First and foremost, if you buy something in the beginning and then decide further down the road you don’t like it or it simply doesn’t work, you can change your mind and replace it with something you think will work better. This, in my mind, is a plus.  The downside of this lengthy renovation is since you’ve had so much time to change your mind and do it differently, it inevitably will cost you more money than you originally anticipated.

Case in point. I’m afraid to even mention the upstairs master bathroom (recently renamed the “million dollar bathroom”) but I will. Okay, I know it REALLY didn’t cost that much but the fact that I paid a previous contractor a large sum of money to do the bathroom, but ultimately had to pay another contractor THE EXACT SAME AMOUNT to rip it out and redo it is why it has definitely earned that title.

Consequently, because I had to come up with double the amount of money I had budgeted for the bathroom, I had to eliminate something from our very lengthy “TO DO” list and that was (drum roll please), finish the kitchen.  I know, I know, it pisses me off, too.  I mean really, I would love for all the electrical work in the kitchen to be completed, the exhaust fan/hood above the stove to be installed as well as the “stop sign” window to be spackled, sanded and painted! Hopefully, by the end of the summer, this will move back up to the top of the list.

This is where the exhaust fan needs to go! Look the outlet is already there and waiting!

I guess the fact that we put up a decent looking metal back splash is a lot better than what we had before (that would be a very ugly black garbage bag and not even a good one, a crappy one) like you see below. This of course was before we got cabinets, and counters, etc., etc., etc. Wait is the stove on? Am I cooking something and taking pictures at the same time? Do you see the flame? I do! Obviously I’m just boiling water since there doesn’t appear to be anything in either of the other pans.

Besides having the exhaust fan installed, the “stop sign” window needs to be finished!Trust me, it looks a lot worse on the outside. Technically, it is centered so we’ll see how this really looks once the siding is done. In the meantime, we are almost finished with the upstairs master bathroom! Hip Hip Hooray! Yes, it looks much better than we ultimately thought it would and it’s the biggest bathroom we’ve ever had in any apartment or house we’ve lived in so I guess it was worth the wait and the money. We have to still install the shower door, hook up the faucet for the vanity and simply put the drawers in. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Remember, this is what we started with – a former nursery with no plumbing that managed to become a bathroom. The original thought was to put subway tiles on the shower walls and a simple gray tile for the bathroom floor. In hindsight, the subway tile looked a lot better when we laid it on the floor than the wall.

This was Round 1 of the bathroom. Yeah, it just didn’t work.

Ultimately the subway tile had to be ripped out and a whole new unit needed to be put in. And yes, they did throw out the piece of marble that cost us a pretty penny on the step you see here that I hoped could be saved! (Case in point: when you tell someone to demo a room and throw everything out and start again, that’s what they do!)

And this is Round 2.

Okay, in hindsight this looks a lot “neater.” And I do love the shelves although they will probably make me crazy trying to keep them clean.

And I think the floor tile came out nicely although Lynn is complaining the grout lines are too thick! REALLY?

Besides the master bath near completion, we also managed to convert a bedroom into what will eventually be a walk-in closet but more probably some sort of office. (I don’t really have that many clothes and would rather have a room to work and/or write in.) Remember we originally had six bedrooms (!) and are now down to three. Here are some before and after shots.

This shot actually looks a lot nicer than the space really was.  I hated walking into that room, it was really scary. We also originally had planned to have a skylight in the room (notice the plywood frame in the upper right hand corner where the skylight was going to go) but since then the wall has totally been dry walled.  Here are two pictures to show the process.

I think the track lighting to replace the single hanging light bulb is a huge improvement! The walk in closet also leads to the attic but a portion of the attic stairs had to be ripped out to put in the plumbing for the master bath.

Now that the plumbing is finished, the stairs have been put back.  This means I can finally start putting some of the many boxes we brought up from our old house up there in storage. Somehow, I just couldn’t bring myself to throw out all the kid’s old toys and books and school certificates just yet.

Once that’s done, I can also focus on putting a new wood floor in the bedroom as well as new flooring for both landings. (Yes, we have two landings because we have two staircases.) Unfortunately, with all this construction going on (think dust and more dust), there’s a lot of clean up we have to do. Really, how is this going to become a bedroom one can comfortably be in! Courage!

Okay, I know the table saw, shop vac and garbage can, coupled with leftover drywall, plywood and tubs of spackle will all go away but really – this is a huge room to clean up.  Let me segue here briefly.  When my current contractor started the job and one of the stipulations was to throw out all the old iron radiators, he actually asked me if he could just throw them out the window.

See this radiator (yes, of course we did save some), well imagine this times 4 and you get the picture –  they’re old and weigh a ton. So no, throwing them out the window was not an option. My luck, they’d bounce back and break a window!

But back to the landings. Here’s one of the landings that’s big enough to perhaps accommodate a reading nook in the future. When I get rid of all the boxes and put a bookcase I bought the first year someplace else (along with numerous dictionaries), I think this will be a pleasant little space.  In case you missed the dictionary in the picture, it’s the big white paper thing with black tabs on it. Side note: Before anyone had an app that would help you spell and define a word, there were dictionaries! Besides English, I also have dictionaries in German, French and Italian! And they’re all really big and heavy! But more confusing is why exactly do we have so many blinds lying around? What rooms are missing blinds? Are there rooms in the house we haven’t discovered yet?  Just kidding!

Our biggest project this summer (money-wise, too) is that we are finally ready to do the siding. We also hope to install some much needed gutters over the porch. This should help to alleviate the “shower effect” we so often get when we’re trying to get into the house when it’s raining.  Yes, indeed the water just pours off the roof! And with new siding we’ll need new outdoor lighting since the ones on the porch are no longer a complete working pair since one particularly bad winter a heavy duty icicle smashed one of them.

We also have been working on the dining room. I say “we” but really Lynn has been doing all the work.  He ripped off some weird moulding and other strange material that had been put on the walls only to find some old floral green, white and gray wallpaper and what I can only describe as an attempt to stencil huge bows on the wall.  I do wonder if there were any family portraits at one point that had been put in these ornate “frames.”

Here’s a before and after shot.

Gearing up for the summer planting season, our garden took a beating this winter even though we were told it was a “mild” one.  “Mild” compared to what I wonder? This weekend I spent a few hours tilling the soil, thinking about what I would plant, trying to remember what worked last year (zucchini, beans, beets and peas), what the rabbits ate (zucchini, beans, beets and peas) and what didn’t grow at all (sage, eggplant and peppers).

We had luck growing basil in containers when we had our house on Long Island so Lynn suggested we try that this year. Luckily, we seem to have a nice crop of asparagus that seems pretty hearty (here’s a shot of a few very tall stalks early in the season).

The strawberries appear to be doing well, too, provided the birds and aforementioned rabbits don’t eat all of them. Dare I mention I saw a couple rabbits the other day and they looked really BIG! Maybe they’ll be too full to venture into the garden? Or maybe they’re large because they’re about to birth little bunnies! Hopefully they won’t eat a new rose bush I was just about to plant in the ground.

On that note, if you’re planting any veggies or flowers this Memorial Day weekend, think of me! And, don’t worry, I’ll have lots of follow-up photos and a story or two about the Red House and its new “look.”

And so our 7th summer at the Red House begins.

For starters, I’ve never had a problem making cookies.  This year it seemed I made batches of my usual kinds (butter with raspberry jam, chocolate chip, almond and amaretto butter, cinnamon sugar) and only two of the four were decent.

Decent Christmas Cookies

The others spread across the pan as they were baking as if they were trying to escape!

Raspberry Jam Cookies Wanting to Escape!

Since I’m also fairly stubborn when faced with having to pay large amounts of money for things that I think are overpriced ($9.99 for a bag of shelled walnuts???!!), I bought two bags of walnuts in the shell ($2.99 each), and then not only shelled them, but proceeded to crush them with a rolling pin the way my mother did, and her mother before her. Note to self: no way in hell will my daughter EVER do this to save a few bucks.

Crushed Walnuts, the Old Fashioned Way

Consequently, with all the holiday baking and eating behind us, I definitely felt it was time to do some serious work up at the Red House (or at least try to).  So, instead of leaving after work on Friday, and getting there at midnight, and then being hopelessly tired the next 24 hours, I actually took a day off from work to get a head start.

One of my first projects nearly two years ago when we bought the house was to paint a pink hallway at the top of the staircase white. I had, however, never gotten around to painting (priming actually) the actual staircase, so this I decided to tackle.

Half Pink, Half Primed Staircase

Problem was, since everyone knows I’m afraid of heights, I actually couldn’t reach to paint the ceiling and no way in hell was I going to figure out how to rig up a ladder (without falling down the stairs) that would let me do so. I moved on.

Next on the list, help Lynn finish insulating the dining room.  This involved me doing nearly next to nothing (holding up pink foam board with two fingers), while he’s struggling with screws and an impact driver.

A Nearly Insulated Dining Room

While he was doing that, I decided that a closet that had been installed in a hallway that leads down to the basement, had to be ripped out.  I’m assuming the closet had once been used to hold towels or other toiletries since it had been located outside the original bathroom.  Well, now that the original bathroom is  gone, it was not only taking up room but was hideously ugly as well.  It had to go.

I started ripping it apart and Lynn didn’t like that I was attempting to dismantle it old school-like, (with a screwdriver and a hammer), so suddenly I found the impact driver pushing my hand away from the screws that are holding the closet shelves in place.  They do come down rather quickly that way (impact driver 1, Julie 0), and we decide to stack all the pieces in the kitchen.  Arranged, I realize they very much look like a Georges Braque still life.

The Closet As Still Life

After this much work in a single afternoon, we decided it was definitely time for cocktails with some smoked oysters as a little amuse bouche. Lynn and I are the only people that we know who actually enjoy eating smoked oysters (other than my parents and occasionally our son if I wrap them in some puff pastry with a big dollop of goat cheese, too). I have to however assume there are other people out there who enjoy them just as much as we do, otherwise they wouldn’t bother smoking them and canning them.

Awesome Smoked Oysters with a Lime Squeeze

While Lynn would have probably liked to use his impact driver to open the can, luckily it was simply a pull top! (I promise I will soon stop the impact driver jokes.)

Since before the weekend had started I thought in order to spend more time renovating and less time cooking, I would simply bring up a bunch of food that was already cooked. That meant for the next three days, we would be eating chili, chicken rollatini and sausages.  I cheated a bit with the sausages because while I did grill them beforehand, I still had to boil some water for pasta (they were going to be thrown into a pasta dish), and slice them along with some roasted peppers, too.

Chicken and Apple Sausage Fixin's for Dinner

The next morning we woke to snow, contemplated whether we should eventually get a snowblower, but then realized it would probably be one of those toys (like the Troy Bilt) that wouldn’t start when we needed it the most.  That said, we both went out with two big blue shovels and simply shoveled the driveway and part of the sidewalk.  This took less than half an hour.

Real Women (and Men) Shovel

We didn't shovel this part....

Besides the snow (3-4 inches), it was also pretty cold (think 2 degrees), and while the rest of the house was warm, the kitchen in it’s current unfinished and uninsulated state was simply unbearable. This meant that when I tried to wash the breakfast dishes that morning, the sponge had frozen to the sink!

Isn't this a beautiful kitchen?

I tried not to spend much time in this room the rest of the weekend and instead helped Lynn put more insulation around a new window we had installed.  Luckily, we had a big bag of that cotton candy looking stuff that comes in rolls, that Lynn reminded me we had used when we redid our kitchen on Long Island.  Since I’m the queen of throwing things out I think we no longer need, I’m actually amazed we still had it!

Insulation that kind of looks like a burrito!

Putting the insulation in the window was pretty simple, trying to fit the original moulding around the frame was not. The impact driver got a particularly good workout with Lynn trying to make pieces fit that should have gone back together in a snap, but wouldn’t.

This is what a new window looks like!

I decided to at least try to keep up with all the mess he was making so I started to sweep, then, mop, particularly in the hallway where we had torn out the closet.  Problem is there is just so much dust from all the sheetrock we are using that even after all my efforts at cleaning, the truth is it didn’t look like I had done anything at all!

Where the closet had been...

Bored with cleaning, I decided to try out some new cross country skis I had been gifted.  Now here’s the thing, the last time I was on downhill skis was probably around 1978. Cross country skis, while more recently (maybe 1997), I, in fact, had to think hard about a) how to put them on, and b) how to actually do this.  Once I figured it out, I was even able to do a fairly slow glide kind of thing across the back meadow until I realized how incredibly hilly the back meadow is.  Hilly, means I would have to go DOWNHILL ON CROSS COUNTRY SKIS.  So, not wanting to fall on my ass just yet, I simply took them off and walked back to the Red House.

There, I placed them, skies and poles, too,  against our crumbling red siding. I was always the girl anyway, who preferred to be in the ski lodge (at the bar of course), then actually on a slope. I will however, find a Cross Country Skiing for Dummies book, or some such nonsense and learn how to do it.

A Great Place to Cross Country Ski....If You Know How!

Meanwhile back on the ranch, I mean, the Red House, as I stumbled up our broken steps, afraid that if the ice beneath my boots wouldn’t send me flying, surely the icicles hanging down from the roof would give me a nice bump (or worse) on my head.

Ice Ice Baby

I did look at the other rooms that are shaping up fairly nicely (before we even had an impact driver, thanks Mom!) and thought that if we could just finish one room by the summer, maybe we could actually buy a sofa we could sit on?  One that would be comfortable and wouldn’t pinch our ass?

The Living Room -- Work in Progress

So three days later, after we had tackled as much as we could, I woke up craving French toast with real maple syrup from a farmer down the road, so I made some. Lynn wondered why I needed that much syrup on my plate.  Because I like maple syrup I said, and poured even more on the toast I had fried up in a pan on the hot plate.

Yummy French Toast (Why is it called French, anyway?)

Considering what happened next at the Red House, I’m really really happy I had as much sugar that morning as I did.  Turns out when I went to flush the toilet in our ONE bathroom, there was no water in the bowl.  When I tried to turn on the water in the sink, only hot water came out.  That’s when we realized that the cold water pipes leading up to the bathroom had frozen solid.

This unfortunately came about because yesterday, knowing the temperature was going to seriously drop (think double digit minus numbers), we tried to insulate the exposed water pipes by wrapping some heavy duty plastic between the pipes and an exterior wall.  Wrong! This had exactly the opposite effect we had wanted, hence the freezing pipes.  We turned the heat up in the house, thought about calling a plumber, then I decided I would simply wrap the skinny pipes in towels.  My theory was whenever the kids got out of the ocean and were freezing, wrapping them in towels got them warm in no time.  So that’s what I did.

Trying to warm up the frozen pipes!

Ha. Ha. Ha.  Couldn’t use the impact driver to solve this problem!  Within an hour the pipes had “thawed,” and we had cold running water back up in the bathroom. Shortly thereafter we left the Red House for the weekend, but decided to leave the pipes “dressed” so to speak in the towels.  The theory was, if the pipes actually burst, maybe the towels would catch most of the water!

I already can’t wait until spring.

When it’s overcast, the meadow has kind of a sinister look to it.

A GRAY DAY

When it’s sunny, I can see myself cross country skiing…but I don’t have skis.

BEAUTIFUL SNOW

Looking at all the snow outside the Red House, I realize I probably should have brought up a pot roast or pea soup — something heavy and hearty to eat this weekend.  But I didn’t; I brought up a piece of salmon which I cooked in a pan with some fresh basil and pineapple juice. I thought that would be a nice light and healthy way to start the new year.

PAN SALMON

The salmon was decent but it made me long for summer; the season I’m most looking forward to right now after too many hours spent shoveling sidewalks and digging out driveways.  Dare I mention we spent New Year’s Day spackling and sanding the walls and spackling and sanding some more?

In spite of my salmon dish and partially because of the cold weather, I’ve been craving spicy food, particularly Indian.  Since I’m not big on curry sauces that come in a jar, I decided to look for a naan recipe instead.  I will admit I did NOT make these up at the Red House but wanted to share it here, nonetheless.

I realized when I was making the naan, the execution was nearly identical to making flour tacos except it had a yeast starter.  You make the dough, let it rise, tear off the dough into little balls, let it rise again, roll the balls into circles and fry them in a really hot grill pan and then coat them with butter.  Since in my mind anything that you can grill and top with butter is bound to be delicious, I figured this would be a win-win dish.   It was and when summer finally does roll around, it will be the perfect flat bread accompaniment to lovely BBQ dinners outside at the Red House.

HOMEMADE NAAN

Homemade Naan (courtesy of Allrecipes.com)

Ingredients
1 package active dry yeast

1 cup warm water

1/4 cup sugar

3 tablespoons milk

2 teaspoons salt

4 1/2 cups bread flour*

2 teaspoons minced garlic (optional)

1/4 cup butter melted.

1.  In a large bowl dissolve yeast in warm water.  Let stand about 10 minutes until frothy.  Stir in sugar, milk, egg, salt and enough flour to make a soft dough.  Knead for 6 to 8 minutes on a lightly floured surface, or until smooth. Place dough in a well-oiled bowl, cover with a damp cloth, and set aside to rise.  Let it rise 1 hour, until the dough has doubled in  volume.

2. Punch down dough, and knead in garlic. Pinch off small handfuls of dough about the size of a golf ball. Roll into balls and place on a tray. Cover with a towel and allow to rise until doubled in size, about 30 minutes.

3. During the second rising, preheat grill to high heat.

4. At grill side roll one ball of dough out into a thin circle. Lightly oil grill. Place dough on grill and cook for 2-3 minutes or until puffy and lightly browned. Brush uncooked side with butter and turn over. Brush cooked side with bugger and cook until browned, another 2 to 4 minutes. Remove from grill and continue the process until all the naan has been prepared.

* I used regular unbleached flour for the recipe and although I omitted the garlic I would probably add it the next time.