A Tree Fell on My House

 

Have you ever heard of a derecho? I'm positive I had at some point, maybe during a grade school science class, but I couldn't have told you what it was.

I can now!

Here's a radar image of the straight-line wind that came through my yard in late June:

The official report is that this derecho had top wind speeds of over 100 mph in some places. I don't know the top wind speed in my yard, since it destroyed the anemometer on my roof (it's this one, and it's so good!) AND knocked the power out for over two days, but I can say that visually, my partner and I were outside puttering in my garden when I saw a line of dark clouds appear on the western horizon. 

I was all, "Shoot, a storm is coming," and decided I had time to just finish putting the last few shovels of compost in my raised bed before heading in.

I swear it was just seconds later that the sky was black, the wind was INSANE, and I was running into the house. My partner had for some reason decided to run around the house and go in a different door, because the man, unlike a derecho, clearly cannot take a straight line if his life depended on it, so he was still outside when my second-favorite elm tree hit the house so hard that it shook. 

A second later, my partner wandered in the back door and was all, "It's so windy out!" 

Like, yeah, DO YOU THINK? 

Ugh, my beautiful backyard elm tree! The one with the kids' tree house in it! AND it took out our Covid lockdown trampoline on the way down!

I mean, I know my kids are grown/nearly grown, but did it really have to destroy so many of their outdoor playthings? This used to be a yard that kids played in constantly, and now not only are those children too grown-up to play there, but the only evidence that kids ever once did play there is the back deck slide.

But at least for a while, the fallen tree, itself, did make a good piece of outdoor climbing equipment!

Actually, it was also a great setting for some outdoor family portraits. If you like taking family photos, I highly recommend finding an elevated spot like this, where you can take interesting photos from below of your family silhouetted by the sky.

Look at that identical body language, lol. Can you tell that these two are related?

We climbed around and posed dangerously in a short break between near-constant storms for the next two days, so constant that the tree removal people also had to keep taking breaks to go sit in their trucks while storms blew over. They'd cut and haul some tree branches--

--it would start to rain and they'd ignore it, it would start to pour and they'd ignore it, lightning would strike so they'd go sit in their trucks, then it would calm down so they'd drag all their stuff back out and work for another thirty minutes while racing the next storm:

Goodbye, DIY Tree House! It's probably for the best that they removed you before the insurance adjustor arrived!

This is what the outside of our house has looked like, then, for the past two months:

I don't know where the chickens were during the derecho, but they were fine!

I don't know if we accidentally picked a shitty construction company, or if they all move this slowly, but I *think* they might finally start work next week? They've got to rebuild some of the framing on that part of the house, and roof it, of course, and then they've got to tear out and rebuild the inside walls and floors and ceilings because of all the water damage. Those ceilings, in particular, now look like this:

Here's a photo of me taking a photo of the ceiling, because for some reason my phone is always in selfie mode?

More selfie mode!

This is the really bad one, and is probably why I've had a low-grade cold for the past several weeks despite having an air purifier running continuously:

Also, for those of you who've been playing along at home for a while, this is in my bedroom closet. You know, part of the space that WE ALREADY HAD COMPLETELY REDONE IN 2022?!?

Yeah, that space. Two new sets of flooring in two years; how fun is that?

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Remodeling Two Teenager Bedrooms: The Dorm Loft Bed Edition

The balancing act is worth being able to paint all sides at once!

I discovered how cutely people were styling their loft beds while researching all the crap we needed to buy for our first-time college student. I am also going full-on dorm-style in her tiny bedroom at home, because it turns out that these dorm room kids have the best ideas for making the most of tiny spaces. 

And her sister, who we're simultaneously moving into her own HUGE bedroom, also wanted the same kind of dorm loft bed, because she has all the hobbies and all the crap to go with those hobbies, so wants as much floor space as possible.

By dorm loft bed, I LITERALLY mean a literal dorm loft bed. I looked everywhere online and all the commercially-available loft beds either looked flimsy or were ridiculously expensive. But then Matt went to our local university's surplus store, spent two hundred dollars on four loftable beds that used to be in a dorm, paid another twenty bucks to a local machine shop to cut the steel pins you need to loft them, then a little more on a couple of 2"x4"s to make the braces for the lower half of the beds, and just like that we've got two loft beds and two metal mattress frames that I'm seriously considering using as garden trellises. 

The teenager who is VERY picky about her room insisted that she wanted her bed painted black. I was extremely hesitant about this, but once Matt and I had finished the project, I had to admit that it looked good. Like, REALLY good.

So then I dragged the college kid's loft bed pieces out into the garage and painted those, too! And they also look good! Will I never cease learning about the wonders of a fresh coat of paint?!?

The next day, the teenager and I spent the afternoon listening to an audiobook of The Iliad (those gods cannot let the mortals alone to live their own lives for a single freaking second!) and touching up all the paint in her bedroom:

--and then while she was at ballet that night, Matt and I got her bed installed.

It holds a human!

It was also terrifyingly tall, though, so the teenager had to wait for me to order and receive a guardrail before she could actually sleep in it.

The college student's bed got assembled next, and now we're ready to style them!

Here's my dorm loft bed inspiration:

The benefit of buying dorm surplus is that these pics are all of the exact same basic bed that we now own. I love seeing what other teenagers have done with these beds!

Both of my own teenagers want their desks under their loft bed. I personally think it's too dim there even with supplemental lighting, but I guess if you've got the sharp eyesight of youth, you might as well take advantage of it! My older teenager has consented to shop our home and let me move the well-loved IKEA table that used to be in their playroom into her room, but the picky younger teenager remains picky, and even with the promise of a miraculous fresh coat of paint, none of the tables we already own suited her.

So we're still working on that, I guess.

Here are some other things that I think would be SUPER cute to style under their loft beds:

I haven't been to a garage sale since COVID, but I guess now I've got an excuse to get up early on Saturday, withdraw some cash from the ATM, and take a little tour around town... or at least I will when the weather finally stops being ridiculous. I'm ready to move Proper Spring, but the weather here keeps insisting on continuing to swing wildly between Second Winter and Swamp Spring. If this keeps up, I won't be able to get any decent yardwork done before Here There Be Tornadoes Month!

There's a New Fence in the Yard

 

Ugh, I wish we'd done this a decade ago.

The other night I was texting back and forth with my college kid, telling her about Luna's day in my care (we had a nice walk, then some breakfast, then I turned my electric blanket on high so she could lay on it all day, then Matt and I took her for a hike and she saw some deer, then I let her try out the new lick mat that I bought her, then she curled up on the couch so I tucked her in with her favorite fleece blanket, etc.), and she accused me of taking the opportunity of her absence to spoil her dog.

RUDE!

Also true. I mean, my kid's not here, so other than texting her all day and Zooming her once a week and playing Stardew Valley together once a week and watching a couple of episodes of Schitt's Creek online together once a week and sending her monthly care packages with curated treats and toiletries and little handmade gifts inside what am I SUPPOSED to do with all this obsessive parent energy?!?

Spoil the one other creature in the family who misses my kid as much as I do, of course!

It's telling, ahem, that I have thought for the entire decade+ that we've lived in this house that a front yard fence would be great for the kids--the whole family, really--and I didn't get around to insisting on it hard enough to make it happen until the kids were grown and the main ones who'll benefit from it are me and the dog.

Whatever. It's here now, and I LOVE it!

The fence guys for sure side-eyed my instructions for the fence, but the lead guy said, "I just do what I'm told and don't ask questions," followed in the same breath by "WHY do you want a privacy fence only on one side of the yard?"

Because this beautiful privacy fence side--

--faces the street! My across-the-street neighbor is delightful, generous, and kind in person, but he's got lots and lots of Trump flags facing our house, and he's got two absolutely GIANT lamps at the end of his driveway that he never, ever turns off and whose bulbs never, ever seem to burn out. They just burn, bright as the sun, all through the night directly into all of our bedroom windows.

As a bonus, this is where I hang all of our laundry to dry, seasonally, and now I don't have to worry that someone will drive by, become consumed with jealousy of my beautiful handmade quilts and clothes, and sneak into the yard to steal them:

The other two sides of the fence are your basic chain link--

--because they face other parts of our property and I didn't want to cut that off visually.

THIS side even faces the south!

I *think* I'm going to move all of those raised garden beds to live next to this fence, although lord knows how I'm going to water them because I already own the longest hose that Menards even sells. 

I'm pretty excited about planning new garden elements to fit in with the new fence. This is my Late Winter of Optimism, my favorite gardening time of the year, before I have to come to terms with the fact that the parts of the property that I can garden on just don't get the amount of sunlight needed to make whatever I want to do possible. If anyone wants to throw out any great gardening and landscaping ideas for me, feel free! I've got an east-facing hill with morning full sun and afternoon full shade that I'd like perennial coverage on to the extent that I never have to risk my life mowing it again, and a south-facing yard that I'd be happy to have raised garden or bed plants in that gets morning full sun and afternoon dappled sun through the branches of black walnut and persimmon trees. 

Tell me daily that berry bushes will not live in either of these spots. I need to hear it every single day or I'll plant them and be sad.

WIP Wednesday: Felt and Fences

It's the middle of the week, and here are the projects that I'm in the middle of!

Felt Moveable Alphabet

I saw this TikTok the other day--

--and immediately decided that a felt moveable alphabet would be the perfect next big gift for my toddler niece, AND it would also work to accomplish one of my favorite long-term goals, which is to use up my ridiculously large felt stash!

Here's where I am on that project today:

Cutting and sewing by hand is VERY slow going for me, so it's good that I'm not in a hurry to finish this project. The letters are looking super cute, though, exactly the way I'd hoped, and I love how tactile and sensorial they're going to be with the color and the heft and the stitching and the texture. I'm also considering making some command cards with short words on them in the same font, sized so that my niece can set these felt letters directly on them to spell the words. 

Front Yard Fence

I've been able to read the writing on the wall for years now, with my college-bound kid and the dog she takes on two walks a day.

Gee, I wonder who's going to pick up that slack when she goes off to college?

I've been bitching my head off for years about our need for a fenced-in yard, and I'm not even going to go into how I would have freaking LOVED to have had it when the kids were young enough that I didn't like them playing out there, just one roll down the hill from a road with a high speed limit. 

But oh, well. I will also love it when I can substitute one walk a day for letting Luna out to frolic in what will soon be our fenced front yard!

And crap. Here's me just now noticing, after the fence guys have been out there all morning so I know that part of the fence is mostly done by now, that the gate isn't lined up with the sidewalk?!?

Whatever. I'll just sit planters on that sidewalk, I guess.

Eco-Friendly Kid Craft Book Reviews

I wrote 50% of this article last week, and another 40% of it on Monday, and now I'm just waiting for the public library to give me the last book I need. Hopefully I'm able to pick it up in the next couple of days, or I'll have to come up with a completely different topic and write an entirely new article for Crafting a Green World this week!

Novel and Non-Fiction

Here are the books that I'm currently in the middle of:

Please note that neither of these are the many books in my house that are overdue--those I'm probably going to have to just return and check out again, ahem. 

Deliberately Divided is a study of what little can be known so far about the unethical human experimentation done in New York City by deliberating separating twins and triplets surrendered for adoption, never telling them or their families what had been done, and regularly testing and observing the children for several years afterwards, to what purpose we don't know, because the experimenters never published their results and instead insisted that all records of their actions be sealed until 2065. To me, the idea of separating newborn siblings for no other reason than to study them feels like an unconscionable human rights violation, and I think I'm progressing so slowly through this book partly because it makes me feel so sad.

The Book of Accidents seems, so far, to be a horror novel about a haunted house and maybe a ghostly serial killer? I'm not sold on it yet, but I do usually love horror, so I'll give it a few more chapters before I decide to DNR it.

Teenager's Bedroom

The house I grew up in had paneling on all the walls, and I still really don't know a ton about painting rooms. But I DO know that I hate priming these bookshelves the most!

I'm pretending like someone is going to help me prime the whole top half of the shelves that are too tall for me, and the top half of the walls, too, but in reality I'm going to have to go get the ladder from the garage, unfortunately.

But check out how much whiter the primer is than those nasty walls that I did kind of already know were nasty, but did think were white?!?

And nope, I don't have drop cloths down, because we've booked a company to come and tear up that nasty carpet, fix the floors so that they're actually level, and then install wood flooring. I'm trying to figure out if I should definitely paint the baseboards and door frames now, or see if I can paint them when the workers take them off to do the floors, or do it after they've finished and just hope I'm more careful in here than I was when I painted the walls in the family room, ahem.

Here's to my fond hope that by this time next week, all of these WIPs will be finished and I'll be in the middle of all-new WIPs!

Other than that alphabet, of course. That alphabet is going to take me months to finish...

Everything in our House is Broken, Except for the Things We Recently Fixed

You. Guys. Is this the year that our house is simply just going to fall apart around us? The other day, I walked through my bedroom and was all, "Huh... that's strange. I feel like that window wasn't always LITERALLY BROKEN!!!"

Like, did a bird fly into it? Did the machinery used to remodel the bathroom vibrate it too hard? Did the constant 40-degree temperature daily temperature changes of our bonkers spring weather break it? Dunno, but we threw fistfuls of money at some window people to fix it for us.

Then, THEN! I called 811 to mark our underground pipes because Matt and I are dumb as stumps and really think we can put in a front yard fence for Luna all by ourselves, and the guy marking the water lines knocked on our door and was all, "Hey, y'all's water meter is running pretty fast." Come to think of it, last month's water bill had been unusually high, so we shut off the main line and omg the meter keeps running. So the water company sent out another guy who said that the leak is definitely on our side, because of COURSE it is, so we paid two more guys to come out.

They dug a huge trench in the yard then came and told us that 1) they couldn't figure it out so we'd have to call ANOTHER guy who owns a bore and pay him to look at it (when hiring these guys, they somehow glossed over the fact that they did not own every single water leak-diagnosing tool, ahem), and 2) we nevertheless owed these guys for digging a trench in our yard and then filling it back in. They'd take $500 if we paid by check, and $400 if we paid cash.

It is only by absolute random circumstance that Matt and I had even half that amount of cash in the house, and so that's how we found ourselves literally passing the hat amongst our children to pay the water bill.

Anyway, don't bother trying to break into our house and rob us, because now NOBODY in here has any cash.

Also, apparently diagnosing and repairing a water line leak is something else that nobody in the world actually does, as Matt has called every single person recommended in our town's subreddit and listed in Dr. Google, and has found exactly one human who will consent to come out sometime next week. He flat-out told us that his minimum charge is $345, which, sigh, and then described a process that sounded something like he'd inject a bubble of air into our water line and listen via sonogram for... something?

I don't know, you guys. I'm pretty sure we're getting screwed, but I literally have no way to figure that out or fix it. If only I'd majored in something practical in college!

But Boy, knowing a ton about Medieval religious practices sure makes one a hit at parties!

In other news, our big bathroom is glorious.

I mean, for a very specific definition of "glorious." The floor is finished, including a sub-floor heating system that is EVERYTHING to me. It's got its own little thermostat so we can program it to turn on only during the times when it would be comfiest to have it, and we can turn it off altogether in the summer.

Ignore, for now, the lack of wall paint and towel bars. Syd has agreed to paint a triptych mural for me in that nook where the toilet lives--we'd been considering an Alice in Wonderland scene, but our Greek mythology study has gotten us amped up about the life of Theseus, and now we're thinking of the journey from Troezen to Athens on the left, the labyrinth in the center, and the journey home on the right.

Stay tuned!

The shower, at least, is completely finished, and is glorious in all definitions of the word:

My favorite part is the overhead light/fan that also includes a Bluetooth speaker! I never could get used to keeping my little waterproof Bluetooth speaker charged, so Matt surprised me with this. Now even during showers I'm safe from having to have an independent thought in my head!

Syd was completely right about the family room. I LOVE the burgundy wall:

You'll be interested to know, I'm sure, that I took advantage of having to temporarily rehome all my books by changing my non-fiction cataloging from Dewey Decimal to Library of Congress. We have a lot of history books and craft books, and LOC catalogs them better than Dewey Decimal. No more "women's work" in a separate section!

Since we were already throwing absolute fistfuls of money in all directions, Matt and I decided that we might as well replace our 20+ year-old college dorm couch, and we're now the delighted owners of the world's largest--and SUPER comfy--sectional. But now I can't reach the outlet behind the couch, and the couch is WAY too heavy to just shove it out of the way to reach the outlet, so this DIY console table is on my to-do list:

Also on my to-do list are curtains for behind the couch to replace the much-loathed vertical blinds and some macrame plant hangers, because Matt also made me a ledge over the window to hold a bunch more of my crap and he put a curtain rod under it so I can hang lots of plants that get in his way.

Oh, and I have some more art and family photos and fossils to hang back up, ideally not crooked this time.

And then we can start thinking about the kids' broke-ass bathroom floor and broke-ass sink and million-year-old toilet that keeps acting like it's about a second from joining the broke-ass revolution, and the ripped-up carpet in their bedroom and playroom, and and and...

Breaking News: Our House is a Disaster

OMG you guys, I have been so discombobulated for this entire year so far!

Right at the beginning of the year, it was finally our turn with the construction crew Matt had first contacted back in... oh, March 2020 or so. Turns out that EVERYONE felt like a global pandemic was a great time to get those nagging home renovation issues taken care of! 

We desperately needed to have our main shower retiled, and it turned out when they finally demolished the shower that we ALSO desperately needed to have several joists, several walls, and the floor in three different rooms replaced because that shower had also apparently been leaking into our subfloor for years.

Here's what your house will look like if your shower's been leaking for eight years!

The joists look like they've been through a fire, and they were about as structurally stable.

The head guy, showing me those joists rotted through with mold, said, "I'm surprised you're not constantly sick!"

Fun fact: I AM kind of constantly sick? Although lately my nagging cough has been a LOT better, ahem...

So now we get to have not only a new shower, but also a new closet floor, new bathroom floor, new family room floor, and new drywall in all those rooms, too. And if we're going to have new drywall, we might as well paint. And if we're painting and getting new flooring... well, we HAVE been wanting a new giant couch for several years now.

It's definitely a yay, because we've been living with the previous homeowner's 1980's-era tile, carpet, vinyl laminate, and dingy white wall paint since we moved in. And that couch used to live in a dorm lounge. So, you know, it's always fun to upgrade to stuff that's more one's taste, I guess.

Except if you know me, then you know that's not actually fun for me. The presence of the construction crew, the mess, the need to pick out and purchase new stuff, the drop cloths and stacks of tiles and non-functioning amenities are really getting to me, and I fervently look forward to one day being once again in my own put-together home without strangers.

Currently, the family room floor is done, with solid bamboo installed on top of our gross old vinyl:

Yes, that's Syd mopping the walls, because a clean room with new flooring made us suddenly notice that there are cobwebs all over the tops of our walls. Does everyone periodically mop their walls, and this is yet another piece of home training that passed me by?

And for some reason I noticed just last night that the workers who installed the floor also nailed our front door shut? You can actually see the board in that above photo! I need to add this to my list of random crap to ask them about.

Also, the bamboo floor is no longer nearly that clean. I don't know if it's always going to show dirt like crazy, or if it's just because I've got construction workers tromping through all day every day, or if it only feels like it shows dirt like crazy because the one good thing about the gross old vinyl floor is that it NEVER showed dirt so maybe I'm just used to being filthy.

These are the two walls we're going to repaint:

Syd suggested burgundy, and I was all, "Yeah, that sounds cool," because I don't know or care about wall color and just didn't want to have to make a decision myself, but Matt does NOT think burgundy is a good idea and so has promised me that he'll take some photos of the room and Photoshop wall colors onto it so we can see what looks good.

It probably won't be burgundy...

Here's the shower tile coming together:

Thank gawd for Matt, who is interested and detail-oriented and design-savvy so all I had to do was follow him around Menard's and be bored while he picked out beautiful tile for us.

Our tile guy, whom I call Tyler in my head and I'm going to be SO embarrassed when I inevitably call him Tyler to his face one day since that's not his name, leaves his empty Skoal cans lying around his work area:

I stole one the other day, intending to clean it and make a cute craft out of it, but when I opened it the lingering--not even lingering. Overpowering? Noxious? Amber waves?--of Wintergreen Skoal fumes about knocked me on my butt. Seriously, just remembering the smell makes me feel like gagging. I held my breath while submerging the empty can halves in bleach water and then left them there for a day, but I swore I could still smell it when I rinsed them off, and anyway, the can is just plastic, not metal like I'd first thought, so I dumped it.

Tyler is, nevertheless, my favorite construction guy, because unlike the other guys, who are gregarious and pleasant and make small talk, Tyler just minds his business, coming and going without fanfare. I unlock the door for him when I get up in the morning, and he lets himself in without a word when he arrives, then leaves without a word eight or so hours later. I have even almost forgiven him for this:

That photo is Tyler, having left for the day without a word, locking me out of the bathroom. Which would be fine, even though I really miss that toilet and sink when they're gone, except that my clothes closet and my homeschool closet are both on the other side of the bathroom. The kids were able to bravely soldier on without the homeschool supplies I wanted for them, ahem, but I needed my CLOTHES! My socks! My underwear! My best hoodie! My comfiest jammy pants! All locked away without warning, along with my heartburn medicine and hair ties and tampons!

And Tyler has done that TWICE so far.

It's for a good cause, though, because check out what he installed underneath our tile:

It's gonna be one of them fancy underfloor radiant heating things so my precious toesies don't get cold without that 1980s bathroom carpet underfoot!

And here's Matt floor-is-lava-ing something I absolutely HAD to have from the homeschool closet:

You guys, I don't even KNOW the timeline for when this crew is going to be finished, and even then Matt and I have to paint and I'm trying to talk him into calling an electrician to put more outlets into the family room because I read an online article that scared the snot out of me on the subject of power strips and extension cords, and the other day I caught him showing the contractor the kids' bathroom and planning for Tyler to retile it, too, and how many rotten joists do you think there are under THAT floor, and if they're retiling it we might as well replace the sink and the toilet and WHEN WILL THIS END?!?!?!?

Just... send soothing thoughts my way, and ocean sounds mixtapes, and frozen pizzas, and links to flexible shared workplaces.