OMG Progress!!

It's cold and miserable out there, folks, but here's a little ray of sunshine to brighten your spirits: there has been progress made on our house! We know, we know, it's kinda like when Jim started dating Karen - that was it, he and Pam would never get together! But lo and behold, we have started "dating" a competent contractor, and we hope that like Jim and Pam, we'll eventually live happily ever after in our new addition, although we are praying it doesn't take 5 seasons to get there. Of course, we are on Season 4...

Season Two Grand Finale: Which Side Are You On?

It occurred to me, only after someone asked me where the siding photos are, that I held out on all of you on that front. So let's do a little flashback to August 2008, when last you saw the outside of the addition:

What you are looking it is the jerry-rigged gutter and downspout, the gorgeous windows, the glass door, the temporary power, and the mudpit that was our yard. What happened next (sorta):

This is our lovely copper siding from Tegola, mentioned in an earlier post. The siding folks came and finally got started with the kind of union-worker vigor that would make Billy Bragg proud. Sadly, things sat like this for a several weeks while we tried to sort out some problems we were having with the downspout design and the door. Once solved, we put in a new door (we'll be back to that project in the future), the siding guys came back and worked some magic on the gutter, and Voila! A Kickin' It Addition:

As you can see, the copper that was put on earlier was darker, which made me wonder when, if ever, that would even out. The answer was "not long." It was also not long before the neighbors started talking to us about our Shiny Happy Addition. Thankfully, our (70+ yr old) next door neighbors love it, but another neighbor down the block (40+ yrs old) asked what we were going to put over it. Which goes to show that being young doesn't necessarily mean being hip.

Season Three Grand Finale: Back Yard Man

Season Three got off to a rocky start while we tried to end the basement water wars, then took an absurdist turn mid-season into Waiting for Dominion Through the Looking Glass. But finally, three months later, our new contractor was able to resume his work on re-installing the back yard concrete. I say re-install, because the Original Incompetent Contractor poured the back yard concrete back in 2007. Except that he poured it in such a way as to render it impossible to open the back door and so had to rip it all out. This didn't stop him from billing us for all his work on it, though.

Take two on the outdoor concrete and the first try on the shed and fence went beautifully. Our new contractor even had the wisdom to question the usefulness of a shed that would only be 3 feet deep, so made a slight design change to give us a far more practical 5 foot-deep shed. He also cleaned up the messes from the two previous contractors, moved the pipes that they had buried on the neighbor's property, re-did the shed once on his own volition to ensure that all the lines matched up, and still came in on time and on budget. I have written to the Archdiocese reporting this miracle, but haven't heard back from them yet. So here it is - the newly finished, brilliant outside of the addition (by the way, it's wet from the rain, not weirdly streaky):

I'll walk you through this 18 x 15' space, to point out the lovely details:

First, check out the cool matching shingles on the roof of the shed. These were leftover from the siding project. They were leftover, because the OIC miscalculated the total we would need for the sides and the inside of the two parapet walls, leaving us a parapet wall short of what we needed. Thankfully, our fabulous siding guys gave us - as in for free - some leftover bronze aluminum taking up space in their warehouse to use for the parapet walls. As you may also have noticed, the existing siding all now looks the same color, so I'm sure the shed roof will catch up pretty quickly.

Next is a close up of what we refer to as the mini-monolith, which is a smaller version of the one inside (and vastly improved in quality). This will house the outdoor refrigerator. You can't see it from the picture, but the conduit for the power was put in before the concrete was poured, so everything is nice and tidy. Also notice how the bottom corner of the fence by the door has a perfect cutout for the valve that sends our runoff water to the underground cistern (a more expensive and voluminous version of a rain barrel). This attention to detail would not come as a surprise to those working with competent contractors, but I don't take anything done right for granted anymore.

Another close up of the shed and the door - look at those lines!!

Once the fence and concrete are stained, this is going to look dope. Someday, The Plan is to put a built-in grill area where that wasp-filled Weber now stands, but who knows when that will be.

I close with a before vs. after, to give us hope as we enter into our next season:

vs.

Keeping the Chin Up

Okay, so admittedly, sometimes I get a little bit bitter about the house. It's hard not to, especially when it means saying no to the overpriced Kate Spade orange patent and peach suede heels with the ruffle on the vamp. Three years into a six-month project gets a body down, not to mention a soul. But a couple of things happened last Friday to remind me how important it is not to let the downsides of life become landslides.

First, was the bike ride to/from work, which involved passing the Holocaust Museum. I do not understand hate, especially hatred of whole groups of people you don't even know. It makes me cry. There was a really haunting contrast between the beautiful evening - the first in a week - and the scene of flowers and candles in memory of Stephen Johns, who was killed in his line of duty as a Holocaust Museum security guard by a racist, bigoted murderer hoping, it would seem, to end his life engaged in a terroristic killing spree. I feel so sad about events like these, because I not only do not understand how people become such monsters, but also because I inevitably feel like there is too much hate and not enough love in the world. And I wonder - were the "evil" people once sane? Were they so ill all along as to be predestined for something along this line, or is there a way you could look at their lives and pinpoint the event or events that then started a chain reaction of anger that ends on the evening news? Was there a way things could have been different? Are some people innately programmed to hate, or is it learned, or both? And how do we counter hate? Surely not with more of it. Is it enough to just be a good person in your small way?

On that bike ride home, thinking about the poisons of hate (and the forces in society that fan the embers of hate into flames), I was also listening to my iPod and have really been on a Paul Westerberg kick lately, and listened to the lines of "Let the Bad Times Roll" and the thread of my thoughts led me to start thinking about how avoiding the poisons of hate - in whatever its form - starts with trying just let the bad parts of life roll by. If you get too up close and personal with the bad things, you can get pulled into a nasty cycle of hatred, anger, and blame, until you are at best no fun to be with and at worst, you become crazy or evil, and there's a lot that's in between, but none of it is happy or healthy. This reminded me of my buddhist philosophy courses in college - which still resonate with me - about how we live in a world of samsara (pain) brought about essentially because we cling too much to our desires and the way we want things to be instead of accepting the things that are. Nirvana, which is often described as heaven, has nothing to do with clouds, harps, or halos: it is achieving a blissful mental state in the here and now. I strive for this healthy state - really, I do. But there's a reason why the people closest to nirvana are buddhist monks living on mountaintops in Tibet - I think it's pretty challenging to achieve this in the throes of modern life. Sure, if i didn't have a job, a spouse, friends, a house, family, and a community of which I am a part, then I might not be so sucked into a world of expectations and desires about how all of those things should be and suffer during the times when the reality of my life and my personal expectations for it diverge.

Like with the house. I admit, I once came across our old contractor's truck in the school parking lot near our house and stopped for a moment, thinking of ways to inflict damage and let me tell you, the movie in my head where I wailed and smashed felt good. For a few seconds. Until the part where the cops showed up and I went to jail, because I don't get away with anything - even in my daydreams. I am ashamed of this feeling, but know that most anyone else in my shoes would feel the same; and I can also say with all honesty that I walked on by without doing anything - not even spitting. The fact of the matter is, as my mom pointed out when she finally saw the project: It's bad, I know, but it really could be so much worse. (I hate to think of how for fear that thinking up the ways will give them life, but it's true, it could be worse.) We do, after all, still have a wall between us and the addition... And the more important thing to remember is that hate/anger/negativity is poison, whether it's directed at another person, a thing, or a situation. Which isn't to say I'm not going to sue the SOB, just that it really isn't good to dwell on being the victim of his boundless ineptitude and corruption or berating myself for bad judgment in hiring him in the first place - it's better to calmly draft the lawsuit, get through the problems step-by-step, and move on. And, when I need a place to release the insanity of the experience, I try to use this blog to make the bad stuff in my head either funny or to just let it out (as well as to share the good stuff, too), so for those of you who read this, I suppose you should be billing me for therapy. You can send your bills to me c/o Dominion Power, P.O. Box 26532, Richmond VA 23261-6532.

Anyway, to finish off the day, went to see the movie Up. It is not only the best animated movie I've ever seen, but it is one of the best movies I've ever seen, period. The opening sequence made my husband and I laugh out loud as this couple starts out their life together with this wreck of a house and the wife starts sawing boards in her wedding dress, and they start this Adventure Fund Piggy Bank, but then have to drain it when the car breaks and then again, this is where art imitated life - a giant tree falls on their house - and so (i'm not spoiling anything here) they never get to take the big adventure they planned before she passes away (which made me cry because it was like my biggest fear come to cartoon life). And then the movie takes off from there. It is a complex dramedy - you'll laugh, you'll cry, it's better than Cats. Do. Not. Miss. It. Anyway, I won't give it all away, but suffice to say, the moral of the story is to embrace life - in all its moments - as an adventure. I've attached the preview and I am trying to pretend the house has balloons on it and that this is one fun, crazy, scary, lively, lesson-filled adventure. So right now, it's the part where we're lost in the jungle, but I really truly do have faith that we're going to come across the beautiful waterfall any day now.