The End of the Concrete Workers

I spent most of Saturday sitting on my porch watching the construction workers dump concrete, wishing my 4-year-old nephew could be here to ogle the cement mixer with me. Its driver was about 250 years old and had a leather do-rag holding back his white mane. He and Bruno alternated climbing around in the spout and checking things out, only when Bruno wasn't up there he was standing in the street adjusting his junk.

We're talking pants unzipped, shirt untucked, hearty junk shaking such as I've never seen before. He put Corey to shame. Standing in the street! Where all the Greek and Italian neighbors had emerged to porch-sit and watch the action and frequently shout back and forth with Bruno in Italian. As it turns out, Frank the fig guy from across the street is from the very same village as Bruno! Yet I have never seen Frank adjust his junk...

Anyway, I have decided my favorite concrete guy is Roger (photos coming soon). Roger is the one in the Guns N Roses crop top with denim cutoffs and a ring of barely-there hair that he combs with a black plastic comb eternally jutting from his back pocket. When it came time to pour the concrete, Roger doffed his shirt and donned big yellow longshoreman boots. He actually stood among the muck and dragged a 2x4 slowly through it to make it level. Two other concrete guys pushed scrapey tools from the side, but it was Roger, knee deep in cement, who resembled a gondolier. Only he belted out Rush songs instead of Italian river ditties.

Saturday afternoon, while I was sitting on the porch watching, the men started talking about how Roger had been recently screwed out of around $1500. I actually heard Roger reference breaking someone's legs, so I knew my presumption about these guys was accurate. Don't eff with the concrete guys.

The next big dilemma was that apparently the band Ratt came to Harmor this past weekend. Roger really wanted to go, but Bruno reminded him that there are lots of DUI checkpoints along the way and there aren't really back route alternatives.

This put Roger in quite a pickle because he couldn't go to Ratt and not get wasted, but then he couldn't drive home--not because doing so is the wrong thing to do, but because there are cops out there. I have no idea what Roger ended up doing Saturday night, but he isn't here this morning helping his buddies pour the "cheeks" on our neighbors' steps. (Was Roger A) incarcerated for DUI or B) incarcerated for breaking someone's legs?)

The last phase of my summer concrete project involves ordering 6 tons of dirt to replace the cement we had ripped out from the back yard. We found a place that does next-day delivery, called them on Sunday, and, provided I haven't had the baby by this afternoon, we'll soon be the proud house with a mountain of topsoil in the front yard. Good thing Corey borrowed a wheelbarrow.

So if you're in the neighborhood later and you own a shovel, stop on by to move some dirt. We'll be here, me making iced tea helplessly and Corey sweating and cursing his way through many cubic yards of earth.

Update: Photos!

Concrete!

Concrete Convoy

Ok, so our house has this very long concrete "driveway" that extends from the street about 100 feet back into our property. Only the first 30 feed of it are wide enough for a car. The rest is just concrete. I believe there used to be a shed on the back portion. We decided that when we got the driveway repaved, we would have the concrete taken out and plant a yard instead, so Baby Love would have more space to run around and, well, because it looks ugly to have mint growing up through crumbling concrete slabs in the back yard.

We hired Bruno to do this work. Bruno is about 99 years old and from the very tip of Italy, where the men are brown and the accents are thick and, evidently, the ear hair is very prevalent. Bruno rolled up at 7:08 this morning with his sons, nephews, and who knows what other folks. By 7:22 when I called my mom, they had already done boat loads of work.

I am so fascinated by this process. I can't even tell how many of them there are, but some have mustaches and some are young, hot dudes in Pitt shirts. Still others are in their 40s, wearing cut-off Guns N Roses t-shirts and tight shorts. Many have Penguins or Steelers tattoos beneath giant maps of Italy on their biceps. They all have muscles and sexy construction worker boots. And they lined up their water coolers on the back porch.

Right now, Bruno is sitting in my garden observing while his boys swing large sledge hammers and break up the concrete. He is like Buddha or the Godfather. Nobody is speaking English. I have never seen such a smooth process. They are simultaneously gingerly avoiding the neighbors' tomato and blackberry plants with their crowbars and hoisting 6-inch slabs of concrete around like they are weightless. All at break-neck speed!

There is definitely something cultural about this Italian family in my yard, something so different from the insulation people. Corey and I got the sense that, when we went out to greet them, we were delaying their labor. Like, "hey man. We aren't here to be friends. You're paying us to WORK." There is an energy, an aura about this crew that makes them extremely likeable, trustworthy, and just demands so much of my respect. These are people who value what their clients think of their work.

Bruno says the whole thing will be done by mid-morning tomorrow. To be honest, it makes me a little sad because I think I could watch them for days.

Water

We had rains yesterday like I've never seen before. I was reading freshmen placement essays on campus when they began and by 7pm when I was headed for home, the streets of Oakland had rushing water up to the height of the curb. The storm drains had quickly filled or gotten covered in debris and there was just so much water it didn't know what to do. It came from the sky and up from the streets simultaneously and it definitely had a current. Chunks of things swirled around in it and each step I took toward the car was cold and scary. The whole thing drew images of George Castanza shouting, "The sea was angry that day, my friends."

There were cops and firefighters everywhere, closing Ellsworth, parts of Walnut. It was bad.

Worse? We had water in the damn basement. Luckily, Corey has been panicking/freaking out about the baby and has been nesting. His version of nesting involves many shelving systems throughout the house, so luckily most of our things were already off the carpet. We had to scurry down there and grab Baby Love's new stuff and our camping equipment and Corey ran to Home Depot for a shop vac.

We've been taking turns sucking muck from the floor. My big job today is to go out and purchase more Borax and baking soda. Borax will theoretically kill and prevent the spread of mold spores while baking soda will eat up the odor.

The whole ordeal makes me more eager than ever for Bruno to arrive--he is the very Italian man with very hairy ears whom we have hired to take away the old concrete on the driveway that angles toward the foundation of the house, where water pools and, obviously, gets inside. Corey is also going to build a second water barrel to get the water from that downspout. Bruno told us he'd come "the week of the 20th." Gosh, I hope that means Monday...

Mark the Plumber=WIN

We finally called the plumber to deal with our water woes that began a few weeks ago. Mark showed up bright and early at 830 this morning and began calling me "young lady."

He stuck some sort of pressure valve on the basement sink and we quickly learned that our water pressure is actually higher than that of a fire hose. Over 150 pounds of pressure per square inch flow through our copper pipes every time we turn the spigot. Mark said he was surprised more of our fixtures hadn't been leaking or exploded by now.

Since our previous owners, famously odd contractors, built drywall around the water main to the house, Mark had to saw into the wall to fix the broken pressure valve but then he helped with a preventative measure and installed an "expansion tank" so we have lower pressure now. Around 50 pounds per square inch. It still feels like we have plenty of water, but now the faucet doesn't jump like a startled puppy when I go to rinse my hands.

Thanks to the awfully cold weather cracking our valve, we caught a potentially disastrous situation before it ruined our house. Yay for Mark!

Water Woes

I'm taking a time-out from fretting about my boobs to fret about our plumbing. I feel like this weekend, everything in our house that could leak water began to do so.

It all started Saturday, when Corey felt productive. He scraped paint away from the vent controls, so we can turn off the heat in the bedrooms we don't use. "Hey! I turned off the heat in your office," he told me. As if I don't spend 8 hours a day in that room five days per week. "Don't forget to keep the door closed."

So then he tried to address the snoring sound our toilet makes. It's a very loud snore, and has been getting worse lately. He discovered that the snoring sound is not a malfunctioning valve as we had thought, but actually a slow water leak. This explains, I think, why our water bill doubled last month from $20 to $40.

My entire upstairs bathroom is dismantled and the water to the toilet is totally turned off, and it's been this way since Saturday. For a pregnant lady, this is a nightmare. I feel like I'm on Survivor when I have to walk down 2 flights of stairs to pee in the middle of the night. I've been trying to parch myself before bed so as not to have to walk through the heatless rooms in my pajamas. I told him if he doesn't turn the toilet back on today, I'm peeing in the tub.

The lag in toilet fixing is understandable, though, because the kitchen sink started to leak. Not just a subtle drip, but a steady stream of water flowing, flowing, flowing into the sink. So he had to fix that. And then as he was finishing the job, the fridge water spout began to explode all over the place. So he was examining that until well past midnight last night.

After a weekend of panic, we have one repaired sink, but still have a snoring toilet and aren't able to use the water dispenser in the fridge until we find out why the water from there is leaky and brown. Could be, perhaps, more upsetting than hard-to-contain breasts. Maybe.

Yard Freak

We have lived here for 4 months now and today, I got sick of being the family with the yard growing corn instead of perfect grass. Despite my father's assurance that the Round Up will eventually kill the weeds I sprayed it on, I got out of the shower today and decided I had to harvest my lawn.

The first things to go were the corn stalks. I'm sorry, but they just aren't a front yard crop. After I yanked those out, I got angry at the dandelions coming up through our sidewalk. And then the waist high grass in the flower beds. And suddenly all I could see in every inch of pavement or each speckle of my yard were weeds, weeds, weeds. I forgot that I was wearing wedding pearls and dressed for a meeting with my professor. I just rolled up my sleeves and yanked out two black trashbags full of yard crap.

The beds look barren now, but I feel like that is better than overgrown. Also, the front yard looks like grass instead of a cornfield. Next step: back yard. And then I'll get ride of all the cinderblocks and scraps of rotting wood the previous owners left for us. Thanks, guys!

Thesis? Forget it.

More Corn

We have corn growing in our front yard. I noticed the stalk a few weeks ago and said, "Corey, we have corn growing in our front yard."

He took one peek and said, "No, silly, that's bamboo." Thinking I had no idea what bamboo looked like and knowing I had not planted corn in my front yard, I believed him.

Only now there are ears on it. Actual ears of corn in the front yard with silk and kernals of yellow juicy corn. I feel like Michael Pollan is following me around somehow, encouraging me to not consume.

Our soil seems to be magically fertile. Maybe I should just dig up the whole yard and actually plant some food. I could get a goat to eat the grass and fertilize my crops and have my own complete food cycle in Morningside.

Cat Fight

Every morning, a ginger cat walks up my driveway and looks at me through the dining room window. He seems to say, "I hate that you moved here." I think he spits on the driveway and then leaps up into my garden, where he shoves the soil around and then climbs into a sunny space to lay and stare at me for a few hours.

Right now, he is out there howling. Loud, obnoxious human baby sounding howls. What the hell is wrong with him? Is he angry at my pine bark mulch (a 4-inch layer over thick newspaper covering that is a failed attempt to halt weed growth)? Does this cat know that I have squirted Round Up on the neighboring leaves?

I kind of want to shoot it with a pellet gun, but we do not have such things at our house. It's standing right now with it's back arched like a Halloween cat howling its brains out. I just want it to go away.

Shoo! Get out of here! I think now we need a dog for certain.

Invasion

"Something happened the other day, and I didn't want to tell you until I saw you in person," Corey told me this morning. I hadn't seen him awake since late Wednesday and only saw him this morning because I couldn't sleep when he woke up at 6am.

"A little mouse got in the house," he continued.

"A little mouse????"

"Just a cute little field mouse, that's all. I heard it making some sounds over in the recycling area."

I tried to remain calm. I immediately felt certain it had made a family in our walls. Corey told me, "I went on a mission to capture it. I chased it over to a teeny hole over there, by the door, and I was sure it got out. So I plugged the hole with [that expandable foam stuff he's been using to seal the windows]."

"We have to disinfect the house," I said, nodding. I'm certain there is typhus in here now.

"Well it hadn't left through the hole after all. So I chased it around and dropped the trashcan upside down over it. Then I slid some cardboard under the can to make a seal and I released it into the woods."

I became immediately terrified that my husband was now emulating my sick father's rodent capture techniques. After my dad had some sort of mid-life crisis, he began capturing squirrels in Have A Heart traps, spray painting them orange, and driving them to the park to set them free. The orange paint was a marker, so he could gage whether he had repeat customers. I can just see Corey going on secret missions into the basement to save little mouse families, finally finding use for the pumpkin paint for the guest room, while I kneel in prayer that my family won't die of the plague.

A Day on My New Street

At 4am, the newspaper is delivered. When Corey's alarm clock went off for the triathalon, we lay there for awhile listening as the "THWACK" sounds retorted into the distance. They are delivered by car, not by small children on bicycles.

When the sun comes up, it shines directly into our bedroom windows. We anticipated this, and our cellular honeycomb shades are just right for sun blockage. The entire front of the house is in direct sunlight until after 3 PM. We have impatiens on the front porch, but they don't seem to like the sun as much as the small pot of sunflowers.

Three children who live two doors down ride bicycles and roller skates up and down the sidewalk all day. They squeal with delight all the time. Corey wants to oil their chains and show them better technique. On the porch, he sits on his hands to stop himself from diving into their gears.

In the evening, the little lady across the street walks exactly one hundred footsteps, turns around, and comes back. Again, and again, and again. She clutches her back the entire time. Last night, she caught me counting her steps. I couldn't say hello to her because I didn't want to lose my place.

The ice cream man comes and plays "It's a Gift to Be Simple." GW tries to contain himself and doesn't purchase a chocolate taco. Instead, everyone eats ice pops and popsicles, the only acceptable things the former owners left behind.

Two Kinds of People

There are two kinds of people in this world. This is Harry:


He is the first kind of person, the kind of person who would come to our house early in the morning and work until late into the night to help us. Harry is a contractor and he caulked windows and pulled up floor boards and sawed wood and gave advice. This is GW:


He is also the first kind of person, who would spend numerous days helping us from dawn until dusk and offer to trade his welding labor to Harry so Harry could keep helping us.

Our new neighbors are also the first kind of person. They lent us their heat gun and mulched our bushes for us just because they looked like they needed some mulch.


These are all good and selfless people, who are kind to us and do positive things for humanity. These are the sorts of people I strive to be like and would wish my children would become.

I think the previous home owners were the second kind of person, people who left toenails in the air vents and mended their floorboards with fence posts. (Harry discovered the fence posts last night.) Under the fence posts were green plastic letters and other kid stuff. Pretty normal, first-kind-of-person sort of thing. They also left us something special:

Definite second kinds of people. People who rush through repair jobs and don't take care of their things. People who leave medical waste in our home. Not the salt of the earth, but perhaps the chicory.

Frustration Mounts

Things are not going according to my grand master plan at the house. It turns out old houses are a lot more work than anything else, especially when they have been shoddily maintained and any repair work has been done very poorly. Our plaster walls mean we have a lifetime of crack chasing ahead. The sloppy work of the previous owners means we have three weeks (at least) of ripping out badly repaired cracks and re-plastering. Corey has learned to wield drywall joint tape and a spackle knife with ease.

He sits in a bag chair against the walls like Bob Ross, putting cute little trees here and there along the seascapes of plaster patch on the six-inch metal tool on his lap. Mostly I am miserable.

My hands ache from scraping off poorly applied paint, my shoulders scream at me from scrubbing the floors by hand. The previous owners' last name has become the ultimate blaspheme in our house and the question of the month is: if you are going to do something so poorly, why do it at all?

Really, why repair a crack in the wall if you are going to then not scrape smooth the plaster. The lumpy mess of stalactites they left all over the walls surely look worse than a little hairline crack might have done.

At any rate, we are just about to a place where I can prime the bedroom before we move on to the other rooms. One step at a time and we should be able to live there in about three weeks. Corey's contractor friend has convinced us to do something which makes us feel excited:

We are going to save up lots of money and then, in about five years, we are going to rip all the plaster off all the walls and put up insulation and drywall. We'll have smooth walls with no cracks and a lower energy bill. Until then, crack master Corey will spackle and I will use the power sander. Every day of our lives.

What Lies Beneath

Today we worked on the house from 6:30 in the morning until 10:00 at night. I put some pictures up with some detailed captions if you have any interest in seeing the progress. I am so horrified by some things the previous owners left for us, though, that I can hardly celebrate our forward motion.

We pried up the maroon carpet in the living room to find all sorts of goodies beneath. A razor blade, some cheerios, a green plastic dog bone, pennies, even a quarter. Some of these items made their way into the air vents in the corners, too.

Now, we have already noted that these owners were trashy inbreds who brag about it. We are also quickly discovering they were sloppy and didn't enjoy a job well done. All the switch plates are installed crookedly. They never took the masking tape down when they painted the bedroom. They dripped puddles of paint on the floors in the hallways. And they were contractors by trade!

But by far the most egregious breach in behavior code came from their treatment of the air vents. While I was removing staples this morning I peeked in the gaping hole. I spied small white crescents. They were toenails. Piles and piles of toenails.

I remember looking at the house when they still lived there:
Take note the man-chair positioned next to the air vent. Now envision the owner sitting in that man-chair for years, slowly peeling off his disgusting toenails and DROPPING THEM IN THE AIR VENT! The vent that pumps the air his children breathe.

We stopped what we were doing immediately to swear to one another this would never become our habit. We might fart and laugh about it, we might forget to put on underpants when we walk in the kitchen with the blinds up, but we will NEVER rip off our toenails with our bare hands and make a mountain in the air vent. And if we do, we have permission to save humanity by slicing each other's throats with the offending talons.

Things are Expensive

Do you know how much it costs to buy blinds for 8 windows? $500. I feel it was worth it. We spent a large chunk of our wedding booty so I could rip down the lacy curtains and those solid colored window coverings that look like movie projector screens from high school. Now, we have delightful honeycomb, cordless, cellular shades that are "attractive and stylish...an appealing way to dress up windows and filter natural light."

I like them because they can be adjusted to the precise height that I want, let in light AND air, and aren't made of cheap plastic. Plus, when I close them I am still invisible to the outside world, so I can continue to run around my house naked after GW moves out (or possibly before he moves out if I get really drunk and forget he's there). So I'm very happy with the blinds. But $500? That's so much money. That's half a trip to Peru. That's my portion of our rent AND cable AND cell phone for one month.

Other things are not very expensive when you would expect them to be. Like I just spent more on blinds than I will on a washer or a dryer. Think how long I will have my washer, how many wool purses it will felt, and it costs less than blinds. How do these things work? Who is in charge of the pricing around here?

I cannot help but remember high school econ class, where Mr. Rohrbach talked about supply/demand and diamonds/water. Then I realize I am full of crap and really just irritated that I spent half a grand on window coverings when I could have just slapped up some aluminum foil and been done with it.

Headquarters: The Before Shots

This is our basement/bathroom. We aren't really going to do any work in here other than fill it with things. This is where bicycles and Christmas decorations will live happily with excess paper towels and laundry detergent. (Once we purchase a washer and dryer)

This is our contractor, GW, assessing the hardwood floors. "Hmmmmm," says GW. "These look pretty good!" He'll be spending the next segment of his life fixing our home because he's nice to us. He's wearing overalls and a red hat, like Mario.

This is my office, cleverly painted in latex paint, and crappily. I will be spending many disgusting hours with a razor blade peeling 704 cubic feet of poorly applied latex paint from the walls before I can paint the room Pecan Sandie with Wood Cabin trim.
It's cool to peel my office, though, because Allie says she likes to peel things and will peel the whole room! Okay!


Here's the hardwood under the upstairs hallway carpet. Looks to be in pretty nice shape! I feel excited about that. Why would anyone cover this beautiful wood with maroon carpet?

This pretty pink room has darker hard wood floors. As you can see in the corner, the wood is kind of stained. GW can fix it. This will be his bedroom/the reading room and one wall will be Pumpkin. The pink curtains are gone already.
Here's the living room! That big old mirror will be gone and this whole room will be Asparagus. It's hard to tell right now, but the stained glass windows have some lovely greens in there that will look so great with the Asparagus paint. The lacy curtains and the maroon carpet will be gone, gone, gone before this weekend. I'm thinking Ikea has a great area rug just for me somewhere.

Here's the dining room. More maroon carpet, gone! This room has some really lovely stained glass windows. I'm painting it a shade of undetermined blue to bring out the purples and blues in the stained glass.

The kitchen is awesome. Just awesome. No maroon in there at all and there is ample cabinet space for all my cooking needs. There is another whole wall of cabinets to my left, which you cannot see in this shot. AND! we have a side-by-side refrigerator with an ice cube maker and a water dispense. Corey will never, ever again put empty ice cube trays back in the freezer or leave the water pitcher compeltely dry on the top shelf. Ever. Life is good.

Additionally, the pantry has roll out shelves. So when I put tomato paste in the way back of the top shelf, I just need to roll it front to reach it. A short girl's dream!

Here's the other half of the basement. The man space. Corey plans to hang bicycles from the wall down here and set up tool areas. The nook in the rear left will be my rugby space. Tonight, I will fill it with cleats and jerseys and balls and bags! Hurrah!

This is Corey's office. The owners left a rolly chair and a filing cabinet, which I think is cool. It looks sort of depressing at night in the lights, but it gets pretty much light during the day. It's like a cubicle, where Corey belongs. Bwahahaha

New Team Headquarters

We did it. We bought a house. All of it! It was a very strange experience in many ways. For starters, the sellers spent a great deal of time at the closing bragging about their inbred relatives. "My great grand parents were first cousins!" said the lady, launching into a long story of feuds and secrets.. Corey and I just looked at one another and tried to melt into the floor.

While all this was going on, our realtor was shoving heaps of papers onto the floor. Another realtor had made Corey-piles on the closing table. She was just sweeping armfuls of crap off the glass surface. It was like my dream. I was too jealous to concentrate.

When it was all over, everything was very anticlimactic because Corey had to go to class and we couldn't exactly move anything in to our home and enjoy it. I put some wedding gifts in some cupboards. Nobody carried me over the threshold. I basically stood in the living room dripping sweat and watching the sun set against the tall apartment building by Highland Park.

This morning, motivated, I got up at started driving carloads of stuff to put in my new closets. I met Valerie, my German neighbor who greeted me by saying "You look German!" and ended the conversation by declaring "You look like a strong German girl. You'll have good babies."

It's so unfair that I have to work today instead of measuring my windows or purchasing a washer/dryer set. I am very distracted by the need to fill my new home with my stuff. In just under three weeks, I will be fully installed in my new headquarters. A spouse, a homeowner, and a graduate student all in one year. I suspect I may indeed be a grown-up on paper.