Home, Sweet (and not-so-sweet) Home

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: We’ve all been spending a LOT more time in our houses recently, even for writers who usually work from home. I know several of us have, like so many others, been sorting, cleaning out and organizing. But there’s another thing I’ve noticed after being in my house for approximately 130 of the last 150 days. It’s imperfections. Like spending just a leetle too much time with your spouse, a beloved residence starts to reveal all sorts of annoying quirks when you can’t get away one in a while.

For me, it started with my desk, which I’ve been using for literally years with no complaint. In the past, of course, I’ve also been able to work at the dining room table, in the kitchen, at the university or at our local library. The last two are obviously right out, and the accommodations we made for having four people working and attending classes at home meant everyone got his or her own space. So I’m 100% at my desk. Which, I discovered, is too damn small for me. Papers piled up on my computer tower. Reference books and notebooks slid from the desk to a small table I dragged in, and spread across the parlour. And then of course, there’s Neko, who feels beholden to sit at my left hand while I work, making it impossible to put anything else on that side of the desk (she’ll just knock it on the floor.)

I solved this issue with the generous help of my friend Victor Wakefield, who cut a furniture grade piece of plywood to perfectly fit between the bay windows where my desk resides. I gained an extra two feet of surface, and now the cat and I can both use the space. Hurrah!

Another irritation I twigged to was the back door, which screeched like a banshee whenever it was opened - and as soon as the weather gets warm, it’s opened a lot. It also stuck against the door jamb, probably due to a century plus of slightly uneven settling. (We can all relate to that, I’m sure.) After a month or so of screech-stick-screech, my dear Guest Son took matters in his own hands, and I opened the door one morning to discover it swung freely and silently. He had taken it off the hinged, planed down the bottom a few millimeters, and oiled all the metal bits up before reassembling it. Brilliant!

Lately, it’s been the front porch. Why didn’t I notice the paint was so old and so boring? Wouldn’t it look great in a checkerboard pattern? We’ll see if I can find some kindly Samaritan (or shanghai’d child) to upgrade it for me.

How about you, Reds? Have you experienced any non-House Beautiful Hmmmm moments while sheltering (and sheltering and sheltering) at home?

LUCY BURDETTE: For me it’s our screened-in porch. We’ve been living out there since bringing Lottie the Havanese puppy home. House-training rules mean you’re supposed to reduce the space a new dog  lives in so she begins to realize it’s her den too, and thus doesn't pee and poop everywhere. Since we’ve been out of the house (all four of us often!), I have also noticed the most annoying sticking of the porch door. And the smell of toxic mothballs wafting up from underneath--John put them there to discourage woodchucks and skunks moving in. So yesterday we had a nice man come and fix both of those issues--wheee! I don’t want to look around too hard at anything else for fear we need more repair people…

JENN McKINLAY: I don’t even know where to start! I live in a frat house with three man-boys. There is not one room in my petite 1959 ranch house that doesn’t bug me on some level. Some need painting, others need upgraded doors, and several need new furniture. I stick to my writing corner and ignore everything but the newly remodeled kitchen (ignore the dishes in the sink!) and the swimming pool - my two bright spots. I have a feeling it won’t be a fully realized pretty house until we get ready to sell it. (sigh)

HALLIE EPHRON: Sticking sliding door to our garden was driving us all nuts… I scored a can of WD-40 at the supermarket. Jerry applied it and wiggled the door back into its proper rut in the track, and voila. Smooth gliding and silent. 

What drives me nuts is the bushes in my garden. I can only trim them as far as I can reach. So they’re fat round balls with cowlicks sticking up the top. Hoping I can get our local tree service come and do a major all-the-bushes trim in the fall. 

My happy place is my little office which is the only room with a/c. 

RHYS BOWEN: No complaints really, apart from my garage which is full of STUFF. I try not to go there: bags for Goodwill, boxes of books for the Friends of the library, shelves stocked with paper towels, toilet paper (even before the pandemic), canned food etc that John can’t resist stocking up on. When I sent my son in law a picture of our pristine garage in Arizona he texted back “Who are you and what have you done with my in-laws?”

NOT actually Rhys and John's garage.

I’d love to do more to my garden, have bright pots of flowers within the enclosed patio area but I’m not going to risk Home Depot. 

We rarely use that patio down under the balcony but now it’s the perfect place to entertain in the shade where visitors can be suitably distanced. Normally it just has a swing on it. But I located our old patio table and chairs, scrubbed them all down with bleach until they look good, found a round table cloth and voila: nice little area to sit and eat.

I’d love to put a gazebo up on our hillside, but for now I’ve sent for a wooden bench to put up there: another place we don’t think of during our usual busy summers but now looks really inviting. I’m hoping to persuade Dominic to build me some kind of shelter up there.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  On day 2 of the pandemic, we bought a new freezer and put it in the basement. (I actually give it a love pat every time I walk by. Good going, I say. You stay cool.) On day 5 or so, I ordered barn red Adirondack chairs for our front porch, and two weathered gray tables. We’d never sat out there before, preferring to stay around the pool in the back, but now it seems like seeing the world go by (or not) is more important. We have breakfast out there, sometimes and also go out late, every night, with the last of the wine, and look at the stars. (And then I saw an article in the WSJ that said something like :Front porches are back.)

Hank's office in The Before Time

My office is a crazy place. It used to be perfect. Now it’s an insane maze of wires and lights and plugged in stuff. Two Ipads and a phone and a laptop, plus my desktop.  And a little basket of lipstick and earrings and mirrors  for last minute Zooms. Gah.

DEBORAH CROMBIE: The first week of the pandemic, we cleaned out our stairwell closet. I tackled a few cabinets in the kitchen, the main thing being my big corner double lazy Susan, which was HORRIBLE.  And in May, I did venture out with my mask a couple of times to the garden centers, and was really enjoying the patio and deck and porch. But, now, meh. It's just two big watering stints a day, and hoping the plants make it through August so we can enjoy the autumn.

As for the big fix-it projects, we desperately need a new downstairs central A/C unit, solar film on the sun porch windows (that's TEN big windows), and ditto all new blinds with blackout lining. (All due to neighbor taking down the huge tree that shaded our backyard.) But these are all big ticket items and I don't really want to tackle them in a pandemic--not to mention that two of the three require having people in the house, still a big no-no here.

JULIA: All right, dear readers, it's your turn. What new or old thing about your house has started working your last nerve over the last five months?

This Old House

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: If you're a person of (ahem) a certain age, you'll know there was a moment, or two, or three, when you woke up and discovered things were not as they once were. The "sleep wrinkles" on your face didn't disappear after breakfast. Your joints began to snap, crackle and pop like your bowl of cereal. Eating a danish resulted in a one pound weight gain that wouldn't go away. Like, ever.

My house is hitting that period. To be fair, she has a lot of years under her belt. Two hundred, give or take a decade. And, just like an old person, the hot and humid weather isn't helping. The front door is swollen with so much moisture we sometimes have to go through the barn and open it from the outside by crashing into it like an offensive lineman through the Crimson Tide defense. The front stair banisters, which were finished in marine varnish a couple centuries ago, get uncomfortably sticky, so that going up to bed feels like holding hands with a really bad first date. The master bath's toilet, which dates from the Eisenhower administration, responds to the heat with a steady drip-drip-drip of condensation which runs across the bathroom floor in a gentle stream. Why does it do this? Because that floor, and every floor, slants. There's not a level vertical or horizontal surface to be found anywhere in my house.

But these seasonal annoyances are as nothing compared to the Large Systems Death Spiral I have entered. When Ross and I purchased  our farmhouse in 1994, we were the beneficiaries of the previous owners good maintenance and bad timing. In preparation for living in their country home full time in retirement, they prudently invested in the best furnace, water heater, etc. etc. available. Unfortunately for them, the husband died less than a year after he stopped working. (I'd wonder if the place was bad luck for husbands, but two deaths in sixty years isn't that much of a statistical anomaly.)

Over the years, Ross and I replaced and upgraded here and there. The eternally freezing-and-bursting copper pipes became impervious PVC. The WWII-era downstairs bath eventually went to the way of all flesh (and ceramic, and moving metal bits.) We painted (and by we, I mean Ross and the Sailor), we had the roof replaced, we had the septic tank pumped out.

Now, however, the bill is (literally) coming due. Last spring, the water pump, which had steadily supplied us from our well since before we were owners of the place, died. We didn't even know where the well was buried after all those years. Fortunately, my plumber had a good eye, and the backhoe guy found it without having to dig up more than a 3x5 trench in our yard. 

Both the front and back storm doors gave up the ghost (with a little help from the Sailor, who managed to break the glass in both doors within a two month span.) I have two dear cousins who are super-good at carpentry and all that jazz, and they volunteered to come over and do a quick change for me. It wound up taking them nine hours to install one storm because the back door wasn't standard size. None of my doors are. I have three in the parlor/office in which I'm writing this, and every one is a half to three-quarters of an inch off from the rest.

My cousins called one door good for the year. They'll be back in September to install the front storm door. I'm planning to have them stay overnight.

This summer, I was hit with a plumbing/bathroom trifecta. The oil-fired water heater, which again, had been there when we moved in, died. Over thirty years, who could blame it. Thank God, it was the hottest part of the summer, when taking camp showers were, at the very least, bearable. I had a new, fancy-dan green hybrid heat pump heater installed to replace it, for only about as much as I paid for our trip to Hawaii. Sorry, kids. This year, you get hot water for Christmas.

When the hot water came back on after three weeks of being shut off, the accumulated mineral deposits blasted into the dripping-for-some-time kitchen and shower faucets and kludged them. (Yes, a filtration system is on the list. But it's a long list.) The kitchen was so bad we had to turn the water off to the sink. Again. The plumber (who likes me very, very much, since I am financing his new car) will be over this Thursday to finally put the new faucets in. They are transitional in style, and it took me more time to pick them out at the plumbing supply design center than it did ti find my wedding gown.

But wait, there's more! While all this was going on, the electricity went off in the master bath - which is also the laundry room. It's not the circuits - I checked. And rechecked. So while the water has been off, and on, and off, and on, the lights and the washer haven't been working. I've been performing my nighttime ablutions by candlelight, which is very flattering. I may keep that. Sadly, having to lug my dirty clothes and sheets to the laundromat (or to kindly friends houses) is much less gracious and romantic. So as soon as Jeff the Plumber is finished with his part, I have to call Joe the Electrician.

Is it any wonder I religiously go to the DIY Network and HGTV sites every day and enter their Ultimate Retreat Giveaway? I linger over pictures of the brand-new, perfectly plumb construction, the cunningly designed laundry room, the kitchen with the full-sized refrigerator that doesn't have to fit in the hallway around the corner from the stove because there's literally no space for it on walls pierced with four doors, three windows and a wood stove.

Do I sound a little on edge? I read that most of the winners of the Dream Home and Ultimate Getaway houses wind up taking the cash option - it's too far from home, and they don't want to pay the taxes. Not me. When I win, I'm putting this old house on the market and moving. North Carolina, Washington State - it doesn't matter to me. Sure, I'll miss the friends I see so often now. But I can always Skype with Jeff if I get lonely.