The only time we clean the house, I mean really clean, is when we have guests coming. We had six overnight house guests visit last week but we couldn’t get the house quite clean enough because we were racing to finish the interminable pantry-rehab project. We have plenty of excuses for not keeping our place clean. For starters: it’s a big house. And we’re always working on it. Or we’re working on something else. And we have four pets. It’s remarkable how much hair a pet sheds. Under bureaus and beds we find hairy dust balls as big as mice. The dust you see in most houses is nothing more than the homeowner’s shed skin cells (we shed 40,000 a minute). But our house is notable for animal hair and sawdust and plaster dust too. Sometimes the dust gets so bad, Jill finger-draws hearts and messages in it across the surface of our expansive dining room sideboard.

Our three week marathon of working on the butler’s pantry generated a lot of saw- and plaster dust because I had the belt sander out to shave down stubborn door-edges. I also used the grinder to slice into wood and plaster in tight places. In short order, the grinder makes the wood smoke and turns plaster into gritty fog. The lenses of my eyeglasses are nearly opaque from scratches caused by construction dust. This happens every year to my glasses.

My mother-in-law keeps a house so clean, I’m not sure where to sit when I visit. In fact, during our last visit, we had a dirt incident. A single clump of dirt liberated itself from the sole of my shoe after Jill and I returned from a walk. The dirt fell onto the kitchen’s bright-white linoleum floor. It was a narrow band of mud-black dirt, about the size and shape of a nail. In fact, my father-in-law thought it was indeed a nail. “What’s that?” my mother-in-law exclaimed. “It looks like a nail,” my father-in-law answered. They and I and Jill were gathered around it, leaning forward for a better look. “It’s dirt from my shoe,” I explained, feeling a little embarrassed. My father-in-law shook his head doubtfully. “Looks like a nail.” “We’d better get that up,” my mother-in-law said firmly. “Right away,” my father-in-law agreed. Jill volunteered to fetch the broom and dust pan. She swept it up, then I took over and swept some more, just for good measure, as my in-laws watched with satisfaction. I feared that more of the offending stuff would drop from my shoe before we got out the door.

Had this happened at our house, one of us one have kicked the dirt aside or simply pinched it up. In either case, we’d have put off sweeping. Not that we dislike sweeping. In fact, we have a broom and dust pan on every floor. I prefer the vacuum. I have a big one and a hand-held. Jill refuses to vacuum unless under a lot of pressure, as when we had to pull the house together last week before our six guests arrived – while I finished putting together the pantry cabinets.

Vacuum cleaners didn’t become common in American households until well into the 1920s. Until then, people had carpet sweepers and, of course, brooms. If they were serious about getting at dirt, they hung their carpets on the clothes line in the back yard and beat them with a carpet beater, a tough wire wand that every household owned. Sidenote: the first item stolen from our house while we were first working on it (eight years ago) was an antique whisk broom I had set among my tools in the front room.

Jill jokes that if I die before her, she’ll let the house close in around her – dust-thick cobwebs sagging from every wall – like Miss Havisham’s house. It wouldn’t take much, I tell her. We’ve got enough web-making spiders in the house to accommodate her. The spiders – called Pholcids — came with the house and are quite abundant. They look like daddy long legs but they keep to themselves in little tea-cup-sized webs. Sometimes the male and female build a web together. I’m a big fan of the Pholcids.

My point is this: if you come here, we’ll probably clean up before you arrive and you’ll think, My goodness, how do they keep up with this big, old place? The answer is, We don’t.

.

Related posts

• No related posts.

Jill’s had the crockpot on all week, boiling antique door hardware in soapy water. Every time I get near the thing, the fumes nearly make me gag. We’re going into the third week of working non-stop on our pantry project.. You’d think such a little room wouldn’t need all that, but this is a Victorian butler’s pantry, twelve feet deep, four feet wide, with windowed doors to the ceiling. It has demanded every skill we possess. We’ve run new electrical lines, rebuilt cabinets, stripped paint, tiled a wall, re-glazed windows, plumbed a sink, milled wood, caulked, glued, nail-gunned, and then hung 14 cabinet doors, with eight more to go.

Nothing is harder than hanging doors in an old house. If the door frame is crooked and the door itself is warped and you’re not sure where to place the hinge, the work can go on for hours. We take for granted all a door must do. It’s surprising that hinges can hold the weight they’re assigned. Surprising too that a door can swing so much and meet its target every time without binding or jamming.

We turn the radio on full blast while we work, tuned to the local alt-rock station (WTMD). Yesterday Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” came on and I decided it’s got to be his best, but I couldn’t help thinking of the Carnival Cruise advertisement that uses the tune as the soundtrack to a montage of frolicking middle-class thirty- and forty-somethings who would probably be appalled if they were to meet Mr. Pop himself. I can hardly blame Iggy for selling the song. I’d have done the same. Still, it blunts the edge considerably.

ACure tune came on—you may remember the doleful, brooding bad boys of the eighties — and I called to Jill: “Whatever happen to the Cure?” She said: “They got old.” “Oh, that’s a sad thing to say,” I told her. As it turns out, the Cure have a new album. It sounds pretty good, just as angst-ridden as ever. Only problem is, when I tried to go to their website it said, “page not found.”

Earlier this week I was shopping at Sav-A-Lot, a bottom-of-the-barrel grocery store (I’m a sucker for a bargain), and was startled to hear a Miles Davis tune drifting from the PA. And it wasn’t your run-of-the-mill Miles Davis. It was “Jeru” from “Birth of the Cool.” Hearing it at Sav-A-Lot was like seeing Madonna shopping at Wal-mart.

Big Steverino came by this week to drop off the ruined butler’s pantry cabinetry we bought from him. The thing was massively overbuilt and has massive hinges and latches, which Jill has boiled cleaned. We salvaged what we could. Much of it was water-damaged. In stripping the wood, we discovered that the cabinets had been originally grain-painted. The drawers are made of walnut. The countertop is a single slab of 24-inch pine. You can’t get wood like that nowadays. We don’t have trees that big any more.

As happens whenever we rehab, I have arranged an unrealistic deadline: this weekend, when we’re expecting a houseful of guests. The steel shop manager says he can’t guarantee he’ll get our pantry counters covered in stainless by that time. Also he’s informed me that his shop doesn’t attach the steel to the counter – I’ll have to do that after I get the pieces back from him. The counters were supposed to be finished last week but the shop that was going to do it got caught up in a last minute corporate order that bumped me out of the queue. After eight years of rehabbing, I’m used to deadline pressure and the imminent prospect of not getting everything done or done right or done at all. It has taught me a kind of patient fatalism. Jill says if we don’t have the counters, we’ll just put down plywood. I can’t help but love a woman who thinks like that.

Related posts

• No related posts.

I bought a grinder last week. It’s one of the few tools I didn’t own but knew I needed. A grinder does as you’d expect – it grinds stuff, mostly stone and glass and masonry. But you can use it for other purposes, like cutting into wood in tight spaces. I’ve been using it as we renovate our pantry. The biggest house job we’ve done in a while, the pantry has involved lots of tearing-out and rebuilding. We’ve tiled the eleven-foot backsplash with antique subway tile. The grinder allows me to cut tile fairly accurately. Today I took the counters to a metal shop, where they will be covered in stainless steel.

Of course nothing’s straight or level in an old house, and so we wondered if the tile would be even with the counter. On the opposite wall, the counter doesn’t line up with the wall because the wall is bowed. I’ve cut into the plaster to straighten out the counter but now I’m not sure what to do with the wall. At one point Jill was nearly in tears as she tiled: “I’m not prepared to work with an uneven surface! This is gonna look like shit!” She had to shim every tile on the bottom row of the eleven-foot stretch, then check each with a level.

As we took on the kitchen and pantry renovation we found ourselves in the situation of needing a lot of old stuff we’ve seen in abundance at stores and auctions but can’t find now that we need it. We drove to York, PA (an hour north), to visit Big Streverino, who sells all kinds of antique architectural salvage online and has a warehouse you can visit if you call him first. We bought an entire wall of built-in cabinets from him. These were removed from a demolished mansion in upstate New York. In fact, the shelves themselves are sort of demolished. We’re going to use the best part of it for the kitchen, then save the rest for parts.

Big Steverino was unloading huge wrought iron brackets from his truck when we arrived. He said these came from Indonesia, remnants of colonial architecture that is now being torn down and shipped in pieces to American auctions, where people wax nostalgic about the Victorian and Edwardian ages. A lot of fake antiques are coming from Indonesia too – new mahogany furniture that masquerades as old. Vanessa, our antiques-dealer friend, says this stuff splits as it dries out because the wood hasn’t been properly cured.

Old buildings are everywhere in York, some quite grand. But virtually all of its big houses on Main Street are now law and doctors’ offices. York’s median family income is about half the state’s average. In other words, it’s a poor town – which means a good place to buy a big old house cheap. York never did so well that it lost its old buildings to urban renewal. Big Steverino grew up in York and has made his living scavenging the Northeast for old doors, mantels, stained-glass windows, and so on. About 35, he’s one of the younger antiques entrepreneurs we’ve met. “It’s a tough way to make a living,” he concedes. “And it can’t last. We’ll pick the country clean.” “But until then you’ll get to hang out with all this cool stuff,” I observed, waving a hand at his warehouse. He agreed to deliver our giant wall of decrepit shelves some time this week.

Before we left York, we stopped at Anza’s Pizza. It’s a run-down, once-upon-a-time family restaurant that must have seen its best days fifty years ago. Jill wasn’t sure about it, but I had a feeling. We’d been directed to a clean, suburban franchise by a salesperson at the Kholer sink store (yet another stop, this time for a hand-to-find cast-iron mini-sink). But Jill and I are fans of the downtrodden, so we gave Anza’s a try. It serves one of the best non-gourmet pizzas we’ve had outside of the NYC boroughs. A dry, crunchy crust, a zesty sauce, not too much cheese, and oregano liberally sprinkled overall. It’s very hard to get a pizza with oregano any more. Why is that?

The place was empty at six on a Wednesday night. It was gutted and modernized about twenty years ago, every flat surface covered with beige laminate. Apparently Anza’s is still in the family. It looked like the grandson was doing the baking and his father or uncle was managing. We ate a large pepperoni and had only one piece left over. Jill asked the manager to wrap it to go. Inexplicably, he rolled it up and put it in a paper bag. We supposed he’d run out of foil. Next time we’re in York, we’re stopping again.

Related posts

• No related posts.

To read about Ron’s four months in Micronesia, go to the archive to your left and click on “Marshall Islands Story Project.”

As a follow-up to our Florida trip, where we were regaled with gator stories, we read in the news this week that an eleven-year-old boy in Louisiana was nearly eaten by an alligator. The fifteen foot gator, known as “Big Joe,” snapped off and swallowed the boy’s left arm. Within thirty minutes, a local gator hunter tracked down Big Joe, but it took him a while to corner and kill the monster. The hunter retrieved the now-blue arm (cyanosis), then rushed it to the hospital, where it was re-attached to the recovering boy. You may recall that in the original “Little Red Riding Hood,” a passing hunter cut open the wolf that ate both Little Red and her grandmother. Neither was worse for her stay in the wolf’s stomach.

Speaking of eating: Jill and I bought a new refrigerator last week. This meant two things: 1) we would no longer argue over ice cubes—who did or did not fill up the trays. 2) We would have to re-do our kitchen. It surprises people to hear that we’ve lived this long without an ice maker. Our last refrigerator was a good one, a fat white box the size of a compact car, but it had no ice maker. It butted so far into the kitchen, we were always bumping into it or stepping around it or moving the table out of the way as we opened the fridge door. Two weeks ago, Jill mentioned that it’d be nice to have a counter-depth fridge. Within a week, we’d found a high-end unit on clearance sale.

Nowadays most home-owners like all of their food and plates and stuff in or very near the kitchen. Most of us stock up on food and household supplies as if preparing for the next world war. Jill and I are no exception. Before thoughts of a new fridge, we’d been eyeing our kitchen and strategizing about making more space. Our kitchen is classic Victorian, which means it was originally very plain and simple: a stove, a cupboard, a work table. In a house like ours, the home-owners seldom went into the kitchen. Dishes were kept in the pantry and food in the larder closet. Victorians didn’t stock up on anything. They shopped nearly every day and tradesmen came to the house with wares. The Victorians did own a lot of plate and glassware, however. Much more than we do. That’s why our butler’s pantry – between the kitchen and dining room — is so large.

Jill and I decided to set the new fridge inside our existing, under-used kitchen cupboard. (Underused because it had no doors.) Like all renovation work, this job – making a home for the new fridge – was incredibly time-consuming. It demanded running electricity to that wall, stripping most of the wood (thick with decades of paint), dismantling the cupboard, then rebuilding it with new drawers and doors. The Victorians were famous for overbuilding, using three nails where one would do. You should know that this wasn’t part of our summer renovating plan. The original plan was to finish the butler’s pantry by putting in new counters and the original tall, glass doors (12 of them). Actually, we started that job by stripping, painting, and re-glazing the twelve glass pantry cupboard doors, but then the fridge distracted us.

We took a break from work this week to scout out sheet-metal shops for estimates on getting stainless steel counters for the pantry. The only way to do this on a budget is to cut the counters yourself (3/4-inch plywood), then take them to the shop to have them covered in sheet metal. Jill knows to wait in the car while I talk with shop foremen. Because I’m dressed in my work clothes and because these shops aren’t accustomed to guys walking in off the street with a sketch of the work they need done, I’m usually mistaken as a contractor. “Where you located?” one foreman asked me. “Downtown,” I said off-handedly. Then I fingered a sheet of metal and asked, “Is this 20 gauge?” It’s like play-acting and it’s a lot of fun.

I’m a mess when I’m working on a big house job. Tools crowd the floor and counters, electrical cords are Medusa’d in the middle of the room, my clothes are streaked and spattered with paint, caulk, and glue, my hair powdered with sawdust. I work fast and won’t stop until I see real progress. I might not eat the entire day, stopping only to drink iced fruit juice. This morning – moving too fast as usual – I shoved an eight-foot ladder out of the way and my cordless drill, which I’d set atop the ladder, fell squarely on my head. It made a resounding thunk! Fortunately the drill handle hit the hardest part of my skull. I saw stars for only a few minutes.

As I encounter impediments in my work (there are always impediments), I curse loud and long. When Jill and I were first working on the house, she found this disturbing. She didn’t know what it meant. Who was I shouting at? She learned that I shout at myself for all my stupidity. Then I shout at the wood that won’t cooperate or the drill bit that broke. I might shout all day long. It’s actually quite therapeutic.

Since the new fridge is smaller than the old one, we’ve been pulling out mystery containers from the old fridge and deciding whether or not to eat what we find inside. In the freezer, we discovered a container of pumpkin puree that Jill had stored after we carved our jack-o-lanterns last Halloween. So she made a killer pumpkin pie. Never mind it’s been ninety in Baltimore every day. I can eat pumpkin pie any time.

Related posts

• No related posts.