House Renovation, Week One

Our home is listed as a 2 bedroom. For all their lives excepting the year in Hungary, the girls have shared a room with each other, and that's worked out well enough. But Stephanie has long tracked the aches and pains of our house, and had more reasons than room apportionment for pursuing a home renovation.

We're not good homeowners. I like happy neglect. But a couple disasters and opportunities finally lined up enough to initiate the full project--not just adding rooms above the kitchen's flat roof and not just renovating the kitchen and not just replacing the siding but all of it--new bedrooms, new kitchen, new siding. The piecemeal cost of staging different projects over time was ridiculous if we could do all of it at one go; and we could do it in one go with the guidance of a philosophy our contractor has taken to heart: Do it "good enough." I'm still most comfortable in a happy neglect, but this is hopefully enough to appease Hestia for the next bunch of years.


The permitting process took a month longer than we expected it to, giving us time to pack up the first couple floors and move them to the basement. Below are pictures of loose stuff now in our office, and of the bookcases and mattresses against the wall adjoining.

The first week of the project is now over, and after four days, there's no going back. Here are a series of pictures taken over the course of a these few days, starting in what was once our library (and half a century ago, a kitchen for the half century before than) and what will become a hallway abutting a larger dining room.

Below is the view from our living room through the dining room and into the kitchen. 

And here's how the kitchen ended up by the end of the week.

Upstairs, our bathroom will evolve from open chambers to a room divided by two dividing doors into a washroom, a water closet, and bathing room. The architect strongly recommended two bathrooms upstairs instead, but this plan will help the five of us share without multiplying costs.

Finally, here is the girls' room. We once had the tower of girls--a bunk bed for two and a trundle that squirted out for the third. Later we pulled off the bunk and built a bed for Sophie behind a curtain on the other side of the room. The window you see in each of these three pictures is the same.

And here is the view from our attic/sky stage right now.

Dad and Wendy have been tremendous. They anticipated this for a long time, renovating their basement to make it a comfortable space for the girls. It's no exaggeration to say we could not do this project without their help. And now we've taken over their house, and they've given us carte blanche to make ourselves at home there. Dad and Wendy still come in from Vashon for their work-week, but they're sleeping on Stephanie and my much smaller bed stuffed into their office. 

Maybe we'll dedicate a tile to their great help in the new kitchen.

Savary Island

                 An international crossing, two ferries, a water taxi, the back of a pickup, and a young guy named Jesse who unloaded our week’s worth of clothes and comestibles for ten brought us to a house on Savary Island, a sand spit on the Sun Coast across from Vancouver Island.

                Five miles long and almost none across, the only cars on the island had been barged in; the only electricity was gas-powered and much of the water pumped in similar ways. There was one store, a couple candy houses, one bar. And the store was like this: I only bought two grapefruits because I didn’t want to take half the supply; one pint of 2% depleted the shelf for a couple of days. I didn’t quite realize until a third of the way into our week how much I’d handed over when I gave my keys to Dave’s Parking back in Lund—the keys to the van, the house, the job. But for a whole week, there was no opening those doors.

                Our good friend Rachel had arranged this trip. The trip part was a bit of a pain in the ass, frankly, and I’m embarrassed about how much we spent on ferry crossings and the rustic semi-walled house where we were advised to bathe as little as possible and burn the toilet paper, but once we were there, we were so free. There was beach in every direction, and the tide would roll out for most of each day, leaving long stretches of soft sand and water warmed in the shallow rolling surf.

                Rachel and Isabelle’s six year old boy, Tommy, needed watching, and also their little dog (eagles were everywhere; and another of Rachel’s dog had a near miss in the past), but mostly kids carted themselves back and forth to the beach or played games in the house, or took the hike to the Sugar Shack down the Sunset Trail on the edge of the beach.

                On the last night, Rachel’s high school friend Amei invited us over to someone’s house for some folk music. Amelia, always up for something, brought her viola. Sophie knew there’d be fiddling and wanted no part of it. But when Sophie recognized the music, she got up on the deck with the guitars and other fiddles and stayed up there until we left. Besides the long walks and runs and climbing rocks with the kids, playing sand croquet, reading Dashiell Hammett out loud with Stephanie, every day discovering new strands of beach, swimming in the early evenings and waiting for the sun to set right before bed, the music gave us something new and rich to experience, and I’ll remember it.

                Before we went to play music, we had a poetry contest. Rachel’s a poet, and so she and Stephanie judged. Everyone who wrote a poem and didn’t judge won something—Sophie’s poem was Most Memorable, and in fact, I do remember that she quantified the experience in her poem a 6 out of 10; Amelia won best all-around; and Maisie’s won for best imagery.

                Here’s Maisie’s poem:

                Savary Island

                looks just

                like

                a mustache—

                A curvy shape

                one a face

                of water—

                Sea foam

                covering the face

                like a thick layer

                of shaving cream.

                “Oh no! Ouch!”

                The mustache

                was

                just

                shaved

                off

                the face.

Grand Ronde Run

The week after school let out, Sam (top right) took us rafting down the Grande Ronde.

We'd also gone the year before and had a terrific time, five days of floating and camping, launching water canons and eating and drinking absurdly well. I was mildly wondering who would kill the rattlesnakes, because in 2013, Jim had come: he was competent with a machete and had killed three of them (we skinned and ate the first). Though Jim couldn't come this year, the weather was much cooler and we saw no snakes at all.

Replacing Jim and his daughter was our friend Jono (center, yellow) and his son, Lionel (right front), flying in from Brooklyn. Stephanie and I had just seen Sam and Jen (center, blue), and Jono at the Oberlin College reunion, during which, Sam and Jon revived the Plum Loco Circus, originally an extravaganza of clowning and acrobats that brought together town and gown in an unprecedented community gathering; later, Plum Loco was Sam and Jono on the road, two clowns on their way to becoming a doctor and a child-life specialist.

Here's a chunk of their show from the reunion.

This year our rafting trip featured equally excellent provisions and ended with the same promise by Sam: next year, more austerity, less prep and less weight. And once again, the area is stunning. The Wallowas in Oregon are dry and craggy, and from the river, we cut through basalt and steep hills. From Minam to Troy, we floated 45 relaxed miles and 4 nights on two rafts and an inflatable kayak.

 

The trip did have one sleepless night, following an incident early on the second day. 

Toby and I were in the inflatable kayak. Everything he did with his paddle, I did the opposite, trying to prevent him water-terrorizing the rafts with his water gun. He was avid to drench someone, but it was just too cloudy, too cool, too early. I steered him towards action.

And then our boat overturned. And I couldn't flip it. We were still in rapids. In the end, Toby was rescued first, though he was holding a paddle in one hand and wouldn't relinquish the water gun from the other, and I floated for what turned out to be a mile and a half before the churning water calmed enough and Sam pulled me out of the river.

First, though, I bobbed along in my life preserver, leaning on the underbelly of the ducky, which kept me a little warm, and grasping my paddle with the other hand, watching the rafts in front of me get further and further away, and getting colder and scareder, looking wildly for a place to self-rescue but mostly keeping my legs up and pointed down-river, just like Sam told us, not to get the feet trapped in rocks and the rest dragged under in the current, and also whimpering a little, saying hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey

Sam told me to let go of the ducky and the other raft retrieved it. For a while I was totally exposed to the river before Sam hauled me onto his raft. I lay prone over a pile of fat wetbags, aware of Maisie on the other pile with Sam's younger son, Robin, aware of the image of me beached and face down.

"Are you hypothermic?" Sam asked me. I asked what that looked like. He said I'd be numb and foggy and wouldn't be able to move. I wiggled my toes and head and figured I wasn't.

But when Sam and the other raft found a place to eddy out, there was no other priority but to warm me up. This began one of the most beautiful episodes of my adult life.

Stephanie and the girls closed in all sides around me. Sam took my wet shirt and gave me his warm red jacket. Someone gave me water which I kept tossing in my face because I was shaking too hard to get it to my mouth. Sam took my swimming trunks, and now I was only wearing his jacket. Someone gave me warm tea, which I jerked into my mouth. At some point, Jono was with me; at some point, Sam's father got behind me and rubbed my kidneys. The girls were all around me.

Then Sam told me to get naked with Stephanie, and he covered us with sleeping bags, and Stephanie shed her clothes so readily, just chucked them and held me, didn't look around or hesitate, and there was nothing else like it, I'd felt so loved, I felt so full of love, and I said so: the embrace from my daughters and friends, being naked with Stephanie under the sleeping bags and everyone around us. 

Sam said I was probably feeling weak and a little groggy headed. "Or as I like to call it," I said, "relaxed."