Afternoon Gin

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I’m sure there’s a name for the drink I’m having here in the cockpit, watching the Terns hunting small fry in the fairway. A delicious concoction of pineapple juice, gin, and TopoChico, shaken, not stirred, it’s a fine way to end the day. Heavy on the gin, please.

I’m sprinkling this post with photos of the remodeled house. Because I don’t want to do a whole post on that.

Back in the day when Paul Bryan wrote his blog about life aboard S/V Kelly Nicole, he used to write these posts he called Morning Tea. I stole the idea, except called mine Morning Coffee. But unfortunately, I still have a job for a couple more weeks and I don’t have time to write in the morning while I drink my Nescafe’. So Afternoon Gin will have to do. These are going to be posts where the mind wanders with little restraint. It’s hard to tell what will come up but I will try to manage a loose theme. Maybe there will be some mild ranting and expressing of opinions. We’ll see. If I get to the point where stomping around and spitting is called for, I’ll try to dial it back.  It’s a little like dreaming on paper; a way to get back into the swing of writing. And I really need that.

Get yourself a drink of some kind and sit back for this post. Relax a little.  I feel the spirit moving in my hands so here goes.

Do you ever wonder how living aboard a sailboat, sailing from port to port and across the wild blue sea would change a person? I tell you what: it’s hard to explain. There’s a longing to be away from all people, from all land, from all the telenovelas of life. There’s a bone deep, visceral feeling that to not ever sail on the open sea again is to die a poor death, with a life truly unfulfilled. I have stopped expecting anyone to understand that if they’ve never found themselves drifting through a high pressure zone, sails down, just loving the flat, clear water. I know I personally did not understand it when other people talked about their experiences, until I, too, had been across the ocean on a smallish boat. It’s so far outside most people’s boxes of life that people just cannot relate to it. And that’s just fine. In the end, this experience is deeply personal anyhow.

A different view of the living room. Want to see what the house looked like before? Go Here.

As a rule I feel like if I ever die at sea, so be it. I’m not predicting it will happen, and I will do everything I can to mitigate that, but at the end of the day, if it does I hope people will shout for joy that I didn’t die in a hospital bed hooked up to all kinds of shenanigans. When you are in your 60’s you start thinking seriously about your own mortality as it stares you in the face from the bottom of the hill you’ve crossed over. And when you are on a long voyage, you have a lot of time to think while staring sightless into the deep turquoise of the water. Maybe too much time.

The kitchen was a complete tear down. I salvaged the original fir floors in here. We love a kitchen with workable spaces that are small enough to keep clean; another thing learned while living on a boat. For more on Edison House, go HERE.

Here’s another thing: after our years of cruising, and there were not even that many of them so I imagine this will only get worse after our next go around, my bullshit meter has a hair trigger. Office drama? I do not have the bandwidth for it. People looking to gain a little power in their otherwise powerless existences by lording it over me or my kin and/or coworkers? Sorry. Go bother someone else. Just get the heck out of my energy field. Be gone.  Personal drama? It weighs me down in a way that makes me wonder if I’m just over drama of all kinds.

Honestly, the finesse with which I used to put up with interpersonal BS on all levels is now replaced by a zero tolerance zone. As I type that last line I realize it’s a lie. I have never put up with that stuff willingly. I learned at my father’s knee to call bull crap when I saw it. And the idea that I would have some finesse at dealing with small but power hungry people in a work situation is kind of laughable, actually. So maybe it’s just that I had a little more tolerance for it before but now, I absolutely do not. I understand what drives it, and I ‘get it’ why some folks need to exert control over others. But I simply don’t have the bandwidth to tolerate it anymore in my own life. I think it’s kind of related to the dying at sea theme (again, not throwing down any gauntlets for the Universe here. Just making a point.)  If I have X number of decent years left on this planet, being around people whose way of being in the world doesn’t align with mine is not how I want to spend that time.

This has made it sometimes very hard to work for a corporation that contracts with a school district. (Read: Two huge layers of expectations and needs, not to mention the layer of the school itself.)  But all corporations are the same under the skin. They are made up of people. And I am so appreciative of my supervisors and colleagues during this arduous time of having an extremely easy job for which I am very grateful but also for which I am completely unsuited. This is the only job I have ever had where I threatened to quit more than one time and I actually meant it and would have been relieved had it come to pass.

The last time I offered to quit my team lead didn’t even respond to my impulsively scribbled email offering my head on the proverbial platter. She knew to give me time for that bullshit meter to cool down. She’s great.  I learned a lot during my tenure at this job. Mostly I learned that I am still living the emotional trauma of my military upbringing. I thought I was a bit more resolved about that. Not totally, but a bit.  Apparently I was wrong.  I think it’s hardwired into me. That’s kind of unsettling. I believe in reincarnation, so I hope I can get that resolved before I die. I really don’t want to repeat that lesson again.  Maybe cruising will help.

I have two more weeks to work and as easy as this job has been on the actual ‘work’ level, I’ll be glad when this part is over. My only caveat is that I really loved working with the high school students. I can take or leave the middle school (mostly leave, if I’m honest), but I feel like many of the high school students I counseled really benefitted from our relationship and that makes me glad. I am proud of them. Most of them are personally courageous and as a group they know way more about life than ever did at that age.

On another note, newly back in land life I quickly discovered that shopping for clothing is almost the most boring and absurd thing on the planet. I cannot believe I ever loved it as much as I did. What a lot of wasted time and money. The buying of clothing is WAY over rated. And this is a shame because at the tender age of 63 I can wear clothes I could only dream of wearing in my 40’s, even in my 30’s. It should be true that I dress for the geriatric runway each and every day possible but I feel really resentful that I even have to wear clothes, much less that they would need to somehow be pleasing to others. This entire year of working I have worn maybe 4 outfits. A year of in-person work. 4 outfits. Just let that sink in, all you clothes horses. It’s possible 4 is an exaggeration. I can’t be bothered to really count. I could go cruising for at least a year on the money I have literally thrown away on useless clothing, most of which I wore only a few times.

And don’t even mention makeup to me. I have discovered tinted mineral based sunscreen. Hoo Rah! SPF 50, baby, and an evenly toned complexion. Moving on.

View of the living room from the kitchen. The plant’s name is Fred and he has lived with me for decades.

When I got my current job, I immediately hit the Goodwill  to find stylish over-priced used clothing. I am always amazed at what people get rid of.  I bought some really cute skirts and envisioned myself being the cool counselor, dressed for secondary school success. I would be fashionable and kicky and fun. I would wear skirts and leggings and arty looking flats. I would look French, but I would not necessarily BE French. The students wouldn’t be able to wait to see what I wore that week. I would be both professional and approachable, which, as a woman, is damned hard to pull off at any age, much less the age where your bullshit meter shows on your face, with or without a mask. That plan did not work out. The skirts still have the tags on them. Glad I didn’t pay retail. (As if I ever would.)

Before we went sailing you could not have pried me away from my vast wardrobe. It filled the closet AND the chest of drawers!  I tell you what: that is not the case at this time. I have one shelf of clothing and one drawer. I have one smallish basket of overflow because the clothes we wear in cold weather take up more room and God knows we may not even have summer this year so I have to keep those handy. I have, I think, 6 pairs of shoes, including tennis shoes, everyday winter shoes, and a few pairs of sandals. That is way too many shoes and I look forward to ditching at least half of them. I’ve already started. I probably have too many socks as well. Those will be going. Laundry is not how I want to spend my time. While some people may pity me, I assure you I absolutely do not miss having a lot of clothes. I do not want to take care of lots of clothes. It bores me and wastes vasts amounts of what time I have left on this planet. These kinds of belongings that I have to care for day to day weigh me down.

The little dining room off the kitchen.

Also, why do people wash their clothes after wearing them one time? Is it just easier than putting them away? Try wearing the same clothes each day for a week. I bet it reduces your stress. It’s ok. Just throw them on the floor at night and put them on the next day. I guarantee you that no one is going to say, ‘Hey there, Bill. Did you just throw that shirt on the floor and put it on again? Are those the same exact grey pants you wore yesterday?’. I mean use common sense. You don’t actually have to go feral.  If you’ve soiled your clothing in some way, go for the washing machine. But as a rule, I bet you are over washing your clothing and wearing it out faster. Oh wait! Then you have to go shopping sooner! I see how that works now. That’s very clever! I wonder if the washing powder people and clothing manufacturers are in cahoots somehow?

And in that same vein, how many showers does the average person actually need? The amount of time and resources wasted taking daily showers is tremendous! If you smell bad after one day there is something wrong (unless you have a physically laborious  job, of course).  Maybe you have too much stress and the stress hormones are leaking out. Maybe your diet is wrong for you. If you constantly feel dirty, maybe that’s a mind over matter issue you need to speak to a therapist about. (I’ll probably be taking your insurance soon. Everything is confidential, you know, and, quite frankly, we’ve heard it all.)  Anyway, living on a boat at sea or even at anchor will quickly recalibrate your need for everyday long showers (brought to you by the folks who manufacture and sell body products). It’s possible to be both clean and frugal with water. We know this. Fight the machine! Question authority! Be clean and tidy but not fastidious! Challenge the expectations of the Society of Beige! You’ll never go back.

Tiny downstairs bathroom. Just don’t splash around in the tiny sink and get soap all over the Italian plaster and all is well.

I roll with things a lot better than I used to (except see above re: interpersonal and work drama). This is how I survived the renovations of Edison House over the last year. Meh. All things must pass. I still get my knickers in a twist with big transitions, like moving and having a chaotic space kind of stresses me out, but overall I do much better with that than I used to pre-cruising. I’m, if not content, then certainly accepting of waiting to see what happens next rather than perseverating on controlling the future, which I have learned from hard experience is not actually a thing that is possible. Occasionally I catch myself in a rabbit den of worry and the old anxious brain starts taking over, but overall that’s way better than it used to be. I think the weather systems over the years of cruising taught me that. And all the break downs we had. The dramatic breakage of the boom. The potentially deadly backstay failure. The unfortunate hitting of the charted rock in the Sea of Cortez. Those things are lessons you will never learn in a book. I look back at those  times and feel proud of how we handled them. What’s a little hole under the boat? If we aren’t sinking, we keep going. I’m ready. Let’s go.

I could sit and watch these Terns hunting for hours. Scratch that. Cruising didn’t change that in me. It’s one of the reasons I went in the first place. It was never about the people, or the cultures. Sorry. I know it’s polite to say that I want to visit other cultures and learn new languages. And sure, those things are interesting to me. But the languages I’m really most interested in are those of the octopus, the fish, the whales and dolphins and tiny creatures. The culture I am interested in mostly is the culture of the coral reef and the reefy rocks. I’ve spent my entire adult life studying humanity.  It was, and forever will be, about the animals in these travels.

People said it couldn’t be done, adding a complete bathroom upstairs. Um. We did it.

Tiny Japanese Soaking tub. Actually a perfect size.

Cruising brings into focus that age is not just a number. It’s a real measure of how long we’ve been on the planet and the wear and tear on all our systems. Boats age. People age. Boats need to have parts maintained and replaced. So do people, apparently starting in their 60’s. When you turn 60, all systems seem to begin failing. We have been grateful for our very good medical insurance through Michael’s job with the State Patrol. We’ve used it a lot. We’re trying to get as many body parts fixed,  healed, repaired, and replaced as possible before we cut the dock lines again.

The breakdown of body parts creates a feeling of urgency about the next trip. It surely does. I remind myself that people get good healthcare (and way cheaper) most places in the world. Mexico taught us that.

People who say a person is (insert number here) years ‘young’ are going to get an eye roll from me so hard a 13 year old would go blind. When, exactly, do we start saying someone is ‘years young’ instead of ‘years old’? (Uh oh. There goes the bullshit meter!)  I’ll tell you when: it’s when we don’t want to call attention to the fact they are getting old. That’s also when mature women begin being called ‘young lady’ in grocery stores by random men. (Just stop. Don’t do it. You mean well, but you take your life in your hands. If you don’t believe women are witchy enough to curse your very soul, just call any woman over 50 ‘young lady’ and then look directly into her eyes. I’m warning you only because you are probably a nice person overall.) To be old in our country’s youth culture is a bad thing. So basically we condescend by saying so-and-so is 75 years young! When we do that, we pander to a culture that would pretend people do not get old or who would dismiss them when they do.

Bodies age and boat life will bring that into focus in ways that land life will not. There is no sense in denying it by inserting one word for another with a little wink of the eye. That kind of marketing just doesn’t work.

We cannot afford to pretend we are in our 40’s out there on the ocean. We must have systems that will accommodate our aging selves and this is entirely doable on a sailboat . We will be re-rigging the boat this season with our aging bodies firmly in mind. We may be getting older but we are  not going to be going quietly into anyone’s dark, still, night or whatever. We’re just going to need a longer winch handle. And maybe a beefier block and tackle. We’ll let you know.

Edison House, built in 1926

Seeing the Neowise comet from the middle of the Pacific on a clear night, just the two of us, is worth all the money and all the work and all the discomfort. All of it. Whales looking us in the eye as they keep pace with the boat, all of us moving north together. Also totally worth it. Being called ‘Adventure couple’ by the Chinese captain of a large ship in the middle of the sea. Worth it. The soft calling and cooing of Elephant Seals echoing off cliff faces in the dark of night. Worth it. Swimming surrounded by Mobula Rays in the Sea of Cortez, in the dusk of a long day. Totally worth it. Coming face to face with a quiet Monk Seal in crystal clear water. So very worth it. Swimming with dozens of Green Sea Turtles on Mike’s 60’s birthday in Hawaii. Totally worth it.  Having a seahorse swim into my face mask to say hello. Incredibly worth it. Even losing a backstay and ending a perfect, idyllic sail home. Worth it.  Uncomfortable , sleepless nights. Worth it. Scary water. Also worth it.  Let’s go.

The gin is long gone, the rain is coming. My friends the Terns are going home for their long sleep. We’ve got a seal in the fairway. Everything is peaceful and filled with gratitude for another day aboard the boat.

S/V Galapagos, Standing by.

 

 

 

 

Timelines: A Sacred Trine of Events

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Yesterday, Sunday, June 5, the year of our Lord 2022, we did not get a Sunday newspaper delivered. We should have known when the Lopez family failed to deliver the slim and damp, plastic-sleeved paper of little worth that we had now shifted timelines. As though our very lives hung at the end of a delivery man’s substantial wrist, carefully tossed from the open window of his dilapidated Dodge Caravan, yesterday was the day that things all started coming together. Perhaps,  had we known, we could have been more prepared. Perhaps, had we known, we would have remembered to pack our underwear.

New, bigger settee and new table. We are loving this.

At one point, maybe a couple of months into the last, hectic year, Mike had paid for a 3 month subscription to the Sunday edition of  The Olympian newspaper, our local rag.  Die hard newspaper readers of old, we had some idea that we could recapture the days of our youth when, armed with mugs of coffee, we would take Sunday as a day of rest and savor each section of the Sunday paper over breakfast. We would refold each section neatly so that each of us could have the experience of cracking the pages open; sniffing the smell of fresh newsprint as it billowed forth. For the inexperienced youth among you, this is almost as delicious a rush as ripping the plastic film off a new album. Almost.  Each week we would have a hopeful gleam in our eyes only to have the fire extinguished as we realized, once again, that we had already read all the ‘news’ the paper printed.  And the beloved comic section that we used to look forward to each week had become sad. Honestly, it was just too hard to even read them. Some of them (I’m looking at you Doonsebury) have way to many small print words and they aren’t even funny anymore. Plus they STILL publish Family Circus. I mean…come on!
Worse than that, all the adverts in the paper are for elderly people. I have to tell you, I may be getting towards ‘elderly’ but even when my joints didn’t need grease I didn’t laugh at Family Circus. Pickles… maybe. But definitely not Family Circus.
Having learned our lesson, Mike called and cancelled the subscription after it ran out. But the papers kept coming. We never got a bill but the newspapers would appear at front edge of our sidewalk every Sunday, just as though the 1980’s were still current. Mike called the office of The Olympian to be sure they had actually cancelled us and they had. Still, Family Lopez kept delivering. On occasion we’d get a hand written note (!)  about making sure that any tips went to them directly because if we added those to our bill, they’d never see a penny. That’s probably true, we thought, so we would make sure to tip in the conveniently enclosed tip envelope. We tipped consistently, but we never paid another bill. Hmmm.
Every week the paper showed up. Until yesterday. No paper was delivered yesterday.
And yesterday was the day we moved back aboard Galapagos. Coincidence? We’ll let you decide.

Things have been in quite the chaotic transition for us lately. (And looking back over the blog, can you actually say that our lives are ever calm? Maybe we’ll work on that.)  Last time I posted we were talking about our house on Edison Street and we were thick into the renovations and remodeling necessary to take a 1926 house that had been a rental for literally decades and turn it into a home, and also a different kind of rental. We love that little house and had planned to rent it furnished to travel nurses and their ilk. It was a good plan until our daughter needed a place to move in Olympia. (Olympia, WA:  land of zero availability for rental housing, and negative zero for affordable rental housing. Come to think of it, negative zero for affordable housing of ANY kind.)

 

The timing of that need had us changing our plans for the foreseeable future. It made sense for her to move into our place, leave it furnished, and make it easy on all of us. No worries about property management, no worries about tenants. Long time readers may recall when we moved out of Lucerne House in Lakewood and onto the boat. Our son and his friends took that house off our hands for that trip. Now it’s Claire’s turn. So she is moving in, and we are moving out. And while this transition will last a bit longer, yesterday was our first real day living on board. Last night we slept in our cozy bunks and this morning I remembered why we generally leave a low heat going in the aft cabin when at the dock in Washington State.

In Hawaii, I happened upon our daughter’s name spelled in lava rock. Literally huge expanses of lava, and I am walking across them, far from the road,  and then this emerges in my phone camera viewfinder. I had no words. I swear on every religious and non-religious text ever printed or thought of that I did not put those letters there and I am not making this up.

In our family we have a saying that when things begin to fall into place in that strange kind of way that the Universe has about it, we have “switched timelines”; jumped off the track we’re on and onto another track into the future.  It’s just our way of giving a nod to the mysterious way events seem to line up when the decision has been made, consciously or not, to embrace a big change. So yesterday, we did not get our paper delivered as we have done for a year now. I hope the Lopez family is OK.

Undaunted by the lack of news in our Sunday lives, we packed the car with more of our daily belongings; computers, medicines, skincare, haircare, some work clothes…just a bunch of stuff we would organize and stow aboard, and set off to the marina. Pulling a packed cart to the gate, we met Jason, our rigger, coming up the walkway.

 

‘Hey, Jason! Good to see you again! Yes, we are moving aboard today. We need to get on your schedule to get this mast pulled. What does it look like?”

 

Jason is taking reservations for August. We will get on his schedule and that’s perfect timing for us. We cannot really get to all that before August. We are firmly on the timeline now. (If you are wondering, no there will not be a cruise for us this summer and I am not one bit bitter about that. Not at all. I am not spitting in rage or having regular melt downs of despair or anything. We have some other travel plans in the works and we have a very long and detailed list of boat projects that need doing. It’s not time to have fun yet. If there is a generous God anywhere, please that she will allow us all to live healthily for a few more years so we can get the hell out of here for a bit.)

Hey, we are divers now. Here we are having fun with gentle giants in Hawaii. Incredible!

Hours of unpacking, organizing, cleaning and stowing later, we have dinner and watch some Netflix. Mike has his laptop open and is trying to fix our blog, which has been broken for months. Maybe even a year. I don’t know. I gave up hope. A couple of long time readers contacted us to find out if we were ok because we had not posted in over a year. Yikes! Yeah, we were OK. But the blog remained broken.
 We considered starting a new one. That plan felt wrong as we’ve had our blog for over ten years and there is a lot of content there. Mike had tried everything he could find to fix it and yet he could not. He’d do research, get an idea, go for it with hope and dedication, and then come away frustrated. He talked to people in India to no avail.  When Mike cannot fix something, it’s broken badly. I tried not to think about starting over.
But yesterday was the day the timeline shifted. Suddenly Mike threw his hands in the air and shouted, “TODAY IS THE DAY EVERYTHING IS HAPPENING!”. And just like that, the blog was fixed. As though he had chanted some kind of magic that unbound the spell, everything started working. (OK, fine. He found some kind of setting buried deeply under layers of other settings that had got yacked up and when he fixed that, a cascade of other fixes happened. You call it computers. I call it magic.)
He has literally been working on fixing this thing for months. It’s been in the foreground of his enormous brain. But somehow today, our first full day and night aboard, it came together and here we are again. So let the writing begin!
PS: I’m still remembering how to do photos, size them, put them in the right place, etc. These photos are terrible. (Lee, I’m doing my best here.) I’m also not happy with the formatting for this post in the preview, but, if I spend time figuring that out I’ll probably yack something up so I’m just going to push this out and be done. But We ARE BACK!
S/V Galapagos, standing by.

Edison House Stories: Time Space Continuum

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Every day I wonder where the time went. Today I have made myself sit down and grab some time to organize my thoughts; a much needed respite from life under a firehose. It’s self imposed, I mean, we did buy an old house and we expected nothing less than all the projects we have before us. The difference between buying this house and buying our house in Lakewood (aside from the ridiculous price difference) is that we have a time schedule on this house. We want it done in months, not years. Because we want to go cruising again. We are moving fast and honestly, I do not know where this energy I have comes from. It’s probably due to having a sense of purpose and firm goals. We are no longer meandering into the future without a care for our own mortality. We have things to do and places to go and we need an income that will sustain that. This is, if we play our cards right, house #1.

This photo is from the historical society and was taken sometime in the 1940’s.

Although we have not moved into Edison House yet, we spend our days there every day. We have a little routine that is satisfying. Mike and I are both working actual jobs, although his job is way more demanding of his time than mine is right now, and we awaken at the Wilson Street house where we have been living with Claire and Dan, get marginally dressed, gather our cellphones and laptops, and walk around the corner to Edison House to begin our work day.

We are finding that we really do like this house very much. We like the size; fairly small by today’s standards, and we like the layout. We like the young man who rents the attached apartment and has lived there for 2 years. Three floors means we are moving up and down stairs all day, which is good for our bodies. We like having our own offices upstairs. We love having a basement. We love the high ceilings. Even the weird little fireplace has grown on us. And I got to use my little speak easy peekaboo door twice so far! It’s as much fun as I thought it would be.

Peek a boo! I just love this thing. Come see us so I can use it more.

My office is shaping up. Notice the ‘chair’ in the corner, made from Galapagos’ old cushions. That little project is on pause right now.

Something we learned on the boat is to really appreciate the use of small spaces and not overwhelm them with ‘stuff’ or large furniture. The size of things becomes especially important when you consider being able to move things in and out of the house, a consideration we never worried about in the Lakewood house with its many wide doorways all around the house. For instance, we are doing a complete tear out and remodel of the kitchen. During the design process I had to decide on the size of refrigerator we wanted. American refrigerators are ridiculously huge in my opinion. They are almost a caricature of American excess. After living with a boat fridge for 4 years and finding that overall I had TOO much space in there, I was not inclined to get anything bigger than the current 30″ fridge that already lives here. When we moved that fridge into the dining room to begin clearing out the kitchen, I realized that even if I wanted a bigger one, I wouldn’t be able to get it through the door! So 30″ fridge it is and will remain. And I’m fine with that.

Speaking of the kitchen, I recently had the joy/back breaking labor experience of removing the hideous ceramic tile, along with 3 additional layers of old flooring; exposing the beautiful original fir underneath. This house is built with 100% Pacific Northwest old growth Douglas Fir and I try not to think about those old trees coming down. All I know is that now every floor has fir that is 15/16″ inch thick and it’s gorgeous. Even the oak floors in the living room and hall are underlain with fir. There is a solidness to walking in this house that speaks to its existence of close to a century.

Underneath everything, the original fir floors. They need cleaning but soap and water will do most of the heavy lifting.

Revealed beneath the unfortunate choices of decades of living.

For now the kitchen floor is covered in the black mastic that is probably made with horse hooves, and turns out to be water soluble. There is a lot of washing of the floor on hands and knees coming to my body in the near future, but I can now take a break from that floor and move on to other destructive activities. I am enjoying the process of discovery as we peel back the layers of this house to its bones, revealing the choices residents of the past have made for better or for worse.

Like the tile in the bathroom. I am dead excited to pull this tile off the wall. My exploratory shenanigans uncovered pink and white candy-striped wall paper. Who knows what may lie beneath the tile of the tub surround, also being torn out, and under the floor tile? That floor is higher than the floor in the hallway, so there is something under there. Maybe just fir, but I’ll be finding out soon. As an aside, if you suffer from any kind of anxiety or even anger, a good tile tear-out is a great way to let it go.

This tiny bathroom offers many design challenges but I already have a vision. Sure, it’s not entirely solid yet, but it’s coming along.

This is the mess of paint layers on the medicine cabinet. So. Many. Layers.

The explorations continue with stripping about 20 layers of paint off of the medicine cabinet in the tiny bathroom. Originally I was going to just take this thing out, but it’s really built into the wall and would be a real act of destruction to remove it. Better to be more conservative in the truest sense of the word and see if the original wood can be brought back to life. So much of the decision making about how to go about upgrading this house must be made carefully, not only with a nod to the history of the house, but also with the checkbook firmly in mind.

Revealed beneath the tile: pink candy striped wallpaper and a bit of crumbling plaster. The Our Old House forum on Facebook is a wealth of information on how to stabilize and repair things like this plaster.

The electricians have started. So much of the remodel money is going to be spent on things like electrical and plumbing. But that’s like spending money on a rig on a sailboat. You hate to do it, but it must be done in order for the vessel to be safe. Same on houses. We will not be risking an electrical fire on this house. We are dealing with a lot of deferred maintenance but, again, we already knew that going into this. It’s not our first rodeo.

In terms of plumbing, let’s just say that whoever fixed the leaky drain on the tub did not have an eye to the future. I’m going to show you a photo, but if you are a plumbing nerd, please avert your eyes. It’s bad. The plumber just shook his head. When a plumber has no words you know it’s bad. And yes, it does leak onto the basement floor. There are a lot of plumbers in this neighborhood of older homes. I see them when I take walks, their useful vans of tools trundling down the roads to their next jobs. If you want job security, be a plumber or an electrician.

So ugly. And yes, it does leak.

That bathroom is not as bad as I previously thought, though. Whereas I had immediately had dreams of pulling out that old tub and putting in a free standing tub, I have changed my mind. What changed it? I took a bath last night after yoga. I used the tub that exists there already and decided I like the way it feels. It’s deep, and solid, and supportive and original to that part of the house. The new plan is to keep it and have it refinished. That’s going to save both money and the tub and time. I still have to rip out all the tile and replace whatever it’s installed on, but we can open up that wall where the plumbing lives and then the plumbers have easy access to running water lines up to the second floor where our final project of any size is waiting. I’m getting excited about the possibilities in the bathroom and the kitchen isn’t even done yet. Whoa, Nellie. I probably should slow down, but how?

These walls. They will succumb to my prybar and hammer. Soon. Very soon. I know just the place to repurpose the fir flooring that goes halfway across this ‘closet’. Halfway? I mean, come on!

On to the upstairs. This little space is about to yield to my hammer and pry bar. I’m going to remove the pitiful excuse for walls in there so the plumber and contractor can explore the space. We need a second bathroom upstairs. Any money we spend on that will be money well spent whenever the house gets sold again (probably after I’m long gone from this earth but don’t quote me on that). Our contractor has some good ideas for enlarging the space, and the plumber has some good ideas for how he could plumb it in. It’s well located just above the other bathroom. If that works out, we will have a 3 bedroom 2 bath with a garage close to town. Did I mention that a lovely French bakery is moving in next to the yoga studio, 1/2 a block away? They’ve been in business down the road about a mile, but are moving to a larger location. Yay! It’s like they knew we were moving in and wanted to be neighbors! It’s not quite the same as Bahia de Navidad in Mexico,  with its French baker who delivers to boats, but it’s a great second to that. I’m envisioning Saturday morning coffee with a real croissant.

Some little vignettes. We try to maintain a little civility here. We’ve moved the ‘kitchen’ into the dining room, along with the tools.s

And speaking of neighbors, I was greeted yesterday by a woman named Brandi in an older SUV as she was turning the corner in front of the house. She liked my overalls. I was seriously confused by her comment because these are probably 15 years old, have boat bottom paint on them, as well as various other grimy substances. These are my serious work clothes. They take a beating and keep on going. What she really wanted was to know if we were moving into the house and to say welcome to the neighborhood. Oh, and to offer me some Irises from her yard and to tell me that she is very excited that we are going to repaint the exterior (Everyone is very excited about that, apparently. Pumpkin Spice is an unfortunate color on a house.) It was very nice, almost heart warming. I hope she can come see the house after we’ve finished the remodeling.

And what of the spirits of the house? I’m sure you’ve all been sitting on the edges of your seats wondering if we have any ghosts hanging around. Well, we aren’t sure yet. There have been some interesting little things like knives being misplaced and found in strange locations later. But that could just be our old and overloaded brains. I do sometimes get the sense that people are watching me in an interested sort of way as I get into a meditative state doing the labor of pulling tile, especially when I was doing the kitchen floor. But that may or may not be something to take note of.

And then there is Grace. Or at least that’s what I call her. Grace is 11 and popped into my head yesterday when I was at the house alone applying stripper to the medicine cabinet. She opened the conversation with a query. “What are you doing?”. Um, what?? “What is that you are doing?”. We went on from there as this external voice chattered on in my head about all the work being done on the house and how excited her mother was that I was taking care of the place. Ooookaaaay….

Mike taking measurements of the fireplace. The cheesy but useful electric fireplace has to go. On the other hand, it offers heat, and both blue and red lights! What a find!! Original flickering candle sconces: a definite ‘stay’. Rug is a classic GoodWill find.

I don’t know who or what Grace might be, which insults her greatly, but my questioning nature and internal skeptic is always firmly in place when these things happen. There have been a handful of times in my life where I have had a connection with someone dead. I wrote about my friend Betty, who spoke to me for days after her passing. I also had some pretty strange experiences on D’arcy Island a few years ago before our cruise. So it’s not unheard of, but as a general rule, I don’t go around listening to or speaking with those who have slipped the old mortal coil. Anyway, Grace followed me back to Wilson House and I finally had to ask if it was possible that I could go to bed without listening to her delightful, if not a little disturbing, chatter.

Is she a ghost of the house somehow? Is she even real? If she isn’t real, then why am I having conversations that feel as though I’m not initiating them? And what is reality anyhow? Haven’t we learned in the last few years that reality is flexible and people get to choose to believe whether factual things are, in fact, fact? Don’t we now believe in secret cabals and reptile people and space lasers and that the earth is actually flat?  I don’t know the answers to any of these things. All I know is that everytime I mention the possibility of Grace not being real I hear this: “I AM, TOO, REAL!”. That response is so ‘eleven’. So I’ll let you know if she sticks around, whoever she is.

Enough of this sitting around and chewing the fat with the blog. I have walls to paint and tile to rip out and paint to strip. Time is flying by.

Yes, Gracie, there probably IS asbestos in that old floor tile.

Oh, by the way! I forgot to say check out the March edition of Good Old Boat magazine for my article on anxiety and sailing.