Day Five, Project Four: Nice New Sashes

I am so glad I decided to take that door off yesterday!

I had about six hours this morning between the time I woke up and the time I was ready to start working. That is, I’d already spent three hours writing and one hour working out, I did a favor for one of the ladies I work for and made a quick run to the grocery for cat litter (because pew!) -- but after all of that I was finally ready to start working on the house. The point being, I’d had six hours to eye the sky from every angle and try to guess which weatherman was telling me the truth, try to figure out whether or not it was a good idea to strip paint in the yard. Was it going to be a hazy but rain-free? Were the skies going to open up and refuse to close? Were we going to get sudden, sneaky thundershowers? Or was there going to be hail?

(Speaking of which, can I tell you something about hail that has nothing whatsoever to do with anything I‘m talking about? I’ve never seen it. Hail. Not ever. People don’t believe me when I say this, but it’s true. Any time it’s happened anywhere near me I’ve always managed to be on the other side of town, or sleeping, or maybe temporarily blind or something, I don’t know. But I know I’ve never seen it. Every time I hear hail predicted in the area I get all excited, thinking maybe this time, after thirty-seven years… But of course now we have those skylights, so now I’m always torn. In fact, a large part of the reason I actually got around to informing the insurance company of the improvements that we’ve made, was so that I could continue to get excited over the possibility of hail, instead of worrying about how it would look in my new bedroom.)

Anyway, by 12:30 I’d decided it wasn’t worth the risk. Not only would I not be able to take the door with me if I had to run for cover, but there was also the fact that I’d be out there with a plugged-in heat gun in one hand and a metal scraper in the other. Stepping around the un-hung door in the back hall for a few more days seemed a minor inconvenience when compared to the possibility of winding up a walking, talking superconductor. Talk about your big bangs…

So I decided to put new sashes in the front windows instead. These windows here:



All three of them need it, but the middle one’s the worst. The other two you can get to stay up with a little fiddling, but the middle one usually won’t -- until the one time it spontaneously does and you forget that it’s not supposed to and forget to prop it, and then it waits for an opportune moment to go spontaneously SLAM! Maybe right away, maybe when you’re sleeping, maybe when you go to shut it and it crashes on your hand. For the first few summers we held it open with a box -- the box just happened to be handy the first time I realized it was necessary, and then the box became a semi-permanent window-holder-open tool. Semi-permanent because last fall we finally installed the porch light that’s been inside the box this whole time, and the box got thrown away, and when I opened the window for the first time this spring the other day, SLAM! I almost put my elbow through it when it startled me off balance. So… Puritan Manifesto to the rescue!

First I had to ask Johnny where to find the sash cord (he’s working in his garden for the day -- he kind of hopes it does rain, actually). He knew where it was, he told me where to look, and it actually was there. Bip bap boom, that’s some kind of miracle in this house. Down to the basement and up again with the cord, then out to the bedroom and back again with the screwdriver, and I’m ready to go. Really, this time.

A month ago I didn’t know how to do this, but when I opened the kitchen windows for the first time this spring, one of them got stuck and wouldn’t close -- which, everyone in New England knows, just because you’ve opened your windows doesn’t mean it isn’t going to snow and they can stay that way. I couldn’t convince Johnny to fix it right now, so I grabbed my girly screwdriver and took a stab. He got off the couch pretty darn quick when he saw that happening. It turned out the problem was that the sash had come off the pulley, and after 45 minutes of sweating, swearing and laughing we couldn’t get it to go back on and stay there, but by the time we’d taken it apart three times and put it back together, I pretty much knew what I was doing. (That window won’t open now, but I think it’s just possessed.)

Again, taking these window casings apart is something I really should have done at some point over the two years I spent stripping woodwork but, again, I didn’t feel like it. (And I do promise to stop talking about stripping woodwork very soon.) I thought someday I’d fix the sashes and while the casings were open I’d hit the corners that I’d missed -- but that ain’t gonna be happening now. In the process of dismantling the center window, though, I do discover a new use for my screwdriver: it chips paint very easily off antique brass screws and screw-casings (or whatever they‘re called)! The wood around the edges of the screw-case, though, I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with that. In my imagination, when I took the screws out these casings came off too, but in reality they just stayed on. So really, why should I bother to clean up all the other edges when these, which are most visible, are always going to look like this:


This is a very up close and blurry picture, but everybody says you can’t even see it in real life. So who cares?

The only thing that threw me (I’m back to the sash-cord, now) was when I got it all taken apart and there were two weights in the little weight-hole. At first I thought it was for the next-door window but no, that one’s got its own weight-hole. The only other explanation I can think of is that it’s for the… Yup. Apparently these are double-hung windows. Sheesh. I always assumed the tops did not come down because, well, because the tops do not come down. Even when I took a hammer and a scraping knife to every edge of them (I had not yet, at that point, discovered the joys of, and many uses for, a well-made screwdriver), it seemed as though I’d loosened everything and yet they still stayed stuck, so I just assumed they weren’t supposed to open. Apparently they are. Huh. Well, not today.

So… cut the old sash cord off the weight (I always feel sad when I see the weights sitting there forlornly in the bottom of the weight-hole, just waiting for somebody to come along and make it so that they can do their simple little job again. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, but I don’t want to dwell…). Measure a new piece of sash, slide it through the pulley. Drop one end through the weight-hole (look, I don’t know what you’re supposed to call the recess in the wall where the big dildo-looking metal weights are hanging, but I know that you know what I‘m talking about), and tie that end to the weight (those six weeks I spent in Girl Scouts at age eight or so have done me well over the years: I’ve been relying on a good square knot -- “right over left, left over right, makes your knot neat and sturdy and tight” -- to hold everything together ever since. If only I could figure out how to tie one around this house…). Now tie another knot at the top end and screw the wood pieces back over the weight-holes. Tuck the top knot into the knot-hole on the outside of the window, tuck the sash into the sash-slot, put the window back in place and we’re all set!

Ahem… put the window back in place and we’re all set…

Shit.

I put the pulleys in backwards.

How the hell did I bollix that up without noticing? Pulleys all flapping around in the air -- both of them -- like a couple of sticky-outy Howdy-Doody ears. No wonder I couldn’t match the screw holes up exactly. If only I could tie a square knot around my brain sometimes…

I managed to fix it without having to take the whole entire thing apart (I won’t go into all of how I got it done, but it involved holding the sash cord in my teeth which, I just now realized, is actually kind of disgusting when you consider what kind of weight-hole crap it had been marinating in. Ah well. Since I’m still alive I guess that means the rusty, hundred-year-old bug poop that I snacked on made me stronger.)

This took me way longer than I thought it would. Longer, even, than I’d planned to spend on stripping doors. No way those other two windows are getting done today. It’s supposed to rain through Thursday, anyway, so I can do them tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow...).
Never did rain today, though. Not yet, anyway, and it’s almost five o’clock.

I am so glad I decided not to strip that door today!

Day Five: Accomplished
Total Time Spent: The second half of “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me” and the first half of “Weekend America” -- about an hour and a half.
Total Cost: Nothing!
Rusty, Hundred-Year Old Bug Poop In My Mouth: Priceless.

P.S. It just started raining…

Day Four, Project Three, : Philips, Flat Or Flowery?

First of all , let me just say: Happy National Homeownership Month, everybody! I’ve been waiting for this ever since I first read about it in the Economist magazine, and now the moment’s finally here. Can’t you just feel the love…?

Okay, back on your heads.

Now that I’ve done it, I realize that taking a door off its hinges is not exactly a thing-a-day job. It took all of thirty seconds. But I was afraid maybe the hinges were so paint-fused together that I’d have to hit them with the 5F5, and if that had been the case I didn’t want to have to do anything else today. And I only have to do what I decide to do ahead of time -- them’s the rules. (Rules which, by the way, I’m making up as I go along and which may change later and I’ll thank you not to point it out to me if they do!).

First of all, I really should have taken the door down before I stripped the frame. But the stripping was taking so freakin’ long that I couldn’t stomach the thought of making the job any bigger. Two years is quite enough, thank you. I figured I’d get to all the un-seeable bits later (and it takes some kind of rationalization to consider the half-stripped coat-closet door, which is literally two feet -- okay maybe three feet -- from your face when you walk in the front door an un-seeable bit. But there you go). And then “later” just never came around. Until now. Damn.

I can’t back up far enough to take a full picture of the door without losing it in a busy portrait of the messiness that is my house. I tried, and what with the wood’s mottled, brown-and-white, half-stripped appearance, well, it came out looking like a pile of laundry in the corner. Or a cow. (And again I say: so long as I do one thing every day, nothing in the rules that I make up says I have to clean -- you should just be glad I don’t have real cows wandering around in here. Although I might. Who would ever know…?). So here’s at least a photo of what the half-stripped doorknob area looks like:



Not a bad looking knob, what? Every door in the house has these exact same ones. They -- whoever, somebody -- tore off the woodwork in the dining room, built an addition over the bulkhead, decorated the bathroom in Pepto-Dismal pink... but the doorknobs, all of them, they left alone. I like them, and the hardware, too. Ooh, in fact, now that I think of it, I really ought to take the hinges off, oughtn’t I?

Okay, I’ll go do that now.

Well, there’s another minute and a half down. Boy, howdy, I am really cooking! It must be this screwdriver Larry bought me…

Larry’s the fella Johnny works with. He bought this screwdriver for me because he was tired of listening to Johnny bitch about his going missing all the time. Honestly, I hated it at first. I’m not generally one for the girly-pink, do-it-herself crap If I’m going to use a tool (and believe you me, I used my share of tools when I was younger), then I want to use a proper tool. So Larry's girly screwdriver stayed in its shrink-wrapped plastic for a really very un-gratefully long time (and please, if you’ve got an explanation as to why in god’s name anyone would need to plastic-wrap a screwdriver, I sure would love to hear it).

But one day I couldn’t find the red one -- a.k.a. “Johnny’s” -- so I finally bit the bullet and unwrapped the flowers. It turns out it’s not so bad. It turns out it’s actually an honest tool. It’s just that it’s all pink and flowery. Which means Johnny won’t touch it. Which means the flowers actually turn out to be a good thing. So now I keep it in my nightstand drawer (so I always know where I can find it) and I use it for everything. Well, not everything -- not “nightstand-drawer” kind of everything, for example. In fact, ew. Now that I’ve had that thought, maybe I should try to find Larry's girly screwdriver another home...

Anyway, aside from it’s intended purpose I have used this flowery thing for stripping paint (it gets the detail of the decorative woodwork better than a stripping tool) for opening beer bottles (but that’s not really fair, I can open beers with anything: spoons, cigarette lighters, magazines, seat belts, table tops, maracas -- wait, seat belts? How did that one get in here? No, no, I would never do something as unsmafe as that... Okay, fine, yes, I did it. I opened a beer bottle with a safety belt. It's not like I was driving. And besides. I really was younger once, you know). And now I’ve used Larry’s -- oh, hell, I might's well just admit it -- my girly screwdriver for prying painted-on hinge pins off of closet doors. I do believe I’ve actually come to love its power-puffiness.

Here’s a picture of it:


Oh, yeah, and that pile in the corner of the shot? Those are the hinges and screws I just took off the door. And that’s probably where they’ll stay until I get around to stripping them: right there on the corner of my desk. So there. I’m the rule-maker-upper of this here manifesto!

Oh all right, fine, I’ll go get a coffee can. But if I can’t find them when I need them, then I’m holding you responsible. You and your stanky keep-the-house-clean rules …

Day Four: Accomplished
Total Time Spent: Seriously, about a minute and a half. Let’s be generous and call it three. Or, as Prince would have it: III.
Total cost: Nothing, nothing, nothing!
Frilly, girly screwdriver that Larry gave me: Priceless

Day Three, Project 2 1/2: 'Scuse Me While I Kiss The Skylights

My plan for today was to take the porch door off its hinges. Take the porch door off today, the closet door tomorrow, and over the weekend commence to stripping paint -- outside, so I don’t get nose-scabs like I did the first time (which might also have something to do with the fact that I wasn‘t wearing a face mask, because the second time I wore the mask and I didn’t get them. But anyway…) I can’t take the doors off the hinges because it’s gonna rain. Or it might rain. It could possibly maybe have a thunderstorm or scattered shower anytime between now and next Tuesday.

I suppose, now that I’ve already finished doing something else, I could have taken the doors off anyway and just leaned them in the hallway until the weather cleared (or didn’t get bad after all). Ah well, there are plenty of days left in the month. Plus it turns out I didn’t really finish what I was doing yesterday.

I remembered last night about the plastic on the skylights (“remembered,” in this case, should be read to mean “looked up and saw”). Crap. This batch, though, was not my sister’s fault. The skylights are brand-new (well, not brand new. What’s it been? Holy crap: two years, now! Almost three!), and everybody knows that new windows are not supposed to draft. But the Handyman -- who I generally love -- said maybe the reason it was freezing in my bedroom was that the warm air was rising, hitting the cold glass of the skylight, cooling off and falling back down, creating a perpetual sort of negative-thermal cycle. I didn't actually ask him this question, somebody else did, but the answer made sense to me -- especially if you picture my bedroom like a big pulsating lava lamp, with warm blobs of red air bubbling slowly up and cold drips of blue air sinking more rapidly back down…

Why doesn’t anybody ever tell you these things before you decide to install the skylight and spend six months fighting with your contractor about them?

The Handyman said the best way to stop the cycle would be to install storm windows and shutters on them. Yeah, okay, I’ll put that on the list, right after caulking up the sink drain and squirting Great Stuff in the dryer vent. Even the Handyman acknowledges that shuttering the skylights defeats the purpose of installing them in the first place (because who ever heard of decorative shutters on the ceiling?) so as a backup plan he recommended plastic, to at least create a barrier between the room and icy window, with the air between them hopefully serving as some measure of insulation.

In all fairness to the Handyman, I don’t think he’d ever actually done this. I think it was just an I-guess-you-could-try suggestion. Which didn't work. It was still freezing in the bedroom.

Which could very well have more to do with the fact that we have about half as much insulation in there as you’re supposed to have (the walls weren’t thick enough for the standard amount; we were grandfathered in. And again I say: why doesn’t anybody tell you these things? If I’d known how cold it was going to end up being back there I might have sprung for thicker walls. Then again, I suppose if I’d thought it through I might have figured out that half the insulation might mean, well, half of the insulating properties. So never mind.). Or it could have something to do with the fact that the radiator in the bedroom is the last one on the cycle and has never since we moved in been known to actually radiate any heat. (And so help me, if anyone writes in suggesting that I fiddle with the dials on all the radiators to force the heat out back to that one, I will pick up that quarter-ton radiator and throw it through those skylights with my bare hands. I’ve tried fiddling with the dials, the plumbers tried it, three separate furnace guys have tried it -- even the Keyspan representative tried it when he finally came, even though he knew the boiler was broken at the time. It. Doesn’t. Work.)

So the plastic didn’t actually make my bedroom any warmer, but I didn’t see any sense in climbing up there to take it down. I figured it would be just fine until spring, when I’d be climbing up to crank the skylights open anyway. Because, oh yeah, that contractor we fought with over them? He took off with the long-handled crank and we haven’t gotten around to buying ourselves a new one. It's only been two years, after all -- or almost three. Hey, I wonder how much those crank things cost… That could be another project for this month if it’s not too expensive. All it would involve is shopping -- and we know how good I am at that, right? NOT! (Does anybody even say NOT! anymore? Probably NOT.). Anyway, when it finally did get hot about a week ago I didn’t feel like climbing up there so I just turned on the ceiling fan. But now I’m out of excuses. Puritan Manifesto, remember. Plus, it’s only going to get hotter, after all.

So... Stepladder? Check. Found it right outside the bathroom, just in case Johnny ever gets around to finishing that paint job (Puritan Manifesto or no, I have long ago learned to steer far clear of Johnny’s painting projects)… Goof-Off and rags? Check. Right where I left them yesterday (hey, I never said this “do something every day for a month” plan necessarily included cleaning up after myself)… A little Goof-Off music? Check. Johnny’s back to work today so I can listen to whatever I want, so okay this smells good… And we’re off!

Ouch. Here's a hint: Might not want the ceiling fan spinning around if you’re going to be climbing all up under it. Okay, that’s taken care of. Now we’re off.

Whoa, I forgot about how I had to climb all the way to the very top not-a-step of the 6’ ladder in order to put the plastic on. It’s WoBbLy up here… and hot… and awfully bright… Hang on while I get my sunglasses.

Okay, now -- wait. What’s this in the junk drawer? Oh the crank handle, for opening the skylights. That might come in handy. Maybe I should take that back up there with me, too. Okay, now we’re really off.

Whoops. Forgot to press play. Last time, I promise. “My name is Prince, and I am funky…” Okay, there we go. Now we’re really really off.

The plastic practically leaps into my hand, it was barely even stuck there anymore, but the tape won’t give me a loose corner to pull from. What if I just…? Crap. Here’s a hint: Goof-Off, although great for removing tapey gunk, will turn the tape itself into a goopy, slimy mess that just smears around and blows raspberries at you. Oh well, who cares? It’s not like I spent two years stripping this frame. This is just stainless steel -- or aluminum -- or some kind of metal, anyway. And what I learn about this is that if you aren’t afraid of ruining things and you really douse the rag in Goof-Off, not only does it do the job a whole bunch of times faster but you also get yourself a little buzz. Especially if your head and the Goof-Off are trapped together in a shiny pretty little box…

Whoops -- hey, look! Goof-Off removes the white stuff from the metal that is not supposed to be there. It’s not supposed to be there, I swear. I didn’t screw anything up. The plasterers made a mess and we didn’t bother to clean it because someday we're gonna box these skylights in and make them beautiful just like we're gonna make the rest of the house beautiful someday if we don’t burn it down first. Ha! Maybe that’s when we’ll put the storms and shutters in, too… NOT! Heh heh.

Hey! Look! Goof-Off even removes the footprint from the ceiling where I killed a god-knows-what-bug last night with my shoe. That was fun. To reach it I had to leap from the edge of the mattress brandishing my Croc Saber over my head like Ewan MacGregor at his dorkiest (I’m not usually one for the Star Wars references, but I’m not thinking straight right now -- forgive me). That’s how I “remembered” about the plastic on the skylights, actually…

One down!

This next skylight is really tricky. Always has been. That’s not just the Goof-Off talking. It’s over a corner of the bed and even in order to open or close it you have to squish the ladder up against the bed frame and then sort of lean over backwards from the tip-top not-a-step. I don’t remember how I reached to put the plastic on last fall. I think… I think… Did I put the ladder on the bed? No, that can’t be safe. It certainly isn’t smart. And lord knows I would never do anything that wasn’t smafe or smart.

By sort of straddling the corner of the bed and leaning over backwards farther than I ought to be comfortable doing, I can get the goof off of about three-quarters of the skylight frame. From there I have no choice. The ladder must go on the bed if I am going to complete my Jedi Mission. Oh no wait, the Jedi thing was last night. Well, whatever.

Whoa. It iS ReAlLy WoBlY uP HeRe NoW…

Here’s a hint: If you’re ever high on Goof-Off, and you’re on the very tip-top not-a-step of a six foot tall stepladder that’s balancing atop a bed, don’t try to do the “Sexy M.F.” dance.

Though if you do, the mattress makes a nice soft place to land.

Day Three: Accomplished
Total time spent: “My Name Is Prince,” “Sexy M.F.,” “Love 2 The 9’s,” “The Morning Papers,” “The Max,” and almost all the way through “Blue Light” -- in other words, about (oh, Used-To-Be-A-Symbol-Man, why did you have to put the song lengths in Roman numerals on the liner notes?) somewhere around 35 or so minutes
Total cost: Nothing! Unless I amortize the Goof-Off I bought yesterday, in which case $2.35
Having it start pouring rain while you’re at work when you (of course) left the g-d skylights open: Priceless.

Day Two, Project Two: Goofing-Off

“Hey, Johnny? If I wanted to take all the tapey, gunky stuff off the woodwork around the windows, what would I use to do that?”

This is the nice thing about having an in-house decorating expert: no bothersome, impatient-making research to be done. Just ask!

“Goof-Off,” he said. “Absolutely. Take it right off.”

“What do I use, just like a wad of toilet paper?” Yes, Erin, because a wad of toilet paper is the answer to everything. Spiders, head colds, cat puke -- a wad of toilet paper and a squirt of Windex, and you’re set.

“No,” Johnny’s very patient with me. “Just a rag.” At last! A use for that garbage bag of clothes that’s been kicking up and down the attic and/or basement stairs since I tried to clean my drawers a year ago! I’ll use an entire t-shirt on each sill!

“Do I need to wipe after it with something? A wet rag or anything?”

“No. Having a dry rag on hand wouldn’t hurt. I mean, you don’t want to leave a puddle lying there or anything.”

“And it won’t…?” He didn’t need for me to end that sentence.

“Won’t harm the finish at all.”

I spent two years stripping that woodwork -- and for a tolerance-challenged girl like me, that’s saying something. I wasn’t working full time on it, of course. I’d do a few hours a day for a few weeks in a row until I would go marginally mad, or the scabs the 5F5 brought out inside my nose would begin to hurt and bleed, and then I’d take a few weeks (or, okay, maybe sometimes a few months) off. But I kept going back, goddammit, and now it’s done. It used to look like this:

And now it looks like this:

And so help me god if the Goof-Off mars the finish I’m going to burn the house down and divorce him.

“So,” I went on, “I can probably get that at the grocery store, right?”

“Goof-Off? No.”

“But I don’t want to get it at Charles Street,” that’s the hardware store near where I work. It’s named for its address -- as in the Charles Street on Beacon Hill in Boston -- and it’s a great little hardware store. Their window displays are fabulous and they have or will happily get just about anything that you could wish for. But they charge twelve dollars for a roll of painter’s tape, and I’m on a budget here.

“So go to Lowe’s.”

“But I don’t want to have to make a second trip!”

“I don’t know what to tell you, love. They’re not going to have it at the grocery store.”

Oh what does he know? It’s not like he’s been doing this for thirty years or anything. They’ll have it at the grocery store. I bet they will.

Yeah, they don’t.

And before you waste your time, they don't have it at Job Lot either. Or CVS. I’m so glad I didn’t make that second trip to Lowe's. Wal-Mart might have had it but I knew that if I walked in there and they didn’t, my head was going to fly off of my shoulders and go spinning around the rafters like an unplugged balloon. Fine, I’ll go to fucking Blowe’s. Which means I have to drive past my house and go a mile in the other direction. But whatever. Fine. Puritan Manifesto, remember…

Huh. Turns out that Humvee that came to a complete stop in the middle of the road and left me blocking the intersection -- when I was so close to Lowe’s I could have thrown my apple core and hit it -- wasn’t just an asshole after all. Turns out the little Subaru in front of him was all smashed up and there was a man standing in the street dialing his cell phone. Maybe I shouldn’t have leaned on the car horn quite so hard. Well, if I could see anything around your stupid Bush-mobile…

Patience, Prudence...

I went to the cleaner aisle at Lowe’s and there were two guys working there. One was wearing a hearing aid (which I didn't notice until after). When I asked him if I was in the right aisle for the Goof-Off he said no, they were working very hard thank you for asking (seriously, I am not making this up). The other guy did not speak English. Actually that’s not quite fair. He spoke English fine, I’m sure. But when I asked him if he knew where the Goof-Off was he said “Goop? Up?” and looked inquiringly at Mister Hearing Aid. Finally a customer overheard and told me to look in the paint department, where I found it and took it to self-check out because I’d had all I could take of Blowey employees.

$4.70 for a small thing of Goof-Off, including tax. I don’t know if that’s good or not. It’s a pretty tiny can. Maybe tomorrow I should have a look at Charles Street and see how much they’re charging. Ooh, and while I’m still here at the register -- why does Lowe’s always need to know my phone number every time I buy anything from them? Do you think it matters that I always make one up?

So now I’m home and I’m off down cellar to get rags… And now I’m off up to the attic to get rags… And now I’m off to -- well, where else can I look? Ah, in the closet, of course. Tricky Johnny, trying to sneak the old clothes back to their rightful hoomes again.

Oh, so here’s a dilemma: if I reach into the rag bag and pull out a perfectly good and practically brand-new dishtowel that I know must have got in there by mistake, am I as bad as my pack-rat husband if I throw it in the washing machine and save it, or does it behoove me to chop it into little bits because I yell at him for salvaging old t-shirts? Talk amongst yourselves whilst I go get off the goof …

This is another project, by the way, that I realize does not exactly count as “home improvement.” Really, it -- like the rug I laundered yesterday -- should be filed under “shit I’ve been meaning to get around to doing and now I’ve simply found a way to force myself to get it done.” The truth is I don’t know why I put the damn plastic on the windows in the first place. It didn’t do diddly-squat towards lowering my heating bill. But yes, I do know. If we’re being honest here, I do. I know exactly why I did it.

I did it because my sister did.

You see, my sister, unlike me, makes good decisions. She finished grad school and she has a good job and she bought a nice house that’s old but isn’t falling down and doesn’t smell like cat pee. If she and her (also-good-job-having, blah-blah-blah) husband thought plastic on the windows was a good idea in their newly-snugly-insulated house, well, then, I’d put plastic on mine. Never mind the brandly-new refinished woodwork, never mind the damper-less (and therefore breezy) fireplace, never mind the daylight I could see through cracks in some of the walls. Just: “Do you really think it’s helping, Brother-In-Law?” “Oh, absolutely,” he replied. Fine then, sign me up!

(Oh yeah, and never mind that two weeks after I put it on we had the floors refinished and I had to take half of it off again to open the windows to let the sawdust out, and then go buy more plastic and do it all over. Sawdust that, by the way, coated the plastic on the half of the windows that I didn’t open and stayed there until I pulled the plastic off in March because apparently I finally found the one thing a wad of toilet paper and a squirt of Windex aren’t good for.)

He was right. Johnny, I mean. It worked, and it didn’t take the finish off. Phee-yew. I only got to use a half a rag though. Oh well. Maybe I’ll just soak a couple shirts in Goof-Off and throw them in the trash. Let the raccoons have a huffing party…

Day Two: Accomplished
Total time spent: Not including the four trips to four different stores looking for the Goof-Off? Exactly the length of one episode of “Entourage” on demand: 30 minutes
Total cost: $4.70
Johnny being always right about absolutely everything: Oh just fucking priceless

Day One, Project One: Wash The Rug

Not a giant project, to be sure. Not even really a home-improvement project, to be honest. But a project that has desperately needed doing for months, especially since the furnace blew and every trip down to the basement results in a trail of sooty footprints -- which are easily enough dealt with on the hardwood floors but not so much mop-up-able on the cotton woven rug from Job Lot.

Plus, let's just be frank: I'd planned to do this project today anyway, before I had my Puritan-work-ethic, manifestic, epiphanic fit.

So first I had to find the money card. The laundrymat down the road doesn't let you use actual money anymore. You have to put your actual money in the little slot and they give you a plastic card that has more money on it than you plan to spend and they get to keep the difference, either until you come back again or, if you're like me, forever -- because you lose the card and have to get a whole brand new one every time.

Except this time I'm on a mission: don't waste money. So I had to see if I could find the card.

I thought I knew where it was, but it wasn't. We're lucky enough to have laundry machines right here inside the house -- a luxury that I recognized as such even at the tender age of six, when I remember feeling terribly sory for the people who had to drag their dirty clothes all the way up to the center of town. I'm telling you, the day Johnny and I got our first in-house machines was one of the happiest of my adult existence. But I digress... The point is that we have machines in our house so the only thing I have to ever take to a laundrymat is this one particular rug. Even the comforters I've decided won't overload my precious machines, as long as I'm very careful with the way I arrange them in there, and as long as I keep an ear out for the tilt-a-whirl. But this rug is heavy-duty, especially when it gets wet of course, and I would be stupid to try to wash it in our little, regular-strength, household machine.

(Um... don't ask me how I broke our last machine, okay?)

So the only time I go to the 'mat is to wash this rug, which I have only done three times since we moved in here: once before we put it down in the spare bedroom (which is now my office); once when the Nephew (who was staying in the spare bedroom) spilled something so disgusting all over it that I didn't even ask him what it was but just put on my rubber gloves and slid it into a garbage bag and drove it down the street; and once before we put it down in the dining room where it lives now, because ever since I decided that anyone who was going to be spilling anything that disgusting did not deserve my cotton woven Job Lot rug in his spare bedroom/office, it had been folded up in a basket (a BIG basket) on the porch, serving as a makeshift cat bed, and had turned into more of an angora throw. That last time we washed it, to get all the cat hairs off, had been about a year ago, so of course I couldn't find the card.

But then, miracle of miracles, instead of taking a cursory look and having a temper tantrum because it wasn't there -- instead of deciding that I'd lost it and chucking some more money away on a new one -- instead of giving up and throwing the rug in my own g-d machine after all -- I actually slowed down, looked again where I thought it had been in the first place... And there it was.

Hey, this patience thing. I've really got to try it out more often.

So anyway I found the card but of course you can't tell how much money is on it just by looking (though wouldn't that be neat), and I didn't want to put twenty dollars on it in order to use ten (the big-rug-sized machines cost assloads of money, but not twenty-dollar assloads), so I took the fiver I had and borrowed a fiver from Johnny and promised to pay him back just as soon as I broke that twenty (by which time he'll forget, ha ha).

Oh yeah, speaking of breaking things: Johnny's home from work today, and for the next few days, because he broke a toe. I know, can't you just hear the tiny little violins gearing up to play pity music for him? But seriously, he smashed hell out of his left big toe getting wood out of the pile the other night for our very first official chimenea fire of the season, and now it's all purple and red and swollen. He was actually rolling around on the couch last night, moaning in pain (this is the night after it happened), and he's not a guy who usually admits to feeling pain. Doesn't admit, or else just doesn't feel it, I don't know. Plus he is a painter and everything, and he was supposed to be doing an outside job this week, which would have meant a bumnch of climbing up and down ladders and all that other scampery crap. So he really can't be working with a broken toe. Which bodes well for our saving-money project, let me tell you. But anyway...

I had asked Johnny to help me gather up the rug when I was ready. All I needed him to do was stand there and lift one end of the table while I swept the rug out from under it and spread a towel down beneath its feet (because I never got around to putting little pads on the bottom of the table legs when we had the floors done, because the table feet were standing on the rug so why did I need to, and now of course I don't know where the little pad-things went. Hm. There's another project for another day this month, right there! If I can remember that I thought of it, that is...).

So I'd asked him to help me when I was ready, but when I got out of the shower - voila! - he'd already taken the rug completely up without me. Guess his toe is feeling better than I thought. He didn't know about the towel-in-lieu-of-feet-pads plan, though, so there's the table now, sitting barefooted on our brand-new floors, just waiting for me to do something stupid or clumsy (moi?) and put a giant gouge in the middle of the dinging room just like I did the living room the very day we put the furniture back in after we had the floors done (Well, how was I supposed to know there was a tiny pebble caught under the front foot of the wing chair?). When I griped about the barefooted table instead of thanking him and his bum toe for trying to be helpful, Johnny offered to lift it up so I could stick towels under after all, but I decided no, let's live on the edge for the rest of the afternoon...

So I threw the rug in the car and drove to the laundrymat, past the cop that's hiding on this side of the bridge that I have to drive over and back every time I go. Over and back to put it in the wash, over and back to throw it in the dryer, over and back to pick it up and bring it home -- you think I can get past that cop six times in three hours without getting a speeding ticket when the speed limit is twenty-five and he's hiding at the bottom of a hill? Let's see if I can! Half the time I can't remember why I'm standing up by the time my knees are finished straightening, but maybe I can retain this little bit information ("cop hiding under bridge") until it's no longer necessary.

Turns out I had seven dollars on the card, so I didn't need Johnny's money after all (I had a five of my own in my wallet, I'd taken his one just in case -- and yes, I gave it back). I started the machine and went back home to wrestle with my printer drivers for a while.

$5.50 they wanted, by the way, to wash that single rug! Well, in all fairness there was plenty of extra room in the machine and I could have thrown some other things in there along with it but of course I hadn't thought that far ahead. I was lucky to have remembered to bring detergent with me, instead of having to pay a dollar for a single-serving pack like I usually do because oh yeah, right, I'm going to turn around and go all the way back home again to get the soap rather than spend a dollar. (Do you get the idea that, maybe, if I wasn't so gosh-darm impatient all the time, we wouldn't be having to wait three months to save the money up to heat our house? Hm... Nope, I don't feel like thinking about that one right now, thank you. La la...).

Finally got the printer working and -- whoops! Time to go throw the rug in the dryer. Sneaky fucker, that cop. He's in a different place this time. Good thing the 180-year-old woman in front of me was going twelve miles an hour the whole way.

The dryers give you 15 minutes for every fifty cents, so I decide to throw it in for an hour and a half. This rug is thick and woven cotton, which I believe I may have mentioned. Usually I put it in there for an hour (because anything longer just seems patently absurd) but usually it isn't dry when I pick it up and then I have to spread it out on the lawn or something and I really want to get this done today. Puritan Manifesto, remember. Actually, I used to lay the damp rug on top of the Cadillac like a cozy little blanket but, alas, Francine P. Caddy is no more. And I am not laying it on top of Chuck the Fucking Truck because I hate him. He can freeze for all I care. Getting flat tires every time I head west on the Massachusetts Turnpike -- he can kiss my ass. I swear to god, as soon as I can afford it I am getting another car and putting a bullet in Chuck once and for all. Maybe I'll even drive him off the cop-car-hiding Fore River Bridge. Of course, that day's a ways away yet (there's a country song in there, I think: "The day's a ways away when I/Can put a bullet in my truck..."). So the point is what? Oh yeah, ninety minutes of dryer time cost me three whole dollars.

Right now as I sit here typing this I am waiting for those ninety minutes to be up. I've got thirty more to go, and I am so tempted to just get in the g-d truck and drive over there and get it. But if it's not dry yet I'll have to sit and wait and read a book or something, and I haven't had the best of luck with my book choices these days. The latest, which I sort-of finished last night (I skimmed the last hundred pages or so because I was fighting back the rising gorge) was called I Can't Believe I'm Still Single -- which, trust me, if he really can't believe it then he's got to be the only one. Before that was Bitter Is The New Black -- which suffice to say I finally threw across the room. I only (sort of) finished Can't because I felt guilty for chucking Bitter. The only other book I've ever started without finishing was Anna Karenina -- and I'm not comparing the two at all (AT ALL), I'm just trying to give you some idea of how far my tolerance level goes and how guilty I feel for having given up (I mean, come on, I even finished Atlas Shrugged and I was like thirty-one or something at the time -- way past old enough to know better than that). I've got another book on deck called Daddy Needs A Drink, but after the two fat whiffing strikes in a row that I just had, I'm afraid to take a swing and put that K down in the column --

Hey, would you look at that? I wasted those last thirty minutes!

Got it. Didn't get a ticket (he was there on my way over but gone on my way back, mebbe he nabbed hisself a baddie) and the rug was only a little damp. Johnny wouldn't have let me put it down if he knew it was still a little teeny-weeny- bit slightly moist, so I put it down myself (he was preoccupied anyway, vacuuming the underside of the sofa trying to catch the spider that's been biting his legs ever since he's been on the couch with the broken piggy. And again I say, bodes well for the piggy that he's capable of such stunts -- methinks he will be back to work before we can cry wee-wee-wee all the way home). So what I did was, I spread the rug mostly out under the table, right up against the legs, then I got down under it on my all-fours and arched my back up against the underside like a cat to lift it, then smooshed the rug out under the feet with the tippy-tips of my extended fingers. Easy-peasy.

The dirty footprints are still there. But I don't give a soot.

Day One: Accomplished
Total time: Well, total time actually doing things only about 40 minutes.
Total cost: $8.50 -- but only five bucks out of pocket.
Sooty Footprints: Priceless.

A Manifesto

So, I've decided.

It will take us a few months to save up for the new heating system. Until then, all the cash is spoken for, but therefore my free time is just that -- free.

Rather than spend it all whining about how things never get done around here because big disasters keep popping up, I'm going to put that free time to proper Puritan use.

Every day, from now until July 1st, I resolve to do one thing around this house. One thing that won't cost any money (or let's say won't cost more than a can of 5F5). One thing that I've been meaning to get around to but I've just kept putting off. One small job, or one hour's worth of a bigger job, every single day.

Some days, honestly, it's going to be cleaning -- because I just can't see vacuuming and dusting and mopping and everything and then still spending an hour stripping paint. And one or two days in there I'll have to skip (I'm busy, for example, on the 24th). But other than that? Those doors I never got around to stripping when I did the woodwork -- their shabby-looking days are numbered. That functionally obsolete staircase won't be -- well, it will still be functionally obsolete, but at least it will be clear. The shelves I've wanted to hang in the entryway and the crap still piled out back from the back room construction that's been finished for more than a year -- all that shit is getting done at last.

And then I'll write about it.

I swear to god.

For a month.

Then we'll see how it's going after that...