, humble, kind, VEGAN, decent people who for some reason I can’t explain, makes me feel like poking their eyes out. It is one thing to be nice and good and VEGAN. But it is a whole other thing to be nice, good, vegan, AND TALENTED!!! However, if I poked his eyes out he would not have been able to design my CD cover, and I really needed him to do that. You can go visit his design blog here. Live it up now Dave – eyes being poked out soon.

Dave did a beautiful job designing this record. But as with most things that I am involved in, I actually did most of the work. Well – I had all the GOOD ideas. Okay, okay – I sent him a few photos, which he put together and created some really cool fonts and made it look right and somehow captured the spirit of this record without EVEN listening to it! How’s that for magic? How easy will that be to do once you don’t have any eyeballs Dave? Will you be so Mister Magic then Dave? Don’t think so…

So if you are actually still reading this post of giddy insanity, you can go and listen to my new record at CD Baby. MY NEW RECORD!!! WOOHOO!!! MY NEW RECORD!!!

I have a NEW RECORD!!! DID I TELL YOU THAT I HAVE A NEW RECORD!!! HOLY FREAKIN’ FREAK BALLS I HAVE A NEW RECORD!!! It is making me a little giddy and kind of feel like my blood is full of fizzy Seven-Up with maybe a few ounces of gin too.

Love,
Rechelle
“Future Folk Star of the Universe”