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.
Posted: February 14th, 2012 | Author: Scott | Filed under: The Cult Of Domesticity | Tags: "Landscape Architecture", Kawama, The Asian Longhorned Beetle
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.
Posted: February 13th, 2012 | Author: Scott | Filed under: The Cult Of Domesticity | Tags: Kawama, Stenciling Walls, The New Frugalism
Heading into July, we were down to the last of the major items on the to-do list: Painting the cabinets, taking the tiles up on the second floor and stripping the paint off the staircase. This was the long July-August of buckling down and finishing what needed to be finished.
The previous owner of Kawama was intent on covering up every floor surface. We already talked about the carpet, for example. The man taking care of the house had told us that the owner wanted to "protect the floors." For what, I don't know, perhaps just future owners.
The other coverup method they used were those horrible self-stick vinyl tiles:
And then there was the strangest coverup of them all — the sickly orange paint on the tile in the kitchen:
Jen got a heat gun to use to take up the tiles. A heat gun is a great tool. It takes up these tiles, no problem, but it also takes off paint, which also came in handy, especially after Jen forbade me from using chemicals to strip the paint on the staircase.
Heating up the tiles and melting away the adhesive was no problem at all:
What was a problem was getting the adhesive residue off the floor afterward. I tried vegetable oil and 409 and neither of those things were working. Someone Jen knows gave us a tip to using washing soda, which is sort of like baking soda but stronger. That did work, though it also took off whatever finish was leftover:
Cleaning the floors of the adhesive was good, important work, but very tedious. I think it took about a week, though I can't really remember after all the beer I drank to break up the day. I'd walk Jen to the subway, pick up a six pack and get to work.
(I did take the day off on July 21. At one point during the day I checked weather.com and saw that it was 91 with a dew point of 74 degrees. Holy shit that was hot. I emailed Threshold in DC to tell her it was 94 there with "an excruciatingly high" dew point of 78. She confirmed that it was, in fact, very hot.)
Scrub, scrub, scrubbing was quiet, as opposed to the heat gun. When the heat gun is on, you're stuck in your head. At least when I was scrubbing I could hear the radio, which sent me on a different tangent in which I'd think about something along the lines of how the musicians on the radio weren't on their knees on the floor just then making their wrists sore and their knuckles soap-raw.
Other times I'd think of things I'd want to Google but couldn't because the clicker was downstairs and, besides, my hands were sticky with glue or wet from soap or just soapy.
After a week or so of scrubbing the floors with washing soda, here is what my pants and shoes looked like (my family has since forced me to throw away these shoes):
But the nice thing about having washing soda caked on your clothes is that they ended up pretty clean:
Then there was the staircase. I had been dreading taking the paint off the staircase, but it needed to happen, especially because once we took up the carpet there was a different color paint underneath.
The only thing with the staircase was, like I said, Jen wouldn't let me use chemical strippers on account of the fetus. So I used the heat gun instead. Even with the respirator it was still pretty stinky, and I couldn't imagine that heating up old paint — some of it perhaps lead paint, though I wasn't sure — was any better.
Once you get going with the heat gun, it's difficult to stop — both because the paint just starts peeling away and because you just want to peel back all those years of paint on the molding:
What goes through your mind while you heat up paint all day? I don't know. Stuff that makes you feel small. What people you went to school with are doing now. Whether your eighth grade English teacher was yanking your chain when she said you should write more. What Steve Albini is cooking. It goes on from there.
Eventually I found a place to stop, and settled on just the staircase.
Jen and I have a word for when things look good enough, which is "rustic." The stairs and the floors weren't perfect in the sense that they are now sanded, stained and finished (I can't even imagine that process, especially now that we've squirreled away all our stuff) but now they looked good enough:
There's something big and self-congratulatory about "peeling away." It's the kind of feeling you get when you sit through a literature segment in the second half of The News Hour, or force yourself to read the business section, or something like that. You sit down at dinner and repeat something about the Bolivia's deficit or Orhan Pamuk and just feel like you've "earned it." In same same way it's like, "I spent the last three days rescuing the bannister — they sure don't make wood like they used to!"
But just when you feel high and mighty about righting a home decor wrong (like self-stick vinyl tiles), there's all the stuff you yourself are determined to cover up. The horrible laminate on the cabinets, for one:
And the longer I looked at it, the less happy I felt about the idea of wood laminate some of the kitchen walls:
Yeah, you're into "authentic" touches? What's more authentic than sallow grey fake wood laminate?
Some things are just self-evident.
I was skeptical about whether this would work, but Jen looked it up online and found that you actually can paint laminate. So we bought the Zinsser primer they talk about and I set about taking off all the doors, pulls and hinges. I would have just replaced the hinges but do you realize how much those damn things are? Like $2 or $3 a hinge! So we spray painted them. (Pulls are a different story — we bought plain ones at IKEA for nothing.) The Zinsser stuff is nasty smelling, but it works. We then painted over the primer with some color called something like "Yellowstone" or something like that and put everything back on.
A few weeks later I looked at the fake wood laminate and realized that it had to be covered, too. It was either that or pull it down, and I didn't think it was wise to roll the dice there.
So some stuff they covered up, and some stuff we covered up. Not the best moment for transparency, I suppose, though I am happy with the results . . . the before, to refresh your memory:
Then after:
And after this stuff was done, we started to see the end of the work on Kawama.
Posted: February 12th, 2012 | Author: Scott | Filed under: The Cult Of Domesticity | Tags: An Endorsement Of Zinsser B-I-N, How To Make Laminate Look A Lot Less Shitty, Kawama, Let's Get Small, The Caustic Nature Of Washing Soda, The Dew Point, The Heat Gun, The Miracle Of Washing Soda, The Sin Of Self-Stick Vinyl Tiles
