Along with the massive siding project, we finally broke down and hired an electrician to put up every light we had purchased in the last seven years for the Red House as well as a new fan for the ping pong room. Oh yeah, maybe someone who could even put real covers on all the exposed switches?

Yes, you can live like that for years and years when you no longer have any young children running around.

First to be capped were the exposed wires in the kitchen we had been looking at for at least three years.

Next was the dangling light bulb that was replaced with a soft glow “sputnik” and a funky new fan whose glass cover broke so we have to try and find one that size. (Initial research has revealed that this, however, will not be an easy task since it’s not a “standard” size. )

I was just happy I wasn’t the one who had to stand on a step stool (or more likely a paint-splattered chair) holding up a light fixture while Lynn attempted to install it and not electrocute himself.  There are just some things we refuse to do anymore and this has become one of those things.

Besides the new lights throughout the house, we have finally finished all the siding. The installers said it would take one week which I was skeptical about considering the size of the house and hence I took off 2.5 weeks from work to be here to make sure that all went according to plan. When all was said and done, it took them 8 days – they lost one day to rain, one day to “camping,” and one other day to do a window installation at another property.

Here are some pictures of the process.  We even got to see the original color of the house (dark brown) when they tore off some of the old shingles.

And yes, the Red House is still RED! And while I was skeptical about the color of the siding when I saw it online, I have to say the Red House looks really really nice. I was worried that the vinyl would look really plastic-y but it doesn’t.  It looks exactly like the color it should be. Watching people drive by the house, it’s been amusing to see people do double takes when they see the sudden transformation. Not so amusing is that someone from the post office took it upon themselves to stop delivering our mail because they thought someone else had bought the house and finally made it look “pretty”!) Can you even imagine that?  It took me two phone calls over two days along with a trip downtown to chat with the postmaster in charge to have this corrected.

Meanwhile the other morning, there was an older gentleman taking pictures of the Red House while his wife was sitting in the car.  I politely inquired what he was doing and it turns out they are friends with one of the early owners of the house (that would be 1950’s not 1850’s!). They were going to visit this elderly couple and wanted to show them the “progress” of the house. When the wife got out of the car and joined in our conversation, she was eager to know if we had kept the third staircase in the kitchen. (I politely told her we did not.) But “what about those wonderful wood floors?” she asked. I told her they were still there but were in pretty bad shape and we were wondering what to do – refinish or totally redo.

It’s difficult to try and convey to people what the house looked like both inside and outside and now with the new siding it will be even more of a challenge.  Although I don’t think this blog and the tale of the Red House is quite over yet, ironically I am missing the look of the old beaten up Red House a bit.

So here’s her new look! (Of course the Red House is a she.)

And yes, we absolutely still need some front stairs, a new garage, a mason to redo the foundation and last but not least landscaping please!

Yes, there is still some painting to be done and insulation needs to be put around the skylight and we need a towel rack or two and a toilet paper roll holder would be awesome but the toilet flushes, the sink works (HOT WATER TOO), and no one drowned in the Jacuzzi.

Considering that we started this project on June 19, 2016 and it’s now September, the only thing I can say is that luckily it’s not our only bathroom!

Here are a few shots of the transformation.

And the finished tub!

We also did the floor in what looks like “distressed” wood but is in fact simply tile. I didn’t think it would look as good as it does so I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.

When we sold our Long Island house earlier this year, we also gave up access to a convenient washer/dryer. (Our apartment has neither.) Which means one of us (usually me because I have a shorter commute and thus home earlier) is doing laundry at the laundromat. Not the worse case scenario actually. What I didn’t realize with these new machines (ours in our previous house were really old) is that 1) they do laundry in half the time and 2) they do laundry in half the time!

So to take you back, this is what the “laundry room” looked like.

And this is what we have now! (I know it IS very exciting!)

Yeah, they’re not fancy front-loaders in designer colors. They are simple white. They were mid-range in price and they will probably last forever.

Since we have TWO other bathrooms to renovate going forward (the one that I dare not mention again until somehow magically it’s done), and the icky white bathroom we are using now, I can say I’m feeling most optimistic since this one turned out so well.

Bathroom done we are moving into the fall season with a huge list of projects.

1. We still have NO dining room. Exhibit 1A.2. We still have NO bedroom. Exhibit 2A.

3.  One of our staircases is still HALF PINK/HALF WHITE! Exhibit 3A.

4. What should be the “living” room is filled with “boy toys” to help do all the renovations! Exhibit 4A.

5. What should be the “family” aka TV room is filled with boxes from our old house. We can’t store anything in our basement since it has a tendency to flood (!) which leaves us with the attic. Unfortunately, we have some stairs missing so can’t physically get up to the attic until the stairs are put back. Until that happens, all the stuff that’s here will unfortunately have to stay here. Exhibit 5A.

6. We are most definitely not hoarders but even the staircase landing is filled with stuff! Exhibit 6A.

7. Did I mention the driveway is totally ripped up and an eyesore, too? Exhibit 7A.

8. We still have NO siding. Exhibit 8A!

9. Not to mention we need a new garage! Exhibit 9A.

I know at this point everyone is thinking  – WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU GUYS BEEN DOING THE LAST 6 YEARS!!! The answer is fixing everything else!

But let me continue.

10. We also don’t have any stairs to get into the front of the house. Yep, we need some landscaping, too! Exhibit 10A.

Compounding the lack of stairs and siding is the problem we face every winter in that the rain simply pours off the roof when we are going through the side entryway. (Shower anyone?) Also when it gets really cold we have very large icicles that form and drip off the roof onto the deck making an entrance into the house somewhat perilous.

To end this story on a happy gardening note, (yes, the thought of the cold and pictures of the icicles did frighten me), we did manage to harvest most of the garlic (we think) that was growing. The cloves were especially large this year and most likely the German Red variety. (Truthfully can’t really remember what we planted!)

Our bamboo is flowering and growing so well it has managed to create a “privacy” fence for a good portion of the property.

Our marigolds also did much better than any veggies I planted (except for the aforementioned garlic). Ditto for the geraniums.

So for now, summer may nearly be over but somehow when I look at our garden gnome I don’t see a smirk on his cute little face but rather a really really happy smile! Perhaps he knows there might be a cold spell but then an Indian summer that will grace our garden or better yet, at least maybe one of the ten projects we want accomplished will happen BEFORE next summer.

When we arrived at the Red House, the rain stopped long enough for us to bring everything inside without getting soaking wet.  Our other activity that evening, unfortunately, before we could have a cocktail or even think about eating was to haul all the trash we had collected two weeks ago plus all of the recyclables (mostly beer and wine bottles!) we had collected from LAST summer to the curb.  Thing is at the Red House we have trash pick-up once a week — on Friday’s.  Since we usually arrive Friday night, we always miss trash pick-up and have to always take the garbage home.

Since most of the trash we had bagged consisted of debris from the house, many of the bags were simply too heavy to lift (for me at least), let alone carry down the very, very long driveway to the curb. That’s when Lynn and I decided we would put a big blue tarp in the back of the car, hoist the bags onto the tarp, and DRIVE down the driveway. It worked. However, spying on the garbage guys the next morning, they seemed a little perplexed by both the appearance of trash in front of a house that looked abandoned, coupled with the sheer weight of what we were ditching.

It rained all day Friday and Saturday, and part of  Sunday.  While this was supposed to be our planting weekend in addition to our finally sheet-rocking the upstairs bedrooms, the most I could do via planting was to layout all the little packets I wanted to put in the ground.

Now the only reason I even contemplated planting all these goodies from “scratch” or seed actually (which I had never done on Long Island) is because everything I planted last year from these same little packets grew!  I may have gone a bit overboard by the number of packets I purchased, but I figured what the hell, let me at least try.  But I’m not an idiot, I did have a back-up plan in case nothing grew and bought lettuce, two different kinds of tomato plants, basil, and marigolds (to keep the deer away), too.

The other good news about the property is we finally found someone to mow all four acres.  Our landscaper actually showed up to mow on Memorial Day and with two really big ride-own mowers and a helper, he did THE ENTIRE PROPERTY IN TWELVE MINUTES.  I felt so bad that Lynn used to spend hours, entire weekends actually, trying to mow the meadow on the Troy-Bilt.

One good thing about a rainy weekend (even a long holiday-one) is that you are forced to tackle projects you’ve been putting off.  This enabled us to start sheet-rocking one of the upstairs bedrooms.

We, however, got off to a bad start.  It seems we had forgotten how difficult it is to rock a ceiling. So even with me standing on a chair and Lynn standing on another chair, holding up a piece of rock by myself with Lynn trying to secure it to the ceiling with a power tool wasn’t working. Apparently, I was a lot stronger three years ago than I am now… But then we remembered the last time we rocked the living room ceiling, we had rented one of those sheet-rock “helpers.”

It’s basically a drywall lift that puts the piece exactly where you need it to be without killing yourself trying to do so. So we bagged the ceiling idea until we could rent one and Lynn focused on doing the walls instead.

Meanwhile the amount of weeds that were growing in the garden and around the house needed to be dealt with.  So despite the pouring rain, I went outside and pulled as many weeds as I could thinking at least once the rain stopped we would be able to till the soil and plant anew.

I hadn’t forgotten, however, in doing this project that Lynn, always the perfectionist, wanted to do the ENTIRE garden over again.  That meant before I could plant (provided of course, I got all the weeding done and it stopped raining), he wanted to put down new sheets of weed-blocker, plywood dividers, and bags and bags of small marble chips.

While he was doing this part, I decided I wanted to try and make pulled pork sandwiches that we could eat if we ever got back later that night to Long Island. I found a pork shoulder that was small enough to fit in the toaster oven, cooked it for about 5 hours at 275 degrees, and voila, it did turn out to be quite tasty!

I also picked some more asparagus from the garden that I discovered hiding underneath all the weeds! I can’t tell you how tickled I am to snip asparagus from my own garden. Lynn is tickled that they look like the “real” thing; I’m assuming he means the supermarket variety.

I also decided to take some photographs of the property.  I still love the color and look of the “barn” aka garage door, and hope even if we have to rebuild it someday that we can at least duplicate its rustic look.

My other culinary find this weekend was to see huge bags of fiddlehead ferns at the local farmer’s market.  I have to admit the first time I ate fiddlehead ferns was in Cape May, New Jersey, of all places. Since their season is so short and they have such a unique texture and earthiness, to me they’ve become that much more exotic (and thus a must for my table!)

Of course the weather finally cleared up just as we were about to leave the Red House. We had hoped to set up the deck furniture and have a meal or at least a glass of wine outside during our time there but it wasn’t to be. I thought about other Memorial days we had spent together, one in particular when we were living in a $375 a month rent-stabilized apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Since combined we made little more than that each month and thus had no extra cash for anything, we would often find ourselves many hot summer evenings on “tar beach,” aka the roof on the top of the apartment building. If we were “tanning,” we’d lie on a towel, if we were trying to be civilized, we actually sat on a couple of director chairs that we had bought at Conran’s back in the 80’s.

Originally the chairs had black canvas seats and backs but somewhere along the line I must have replaced them with what looks to be now like a light blue. There was one chair left and our son Nicholas wanted it for his up-and-coming photography and video studio. I took a picture of it before I sent it off to him. Who knows, maybe one day he’ll do a photo shoot at the Red House and bring it back…It’s got a lot of history you know.

Our bamboo though is growing back slowly and everything we planted in the fall seems to be making a very cautious beginning.

We have a few pieces of asparagus sticking up through the soil in the garden and I managed to snip off four stalks to eat.

Our strawberry patch will be awesome if everyone of those little white flowers I saw turns into a berry. The garlic, too, is slowly shooting up but even though I thought I planted enough garlic (75 cloves!), I don’t think I did and I may actually need to plant another batch. Oh yeah, we have a few daffodils and tulips, too.

We were going to concentrate on the garden this weekend, planting everything we want to grow over the summer. The garden desperately needed to be weeded plus we wanted to buy more rocks and lumber to better define the space. Since the weather was absolutely perfect (high 70’s who would have thought) there should have been no excuse not to do it. However, I got side tracked when I saw an ad on craigslist for church pews. Real ones. In the exact color I wanted.  For $50 each.

The plan is to eventually have a “Stube” in one corner of the kitchen. Basically for those unfamiliar with the German word, a “Stube” is simply a room, in this case one where I would like to have breakfast and maybe even lunch. I’m thinking in one corner of the kitchen is where I would like the “Stube” to be.

We still have to figure out what kind of table we want in the room but church pews as benches were exactly what we had in mind.  Problem was, even from the Red House, the pews were in a church over 3 hours away.

But first we had breakfast. The day before we found the first farmer’s market of the season setting up in town where we bought farm fresh eggs and ramps  Now if you’re not familiar with ramps they look like a scallion with a leaf on top.  Really! For 3 bucks this is what we got.

They have a slight garlic taste and if you saute the leaves, the possibilities of whipping up a really good stir fry are endless. I ended up throwing them into a batch of scrambled eggs (along with some pancetta, too) which resulted in eggs that were so yellow Lynn actually thought I had put curry in them!

After breakfast, we got in the car and headed north. It was a gorgeous, sunny blue sky kind of day but unfortunately there was no place to stop for lunch and I hadn’t thought to pack anything except a couple of bottles of water. We ended up having to make a pit-stop at a Mickey D’s, and about 3.5 hours after we left the Red House, (and only about 20 miles from the Canadian border), we arrived at the church.

Now even though we had been given the EXACT specifications of the width, length and height of the “short” pews over the phone and had even measured the trunk of our station wagon, we decided that one pew would definitely fit, but two might not.

Inside the church we met Pastor Rusty and his lovely daughter Olivia. They not only helped us carry out the pews to our car, but they also lent us tools to remove the racks that were attached to each pew back. (Did I not remind Lynn to at least put a screwdriver in the car because I figured we would need something? Yes, I did, but he didn’t remember.) Luckily, Rusty and Olivia were there to help us position the pews in the back of our car just right so that both pews did in fact fit!

And then we simply drove back! On the same road that took us there.  Round trip we drove over 300 miles that day to get them and yes, it was still that warm even at 7 o’clock at night.

When we got back to the Red House, we lifted the pews out of the car and stored them (temporarily) in the tv room next to our dining room table (still in the box) and the real Charles Eames chairs we’ve had for at least 20 years but have never used. (Because you have to wear padded underwear to sit on them, yeah, they are that uncomfortable.)

Even though it was time to think about dinner, I couldn’t help but wonder who would grab the rest of the pews we had seen in the church that day.  Whose houses or restaurants or perhaps even other places of worship would they end up in?

But let’s get back to dinner. We were out of propane so grilling wasn’t an option, I did have a couple of filet mignons in the fridge and since it was Cinco de Mayo, I thought why not slice up the steaks and stuff them in a flour tortilla!  Of course as I was trying to broil the steaks in the toaster oven (which didn’t work they just turned an icky grey color), I kept staring at the gas line we had installed three weeks ago wishing that 1) the kitchen was finished and 2) the kitchen had at least a stove that could have sizzled up these babies in no time.

I finished the steaks in a frying pan on the burner; we sliced them up, they were edible. I also made a salad I’ve been making frequently these days (courtesy of Jamie Oliver) by combining roasted carrots, lots of fresh parsley and slices of avocado and red onion topped with a zesty lemon dressing and cubes of Havarti cheese. Ok, so it’s not particularly low cal but it’s really really awesome!

Unfortunately, we didn’t get a lot done that weekend because of our little church pew excursion. Lynn did however manage to paint the door going down to the basement. I loved the way he covered the “port hole” windows in the door by putting paper plates on them! Really, I think this is such a funny look, I might actually insist the door stays that way.

And while we did manage to BUY ALL THE DOOR KNOBS WE NEED FOR EVERY SINGLE DOOR IN THE HOUSE, they, alas, are still sitting in a big pile as you walk into the house.

For those of you who don’t know what farm fresh eggs look like- they look like this – some are brown, some are beige and some are even tinged a bit green! Oh, yeah, they come in all different sizes, too – just like people. And that’s as philosophical as I’m going to get…today…