Escape from Grey Gardens

The upcoming trip is finally coming together, to Copenhagen for the Performance Studies International (PSi) conference in August. I really wanted to go somewhere else first, reasoning that I wasn't going to endure crossing the ocean for a lousy 4 days. But since the 4 days would be work days, it made sense to stay a week in order to have a few days to see the place. I'm sure I'll like Copenhagen, but it has never really been on the list of places I'm yearning to see--all of this added up to deciding to go to France for a week first, settling on Normandy, researching it and finding that I really couldn't afford it and it was late to be planning, transportation wouldn't be as easy as I thought, etc. The friends who were coming too backed out, and that was that. I'm disappointed but now I've got a leg up on planning for when I do go to Normandy. And I will, some day.

So I started looking into Copenhagen a bit more, and found plenty to do and see. For one, I have a hankering to see the island of Ven in the strait between Denmark and Sweden, mostly for the Tycho Brahe museum since I got interested in him way back in college, and later when I was in Prague. Looks like a nice boat ride there and back, and you can rent bikes on the tiny island. I like that there are very few cars. I guess I also want to see Hamlet's castle in Elsinore and of course Tivoli. Then I stumbled on an episode of an HGTV guilty pleasure, House Hunters International, set in Malmo Sweden, and decided I wanted to see that town too--there's a train from Copenhagen that goes over the very long Oresund Bridge. That's at least 3 days worth right there, and I'm just warming up. For a mad day or so I started looking at cruises from Copenhagen up to the fjords in Norway, which I've always wanted to see. But the logistics were off--no cruises under 7 days, and times weren't matching up, etc. So I put that aside for another trip (one I will, will do--see the fjords, and also go to the Baltics, but one thing at a time, and Antarctica trumps all of the above) and I compromised and extended Copenhagen to 9 nights.

Booking an apartment was a real ordeal. It's not like Italy or France, with so many gites and apartments and villas from which to choose; it was pretty slim pickings. After tons of searches I found several, but nothing was working out--here's the ST message board thread about my search. We finally got a list of half a dozen places from Hay4You, an agency that rents out Copenhageners apartments when they're out of town. We went back and forth with how many in our party (eventually 3) and where each was etc., finally settled on a 3 bedroom in the center which I confirmed today. It's a great deal--a huge place for around 1600 USD for the 9 nights, split 3 ways. I'm pretty amazed we got anything,considering how late this all came together, but that's apparently how Hay4You works. I had my doubts, since they took so long and I felt like I pestered them to death, but they came through. They've been very pleasant in email, if a bit slow. Perhaps that comes from the Danes being the happiest people on earth.

Not discussing work here (First Rule of this Blog) but I'm very pleased our panel got accepted at PSi. They even gave us 2 slots: one to show our video ("Revisiting Flaherty's Louisiana Story"--a very intense kind of experiment in documentary and pedagogy that consumed my life for a whole year) and another to read papers about it and discuss.

Another quick entry, just to be a bragging step-gramma. Gary's daughter and her baby Addison came to visit us for a several days last week. She turned 6 months while she was here. We fell in love with her utterly. What else can you do with someone who can stick her foot in her mouth while eating strained carrots but fall in love?

She's a very content young lady. And she's all about her feet. She loves movement and music, and only fusses when hungry, needing a diaper change, or the music stops or you quit pushing her stroller or dancing with her. She's very clear about things, and I appreciated that. She liked Van Morrison and Jimi Hendrix the best when we were dancing. I made her a CD to take home.

I suppose I asked for this when I started referring to our house as Grey Gardens, but we seem destined to become like Big and Little Edie, the residents of Grey Gardens' namesake. We don't yet have raccoons living in the attic and if we did I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be feeding them bags of Wonder Bread, but it sometimes feels like that kind of thing is just around the corner.

One evening a week or so ago we heard a kind of a yowl outside, and Gary, never one to trust the obvious, said it was a bird--maybe a cat bird. I thought it was a cat. Later he went to bed and I heard it again, plus some scuffling sounds on the front porch. Scout, who was up watching TV with me, seemed to agree we were hearing cat sounds. So I turned on the porch light and peeped through the curtain, and there were 2 tiny tiny kittens huddling behind one of the porch chairs. It was raining, and they looked so darn forlorn, mewing their agony into the night. When I went outside to investigate they disappeared.

However, we just so happened to have some kitty chow in the pantry leftover from the last kitty who showed up here, and the next day I wet it down a bit (they were so small I wasn't sure they could chew yet) and left it plus a bowl of water on the porch. Nobody touched it. I tried bread soaked in a little milk; no customers. But the next morning the kitty chow had definitely been sampled. Could have been just about anything that did it--I wouldn't put it past the dogs of course, and we do have raccoons, coyotes, armadillos, skunks, possums, etc. etc. around... But I cleaned and refilled the bowls and when I went to put them back out, a little head popped up from under the porch where the sego palm is growing up against it. And then another. I looked everywhere for a mom or more kittens, got as far under the house as I could, but no luck.

Long story short they seem to be getting stronger and I think we got to them in time. They will pop out from under the porch to eat or even play a bit if I meow at them. I bought a big bag of kitten food and they are eating well. The smaller of the two (I am partial to that one) is the braver but seems to have a hurt eye, or maybe it didn't fully develop. I am working up to touching them, using the same method I used with Hattie, sitting patiently with treats in my hand. I want to get them to a vet, but it will take some doing to catch them first.

And yes, we will probably keep them, but they will have to be outdoor cats since I am so very allergic. I haven't named them yet because I don't know the sexes but I am contemplating the names Edie (of course!), Dixie, Shackelton (for Sir Ernest) and Cinclare (for the sugar mill down the road).

Edie or Shackleton

Dixie or Cinclare

Grey Gardens pet total thus far:
3 dogs, 2 kittens, 1 parrot
all of which were strays or unwanted

If we count the critters that aren't really pets but we feed them or try to help out, add, say, hundreds just for the birds, and then there's the bunnies, and stop me before I am in the attic with a loaf of Wonder Bread.

We finally got started on our final major interior Grey Gardens of the south renovation project: bathroom and closet remodel, which will lead to having a "master suite." What you are about to see ain't pretty.

When we moved in one of the things that was confusing, yet in retrospect I kind of like, was that many of the rooms here didn't seem to say what exactly they were. Which room would be our bedroom, which dining room, which parlor? Several rooms had apparently been used as bedrooms we didn't need for that purpose, and then the room they used for a dining room was right at the entrance, and I didn't care for its formality as a dining room, nor for walking smack into the dining room when one entered the house. The folks who had owned GGLA since 1942 raised 5 children here, and the patriarch was a DIYer and recycler avant la lettre. Since its origin as a circa 1870 addition to a house down the road (possibly it is earlier, came from somewhere else first), its being trucked up the road and made into a house in its own right, several additions and remodelings, it has become a kind of a puzzle. One theory is that every time they had a new child they enclosed a porch and built another porch onto it, and so on. It's hard to date things, since most of the additions and changes made use of recycled materials, some of it really great. We're carrying on what we can of that tradition. For instance, the old shelves in the pantry were old cypress, recycled from something else. Gary and a friend sanded the decades of pantry dirt off them and made them into our new dining room table.

Anyway, when we moved in we opted for a room off the former dining room (now a giant lobby, more or less) for our bedroom since it was the warmest room, and when we arrived it was really cold and GGLA had no central heat, just a few scary decaying floor and wall units and a few fireplaces. Since we had central air and heat installed and have been living here long enough to figure out what will work best, we decided to flip some rooms and make what is now our TV room the bedroom, and vice-versa. The pass-through bathroom which desperately needed to be gutted and redone will no longer be pass-through, but instead will be entered only through the bedroom. We are also wrecking out the warren of 4 closets that surrounded the bathroom (one of which was cobbled together as a sort of large but only 5' high weird cubby off the stair landing holding a hot water heater) to make the bathroom bigger and to make just one big walk-in closet, entrance from what will be the master bedroom. It has all been hard to work out, since the warren of closets was so cobbled together--you'd go in one to try to measure things and get confused, it was like the black hole of geometry, didn't add up.

Now that we've done most of the demo we can see that the bathroom and closet warren were a room of its own at one time, with, guess what, a porch (you can tell from the floor) that the bathroom claimed. We are bumping out one wall to take a few feet of bedroom space so we can have the dream bathroom for aging arthritic people: shower with a steam bath feature, separate tub with jacuzzi, etc. And the closet which will be MINE all mine will be the first (and last!) closet that I get to design and that will make sense for me. It will also be large enough for everything--no more of the old house inadequate closet plague I've had everywhere I've lived as an adult, that makes you put part of your stuff down the hall in another room, for instance. And I finally won the argument for a bidet. Gary was trying to sell me on something called a Toto Washlet but I find that sort of thing really silly--a kind of mechanical toilet seat that contains the bidet function. You press a button on some sort of remote control and this little gadget that looks like an anal probe pokes out and sprays you. No way. Toilet and bidet need to be kept apart, and although this little Toto hard sell flash presentation is bizarre and funny, I can't see actually having an electronic toilet in my house. Yesterday we worked out how to fit both and solve a need for a support wall anyway. There are some things you can't figure out on paper in advance.

All of our plans of course involved trying to save enough money to realize them (harder these days, definitely so). Of course we are doing most of the work ourselves, but even so, this is a pricey redo. But no cutting corners on materials for this one. We were about to start when the ancient septic system failed, and there being no point in attaching new plumbing fixtures to that mess, not to mention how dreadful having sewage back up into the yard was, we had to spend a chunk of time and money on getting the septic redone. By that time we were expecting guests and so we delayed longer. But we're finally on it. Gary thinks we can do this in a month. I know to double that automatically, and from the looks of it, probably quadruple is more accurate. We can't work on it full time--the rest of life goes on. So we will be pretty discombobulated for some months. And even though I threw away a lot, the stuff one has stored in 4 closets has to go somewhere, so, for instance, my clothes are now on hanging racks in the middle of the bedroom.

Last week was an orgy of ripping out closets and junk. And finally, the place is making some sense. The stairway curves around it, so there's still some funkiness, but we've got a plan. I failed to document the kitchen redo (partly because all I wanted to do was scream and rip things out in the "before" days) but for this one I'm keeping track. So here we go.

Before the demolition, here's the pass-through, ugly ugly ugly and very worn out. The plunger is sitting in the tub drain to contain the smelly water that kind of percolated out of it every so often. Not usable.

Looking the other direction, and please note the hideous simulated parquet woodgrain lino. Ugh.

Here's one of the closets from the warren. Dark, full of cracks through which moths entered and ate holes in nearly everything I had with wool in it. Good riddance.

And here, demo started, is a shot looking out from another of the closets.

Here's the kind of thing we discovered wrecking out walls: circa 1870 wallpaper (that's a guess).

Here's the bump-out wall, framed and sheet-rocked before the demo in order to contain dust and mess. That was a good idea, except now the air duct need to be extended to come through it. And while it is containing some of the mess, doing all this is still stirring up a lot of dust, and coming and going tracks it out into the house. Not to mention all the clutter from the closets being out of commission. The shining eyes on the left are Hattie's, peeking to see what the heck is going on here. She hates all the noise and rearranging.

And another discovery: besides the odd rat's nest (I am not kidding nor is that a metaphor) we dug out of walls and from under the stairs, wood shavings used as insulation. I'm happy we found and eradicated this, because the thought of it surrounded by old wiring makes me very queasy.

Most of the closets wrecked out, things begin to make sense.

The closet door visible is from the inside of the same closet as in the third photo above.

Part of demo is of course getting rid of everything. We threw most of it out the window, dragged it out into the yard and burned it. The side yard here is still pretty scarred from where they dug the new septic field.

Gary has a helper, an experienced house carpenter, and he's worked out how to make all the load-bearing stuff work out. They've torn out more (and pitched the bathtub out the window, next the defunct hot water heater, lowered by rope from the weird landing closet that no longer exists since the floor is all gone to get us the ceiling height we need downstairs). They've framed the ceiling and ripped up enough of the floor to determine it's going to be a lot of work but not as bad as we thought it would be. My job has settled into trying to keep the mess down to a dull roar. It takes me 1-2 hours a day to clean up after the day's destruction and carpentry. Yesterday this also entailed eradicating the rat's nest (again, literally) that had been under the tub. Thank heaven for particle masks, work gloves, and my pal the shop vac.

To be continued...hopefully, not over a great period of time. It will be so nice to make a blog entry called "After."

This Old Mess

Project is kind of stalled, since infrastructure stuff needs to happen before we can progress. We ripped up most of the floor to discover a sill must be replaced and the house jacked up a bit to do it. That should happen this weekend. We found nice floorboards, alternating strips of pine and walnut, under the 2 layers of lino, but unfortunately only a few boards could be saved. We pried all that up and got down to the subfloor--and then I've had to pull about a million nails out, some with pliers, heads snapping--not fun. Some of the subfloor will need to be patched, where fixtures evidently leaked. More rats' nests. More dirt and mess. We tore down most of the ceiling, and as the photo shows, the new ceiling that Gary and helper framed will be uniform height. Gary also cut away more of the wood added for all those closets and we had a sheet rock guy in to give us an estimate. The plumber comes tomorrow morning to cut off all the skanky old plumbing. On his first visit he looked at what was going on under the house and gave his verdict: What a mess. We decided just to have it all yanked out and start anew, because it is, in fact, a giant mess. There is gas pipe used as water pipe in places, all of it's patched together willy-nilly, and some if it's so fragile we're afraid to work around it. The grey pipe you can see in this photo is the drain from the upstairs bathroom, and it needs to be re-routed.

Since the photo was taken the heating and AC guys came and added 2 vents, one for the dressing room and one for the bathroom, and they re-routed the one that got walled in and now goes all the way to what will be the bedroom. They also added a vent on the stairs, since we have a hot pocket after the landing. Hopefully that will help knock down the heat upstairs.

While they were here they accidentally cut the wire on the smoke and fire alarm you can sort of see peeking out in the photo--it's just dangling until we get the new ceiling in. The alarm was bellowing, the dogs were running around barking at it (except Hattie who ran and hid), and I couldn't remember the code. Or rather, the sequence of buttons you press before and after the code. By the time I got it done and called the alarm company to tell them not to send anyone, the fire truck was already pulling up (with sirens blaring, causing more barking and running and hiding and fuss). I apologized about 80 times and we're going to bring the firemen some cookies to the station. But it wasn't all bad: I found out how quickly they get here (very!) and gave them a tour of the house. It can't hurt to be on friendly terms with one's potential saviors.

To me it's unbelievable how much material--the sheer quantity--we've had to wreck out. It would have filled at least a couple of dumpsters. We saved what we could, but it wasn't much.

We picked out subway tile for the walls, some of which will be beadboard, too. The floor will be little hexagonal tiles, off-white with some black accents. The dressing room floor will be cork--we love the cork floor we put in our kitchen, and it's the same only a lighter color. We are still arguing over stone for the tub surround, vanity top, and shower trim. Gary wants Carrara marble; I want something gray but not granite, or if granite, the stuff that had a kind of rough surface. We are buying all the fixtures this weekend during the Louisiana sales tax holiday.

Meanwhile my friend Tracy called to say This Old House magazine was coming (today!) to photograph their kitchen for the November issue. Their place, in Baton Rouge in Beauregard Town, is really gorgeous--they spent over a year remodeling, Tracy's husband working solid on it. Their bathroom was already featured on the TOH website. It was a real wreck when they bought it--for instance, it rained inside--but they've brought it back and now it's so lovely. Even though they had to do much more, their reno must have been easier since they weren't living in it while they did it. Gary and I are kind of slow, but it's the best we can do. Right now, we've got This Old Mess.