Pics of Home

These are some photos Papa Sasha took around the house. "Eww! Squeezy Spider!" The wooden plank is for Tyoma to walk up. The livingroom is no longer green!

The rag on the table is driving me crazy! Just some random pics. The house is sort of looking more like my ideal...

The Deck

We've lived here for over a year, and finally, after several false starts, surprise rainstorms, and moderate procrastination the deck is being stained. It's been a three week process. Tennisfiend has done all the sanding, cleaning, bleaching and prepping, which was not quite the ordeal as our swimming pool in 'Cruces, but plenty of work nonetheless. Last year, we bought some "redwood" stain since it was close to the previous color. We changed our minds after painting the kitchen. Did we want to look out the back door and see ORANGE? Naw. Muted grey. I wonder if the color is too light. E says it's fine and that I'll get used to it.

WE SOLD THE HOUSE!!!!!

It's been almost a year to the day since we put our house on the market, but we finally sold our house! The deal was congealing just as we were coping with the ice storm and power outage here. With our basement flooding and no power, the last thing we were thinking of was our sweet old place in New Mexico!! Sure, we've had more than a few "buyers" who were "very interested," but nothing ever came of it. So when our realtor called to say we had buyers, we said, "Sure" and went back to airing out our sodden quilts. Our new buyers loved our little home and took it at the listed price, minus a few repairs. Yay!!! It feels so unreal. What a huge relief it is to not worry about extra bills, maintenance, the pool freezing or tornadoes!
 
  

We won't see any money for a few weeks but we have plans to fund a little project in the basement anyway. After the flooding that floated twenty cardboard boxes, three wooden book shelves and several boxes of clothes around in circles in the basement, we decided to move wooden furniture upstairs into my "office" (my office being the partially finished and very cold room above the garage) and everything else onto shelves or waterproof boxes. Yay, Rubbermaid! It would be nice to have a mini-Ikea shopping spree and replace some of our sad Closet-maid storage that has been doubling for furnishings, but it might not work out that way. I think we'll finish painting the kitchen and living room first! Yay!!!

Farwell Mustard Yellow!!!

Yay!!! We are closing in on our kitchen project! I can't tell you how nice it is to cover up all that yellow! We are hoping to get everything painted before Tennisfiend's mom arrives on the 5th!

Hideous Green

So, a few weeks ago I picked up a sample of the green paint that would transform our kitchen into a tranquil oasis for cooking and dining. Foolishly, I primed the sample area with a paintbrush, not realizing that I put the primer on a bit thick. Result: the wall looked like a vertical karesansui garden.

I sanded it before painting with the green, but the underlying texture came through, nevertheless. Not that it mattered, the green totally did not work. Despite my careful color selection, it still looks hospital green. Would you like some appendix with your gazpacho?

In the photo above, Tennisfiend is sanding away the bumpy primer (you can't see his scowl from this angle) so we can begin again. Heh. Anyway, we ordered four new paint samples online, using some suggestions from Papa Sasha plus our own eyeballs. We picked out a lovely pale greenish-yellow which works very well. I didn't dare paint the wall again, so I painted scrap wood and we chose the one that looked best. The new color had better work! I'm going to perish if we have to stick with the yellow!

Hasta La Vista Ugly Border!

In case you haven't seen a close up of the hideous wallpaper border in our kitchen, here it is:
 
I personally do not care for the border, but what makes it completely distasteful is its pairing with mustard yellow paint, pickled oak cabinets, and forest green counter tops. Blah!

 So, with no regrets and only a smidge of nostalgia, I tore the border down today. After surfing online and consulting with the color experts at Home Depot, I will try a greenish paint to make the green countertops look like less of a mistake. Wish me luck!

Price Reduction

Well, we knocked some money off the price of our house again.  The pool is proving to be a pain in the ass, but I am glad that we have a handyman looking after things for us. Sigh.

Our New Home!!!

Long story short, we picked out our new home! It's in Merrimcack, not too far from the turnpike and in a lovely neighborhood! Yay! It was one of our two top choices and we were able to get it for a wonderful price. The downside is, of course, some ugliness installed by the former owners. The kitchen is painted bright mustard yellow with a grotesque wallpaper border featuring plump, psychotic figures in chef's hats. This clashes outrageously with the pickled oak cabinets and forest green countertops. Brr!



But hey, painting is easy! And new, muted countertops to match? Hmmm...maybe a Christmas present for the house next year! It'll be loverly! The rest of the home is very lovely and very neutral, excepting for the family room adjacent to the kitchen, which is inexplicably mint green:



Whoa!I had seen this property on the internet in Las Cruces and ruled it out completely since the downstairs looked so funky. I'll post some more pics later! Yay!

Video Tour

OMG!

Well, I have to admit, the house is pretty darn clean.  I've swept, polished, dusted, vacuumed, mopped and shined every square inch for the video crew.  I remember when we had Violet clean for us, and as much as I liked her, I don't want to have to chat with her as she cleans for an hour.  I am really relying on mom's help to babysit while I clean, pack and organize. 

It's nice that we have a 12 year old from up the street to babysit Tyoma for a few hours every now and then.  It's odd, though, she brings movies over to watch.  Tyoma likes the weather channel and that's about it.  He won't sit still for TV, not that I blame him. It's loud, too bright and riotous. Heh. I grew up with Chuck Jones, so I should talk!  I guess I should say it's a bit much for a toddler!

Anyway, I keep out of the crew's way while they film.  I feel crazy anxious about how it will turn out, but I guess I'd be crazy anxious over making toast, too!

House Sale

You would not believe how difficult it is for me to open up our house for sale, but today it is officially on the market.

I feel freaked out because the idea of having people come into our home and look at our furniture and, well, stuff, is freaky. But we must. i don't want our home to languish on the market for months and I hope that the fellow who sold us the house can help us dispatch it quickly.

We are fortunate that Papa Sasha helped us out so we don't have to pay monthly rental at this time, but we have kept records and will be paying back rent as soon as we can get back on our feet.

Our Realtor will be sending a crew here to film our place for an online tour. This multiplied my freak out factor by twenty. I am so particular about my home, so house proud that I don't know if I can cope with the anxiety of the filming or visits.

Well, seriously, you won't have to lock me up, I'm just sayin'.

Good-bye Aquarium

Since we might be packing up and leaving, I decided to give our aquarium the ole heave-ho. I donated the remaining fish to Petco (Rest In Peace) and spent the rest of the day with buckets of bleach and siphon hose. Tennisfiend  will store the behemoth in th garage until we can find a good home for it. Sigh.

Garden Despair

Early this morning I stepped in to the backyard for the first time in many weeks. Although part of my absence has been due to being busy with Tyoma, we have also been infested with mosquitoes. West Nile always lurks in southern New Mexico, so I’ve been extra cautious, not wanting to be a statistic filling airtime on CNN. 

No mosquitoes this morning. Surprisingly, I noticed that I could see big white clouds of my own breath! Whoa. Just last week I wore shorts and blasted the AC, now it’s time for sweaters. I took stock of my poor, neglected garden. Survivors of my birthday planting looked blighted and misshapen. Weeds overtook most of my flower beds. Unkempt ornamental grasses swallowed their delicate neighbors. Totally depressing. 

On the bright side, our new gravel was immaculate—free of weeds and raked lovingly by in the finest karesansui fashion. The koi pond, filled with mosquito fattened fish, sparkled crystal clear. Our pool rests tidy and clean under its recently installed solar blanket. And finally, our new porch, recently scrubbed by TF, glistened with dew. Sheesh. Am I off base feeling that all this order is incongruous next to my wretched garden? Humph. I plan to find some mosquito netting for the stroller and get caught up on my work before the first frost.

Buying A Pump

After spending three hours wringing out wet towels last night to drain the sunroom finally agreed that we needed to break down and buy a pump. I was inordinately excited about a trip to Lowes (yay shopping!) until I spent fifteen minutes standing around while Tennisfiend meticulously studied the pump assortment.

I dragged a white five gallon paint bucket over to the pump aisle and took a seat across from the display security camera system so I could entertain myself while TF satisfied his research instincts. Thirty minutes later, after some discussion, we left with a moderately priced pump that will hopefully suck out the next onslaught of flood waters. To commemorate my victory in the pump war (I've been campaigning for one since last summer), TF took my pic in the back yard. I'm eight and a half months pg!

Pool Project Complete!

Well, its been almost eight months and we finally finished repainting our pool.
 
You can't image how long this project took us! Draining the pool was a bucket of fun, and we almost gave up on the entire project, but the temptation of a fresh, new swimming pool was too much to resist. The hard work began in late March. We had to hire someone to sandblast the old paint off and only two people sandblast locally.
 
Naturally, we picked the scary sixty year old alcoholic with rickety equipment and a bad leg simply because we didn’t want to wait two months for the other company to get around to us. For $200 he pulled his wheezing machine up to the side of the fence and tottered over to Egor, who had to help him inside the pool. E said he smelled about 40 proof.
 
Pool guy was too infirm to clean up the buckets of sand and old paint liberated by the procedure, so we were stuck with the chore. E spent the balance of the weekend sweeping and vacuuming the fine, chalky dust, which seemed to have spread everywhere. I was grateful that we had the foresight to cover the koi pond. What a mess.
 
 While we tried to figure out how what to do next, the pool project remained in limbo. Thirty years ago, when our pool was poured by overly ambitious homeowners, it came out not quite right; they messed up the concrete forms. The pool’s distinctly lopsided appearance has been marred even more by deteriorating concrete painted over repeatedly in lieu of sensible repairs.

Quality restoration would involve an endless succession of patching, cleaning, solvents, washing, more patching, more solvents, multiple coats of primer and epoxy paint. We chose a simpler (and cheaper) route, consisting of lots of patching and minimal solvent use. Weekend after weekend Tennisfiend mixed and mashed epoxy patch and hydraulic cement into the numerous craters, fissures, cracks, chinks and crevices populating the pool.

In the 100 degree plus weather, epoxy oozed down the sides of the pool requiring plastic sheeting and duct tape forms to keep it in place. Hydraulic cement needed to be applied at the crack of dawn to prevent it from setting up in the mixing container. Well, you get the idea, it was lots of work.

When Tennisfiend wasn’t smearing noxious pastes on the pool, he was sanding and shaping the previous patch job. The whole process took about six weeks. After he finished patching and we ordered the paint, New Mexico’s monsoon season began. It rained and rained.

We spent three weeks either pumping rank water out of the pool or hosing off the accumulating dirt and plant particles. Finally, three days of clear weather were forecast and Tennisfiend began to paint. Unsurprisingly, the weather changed and it rained midway through the project. Sheesh. Anyway, it was poolpaint, so he finished. Here is our new pool:




Of course our desire for insane home improvement projects remains unquenched, so take a peek at our pool area:

 
To polish off our project, Tennisfiend will install a ladder (my pregnant self can't get in the pool without one!). We will replace uneven concrete pieces (by the table and chairs)next spring, and paint the entire deck tan. We also plan to remove the unsightly chain link fence and erect an attractive wood fence. It would be great to build a porch over the sitting area, but that might be way too expensive and/or time consuming. Most likely, we will buy one of those shaded enclosures you see at Lowes and Sam’s Club-- has a nifty set up in his back yard that I’d love to imitate!

Candy-Can!

At last all my pampering paid off! My “Candy-can” (Echinopsis trichocereus x ‘Cherry Red’)blooms spectacularly! Each blossom is about the size of an English teacup and smells faintly of strawberries.

 

The fuss I create over my cacti is a testament to my anal retentiveness. In winter, I blanket each specimen to protect it from frost, being certain to remove the coverings during daylight to permit adequate sunlight and ventilation. Since I'd be bored with nothing to fuss over during the summer, I rig up artificial shade to keep the plants from cooking under the intense New Mexico sun.

 

I wish that all of my attentiveness would pay off in the form of startlingly lovely photographs to match the blossoms, but no such luck. So, here’s a pretty picture ganked from my folk’s website:

Attic Expeditions

We live in a house with two roofs. An artifact from the 1970’s, it was custom designed by an ambitious local businessman to emulate a southwestern pueblo.

Unfortunately, his design was flawed--resulting in a perpetually leaky roof. After the house changed hands several times, a rancher solved the problem by building an immense tri-hipped roof over the existing flat one. So, we have a spacious attic that could pass for a second floor with some loving care.

This weekend, Tennisfiend decided to tackle the attic project with gusto. He dumped out the accumulation of spare boxes, mysterious wood scraps and inexplicable objects left behind by the previous owners. Finding a naughty VHS tape of animated fairytales wrapped in a moldering apron and numerous ancient (but not collectable) radios highlighted the afternoon.

Tennisfiend spent the latter part of Christmas Day lugging buckets of lava gravel and roof tar down our rickety ladder. Last night he decided to replace the buckets with our monster shop-vac. Wrenching the shop-vac up the ladder produced the loudest ten minutes of metallic clanking and Russian cursing I have ever heard.

An hour later, another dreadful racket commenced, it sounded like God was using our roof as an Emory board. Mildly startled, I snuck up the ladder to witness Tennisfiend peeling up inconsequential strips of roof tar with the aid of a flat bladed shovel. What a thankless job. I silently retreated.

At 9:00 p.m., a burning smell permeated the house. Tennisfiend explained that some roof tar had caught fire but would not elaborate further. At 10:00 p.m. a dusty and preoccupied Tennisfiend wrapped up his work. As we turned in for bed, he asked me where we could find a soldering torch. I had no idea what a soldering torch was, but I finally understood that he meant “blow torch”. When I asked, “What for?” he hesitantly explained that he planned to use it to heat up the roof tar, facilitating its removal. Heh. So when they find my singed corpse with a smug “I told you so” smirk charred on my lips, you know exactly what happened.

A Draining Weekend

Wheeee! 
For the past two days, Egor and I have been emptying our swimming pool for repairs and repainting. The process started two weeks ago when I removed the chlorine feeder to make the water environmentally friendly for disposal. Since the water has become increasingly green, we had to empty the pool this weekend.
Our biggest task was removing the water without flooding our backyard and sunroom. We bought 100 feet of vinyl hose, connectors, and hose clamps. After attaching the hose to our backwash/drain outlet, we extended the hose to our driveway and began the eight hour process of pool draining.

Ten minutes later, I gasped when I saw the puddle of water collecting across the street in our neighbor’s recessed gravel driveway. If this was the damage in ten minutes, in eight hours we would have washed their entire house down to I-25. Time for Plan B. We rerouted the hose into the empty lot north of us. Seems simple, but the new route meant a perilous trip through my cactus garden for the flimsy blue hose. Despite our cautious efforts, we managed to puncture the hose repeatedly. Thank heavens for water-proof duct tape and Tennis Fiend’s eternal patience.

The next hour and a half went swimmingly. The vacant lot gratefully drank up the water, and the neighbors did not need to break out their canoes. Then the pool pump lost pressure. To fix it, we added running water from a garden hose to the skimmer. Three hours later, we turned off the pump and went to bed, intending to finish Sunday. At 4:am I woke up remembering that I forgot to turn off the water to the skimmer. D’Oh!

In the morning, the next several hours of draining were routine. Our only problem was me.  I wanted to drain the last portion of water into a grassy area by the pool house. When we shut off the pump to disconnect and reposition a hose segment, we could not re-prime the pump.  An hour  of tinkering yeilded only a piddlely little stream. Bailing a hundred slimy buckets of pool water by hand seemed like a real possibility. Fortunately, the pump mysteriously gurgled back into life and I got to play fireman and water the plants. Yay!

Agua Peligrosa

I suspect that our swimming pool is sentient. It is obviously warmer and more buoyant than other pools and it even seems to quiver with gratitude when I haul out the cleaning equipment. Most convincing of all are the sacrifices. Every week, particularly on Fridays, I find a bloated body conveniently circling the skimmer intake. Usually it’s a lizard or toad, occasionally a bird. As a rule, I recover the offerings, since E has a morbid horror of anything remotely reptilian (and dead).

After a year and a half of collecting pool victims, I had yet to rescue a living creature. But today was different! Inspecting the latest casualty, I noticed a feeble wriggling, almost obscured by the whirling induced by the skimmer. It was an upside down toad, which had cleverly managed to float himself at an angle to keep his nostrils above the water.

After putting the toad in a peaceful place to recover from his ordeal, I spent the balance of the afternoon constructing a toad-proof section of fence around the pool. I think the pool will have to content itself with birds and lizards for a time.

Bulldozers

This morning the droning of bulldozers once again shattered the quiet of our semi-rural neighborhood. Our home is adjacent to two empty lots beyond the city limits, deliberately avoiding the burgeoning tracts of houses sprouting up to the east and west of town.

Six months after our purchase, new houses began erupting around us at an alarming rate. So much for believing realtors. The bulldozers began clearing the chaparral scrub directly behind us two months ago. I was devastated. From the sunroom, I witnessed the dozers caroming about, belching black smoke and stirring up clouds of opaque dust that left my skin feeling gritty.

Later, as I watered a new segment of my rock garden, one of the drivers had the audacity to wave at me. Reflexively I waved back and spent the next three hours wondering if his next act of friendliness would include leaping over the back wall and dragging me off to spend the afternoon riding shotgun on his dozer. Since then, the bulldozers return at irregular intervals, roaming the lots behind us for few days only to disappear for a week or two.

Despite their ritual, the lots look much the as they did after their first day of development, as if the bulldozers were simply rehearsing for some more sinister task. Resigned to their presence, I ignored them today, until I encountered the Waver at an intersection silted up by yesterday's rain. He was scooping up sand and delicately depositing it onto a remote mound. I watched in puzzlement, since the intersection is far removed from their work site.

Maneuvering his machine, he noticed me, and gave me one of the goofiest, most sincere smiles I have ever seen. He backed up and motioned for me to proceed. I waved back mechanically, a bit stupefied by the situation until I grasped the altruism of his actions. Although I cannot totally embrace the idea of bulldozers happily clearing the land for smiling people who will love their new home as much as we do, I will return greetings to the Waver with genuine sincerity.

Water Damage

We spent most of the early morning bailing water out of the sun room with an assortment of towels, mop buckets and a garden hose-powered siphon. The rain was beyond torrential. Driving to Lowe's in the afternoon, I was shocked to see the damage to our local roads. Landscaping was washed into the street, arroyos silted up intersections and even E's work was flooded with three inches of water. What an ungodly mess! On top of that, the plumbing in the bathroom is acting up again. We were flooded (again) over the weekend when the water supply in the main bathroom broke overnight and soaked everything. The worst part is the smell. Sickly sweet, like rest-home rooms and pungent rooibos tea. There must be some secret, unwholesome process involved in constructing particle board bathroom vanities. Blah. Nothing like a reality check via Fox news to make all my problems seem inconsequential. Mopping the floor versus waiting on the roof for a helicopter. I suppose everyone feels the same across the nation. Daily hassles frequently seem all consuming until you connect with others who cope with much worse. It's humbling. I should make more of an effort to appreciate my life on a daily basis.