Tag: old houses

Free House: Basement Take 2

This past weekend my husband Andy got over to the free house and worked on the basement. He had already cleaned out a lot on a previous occasion, but there was a corner he hadn’t got to yet.

He cleaned it out and filled another trailer load of trash and made a good pile of scrap metal for the people who drive around picking that stuff up.

He strung up some new lights.

And he did some work jacking up old beams that support the floor above.

He hopes to replace those when money allows. We’ve also got another support beam that has termite damage and will need to be replaced.

Fortunately he knows how to do all that stuff. We just need time and money!

The next little bit of time is going to be really busy with holidays and end of semester music events and we have a wedding in the family coming up quickly too. I have no idea how much time I’ll have to get over next door, but whenever I do, I’ll keep you all posted.

I Am Rich

I love the sounds of my house. A couple minutes ago I was sitting at the piano, trying to sight-read through a fairly simple Chopin piece I had never seen or heard before. It was slow going. Adagio. I wasn’t really focusing on what I was doing. Honestly, I was just killing time, waiting for my kindergartner to finish his workbook. Right now all the kids are waiting for him to finish his workbook. I told him that when he had finished his school work (workbook and read aloud a story) then I would go down to the store and buy our traditional bags of Candy Corn (and for all you haters out there, we happen to think candy corn is awesome!!). Every October I put out some ceramic pumpkins on my mantle, fill them with candy corn and the kids get to grab some after school is done, or chores, or whatever hard task is in front of them. 

Anyway, I was playing the piano, waiting for David to finish his workbook, and I started just listening to all the sounds of our house. 

We started a fire in the wood-burning stove this morning. The stove has a little fan that blows warm air into the room. It is a soothing white noise. We also have a large fish tank in the living room whose water filter sounds like a little waterfall. We need these soothing sounds. They counterbalance the sound of teenagers hurling themselves down our wooden staircase as loud as they can. And the sound of the three year old talking to himself as he plays his little imaginary games. I have one teenager home this week because her school is shut down for Covid. She loves music and carries her phone everywhere with her, sharing her very eclectic music choices with the whole family. 

You can hear our dog barking outside, faithfully protecting us from any random person walking down the sidewalk. The occasional car drives by on the street in front of our house. You can occasionally hear a siren rushing past on the main road which is only a block away from us. 

The kindergartner has a chronic whistling habit and the eleven year old is constantly humming. And Chopin continues to plunk along in the background. 

There is so much life tucked into the walls of this home. 

(Time lapse)

So, I just got back from the store, candy corn has been bought, pumpkin candy dishes are now full. 

When I pulled up to the Family Dollar, I saw two apparently homeless people, a man and a woman, in the alley behind the store. By the time that I left the store and was heading back to my car, they had settled themselves on the back steps of the store’s delivery entrance. They had bags of belongings and some fountain soda cups from a nearby gas station. They looked dirty and the woman looked like she was crying. But they weren’t trying to make eye contact with me, and I had nothing to offer them. No groceries in my bag, just candy corn. No cash in my wallet, just a bankcard. No words to share, my innate shyness balking at starting a conversation. I remembered that I had supported one of our homeless shelters this past weekend by shopping at their thrift store (thank you Ma’am, your purchase has just helped us feed ten people!), and I just hope that this couple will make their way to the shelter by evening and take advantage of this ministry in our city.

I climbed back into my car and drove back home. And once again, I felt like the blinders had been ripped off my eyes. A glimpse at my true reality. My home, a beautiful mansion. My children, costly jewels, unmeasurable treasures. My life, a dream come true.

And the noises in my house sound like a beautiful symphony. The chaos is simply an outpouring of joy. I feel like the richest woman on the planet as I survey this ramshackle house of mine. 

And my prayer becomes, make me a blessing.

God, you have blessed me, show me how to bless others. 

The Perfect Day

Today has been one of those “Perfect” days. The kind where nothing overly impressive happens, you just feel connected with the goodness around you. 

We slept in this morning. Eight o’clock! Amazing! If you have a house full of small children, eight in the morning is late! 

We lazed around in our pajamas, reading books, kids playing busily. And then, sometime around eleven the kids gave me a list of things they wanted to do: go to the library, go to the park. 

Not till we get our chores done. 

So, we divided everything up and the house got clean pretty quickly. I put on my new cover for my futon couch and pulled a couple chairs from other parts of the house so I could have a living room with furniture again. (Got rid of the couches a while back, and haven’t been in a rush to put things back together again.)

I made a menu for the week and then went shopping and stayed within my budget. (Not sure why, but that is always So Satisfying!) And I bought some flowers to put on my mantel in the living room. 

The weather today is about ten degrees cooler than it has been the past month and suddenly my kids are willing to play outside again. And other neighborhood kids have emerged from their air conditioning as well and so I have a yard full of children all happily playing together. 

This coming Monday is a holiday so I don’t feel as pressured to get everything done immediately. 

My washing machine is busily doing it’s job. By Monday I will have a big mountain of clean clothes to fold and sort and put away.

One of the neighborhood kids was talking to me earlier, he’s new, never been in my house before. He looked around. 

You know, this place kind of reminds me of a mansion. 

I was startled and then laughed.

Well, it’s big, but it isn’t very fancy like a mansion. 

And I sit in my old, faded worn chair in my living room. The walls need painting, the trim has never been painted or finished in any way, still showing the marks of over a hundred years of use. My bookshelves are over-run with books. The floors have also not been finished in the past one hundred years, and my kids skating and scootering and shoving furniture all over the place has done nothing to improve their appearance. 

But things are tidy. There are bright flowers, the soothing sound of water bubbling in the fish tank, the hum of a fan. Silence. And then thunder as a horde of children run down the stairs and out the door. The sun is shining in through the windows. My fridge and pantry are full. I’ve run all my errands. We have plans to play at the park after supper. Tomorrow we get to go to church. 

Yes. It is one of those “Perfect” days. 

And it occurs to me, that most days have the potential to be perfect. It just takes an eye to see, and a heart to be thankful.

One List at a Time

We are back from vacation! I think the drive home hit our world record for least eventful, fastest, calmest drive we’ve ever had.  We did twenty hours straight, drove through the night. Only stopped for bathroom breaks and to get gas, one pass through the drive thru. Kids didn’t fight. No complaints about being bored. We didn’t even watch any movies, just listened to music. I do not have any idea why everything went so well. It’s never happened before. 

 

So, after this amazing trip, I walk into my home. And I’m greeted by an old musty house that is pretty messy. No couches in the living room cause they were nasty and I threw them out a couple weeks before vacation. Stacks of homeschooling books. Clutter. Lots of unfinished projects. My daughter runs up to me, When are we going school shopping? Can we go right now? (What??) No, we JUST got home. We are not going shopping. (School starts the middle of August here.) 

 

I look through the mail. Bills. People needing information from me. Phone calls I need to make. 

 

Mom, when are we taking our kittens to the vet? Uh..soon. Not today. 

 

What’s for supper Mom? Uh, let’s see what’s in the freezer, I need to go grocery shopping. 

 

Mom! The fish tank needs more water! Yes, I will fix it tomorrow. 

 

I sink into my chair. Yikes. Deep breath. Today. Focus on today. Today, I’m going to unpack a couple things, take a shower. Go to bed. 

 

This morning I woke up and again had to fight off the urge to get overwhelmed. One step at a time. In order to get myself from fretting, I sat down and wrote a list of goals. Things I want to happen sometime this Fall. 

 

Personal goals: Exercise every day, get my blood sugar under control.

 

Spiritual goals: family devotions, bible memory.

 

Household goals: buy couches, get a homeschooling space set up.

 

School goals: get everyone ready for the school year, get a school routine going.

 

Nothing unrealistic. All stuff that needs to happen. Writing it down makes me feel better.  When it’s all written down, it feels possible. Like, one day, I will wake up, and all these things will be checked off this list! 

 

I am feeling optimistic about the future. Homeschooling is actually sounding fun. It helps that it will only be three kids, not seven.  I ordered some books for the coming year and I was flipping through them today, How many chapters? How many months do we have? How many pages do we need to get done a day to finish this on time? And it was fun. I’m feeling ready to hit the stores and buy out the school supply department. 🙂 

 

This coming school year, with kids in public school, doing virtual school (one highschooler decided to stay home and do virtual school instead), and homeschool, it is going to be weird, and unnatural, and uncomfortable, and alarming at times. But right now, coming from a place of rest and refreshment, I just have the attitude of Bring it On. I’m ready. One step at a time. One list at a time. 

 

Kitchen Pianos and How to Degaje

kitchenpiano

(edit: I forgot to post the picture! Here it is!)

When I was a kid growing up in Haiti, there was a word that I heard a lot. Degaje. Which means, essentially, make do with what you have. If you have ever repaired anything with duct tape, then you are Degaje-ing. My dad had Degaje down to a science. “Well, the car broke down, and I couldn’t find a part for it, so I took this scrap metal I had and welded my own part..” or “You need bookshelves? Ok, here’s a big stack of milk crates, have fun…” or maybe, my mom, “I made bacon for breakfast…ok, it’s not really bacon, it’s fried spam, but it’s close!” You get the idea.

I have carried the spirit of Degaje into my marriage and family life. It sometimes gets on my husband’s nerves. His motto being, “If you’re going to do a job, do it right”. My motto goes more like, “Do whatever you can with whatever you have and as long as it works, everything is fine.” I will tell my kids that we are going to Degaje and they look at me blankly. What? Speak English mom. I still haven’t got it into their vocabulary.

That brings us to my kitchen piano. My husband knows how to tune and repair pianos. Shhh. It’s a secret. He’s not out for hire. He doesn’t mind keeping our family pianos going, but it’s not his favorite work. No, he really doesn’t want to come tune your piano for you. So, years ago he brought home an old broken down piano. I think someone was giving it away and it was either he take it or it was going to the dump. He took it. I think the idea was that he would fix it up and let it be a piano for the kids. Shortly after that though, he bought me a nice upright piano and of course the kids wanted to play my nice piano instead of the old beat up one that hadn’t been tuned yet. The old piano got relegated to our back room.

The back room is an addition on the back of our house that is very pleasant, full of windows. It has been a multi-functional room since we moved in 12 years ago. It has been a children’s bedroom, a sickroom, a family room, a junk room, a school room, a guest room, and finally it became the parental bedroom. Throughout all these transitions, the piano has remained. When it became my bedroom we used the piano as a kind of bookshelf and shoe rack. It looked ok, but it took up a lot of room. Then, for my 40th birthday, my husband remodeled our bedroom. We got carpet on the floor, fresh peachy paint on the walls, new curtains, new closet system. It’s beautiful, I love it.

When Andy started the bedroom remodel, he moved everything out of the room so he could lay the carpet. I suggested this would be a wonderful time to haul the piano away since we had no use for it. He seemed to agree with me and I was excited. Hurray, the unused, old, forgotten piano will finally go away! He rolled the piano out of our room, down a short hall and into the kitchen. He was focused on our bedroom and he said he would take care of the piano a bit later. The piano was in the middle of my kitchen and getting in the way, so we pushed it against the wall where there was plenty of room.

Now, I have to explain a bit more about our house and kitchen, because I’m sure you’re wondering why my kitchen had plenty of room for a piano…Our house was built in 1909. It is a “project” house. We are in the middle of remodeling it. We’ve been in the middle of remodeling it for 12 years. We have done all the major work like replacing plumbing and wiring and drywall, new bathrooms, new roof, that kind of stuff, but we’ve never quite got to finishing all the trim and painting and maybe fixing the floors…or finishing the kitchen.

My kitchen right now has very little counter space. A round table in the middle of the room, a countertop that holds all the cereal/fruit/bread/vegetables, and a little bit of counter on either side of the sink. That’s it. So, suddenly, I had a piano in my kitchen. I started setting things down on it while I was cooking. Other people started setting things down on it. Slowly the piano began to disappear under a pile of spices, and cooking supplies, and tea pots, and cast iron skillets. My husband raised an eyebrow when he saw the accumulation. “How am I going to get rid of the piano with all this stuff on it?” I assured him that as soon as he was ready to move the piano, I would move the stuff out of the way. Then logic kicked in. Why move the piano when it makes such a great counter space? Degaje at it’s best. And that, my friends, is why I have a piano in my kitchen. In case you were wondering.