Furball Lends a Paw

I am drawing the line. As you can see, Furball is helping. When Pat came home for lunch he brought me a second roll of blue tape. That really helps. After the lines are drawn, I can lay both lines at the same time.

In case I do this again, I'll document what I've learned. First-- knee pads are a must! That floor is HARD. I tried various methods of drawing the lines. The easiest one doesn't even require a pencil. Just a good yard stick and the tape.

I place the yard stick near the wall and use the tape to mark the 12" point. I'll next use the second roll of tape to mark the 13" point. I press the first six inches down securely on each piece of tape so they won't come loose when I tug on them later. Then I move the yard stick about 1/3 of the way down the floor and position the edge of the stick on the starting point of this "brick". Using the first roll of tape like a plumb line, I "snap" it straight to the 12" mark and secure it to the yard stick. I now have a straight line. I repeat for the second role of tape, securing at the 13" mark. Press the tape down and progress to the next section of floor.

Quick. Straight. And no pencil marks to paint over if there is a mistake.

Peeping Tom

While the painting is in progress, we put the boys outside. (Furball, the Ladycat, is afraid of squirrels. She never leaves the house.) I'm not certain if Morris wanted to see what we were doing, or if he was telling me he wanted back in. However, we did have a Peeping Tom while we painted.

There is a cart parked under the kitchen window where I keep unused flower pots. The cats will jump on it and look inside to tell us they want in. The view behind him is the east yard and the three-car garage/shop. This is our main "back yard" because we seldom use the front door and only cross the west yard to get the mail. The south yard is another full lot. We use it for the garden and orchard.

Second Coat

The red brick color we're laying for the main coat is Dutch Boy Mesa Red. I was making the pizza dough for supper when Pat started the next coat. He used a small brush to paint the edges where the floor and walls meet, then came back with the roller for the rest of it.

He had about two roller widths painted when I heard, "Oh. That's really red."

"IRIS!" His voice came drifting into the kitchen. "Is this what you REALLY want?"

Grabbing a dish towel and wiping flour from my hands as I wove my way through the furniture stuffed any which way in the half of the room we aren't yet painting, I came to look. It was a wonderful brick red. Just what I wanted.

"Don't worry, Pat." It will tame down when we add the stripes."

"YOU get to paint the stripes." I was informed. Ah. Pat doesn't do brush work. :)

Primer coat

I must admit, I like the way Pat thinks. I had expected to paint these floors with a brush. He pulled out the paint roller and pan. Now, that's the way to go!

We are using Kilz for the primer because it hides stains so well.

Oh, yes, this is the way to paint a floor!
Not only did it go on quickly, I got to watch Pat do all the work. The Kilz is really thick, but dries amazingly fast. By the time he had finished the first third of the room, there were spots already drying.

I had the really hard task of sitting across the room in my rocker and going "You missed a spot!" Pat showed amazing restraint. He never tried to paint me or throw anything at me. :)

First Stage --Prep Work

It's begun! I was pulling staples when Pat said he'd do that if I'd unload the three bookcases. Gladly!

Each of us feels s/he got the better end of the bargain.

I will say, being a librarian shows. I have a lot of books. Pat has a mere pittance in comparison. :) His books take up a couple of shelves in the bookcase in his computer room. Mine are EVERYWHERE!!!! At the moment they are all over the daybed. Boy, was Something disgusted when he wanted to catch a quick nap this evening.

The Foundation of the Matter

I've waited a year, thinking we'd be more productive than we have been, but it doesn't look like we'll get to put down the hardwood floor I want any time soon. I'm resigned now that it may be two or three years before we do it. The issue at hand is the things that have to be done BEFORE we can do the floor.

Besides replacing the roof, (there is a leak in the flat roof over the utility and bathroom areas), we have more horsehair plaster to remove. That's dirty work that can ruin the finish on a nice floor. I'm too cheap to put down an interim floor just to see it ruined. I refuse to put down the good wood floors I want until the plaster is replaced. I have plans to replace the utility room and bathroom floors later, too. I have my eye on some click-together laminate that looks like stone. I've heard they don't stand up well in wet areas. This may not be a good idea for the bath and the back door. I wonder if they can be sealed? Hm... I have time to make that final decision.

We have four more rooms that may need the horsehair plaster removed. Kitchen. Utility. Bath. Northwest Bedroom. I can hope the bathroom and utility room have already been done when the folks reworked the bathroom, but I'm not holding my breath. It's all paneled. That was Dad's way of coping with crumbling plaster.

My old bedroom, the northwest room, has walls that are in good condition, even if they are still horsehair, but the ceiling is crumbling. Dad installed dropped ceilings to hide the problem. He did that for two reasons -- lower ceilings make a warmer house in the winter, and it was an easy fix. Dad wasn't worried about a "period look". He wanted something functional. He was also in his 70s when he was doing some of this work (with only Mom for help) so he wasn't going to create more work than they could handle. He only lowered the ceiling a foot, so that really isn't a big issue. I want to go back to the 9 ft. ceiling.

Before Robert and Pat stripped the plaster off the living room, the first thing they did was pull out the old green carpet. We've been living on the particleboard underlayment for the past year. I've even tried to wax it to make it look a little better, but that was useless. I'm really tired of living on particleboard. But I'm still too cheap to spring for an interim floor. Or am I?

Browsing at Sutherland's the other day, I found a flyer for floor and deck paint that showed it laid down in a red brick pattern. That looks nice! I know it's intended for a concrete floor, but the texture of the particleboard would just add realism to my bricks. We bought the paint and will be giving it a try. Even if it looks pretty amateurish, it will be better than raw particleboard for the next few years.

As you can see by the photo, there will be some prep work before we put down the color. I need to pull the nails that held the carpet down for starters. We will seal the floor with Kilz before putting on the color. In his later years Dad cut a trap door in the floor so he had access to the floor furnace. We have removed the furnace and will close off the trap door when we install the wood floor. In the meantime I plan to paint the black lines between the "tiles" to fall as so they hide the edges of the door.

Jonseys Construction

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Jonseys Construction

This is what's Pat's business card looks like. He always gets a chuckle when folks first read "Hire a Husband". But they like it! Almost anyone who sees his card thinks of some nagging problem that needs to be done.

It took a while for his business to get off the ground, but it's going strong now. He also works 4 days a week as maintenance man for the county library system and 1 day a week for the regional system as the rotation van driver, delivering books to member libraries. He has a full calendar. Now you see why we haven't had time to work on the house.

Ah, well, I consider this a lifetime project.

Summer Distractions

We haven't done much on the house this summer. However, Pat got to plant his first garden. We planted onions, carrots, lettuce, corn, tomatoes, peas, pole beans, asparagus, potatoes and watermelon. We let the strawberry bed go back to grass. That was too big a project for this year.

The spring crops did really well. We had a lot of rain this year, even some flooding around the Oklahoma line near Coffeyville. That translated into a lot of rain where we live. At one point the corn laid over nearly flat. Pat was heartsick. I thought it might stand itself back up, but didn't say anything because I wasn't sure. After three or four days, as the ground dried out, the corn pulled itself back upright. Pat was amazed. Unfortunately, all of the rain and problems at all the wrong times meant the corn didn't "make" very well. If Pat got two ears to eat, he may have been lucky.

Our best crop, hands down, was the tomatoes. We were able to can about 50 pints of tomatoes and a dozen quarts of juice. Except for a few onions, we didn't have enough to preserve for anything else. We picked one watermelon. The beans flooded out. The weeds took the asparagus. We had two or three meals of new potatoes but I wasn't ready to harvest the potatoes when Pat was. I could have sworn my folks harvested potatoes in the fall, not the spring. So we left them in the ground too long and they rotted.

But for all of that, the garden was a success. Pat had fun "farming" and we know we want to do it again. His home-based business has taken off and he's added two part-time jobs to his workload as well. I'm really busy with my job, so I don't see us putting in a big garden next year, but Pat wants to try corn again and I sure want fresh tomatoes and onions. We will be planting again next spring.

Guess we'll spend the winter pouring over seed catalogs. :)

1947 Lineoleum Floor

Spring has sprung! It's so nice to have the doors and windows open. It gives us an urge to get things done.

Pat has been busy this winter. He has reworked the living room walls, evening out some boo-boos and painting walls and ceiling. On nice days he has puttered in the 3-car garage, organizing it and enjoying his "man-space."

BUT NOW! IT'S TIME TO GET BACK ON THE PROJECT! We outdid ourselves today. (Am I sore!) We had been using Granny Mitchell's iron bed in our bedroom, but it was just too large. That wonderful foot rail that curves out to make a quilt holder takes up 18" more floor space than we had to spare. Today Pat wanted to install the new ceiling fan in our bedroom, so it was a great time to switch bed frames.

Pat took down the iron bed and pulled out the red cedar one that matches the rest of the bedroom set. It had been in storage for more than five years and was layered in cobwebs and dust. I grabbed the lemon oil and a rag and began dusting. Hey! There was wood under there!

All winter I have been muttering about the 1940s lineoleum on the bedroom floor. I have no idea how old that flooring truly is, but it looks like the stuff that was on the floor in grandma's house when I was a kid. It's real lineoleum, not vinyl.

"Do you really want to take that flooring up?" Pat asked as I was mopping it. "YES!" was my resounding cry. Hey! I guessed right. We rolled it until it cracked and broke, then took it out in pieces. Underneath was a layer of old newspapers. Kansas City Star, Feb. 2, 1947. The flooring was one year older than me!

We had fun with the newspaper. There was a politically incorrect ad for Aunt Jemima pancake mix, a Parade insert with an advertisement for "the really original postwar styling" of a Studebaker, and the funnies! Gasoline Alley. Little Orphan Annie. Dick Tracy. There were funnies there that I haven't seen since I was a kid; some I've only heard about. One called "Newsreel" had a story about Groundhog's Day. We weren't able to salvage much of the paper, but I kept the Studebaker add and a page of funnies. Pat would have liked to spend the afternoon just reading the paper, but we had things to do.

The bedroom is too small to rearrange. The furniture only fits in one way. But we have a wood floor now. The boards are stained but not varnished... and as ugly as Mom said they were. She despaired at the wood floors in this house. She said "I've seen better floors in barns." They are wide, poorly fitted, pine boards. Air leaks through them in the winter (remember me complaining about the cold in the computer room?).

Pat put insulation under the computer room and the bathroom. He plans to do this room soon. We will probably put floating laminate in this room and the computer room as well as the living room and kitchen. There really is nothing here worth salvaging.

Onions!

Onions! We've got onions!

Pat is so excited! The first thing to pop out of the ground is the onions. He feels very territorial about them. They are HIS onions.

Before this he was sure he could kill plastic plants. It's so exciting to see something come up. Now he wants to see the corn come up. Never mind that we haven't planted it yet. He can't wait to see corn rows in our garden.

Flat Lala

We have had a spring guest. Flat Lala visited in granddaughter Lala's place. You see her sitting among the tulips with this entry. Lala means Tulip in Slavic. The stone head always reminds me of my bald headed Papa. FlatLala finds it a bit grim.

I've had a lot of fun with this assignment. Flat Lala has accompanied me to work; helped Pat and I plant garden; helped Pat in his handyman business and traveled with us to visit cousins in Indiana. If you want to know more about Flat Lala, visit her blog at http://flatlala.blogspot.com

Farmer Jones

Garden time! I love spring!

Pat has never gardened before. He has prided himself that he is "not a farmer!" But he is really getting into the spirit of things this year. Last Fall our neighbor Merle plowed a section of Mom's garden when he plowed his own garden.

Pat was amazed to see Merle's tractor listing to one side with each pass. Then he walked out to inspect the newly turned earth. "It's 2 ft. deep! He dug that ground nearly to China!!" The garden sat during the winter with the snow adding nitrogen to the turned earth and the freeze and thaw of the season breaking up the clods.

Come spring, our tiller wasn't working, so we rented one in Burlington and smoothed out the garden. Pat also dug me an asparagus bed and a strawberry bed. We're starting small with only about 1/3 of Mom's garden tilled. Today we planted potatoes and onions. Later we will put in English peas, pole beans, corn, pumpkin, watermelon and cantaloupe as well as carrots and tomatoes.

You can see Flat Lala helping Grandpa plant potatoes and onions.

Christmas comes to Kansas

The tree is up. Stockings are hung by the archway with care. We're short two stockings -- Matt and Mark weren't in the family the last time we hung a full set of stockings. That will be remedied next time we go to town. My favorite, though, is what Pat did with the piano. His stocking is the Happy Face. Mine plays Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.

The Happy Face so fits Pat. George was the Love of my life, but Pat is my Joy. How can I be so lucky to have married both Love and Joy?

Let it Snow!

Snow! It began yesterday as freezing rain. My 60 min. drive home took two hours. The top speed I could make was 35 mph. The windshield iced even though I had the heater on full bore with the wipers going. At one point I had to stop and break ice off the wipers so they could scrape a small space for me to see out.

The roads were too icy to go to work today, so I telecommuted. Wow! This is wonderful! I have the greatest job in the world. I've never had this option before! Look at the picture below this entry to see how I spent my day -- on the computer with my tea beside me. It began snowing about noon and has just barely stopped as I write this. I wouldn't rule out that it might start again -- we're under a heavy snow warning until 6 AM tomorrow morning.

Pat and Hagar have had too much fun today. Pat is originally from Eugene, Oregon then he married a gal from Dallas and moved there. Neither place gets much snow. The last time he saw this much snow was 1968 --when he was a junior in high school. Hagar just loves it 'cause it's his kind of weather. He thinks he's a Husky instead of a German Shepherd. After about three inches had fallen, they had to go out and run around in it. Hagar put his nose down and played bulldozer for a few feet then nearly dropped down and rolled in the snow. Who knows what he would have done, but he got distracted by another dog walking down the street. (Hagar's extra alert pose in the above picture is courtesy of the strange dog.)

It's 10:21 now. The snow seems to have stopped. Pat measured the snow in the front yard -- 10 inches -- and the back yard -- 11 inches. The WIBW weatherman said Waverly got 8 inches. Oh, well... Pat is still delighted to see so much of the white stuff. He didn't run out to make a snowman, but he did pop Christmas carols on the CD player and pull out the Christmas tree. Hey -- it's Christmas weather.

Properly Victorian

It's nippy this morning. We sat the heater low while we were sleeping and it hasn't regained it's momentum since we've been up.

I'm feeling properly Victorian as I sit here at my oak roll-top desk in my 103 year old house. I'm wrapped in a shawl (this one is hand crocheted. I can't remember if I made it or Mom did). I have a cup of hot tea and a toasted English muffin beside me. In honor of the mood I'm using one of my Mom's good China cups -- the one with the pink roses on it with the gold trim. It's a real tea cup, saucer and all, not a clunky mug. Aren't I a proper lai-dee?

We won't mention the stacks of packing boxes lining the room... I'll face those later today. Pat painted the living room yesterday, so now I can put up pictures. We'll have quite a rogue's gallery. I've found at least four boxes of framed photos.

I've been up since 5:30. Mother Nature has a wicked sense of humor getting a gal up on her day off. I let Hagar, the German Shepherd, and two of the tomcats out before I went to the bathroom. The dog and one cat were back before I could get the door closed. See? I said it was nippy out there.

I've been sipping tea, reading email and working on my blogs for two hours. Now the rest of the family is stirring. Pat is up. Hagar is swearing HE hasn't ever been outside. Morris came in and Midnight went back out. Dewey sits in his chair watching this nonsense. being aloof as only a cat can be. Furball and Freddy are in here keeping me company. They've been playing tag on one of the boxes. I should find warm clothes and get the day started. It's been nice having this quiet time. Maybe I'll do it again some Saturday morning.

Dewey and Sumo

Dewey is sitting on the front steps. He wants Pat to repair the broken step.

Dewey D. Cat is probably our largest tomcat. Morris, Joe's cat who is living here, has as much mass as Dewey, perhaps a bit more, but he is so compact he appears smaller. Dewey, however, is no match for the original Sumo. The original Sumo was at least 25 lbs. (Dewey is about 15).

Sumo was a rescue from the pound who needed a home. We never knew, but I imagine he grew up with a little old lady who overfed him. When she went to a nursing home, he went to the pound. I fell in love with his picture when a call for a home came out on the city e-mail. Unfortunately, Sumo didn't like to share with dogs and other cats, so he spent the rest of his life under our waterbed. He had his own catbox, food and water under there. The only way we could get him out was for me to crawl inside the waterbed and retrieve him.

Sumo lived with us less than six months. We hadn't seen him for a couple of days. When Pat checked under the bed, he was dead. Sumo is buried in Texas next to Worf and Lady Zsa Zsa. The verdigree yard ornament in this picture is about the size of the original Sumo and we call it Sumo in his memory.

Heat! Heat is nice.

The floor furnace my folks used for years became unreliable. I have no idea how old the furnace was. It wasn't new when we bought the house in 1960. It got to the point that gas company wouldn't turn the gas back on unless the furnace was replaced. The last winter my son Joe spent in the house, he used an electric monstrosity that came from an old motel room. It heats quite well, but you can't hear because the fan is so noisy.

That wasn't for us. We researched our options and decided on a gas radiant heater. Pat found ours at Bluestem Farm and Ranch Supply in Emporia. He and Joe installed it on a Friday. The wall between the big window and the front door already housed the air conditioner, so they mounted the wall heater under the A/C unit. (In the picture you can see the both the new heater and the old furnace. The odd black object is a snoopy Furball.)

Since Pat was the smaller of the two, he was elected to crawl under the house to run the gas line from the furnace to the heater. There is headroom under there! Pat could actually sit up. Then he saw the foundation. The house isn't exactly a pier and beam construction. The perimeter of nearly every room of the house is supported by its own handlaid rock wall. Doorways have been cut through or pushed through to allow access to various parts of the house. Pat said it's no wonder the house doesn't settle. It can't.

By the time the gas line was run and the new heater in place, Pat felt like a little kid who had been rolling in the sandbox. He said he hadn't been that dirty since he was three. When I got home from work, he and Joe were making dibs on the shower. We were all ready to fire it up, but we had to wait for the gas company to reinstall the meter. They didn't come until the following Thursday.

Ah, but we're warm now! We're keeping the old furnace covered with a rug. Pat and Joe will remove it next Spring when we lay the new floor.

Kitchen Switch

The kitchen is our next big project. Mom had an L shaped kitchen with the stove and refrigerator both on the same end. I like the L, but want the stove and refrigerator on opposite ends of it. Pat switched a counter and the stove shortly after we got here in Sept. In October he moved the overhead cupboard to its new home beside the refrigerator and hung our microwave over the stove. In the picture above, the space where the trash can is located and part of the counterspace beside it is where the stove used to be.

When Joe visited from college one weekend, he discovered the only thing wrong with the light over the sink was a GFI breaker had been thrown. There were two of them. One near where we have placed the stove and the other next to the light switch. Pat and I had reset the one near the light switch but didn't realize the one by the stove also drove the light. (I wonder what Dad's logic was on that when he wired it?)

The joy of having my light back was shortlived. It came down when Pat moved the cupboard. It had been mounted on a board attached to the cupboards. Pat solved my light problem by running a display shelf the length of the east wall. The light is again mounted over the sink and I can see again!

At Thanksgiving when Joe was captive for five days, he and Pat finished this part of the kitchen project by going under the house and rewiring the stove and the hot water heater. No more electric cables running across the floor! For joy!!

In the future we will remove the panelling and the horsehair plaster behind it. I would like to put up board and batten wainscoating around the wall behind the table. Pat's three-corner cupboard looks like it was made for the corner there. We will be putting up the wide board "bungalow" style woodwork in the kitchen around each arch. I have my eye on subway tile for the walls behind the stove and under the counters. Maybe come summer we'll be able to do it. Who knows?

Painted Walls!

Look at that! The walls are painted! We're looking like someone lives here!! It's been a busy two months. There are mountains of boxes (mostly empty) still on the back porch. Pat doesn't want to overwhelm the garbage man by giving him all of them at once. I'm disparing at ever finding a place for the contents of the rest of them.

The living room is coming along nicely. It will be spring (tax refund time) before we lay the floor. That's okay. I will wait to get the floors I want. In the mean time we have two big rugs that keep the dust off our feet. The cats and Hagar enjoy sleeping on them. We'll probably keep them after we lay the hardwood floors. If we didn't the critters would never forgive us.

Piano Movers

Talk about moving! Skip and Patty had been storing my piano. They took it home with them after Dad died because we weren't sure what we would be doing with the house. SO... last March Pat and I visited Nacogdoches and loaded the piano to return it to Kansas. This is a well traveled 700 lb. piano. Skip took it from Kansas to Louisiana to Texas and I'm taking it back to Kansas. Pat and I felt ever ounce of that piano's weight when the two of us unloaded it.

We were doing fine. He backed the pickup up to the front porch and we propped the front door open. The piano wheeled right onto the porch and there she stopped. She couldn't get over the threshold. We ended up making a ramp of plywood to bring the piano up the small incline of the threshold then levering it with bigger boards to get it across. All of this with me being the push power and Pat being the lift power. Boy! I was sure wishing Joe was around right about then. (It was dawn of March 26, and there was no way Joe would even be awake, let alone the fact that he lived 30 miles away. Still, I wished he was there.)

We had driven half a day to get to Nacogdoches. We left Skip's about 6 PM and drove the entire night to get to Waverly. We arrived at dawn and unloaded the piano. The plan was to sleep there, then return to Texas. Unfortunately, the heat wasn't on and it was 32 degrees in the house. There weren't enough blankets in the house to get comfortable in bed, so we just crawled back into the pickup and headed south. About 36 hours after we left Grand Prairie, we were back. Our bed looked really inviting. Pat told me if I had any more wild hare ideas about taking pianos to Kansas, he'd shoot me.