Cold Spaghetti

This was the back as of 12/26. Paul worked on blocking and other assorted small tasks (with Will’s supervision).
We’ll have a cool over-hang. The day I took the kids to Mobile (i.e.: freed Paul to work ’round the clock), he finished evening them out. He also finished blocking the ceiling joists. But the big project he did while we were away was to take down the rotten boards off the back of the peak of the roof (see them?) Once the boards were gone, he re-framed out the peak, put Tyvek up for protection, and installed a new attic vent. (Actually, our existing vent was permanently shut, so this is a major improvement.) When he gets around to blogging about this, he may have some interesting tidbits about the state of the roof and vent. The plan was for him to continue to work on the roof over the existing structure (the current, nonfunctional back bathrooms/laundry) by removing the roof and starting to lay the foundation for an actual roof. More on that later, because roofing and the many confusions over it are seriously big topics. In fact, if we had to point to one logistical issue that stalled the start of this project more than any other, it would be issues with the roof.
This is the structure and how it will basically look… just needs a little imagination to fill in the pieces!

This was the first time we’ve had a tree since we lived in Ann Arbor. We bought this tree on clearance after Christmas last year and put it up for the first time this year. Will and I made the garland out of Mardi Gras beads, hung ornaments that hadn’t seen light in over 4 years, and made assorted decorations. (Will is quite the crafty guy.)
This one was Kate’s (she put the nose on all by herself). Will and I helped guide her with the rest.
Will and I put together this ice skater. The best part is that Will wrote his name on the ice behind the figure.
This doggie is 100% Will. Note that the dog’s mouth is a “W.”
Another Will original — with glitter and Popsicle sticks!
My favorite ornament… of Paul’s 2-year old hand.
Kate and the Christmas tree, Christmas Eve day. We hung everything out of reach of Kate — she loved messing up the garland and we didn’t want to give her much opportunity to get involved with anything else.
After Santa’s visit, in the wee hours Christmas morning. The doggie rocker was for Kate and the Black-n-Decker workbench for Will. Both were huge hits. Other treats: Will gave Kate an animal hospital set, Kate got a Baby Stella doll, Will got a talking and racing Lightening McQueen (even Kate can program it; she is alarmingly brilliant) and we all got pajamas. Santa brought both kids Ugly Dolls and they are great (Will LOVES his “Big Toe” and has been taking it everywhere.) Paul and I had some big exciting items, too… a camera lens (for me) and a tile saw (for Paul).
Below, sometime Christmas morning. We opened presents slowly and in waves, finishing some the following day. Here, Paul is asleep on the floor while PapPap and Kate play with the animal hospital (a gift picked out for Kate by Will, “because Kate likes gatos”).
Will working on his workbench.
Will colored the ornament below last year.
Granna and Kate open up the Baby Stella doll.
It was so nice to be home for Christmas, even if the day was crazy. It will be very hard to take down the tree!

Does the view seem wider than previous pictures? There is a reason, but more on that later.


The photo below is to demonstrate Paul’s flipping around the roof. The rest is a little lagniappe.





These are what he’s nailing the boards into. Hurricane protection.






Nice view if we were going to have a second story. (We’re not.)











They finished the roof after dark — or really, just throwing the last beams up. (Getting them up was something Paul couldn’t do by himself, so they cut and got them up while Paul had help.) Paul finished nailing them all down the next day.

Big french door in the back. Big picture window in the porch area, with smaller window on the side. Small window to the left (study side) with little itty-bitty window on that side.
Interior glass door from laundry to porch — a little more towards the center than the old door.
Use your imagination….

On the 22nd, Paul built the floorboards. He did it by himself… with some management:
Paul on why Will is good management: “He doesn’t have a clue what is going on, but he has an opinion about everything.”

On the 23rd, Paul and Dad finished the subfloor.






This is how Paul is making tool clean-up easy — he rolls tools in and out of the outbuilding.

Somehow, I need to just relax. Or something.

The season came too fast… what with holidays, birthdays, teaching, trips to Emergency Departments, plans for the back addition, The Defense, and everything in between. I haven’t finished the whole Christmas thing yet (my brother and sister-in-law arrive in Mobile later this weekend) and am still hard at work at the Christmas project I started over a month ago. Santa came, the kids were thrilled, and we went through the motions… but I’m just still not there. I just feel like the whole holiday has been completely missed.

Part of it is that Paul has been working nonstop on the back of the house, which has meant that any celebrating we have done as a family has been incredibly short, pressed for time even within its allocated cut-offs, and unfocused. The holiday has been, for us, a time to use time off from work to do all the other work we do. We both have been like machines. I think the time outside and the physical demands of the building have been both tiring and exhilarating for Paul. He looks great and although complains of understandable soreness, seems energized by the challenges. I feel trapped and overwhelmed by the demands of the holiday, the needs of the kids, and my desire to do it all. I’m jealous because I want to be doing something that recharges me… reading, painting, yoga… anything. But this is impossible unless someone else watches the kids, which isn’t happening. We are trying, as always, to incorporate these things into our play, but it doesn’t serve to energize me.

Maybe part, too, is the way we entered this holiday. Trying to play catch-up.

The morning of the Friday before Christmas, I rushed to get gifts for the teachers together. Paul had the delivery of lumber coming that morning and didn’t want the hassle of finding help he could trust to move the thousands of pounds of valuable wood to the back… so he spent all morning carrying heavy beams and missed the holiday party that morning at Abeona House. I was planning on going and was so excited to be going — Will was part of a play the preschoolers were presenting. He had been talking about it, working on costumes at school and practicing. That morning, he asked if I was coming to his performance. “Yes,” I told him, “I wouldn’t miss it for anything in the world.”

Do you see where this story is going?

Problems with getting everything together, my mistaken memory of the events at the school, and just stuff that happens when you are in a hurry… all collided and I arrived at the school at around 10am — rushing in because I thought the show was just starting. But it was already over (it had started a half hour before). Will saw me from his seat at the head of the snack table, “Mommy,” he said, “you weren’t there.”

I have never, in my life, felt so strongly towards simply Not Being. I just wanted to disappear, evaporate, melt away. This couldn’t have happened. It couldn’t have. Just then, Emmy came in and so sweetly commented on Will’s finale: “Where he gave the sweetest bow.” I went to the back of the kitchen so that no one else would notice my crying, my fighting to hold it together. Maybe, at least, I can take pictures? The one thing creative thing that I have, that I can do? I opened up the camera bag to find that all the memory cards were at home — victim to my rushing and holiday madness. I couldn’t take a picture of anything. I contemplated just leaving the party right then and going back to bed. Maybe I could forget the morning ever happened?

A few moments of talking with another parent helped me push back into reality. The party went on and no one noticed that I was without my camera. I began to feel my identity without a lens come into being and picked up with life. Later that night, Will recited the performance to me. Here’s the jist: Out of an egg comes a creepy, crawly bug who is determined to go to Mexico (“I gotta go, I gotta go, I gotta go to Mexico”) despite being told by many that it’s an impossible prospect. Eventually, the bug turns into a butterfly and joins the millions like him in Mexico, where he lays eggs to continue the cycle. It wasn’t the same as being there, but it made me feel a bit better.

I realized something else then. That I am human and because of this, I cannot promise my kids that I will always be there. Because I am human and real and flawed. I make mistakes, I forget things, I am sometimes late. Things happen. But I always try my best — that is a promise I can make. Unfortunately, my best sometimes totally screws things up.

Like, when despite my best intents, I completely blow the surprise I’ve been working on for Paul for over 4 months.

On Saturday, I picked up the commissioned painting of the kids I had been planning with an artist friend for months. He used a photograph I took of the kids and interpreted it in his own style; the result is unique and sweet. It’s just our kids: imperfect, playing, real, fluid, and completely themselves. I had been swiping small amounts of money away for almost a year (surprising Paul with anything is next to impossible due to the way we use Quicken) so I save little amounts of petty cash. Paul knew something was up, but was completely in the dark until I began to tell him, over Saturday dinner, about my visit with that particular family (the painter is Will’s friend Aya’s father). Coupled with my disastrous recovery, Paul put it together. I felt so defeated that I just gave him the painting (I figured it saved me the hassle of figuring out how to wrap it without endangering the unframed piece.)

So broken hearts and ruined surprises brought us into Christmas-time 2007. Haven’t I mentioned how 2007 sucks? I cannot wait for 2008. I’m tempted to crawl into a hole and hibernate until 2008; I don’t feel anything will be safe until we are finally out of this terrible year.

Will wrote a letter to Santa this year: his first. It started off like this:

I especially like how he added the “L” to the end of “DEAR”. I also like that he decided SANTA should replace the “N” with an “L”. I thought this meant that he would be writing “DEAR SALTA” (“salta” the Spanish word for “Jump,” which is a word Will knows very well, so I was amused at this particular choice). But when I suggested he add the last “A” to the end (for he had just written out “SALT” at that point), he said he wanted to put both letter “As” together. So be it. “DEARL SAALT” is how Will’s first letter to Santa begins.

I took the rest on dictation:

Because he didn’t know how to write words for things (he is still learning his letters, as demonstrated above), I suggested he cut out some pictures. This worked out well, as I had collected fliers from the paper and could encourage him towards things (i.e.: things we knew he was getting). Paul and I got him the Black-n-Decker tool bench (below) and my parents got him a talking Lightening McQueen car (hence the picture of Lightening McQueen). He signed his and Kate’s name to end the letter. (“K” is a hard one to write and he did a really, really good job!)
Then, today, our mailbox had a letter back from Santa! It worked out well — I happened to be coming from the backyard when our mailman (Chris) was on the porch dropping off our mail and picking up the gift we’d left for him there. I told him about the letter from Santa and ran in to get it out of the freezer. Chris said he’d make a huge deal about how COLD it was next time he saw Will. So Chris dropped in the letter with all the rest of the mail and Will found the letter a minute later — freezing cold from the North Pole! Once we opened the package and unrolled the parchment, this is what the letter looked like:
Merry Christmas 2007! Ho Ho Ho!

These are from over a week ago, but are interesting enough to catch up on. My apologizes if I hose up exact details; Paul will fill in the details and post more when he can move his arms off of the floor again.

So, all by himself, while I was off with the kids, Paul took off the back of the house. He then discovered that the termite damage that was found when we had the house inspected (and got $7000 back at closing to fix) was a bit more extensive. The picture above — see the door to the right (the doors to the backyard are interior doors, and no we didn’t install them, hence why they look that way) — anyway, that corner of the house had heavy termite damage. It was fixed before closing. But it wasn’t until the wall was off that one could see how high it went. With the changes going to the back and the importance of the load on that back wall, Paul wanted to get it right. He ended up jacking the house up on that side, splicing out the termite-eaten areas (actually, he said part was completely gone, so it was just evening out the eaten edge) and putting in new pieces. You can see if from inside — stay tuned and I’ll see if we can move some stuff around and get a few pictures. It’s pretty interesting.

Thank goodness our friend Robert answered his cell and had a jack that Paul could use — Robert was a real lifesaver at that moment. I still can’t believe all that Paul did completely by himself. (With me calling every few hours to make sure he was still alive.)

Other interesting pieces… see that foundation pier? Yikes. You can see some of the termite damage in the supporting beam sitting on the pier. See that spigot? Paul installed that after we moved in. This past Saturday morning, he drained the house again and took it off… the last step before starting to frame out the floor!
More dtail to the back. See the hole? Those wood slats are our floors. One has a decent hole in the space between the siding and wallboard. See all the years of debris and bug carcasses? Yikes! We are working very hard not to think about what is in the rest of our 100+ year old walls. (Being perfectionists, this makes us want to re-side the whole house… which would give the bonus step of adding insulation… but the $10,000 or so price tag is a bit unreasonable. Granted, we’ll know better what the real cost is once we’ve bought the hardi for the back of the house. As we begin to buy more materials, we have learned that labor and overhead is SERIOUSLY high.)

Above — evidence of a pipe that once ran out of the back of the house.
And an outlet.
Above: bug shell carcasses. Eewww.
More detail around the right side door (facing house from back yard). Wild!
Above: the nails above were what held the siding on — pounded directly onto the house. (It was aluminum siding.)

Some rough costs and details so far (that I can remember):
— Foundation with piers and flashing: $4000 (This we subbed out — want to have a level foundation! cement had to be wheelbarrowed into the backyard from the street since the space between houses is so narrow.)
— Floorboard lumber: just over $1100. (We used black edge versus pressure treated. At first, Paul was interested in pressure treated (tongue and groove) because of the short distance from the ground. But it came into the yard damaged. The excellent gentleman helping us (Wayne at Kellett Lumber) suggested the black edge. It saved us about a $100 and I was thrilled (no out gassing to worry about).
— Lumber for walls, headers, and ceiling (basically, all the remaining lumber): roughly $2012. All the lumber was delivered Friday morning. Paul missed the school party that morning to carry it all in the backyard (worried it would get lifted off the street). While at the party, friend and fellow parent David heard about Paul’s difficult morning chore, left the party and showed up at our house to help carry wood. Which he happily did all morning, making the job much easier on Paul and bringing on the important elements of fun and friendship to the task. Thanks, Dave!
— Windows, Simonton (4 windows). We looked at Pella (stay away, particularly if in a high-humidity area); cheap aluminum (only because we went to the wrong place); and even Home Depot (don’t bother); to end up with Simonton. I’ll let Paul sing the praises of why we went with them, but if you are in the NOLA area (or another high-humidity, high-wind possible, area… we highly recommend them based on what we’ve learned). More on this once they are actually here and installed. I think they were about $1200 total? Maybe not… I can’t quite remember.
— But the double french exterior door, that was $1400. It wasn’t Simonton, I don’t think. (Sorry, we ordered them two or so weeks ago and I am forgetting some details.)
— Skylights (2): Velux. Can’t remember the price, but like everything else, it was cheaper than we had estimated. Skylights were tricky since the pitch on the roof is going to be slight. Paul and Dad are still hashing out some details on how they are going to frame it out.