Spoke Too Soon.

As we were sitting down to a lovely dinner together, Erika and I decided that our bathrooms are horrible. They're straight out of 1972. I feel like they should be decorated with a disco ball, a "Keep On Truckin'" mural-poster, a lava lamp and bright, fluorescent green paisley wallpaper. So we are redoing them. Totally. Gutted to bare walls and rebuilt from the ground up like in that show with the million dollar man. We have pics, including, ironically, bright fluorescent green paisley wallpaper.

Done with Painting?

I think we're almost hesitant to declare that we are done painting stuff in our house. We recently thought about it, and we have literally painted every square inch of this place. Actually the banister in this picture is perhaps the last bastion of the characteristic dark wood that used to permeate our home. No more!

These stairs were it. Although we'll be wiping down shiny white kickboards for the remainder of our ownership days here, they needed to be painted. Also, we had a little Satin Impervo leftover and really needed to use it. Finally, the appearance of these stairs were giving Erika flashbacks to the house in the Berkshires where she's been known to fall down a flight twice in a 2 day stretch.


It had been awhile since I'd worked with oil-based paint. I was sort of careful while painting - I mean, I used tape - but some paint did drip from time to time and I neglected to wipe it up. No worries, I figured, I can go back later and clean it with paint thinner. Did you know that paint thinner does a great job of cleaning up dried oil-based paint and floor finish too? It's true! So after trying to clean up one or two "errors" I realized my folly. We still haven't resolved this minor detail, and the end results really do look sharp.

housechapin On The Road

Once upon a day in Monteray, Massachusetts Erika and I found ourselves with time to do whatever we'd like in western Massachusetts. Shelly and Todd went skiing, but after 3 ACL reconstructions I formally announced my retirement from that sport during a lightly attended press conference. Chris and Lauren had a date at a nearby spa but we had no such aspirations. Given our shared profession, we decided to hit up a nearby college - Williams. Sure, it was snowing - heavily - but it looked so close on the map. We punched in the address on our GPS and braved the elements.

The GPS had already tricked us into rolling down a one lane, unplowed "road" on our way to the Bershires cottage. For some reason, we thought it would never lead us astray for a second time. Erika was driving slowly and carefully. We again found ourselves on what appeared to be a less-than-serviced road. We passed a van at one point and continued down the road until...the road stopped being plowed entirely and a sign informed us that the road was closed in the winter beyond that point. So...we turned around and began to head back. Shortly after we came to the same van we had passed, only now he was sideways on the road, with a healthy portion of his van embedded in a snowbank. Being the good samaritans we think we are, we decided to help this guy. Erika approached the van, only when she tried to brake the car didn't stop...it continued very...slowly...down the slope and into the van.

The good news: the van was now dislodged from the snowbank.
The bad news: there was quite a bit of damage done to our cars.

At this point I was thinking I should have just gone skiing and torn another ACL. We had nearly no cell phone service, save for a 1'x1' square on the side of the road. We successfully got in touch with the local police - that's singular, by the way, as there is literally one police officer in that town. It took him 3 hours to get to our accident scene. 3 hours. No exaggeration. When he finally arrived he looked at both vehicles and said, "Well...I guess I can write up an accident." report." If you are looking for something excruciatingly painful/boring, try sitting in 10F weather with nothing to read but a road map. Also, you and the person you're stuck with have exhausted every talking point from favorite vacation spots to which NPR show we'd cancel (mine was Story Corps, even though it's a part of Morning Edition, I really, really hate it).

All in all, we lost a day of vacation, our insurance rates might go up a bit, and we had to pay the deductible to fix our grill. But the grill was looking kind of faded anyway, and it looks brand new now.

Choppin' Wood (Not Broccoli)

We live in the woods. I guess this is a rather blatant fact that we somehow overlooked when we purchased our humble abode. This reality was made quite clear this fall when approximately 245 bushels of leaves fell onto our version of a lawn. Speaking of the lawn, we should have also recognized the relative lack of grass where one might expect to find those thin green blades. On the one hand it makes mowing quite simple. On the other, it makes playing bocce difficult. We decided that in order to theoretically play bocce we would need a lawn. Lawns need sunlight. We had very little, due in large part to the varieties of deciduous trees canvasing our canopy. Flora-related sacrifices had to made.

It so happens that Michael went to high school with someone who would go on to attend Paul Smith's College, a school in upstate New York that is renowned for graduating students who are trained in the art of felling trees. We consulted with Robert (formally known as Burt) and decided upon a trio of trees that would have to be felled. Of course, the week before he was to complete this mission, the largest tree - assuredly in protest of its sentence, dropped a rather large limb upon the power line that supplies our home with wonderful electricity. That ordeal left us without power for a couple days and led to some heated discussions with Connecticut Light and Power.

Burt came to the rescue. He expertly landed our trees, along with a couple dozen smaller ones, in a matter of hours. We were left with a large quantity of wood on our lawn and no means by which to reduce the severed sections of tree trunk to pieces that would fit into our wood-burning stove next year. Luckily, our fathers both possesed chainsaws and both came to assist in the sizing of our soon-to-be fuel. More pictures to come, but my favorite is Erika learning the art of axe-swinging - a skill that is likely taught at the aforementioned Paul Smith's College but one that Erika is still working on honing:

The Blog is Back...and so is Wallpaper

What the heck have we been up to? If I've learned anything from The Wire and LOST - and I'd like to think that I have - we can't just tell you all at once. We need to tease it out ad infinitum. At the same time, I'm not really sure why it's taken so long to update this awesome blog. Maybe it was because I overheard students talking about how blogs were "old fashioned." In any case, it's not just around here where things have changed:

* We have a new president. Or, at least, light at the end of this dark tunnel come January 20th.
* The Red Sox lost in the playoffs. Shocking, I know, but those pesky (and healthy) Dev...er...Rays were just the better team.
* The stock market has made a little correction.
* The legislature is arbitrarily giving out b-b-b-billions of dollars.
* 24 returned. No idea if this season is going to not suck. Entourage finished what turned out to be a pretty good season.


Back on the homefront:
* I kicked pneumonia's ass...finally...after it beat me senseless for several weeks.
* We invited Mike's high school friend to take down several trees. It's like beating back nature...we live in the middle of the woods.
* Erika finally got her chaise lounge.
* Painting continues. Very, very slowly.

Finally, I think - I THINK - we have taken down all of the wallpaper we need to take down. At nearly the same instant we took down the last shred of glue-laden floral-printed paper, we learned that wallpaper is making a comeback! Now, I don't know if this is true or not...but I do know that if wallpaper is indeed coming back into style, it sure as hell won't look like the abysmal crap we took down. Sorry, Mrs. I-forget-your-name-former-houseowner, but taking down your old wallpaper was awful. Had we known, we probably would have lowballed you an additional $5k or so.

No Camera, No Pictures

Erika took the camera to Seattle. And then the battery died. So no new pics from this coast or the other. Just do a Google search for "Seattle." I bet there are plenty of beautiful pics of that fine city elsewhere on the intarweb. In the meantime, check out Mike and Cait's blog. I hear a rumor there is a video of Emma floating around where she is clearly saying "hi."

Oh, and while I'm thinking about it...if you ever try to embed a stapler in a Jell-O mold make sure that you quadruple the amount of Jell-O for best results. Just sayin'.

Arbor

There are so many positive things that came out of our housesitting gig. Things like not having to pay rent or mortgage for a fiscal year or two can really open doors. Stumbling into that little opportunity certainly helped us open the door to our house.

If there was one drawback to our job as semi-pro housesitters it was that we had to store our stuff for the duration or our tenure. We like our stuff. That's why we have it. Of course, at the same time, we helped to fill the dumpster that was parked outside our place while we were doing the renovations with stuff we realized we didn't want. So after we heaved the stuff we didn't want anymore into the dumpster, we could turn our attention to the stuff we did want. This arbor is a perfect example.

We were married over 5 years ago, at a winery, on a little hill overlooking the Hudson Valley. As picturesque as the panarama was, Erika asked her father to build what would turn out to be this arbor for us to get married under. At the time it looked like part of the landscape, but the next day we returned to the winery and dismantled the arbor. Eventually we brought it back to New Hampshire (where it remained in storage), then to Portland (where it remained in storage). Finally, now that we're in a place that we plan to stay in for a decade or so, the arbor assumes its place on our property.