Foolish Mansion

The corn stoves have been much more cooperative this winter, now that the price of corn has prompted us to switch from corn to pellets. The plants and even the turtle have been kept warm enough to survive the winter. We did put bubble wrap on most of the old windows, and that helped quite a bit. The old windows are four feet wide and eight feet tall. The cheapest way to buy bubble wrap that would fit over these dimensions was to purchase a two hundred and fifty foot roll. It was about four feet in diameter  before we used it and it is still enormous.

If there is ever a murder here we have plenty of bubble wrap for concealing the body. Or, if a horde of toddlers ever descends, they can stay busy popping bubbles for years to come. Truth to tell, I am sure I would prefer dealing with a dead body.

Toddlers are wonderful, as long as they are A) Someone else’s and B) only stay for five minutes. This does not, of course, include my grandchildren. They are welcome to stay for ten minutes, unless accompanied by their parents. In which case they are welcome to stay for a week. Maybe.

It’s not that I don’t like toddlers. I just hate “toddler hazards”.  “Toddler hazards” are everywhere. Toddlers are like little homing pigeons for disaster: steps they could fall down, brightly colored cleaning fluids they could drink, cars they could run out in front of, strangers they could take candy from, bathwater they could drown in, etc. They make me a nervous wreck.

So how did I survive having nine of them?

I spent a lot of years being a nervous wreck.

Now that it is all over and my children are too old to attract most of the above-mentioned disasters. I can finally relax…….as long as I don’t think about the hazards of motorcycles, air force deployments, stupid life-altering decisions, etc.  Not that any of this has happened yet, any more than any of my toddlers were hit by a car or drowned or poisoned or kidnapped.

Did I mention I’m a worrier?

For some reason, however, I only worry about the mundane. I rarely worry about rapelling, rock climbing, wildfire fighting, sky diving, cave diving or even train jumping. Go figure. I suspect that I really only worry about the things I think I should be able to control or influence. When John (28) hitchhiked across Jordan last winter, or Robert (25) went to Guyana for jungle survival training last summer, I really wasn’t that worried. I thought John was being an idiot. Even the soldiers at the Iraqi border agreed with me, according to John.  I knew Robert would be fine, and even if he weren’t, we could send William(21) to get him.

Speaking of William, I confess  I was not happy when he ran with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain last summer. And I did try to talk him out of it, with absolutely no hope of success. But did I worry? Not really. Compared to what he plans on doing in the Air Force, running with the bulls is not that bad. After his training is over, then I’ll worry.

However, I have digressed from house topics.

Bill working on Kitchen Floor

The kitchen floor is, at long last, tiled, thanks to John, who started the job with Chris, William and Joseph (18), just 24 hours before catching the flu and leaving the bulk of the work to his brothers. John’s  comment was, “My goal was to get the floor to a point where it had to be finished.” He did not add, “by somebody else.”

The kitchen floor is now tiled in matte black with a narrow, shiny, black granite border. This matches the black of the window trim, which was Chris’ choice. And a brave but fortunate choice it was. We even have white lace kitchen curtains up, just two and a half years after our purchase of Foolish Mansion. Once we get the trim up, a couple of cabinet doors hung and a giant vent hood installed over the commercial style range, the kitchen will be finished.

In the meantime it is very well suited to cooking, which was the point all along. Jennifer (14), has been experimenting with desserts and homemade macaroni and cheese.  Patrick (12) has added meat loaf to his previously limited repertoire of lemon roasted chicken. Jennifer and I have recently  made chicken marsala, olive oil dipping sauce and a ricotta cheese cake. All of our recipes came from the book, “The Trouble with Mary”.

I just love those novels of impossible Italian romances that thoughtfully provide the recipes, so you can get at least a taste of the reality they are describing. There was, unfortunately, no “hot Italian hunk” recipe included. It’s just as well. Chris would not have appreciated this and might have retaliated with a “hot Italian babe” recipe of his own. Some things in life are better left untasted.

Mary Elizabeth is now unhappily painting half of the living room, or maybe two fifths. The room is 42 feet long with a fireplace at each end and a huge “hallway” without walls in the middle. Mary Elizabeth is working on one fireplace end.  Some of the trim is a foot wide. The ceilings are 11 feet tall. The sheer volume of trim is driving Mary Elizabeth crazy. Not to mention the scraping, sanding and priming that preceded the painting. I started it all, of course. But like John, I got the flu twenty-four hours into the job and guess who got to take up the slack? Come to think of it, flu season is a really propitious time to start a job, as long as you are the one who catches it and it does not hang on too long after the job is finished.

The trim in this house is a nightmare, with shreds of it constantly dripping down on our heads. Some person, prior to our arrival, evidently painted a water base paint over an oil base semi-gloss and wound up with miles of constantly shedding trim. We have redone the kitchen, dining room, sunroom and master bedroom. We only have about 10 rooms to go, more or less.  If Mary Elizabeth is smart she will go to college in Alaska.

Wall behind where the sink goes

Chris is tiling the walls of the upstairs bathroom. The floor was tiled over Christmas by William and Joseph. It looks great. The walls are looking even better. I can’t wait until it is done.

Patrick also has a few improvements in his room. He has a new ceiling fan (where previously there was no ceiling light at all), a closet light and new wiring and plug ins in  his room. Patrick is thrilled and so am I, to a point. It is now easier to avoid the lego landmines he has strewn all over his floor. It is also much easier to see the dust and the crumbling plaster on his back wall, not to mention the ever flaking trim.

Chris plans on re-framing inside Patrick’s walls and installing insulation, since Patrick has two exterior walls and his room is always cold. I do not know when this plan will be activated. Hopefully when William, John and Joseph are all home. About 24 hours before Chris gets the flu.

And now to less glamorous tasks:

Jenny and Patrick wrestle with the auger

Last week the sewage line in the basement clogged up again. On Saturday, Chris went to Shelbyville to rent the giant augur for about the fourth time since we moved here. There must be some glitch in the piping  in the basement .  The augur machine itself isn’t that big but the ten foot lengths of coils that attach to it come rolled up in huge tires that are fat and stinky. Thus the truck is required to pick them up. After Chris returned with the machine, he and the kids rolled the machine and the tires into the house to the top of the north basement stairs.

Fortunately, last time Chris rented the auger, he took the opportunity to teach Jenny (14) and Patrick (12), how to use it. Yesterday afternoon, Patrick and Jenny put on enormous work gloves, ratty clothes and even rattier shoes, and descended the basement stairs, girded for biohazard duty.

Chris and I stood at the top of the stairs spying on them, listening to their conversation as Jennifer and Patrick gave each other orders, ignored one another’s orders and yet somehow managed to work together.  They conferred on how to attach the augur coils, who would handle what, etc. Chris snuck down to take a picture of them as they worked. It was hilarious, big machine, very small workers. They looked like a couple of humanoid moles, toiling away, undaunted and unperturbed by the relative enormity of their task. We were so proud of them. After using over 80 feet of coils they finally punched through the obstruction.

After the job was done Jennifer came upstairs, demanding “hazard pay”. For all our sakes, Chris sent her and Patrick scrambling for the showers. Afterwards, he took them and a paint splattered Mary Elizabeth, to the movies. They saw “Megamind” and loved it. This morning Chris returned the augur to the rental place and now all is well. The toilet is flushing quite nicely, The garbage man will never know why one of the trash bags he picks up tomorrow morning smells so strongly of bleach.