Construction has begun on Rob’s dream: a backyard building where he can practice martial arts. I have a vague fantasy that I’ll be able to park my car in the garage when all is said and done, but who knows, he may decide that the kettlebell collection needs to stay where it is.
It’s a stressful thing, home construction. I’m in a weird place where I don’t actually have any opinion about what goes on inside the building (please don’t ask me how many electrical outlets and where they should go), but I’ll be damned if the roof is going to be “gray” instead of “stone.”
I’m excited though, to see the frame start to take shape. It makes me want to follow through with some of the improvements I’ve been meaning to do. My last effort at home decor was painting 3 of 4 walls in the kitchen a lemon yellow that Rob hates. I meant to do all 4 walls, but I got tired, and thought I’d save the last wall for another day. Then I decided it would be too much of a pain to paint around the sliding glass door and underneath the kitchen cabinets, so I left the last wall white.
That was President’s Day, I think. For some reason, I schedule painting for days when I’m home but Rob has to work. The green tea library walls were done last Veteran’s Day…the merlot foyer over Thanksgiving and the lemon kitchen on President’s Day. Might have been Martin Luther King Day.
Up next is repainting the peeling eave along the side of the house. Last weekend, Rob’s parents helped me pressure-wash the old paint off with a portable little contraption that I later broke by clogging it with mud. While we were at it, our friend/subcontractor doing the site prep stopped by and said, “Oh, if I’d known you were doing that I would have brought my giant gas-powered something-or-other that would take care of it in two seconds.”
Man, if I’d only thought to ask!
Other projects in mind are staining our little front porch and hanging bamboo shades in the front windows… but the priority might be repairing the little rusted holes in the gutters.
Kari Neumeyer 