How One Thing Leads to Another . . . .

Remember I said the contractors were starting to tear the siding off our house? Well, here’s what the front looks like this morning:






They left a note on our door that when they started tearing off the front door molding, they found moisture, dry rot, and mold. So they had to remove the front stairs and porch, take out the wet sheathing and insulation, and let it dry out. And that they would be removing our front door and replacing the structural upright beams today. So Tool Man and I got up bright and early (these guys usually start at 7:00 a.m.), had coffee and tea, walked the dog, and Tool Man proceeded to take the hardware off the door. We’d just bought it a few months ago and want to reuse it, since the contractors will have to replace the whole door and the new one comes with cheap hardware. Then the contractors came (promptly at 7:15 a.m.) and said, "Oh, we’re not going to replace the door today, we’re doing that tomorrow." So Tool Man is putting the locks back on the door today, so he can take them back off tomorrow.

We live in a row house, meaning it’s in a row of houses all connected to each other. Meaning, we don’t have direct access into or out of our back yard, except through the house. When we bought this house 3 years ago (somehow it seems MUCH longer than that), this had been a rental and the backyard had been left untouched for 4 years; it was full of vetch, blackberries, and thistles higher than the privacy fence. So Tool Man sprayed, cleared, dug, tilled, raked, and leveled the backyard before we moved in, so that the very first day we were here, it looked like this:




Then he laid a brick patio, sowed grass, planted shrubs and flowers and bamboo, and has spent the last 3 years fighting slugs and grubs, and bitching about the dog leaving brown spots in his lawn. So, to do all that, he went up and down stairs with bags, jugs, a tiller, lawn equipment, and debris bags. We have neighbors on each side, while pleasant enough to talk to, are not the best landscapers. They have dandelions which go to seed and land in our yard, blackberries which creep through the fence into our yard, a stagnant water feature, and flood lights directed into my living room. So when the contractors decided to take down sections of fences for access to everyone’s back yard, just where did they stack the sections? You guessed it, right in the middle of Tool Man’s backyard.





The contractors originally stacked it against the standing fence, on top of the garden phlox and trumpet vine he just planted this spring. So we had to move the sections ourselves into a sort of lean-to in the middle of the lawn. So not only can he not mow the grass (which will probably die anyway from having this stuff stacked on it), the hostas and bamboo behind the sections are probably going to die from lack of sun. Not that we have a tremendous amount of that here in the Great Pacific North Wet, anyway.


Oh, and back at the front door? Well, the contractors said we had to remove everything from the foyer because of the reconstruction. Remember our foyer?



Well, now it looks like this:



We couldn’t take down the mirror; it’s earthquake-strapped to the wall because it’s so heavy. But we did move the clock, the trunk, etc. down to the landing by the family room.




Which is why my toe looks like this: