Taking Down The To-Do List

Eventually Jen took down the to-do list that she composed and posted on the refrigerator sometime after we moved into Kawama:

Spraypainting the chandelier we talked about.

We also talked about the kitchen cabinets.

Painting the dressers in the bedroom involved using the same paint we used for the stenciling in the bedroom; that paint was a brand name that proved to be of terrible quality.

Painting the dining room sideboard and replacing the handles entailed spraypainting the dresser the owner left in the basement and changing the pulls:

Hanging the craft shelves involved me purchasing a special masonry drill bit to drill into the exterior wall; I think the shelves will stay where I put them; so far, so good.

"Stairs" we discussed.

Paint touchups were just that; not a big deal, though I was quietly relieved that the flat white we bought somehow matched the existing white on the ceiling.

The bathroom faucet, the toilet, showerhead (nothing much to say about that except I'm thankful it works) and caulking — pretty straightforward. Did I mention that the secret to caulking is to use painter's tape for smooth edges? I had no idea that's what you did and often wondered why so much caulking looked so shitty.

Unpacking the front bedroom/"office" was a little more complicated than we thought it was going to be.

Stenciling.

The yard.

. . . . .

At first I was hesitant to move out of our tiny apartment. But here are some things that have made it all worthwhile. First, having a dining room meant that we could have a proper dining room table:

If you ever had dinner at our old place, you might have experienced our version of "table leaves," which just meant that we took our shitty table, appended a television tray balanced on several reference works and put one or two chairs around the coffee table. It was ridiculous. We tried to overcompensate with the food. Anyway, I just about had tears in my eyes once we got this thing assembled. I only wish we could have had more people over since we moved in.

The washer-dryer. Enough said:

A backyard. Maybe the idea of having 100 square feet of outdoor space isn't that impressive to you; I get it — I'm sure it looks strange to a lot of folks — but going to 100 square feet from zero square feet is a force multiplier like you wouldn't believe:

And then there's growing shit in the backyard. Even if you're terrible at it:

There's knowing you have roof access, even if it's a pain to hoist yourself through the hatch and even though it's pretty knee-buckling at the edge:

There's understanding that changing an air valve on a radiator isn't that big a deal:

There's understanding that changing a thermostat isn't that big a deal:

There's having Con Ed tear up your sidewalk:

And waiting four months for them to fix it:

Actually, they did a pretty nice job in the end, and I gather that it was some kind of necessary work . . .

There's worrying about flooding:

There's having your first fresh Christmas tree instead of the quarter-sized fake thing that fits into a duffel bag the rest of the year:

It took a while but we finally had our housewarming party:

And that's the story of how we got into Kawama.

You Go To War With The Yard You Have, And Tend To It Like The Meth Addict You Are

The thing about fixing up a yard is that there's a high rate of success — or at least you can't screw up anything that badly. It's not like you're going to cause the house to flood or set the roof on fire or something like that. If you dig some dirt and bury some rocks, it's not a big deal: undig the dirt, move the rocks. If you kill a plant, plant another. You know?

The bad news about the backyard at Kawama was that it looked like shit — it was an overgrown mess of Rose of Sharon bushes (so mature we treat them as trees), leaves and Astroturf. The good news about the yard is that it was so crappy looking that I couldn't really screw it up.

I'm exaggerating, of course — it wasn't so bad — the Astroturf, while a puzzle to us, wasn't too hard to take out and there weren't all that many leaves. Besides, the fence was in good shape.

First thing to do was get rid of that Astroturf:

In terms of "real work," we left the yard for later, figuring that it wasn't as much of a priority as what was inside the house, but we dug up a lot of the Rose of Sharon early on — it was easy to do, and tough to stop doing once you got going. There were maybe ten separate plants in the backyard and we left five (later reduced to four).

We bundled the Rose of Sharon limbs for the Parks Department to take away. In Queens — along with Manhattan, Brooklyn and now parts of Staten Island — the Asian Longhorned Beetle has made it such that the Parks Department has to take away wood debris. They actually came to pick it up, no problem, on the day they were supposed to come:

Here's what the yard looked like in February, after a season of experimenting with tomato plants and letting it relax a little:

I ended up cutting the shit out of the Rose of Sharon — the plants that were left were still a little too unruly, so I trimmed them back before the winter:

I used some leftover chunks of rock and/or concrete to make a path to the compost bin. I realized later that it looked rather phallic — a phallic path to a compost bin, interesting, that:

The front "yard" was so overgrown that it seemed like the only responsible thing to do was cut it all back. It's interesting — I do yardwork like a meth addict but nothing seems to endear yourself to neighbors like tending to the front planter. You only have to be out there for a few minutes before the older neighbors descend on the scene of the crime to give their support; maybe they're just happy that the new people are doing anything at all.

Anyway, here's the front yard we went to war with:

Here's the front yard we finished with:

A family friend who is a "professional" "landscape architect" took a look at the "work" I did and pronounced it a lost cause. Well, what does she know anyway? I'm more determined than ever now to train, trim and prune this ragtag collection of plants. And besides, it seemed necessary to break some eggs to get into the dirt there — I pulled up several bags worth of trash, not to mention larger bits of debris: bricks, wire, a vinyl tile even. We'll see what happens in the years and decades to come.

And Then We Stenciled

The last major thing we had to do in the house was the stenciling on the walls. Jen liked the way it sort of looked like wallpaper except that it wasn't wallpaper. As with some of the stuff in the house, I quietly acquiesced.

I'd been postponing doing it because I figured it would be harder than it looked. I almost didn't want to do it until I saw that each stencil cost between $30 and $40, so it would have been a waste not to use them.

I (wisely!) did the first stencil in the bedroom. I needed to give it time to dry, so I did it before we went away one weekend. When Jen met me at the bus or train station (can't remember which) she asked how it went.

"OK," I said before adding "I think."

"You think?"

"We'll see how it looks."

Jen didn't like the sound of it.

I didn't have time to really look it over before I rushed to shower and get to the bus or train station (can't remember which). I just didn't think the lines were crisp. The instructions said to use a brush and dab at the stencil, but it was taking too long and it was too streaky so I used a roller instead. Then the stencil got wet with paint on the back and kept falling off. Then I realized that in the lower half of the wall toward the middle I screwed up the stencil, so the pattern was off.

Which is to say that I honestly wasn't sure how it was going to look.

But when we returned Sunday night Jen was pleased with how it looked — even the mistake in the lower part of the wall. What I realized was that it looked pretty OK if you thought of it as a sort of silk screen look, and you embraced the imperfections. Bedroom, before and after:

The dining room was the most intricate stencil and this time I didn't skimp on the tape. Word of advice: Use painter's tape (the blue stuff) and not regular masking tape (the green stuff); it makes a big difference in terms of stick-to-it-tiveness (I used several rolls of packing tape the DirecTV guy left for some of the molding in the living room, so I mistakenly assumed I could get away with it). Anyway, it went a lot more smoothly — and looked pretty good, if I do say so myself!

And, with the exception of a few scattered things that probably don't really merit a mention, but which I reserve the right to mention (including, for example, an ill-advised foray retiling the basement shower over the hurricane weekend — every single inch-by-inch tile — but it does look a lot better), that was the end of the work we had to do at Kawama — inside at least.