GOOD RIDDANCE

A final "after" picture is forthcoming, but here's a little sneak peek of the latest development in the sad garage saga:

Goodbye, garage. Though we were initially very discouraged to lose it (due to draining problems and tree roots compromising the foundation), one upside is that the property now looks a whole lot quainter. Though it would've been quite nice one day once we added new siding and a whole new front, the garage in its current (well, previous I guess, now that it's gone) state was a hideous eyesore. Now have a clear view of the pretty little forest at the corner of our property, and the last bit of true ugliness around here is gone. Amazing.

That was one huge checkmark on the plus side. The best part though: we didn't have to lift a finger. We found a guy who wanted the roof trusses and metal roofing (both of which were in great shape and can be reused), so he brought a crew and got to work. By the time we got home from church on Sunday, the garage was 50% gone. By dinner, all that was left was the cement slab and one last load of rubble to be hauled away. If you learn anything from me about renovating your home, let it be this: having someone else do the work sometimes can really be the best thing ever.

We still haven't 100% decided what to do about the cement slab. We're looking into it. We could clear it off and let Johnnie ride her bike on it. We could put up a basketball hoop. We could build a pergola for picnics. We could cover it with dirt (maybe?), mark the spot and forget about it (until we sell the place one day and have to tell the new owners where it is). We'd prefer not to have to break it up though -- it's HUGE -- but we'll see. Let's worry about that a little later.

Until then, stand by for before and after photos... and for more house updates soon. On the docket we've got exterior painting, master suite drywalling, and lots of other projects that are moving forward. The snake incident was pretty motivating for us to get this show on the road already.

A NIGHTMARE HAPPENED IN REAL LIFE (PART II)

The time: Mid-afternoon on Memorial Day 2013
The place: Our living room

Memorial Day started out like any other day off. After a busy morning working in the yard, doing laundry and playing with Johnnie around the house, Ez and I decided we wanted to take J to a local park to feed the ducks and run around the playground after she woke up from her afternoon nap. After checking all the essential tasks off the naptime to-do list, we took a few minutes to collapse on the couch while we waited for her to wake up.

About 10 minutes into an episode of "Earth from Above," we heard the plastic dust barrier between the living room and dining room begin to rustle. I thought nothing of it, as our house has no shortage of random noises. But Ez, being ever and endearingly paranoid, couldn't relax until he got up and checked out what it was.

I can't believe I'm saying it like this, but -- unfortunately -- a pregnant spider it was not.

"Holy ****, Em! It's a big *** SNAKE!" he shouted.

Just then, I heard a thump and the shiny black beast peeked its sinister head through the doorway and began slithering down the steps. It had gotten into the house through a gap between the original log section of the house and the newer addition, a pretty raw-looking area that we haven't closed off yet because we were still planning to run some wiring through the gap. (Guess what project just moved up to the priority slot on the ol' to-do list?) Earlier in the day, our carpenter had been digging around in the rear corner of the basement looking for something, and he must've piqued the snake's curiosity about its surroundings. I couldn't tell how big it was (honestly I didn't really want to be seeing it at all), but Ez estimated it at 5 terrifying feet or longer.

I froze in terror, but thankfully Ez sprung into action.

"Don't let it get away!" he yelled, running toward the basement in his underwear. I still could not believe this was happening, even as the snake attempted to climb the wall. Sure, we've had birds in the house before in the midst of all the construction, but a huge snake?

Things that went through my head as I stood on the coffee table, quaking all over:

• If it tries to get away, how will I stop it? 
• OMG it's looking right at me.
• SWEAR WORDS. ALL OF THEM.
• Thank God Johnnie is napping upstairs.
• PleasepleasePLEASE don't slither back into the wall/under the sofa/into a dark corner.
• When I pack my suitcase to move out, I must remember to bring my Clarisonic.

Ez came back with a shovel. The snake was still there, looking around warily, poking at the air with its tongue. It had stopped (thankfully) on the second step, and Ez stood above it for a moment, glaring at it and shaking his head.

"What are you going to do?" I asked him, afraid to know.

"I'm going to kill it," he said. I closed my eyes as the shovel came down...

I will condense what happened in the subsequent 5-10 minutes simply by saying IT WAS ALL SO HORRIBLE. Someone suggested we should've caught it and given it to a local farmer, who could've used it to catch mice, but wrangling a 5-foot snake out of our living room and into a car, then driving it around to find a farmer to give it to, just didn't seem feasible at the time. All options = horrible.

When Ez gathered it up in a bucket and took it outside, I burst into tears and kept on crying while he scrubbed the steps with a bleach solution so strong it burned in my nose. I'm so thankful he handled the whole thing with minimal effort from me. He told me he hadn't known I was so terrified of snakes -- something I hadn't realized either. Having grown up in the country, I've seen plenty of snakes in the wild without any major meltdowns, but apparently seeing one inside my house has a different effect on me. Go figure.

During the whole ordeal I did close my eyes and take a picture as evidence of what a stud my husband is, but I can't bring myself to post it here... If you're really curious, I'll email it to you. We determined it was an adult Eastern Ratsnake (not poisonous). According to the Maryland Dept. of Resources website, "An arboreal species they are notorious for getting into human residences, where they may live in attics undetected." (Or basements, as it were.)

I remain thankful that Johnnie was napping during this nightmare. She woke up in a good mood a short time later, and after I washed my face and Ez put on pants we headed out to the park and ran around until we felt better.

I have to admit my attitude for the past week has not been stellar; the little, everyday inconveniences of living in this construction zone with a toddler have been getting to me more than they used to. I'm trying to be thankful in all situations and to not complain, but it's been a challenge. Progress has been slow the past couple months, but we are getting ready for a big surge of effort soon. I'm looking forward to it, even if it means late nights, going broke, creating more dirt, whatever. As long as it means the goal is inching closer.

ON MOTHERHOOD

A week or two ago, I was chatting with some colleagues about our work schedules and the busy season that is coming. One of my younger, single, childless coworkers said, "I think I should rent a kid for a few weeks so I can demand to be able to go home by a certain time every day."

She was joking, but I was taken aback. Was getting to leave work at 5 every day all she took away from the harried lives that I and our other working-mother colleagues were trying to keep in balance?

I didn't really respond -- it was just too complicated. How to explain what months of sleep deprivation feel like? And the feeling I get when I look at Johnnie and am convinced she is the most beautiful creature on earth? How to describe the rushed process of preparing (what I think will be) a home-run dinner for my child while she fusses at me in the background, only to have her refuse to eat it?

How to tell her that most days I don't actually love being a mother?

It's true. Often, the only thing I really love about motherhood is Johnnie.

Maybe it's wrong to say this out loud, but I don't love that she woke up crying at 4am twice this week, in pain from her latest teething adventure and unable to go back to sleep. (Really, are all these teeth necessary?) But because I love her, I held her and comforted her until morning.

I don't love sitting cross-legged on the floor, my ankles going numb, when there's a perfectly good sofa 6 inches away. But because I love her, I spend hours down on that floor with her, tasting her fake food, reading her stories and counting her toes.

I don't love folding all her endless tiny laundry, spending hours researching and preparing healthy and toddler-friendly food, sacrificing workouts/reading/hobbies/husband-time/friend-time/me-time so she can have a bigger piece of me, watching Caillou (he's the worst), sweating through nightmares that something bad will happen to her, trying to teach her patience while I'm growing impatient myself, or -- of course -- changing her diapers. But I love her, more than I could ever really explain, and there is joy in knowing I'm doing each and every one of these things for her.

On its own, "motherhood" kind of stinks sometimes. There is much unpleasantness and sacrifice. It knocks the wind out of me regularly. I even almost lost a tooth once.

Fortunately, there's a cute, sweet miniature person involved who is usually just looking for a hug, a cookie and a good time. And, also fortunately, her joy and belly laughs are contagious. She is both the cause of and the reward for all of it. I wouldn't trade her for that big raise I'll probably never get since I'm out the door by 5 every day. But I'm much richer (and considerably more tired) because of her.

It's hard to explain that to someone else, because I really don't understand it myself.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

For the longest time, I've been sold on traditional white subway tile with dark grout for our master bathroom.  Like this:

Fashion designer Lauren Moffatt's bathroom,
From Design*Sponge. Photos by Alice Gao. 

But lately, something about squares is calling out to me. Maybe it's because subway tile is so common, but square tile in a running bond pattern is feeling fresh -- a bit less expected than subway tile, but still a classic choice.

Mandy Milks's bathroom 
Photographer: Michael Graydon Source: House & Home March 2013 issue

I've already purchased a biscuit-colored hex tile for the floor -- but if that weren't already a done deal, this photo may have sold me on black hex for the floor. It looks like it would feel nice underfoot, and warm too. But I'm still happy with what I chose, and the price was right, so there.

My hope is that this summer we will be able to hire someone to do our bathroom tile work. I get all happy inside when I think about not having to do this job ourselves. It's a considerable amount of tiling, and we are taking a good look at our To Do lists to try to see what we can parse out and what we can do ourselves. This seems like one of those jobs that a pro can do much faster -- giving us more time to do the less brain-intensive tasks that are still looming. (Please don't make me use my brain.)

Anyway, back to the point:


Which tile do you like better -- subway or square?

13.1

In case you were wondering, YES - we survived our half marathon on Saturday. I mentioned back in November that Ez signed us up for the Ocean City Half, and then I purposely never mentioned it again. I don't have a lot of patience for reading about people's exercise regimens, so I didn't want to make a hypocrite of myself by blathering on about it here. But race day came and went, and I'm happy to say we had a really good time.

To keep it brief, our training started off well and then petered out in January... I was majorly sick three times between then and March, Ez had really important work things happening and Johnnie went through a long phase of sleepless nights that made 5am runs extra extra painful. By the time race day rolled around, the longest run either of us had done was 6 miles.We were just not ready.

But, since you know we are total gluttons for punishment who do things like major gut renovations and half marathons, we did it anyway.

My original goal for myself back in November was to finish in 2:10 -- though we didn't come close to that, I'm pretty proud of us. Our survival strategy was to complete the whole race in intervals of 10 minutes running and five minutes walking, over and over. With this strategy, we kept a 12 minute mile pace all the way until mile 10. At exactly the two-hour mark, Ez's legs decided they'd had enough and started cramping from every angle, so we walked the final 3 miles. We finished with a time of 2:50 -- slow for sure, but not slow enough that they packed up the finish line before we got there.

I am so proud of my husband -- who is more of a power lifter than a runner. He knew I was not terribly excited about running that far unprepared, so he tucked some baby aspirin into the pocket of his running shorts, loaded up the iPods and did it with me. That's love.

Will I do it again, and train for real this time? I'm not sure yet. It was actually really fun and invigorating, and I'm glad we sucked it up and did it. In some ways I would like to do it again and actually run the entire thing, but training is boring for me... Running by myself on a treadmill at 5am is not awesome. After 3 or 4 miles I'm craving variety, and long distance running is a lot more time consuming than other workouts that are much better for your health and joints. I guess we'll just have to see. I did buy a pair of fancy new kicks in celebration of this small victory, and I took them on a short inaugural run yesterday. I could tell it was the beginning of a beautiful new friendship. How far they'll take me at a single clip is TBD, but we'll definitely be logging some miles together.

CUNNINGHAM FALLS

Happy Earth Day, everybody! On Saturday we took some time with friends to enjoy Cunningham Falls, a beautiful state park fairly close to home. The half-mile gravel trail to the falls is very easy and leisurely, but it's the rock-hopping and little pools of minnows in the rocky stream above the falls that you don't want to miss. Johnnie walked a lot of the gravel trail by herself, then rode happily in the Ergo on her dad's back as he scrambled over the ancient stones. My favorite thing: stretching out and sunning on a huge warm rock like a walrus. Sometimes Maryland isn't such a drag after all. 

A cheesy one for the scrapbook. (See Johnnie there in the back?)

Johnnie, our future park ranger, spent the whole day smiling, all tucked in like a little pappoose. I don't think she could've had a better day. 

After a great day out in nature, we returned home to discover that some of the seeds I planted in the garden last Sunday have sprouted already. These are dwarf blue kale sprouts. We also have a whole thick row of lettuce sprouting and some broccoli and carrot shoots coming up too.

I'm going to go ahead and call this year's Earth Day a smashing success here at Thirtyeight20. What did you do this weekend?

THINKING ABOUT DINING ROOMS

Photo ©Eric Roth

With the dining room floor now installed, I am giving myself permission to think about the dining room as a space that will actually be useful to us in the nearish future. That means figuring out the fun stuff like furniture, art, finishes, etc. I looked through my Pinterest folder of dining rooms recently and discovered that I am gravitating toward warm wood (hello, exposed log walls), crisp white and black accents. Since our dining room is basically a pass-through room in the center of the house, I want a space that isn't too cluttered or busy. Maybe I'm turning into a shaker in my old age.

Image from scandinavianretreat.blogspot.com. 

I found this on Pinterest, and the original source is uncredited. Anyone know?

Image from Stylizimo.

Home of stylist Hanne Borge-Yngland featured on the style files

PLANTING A GARDEN

I am not known for my green thumb. One year in elementary school, everyone in our class was given a packet of mixed seeds on Earth Day. I took them home and dutifully planted them in a little plastic terrarium I had gotten as a McDonald's Happy Meal toy. I watered those buggers faithfully for weeks and nothing happened. Not a single sprout popped out of the soil. Defeated, I dumped the soil and the seeds out into the front yard and forgot about the whole thing. That is, until a whole year later when a thick mysterious vine began snaking its way through the yard from the very spot I dumped my seeds. That year we had homegrown pumpkins.

The moral of this tale is the only way a plant will grow is if I have nothing to do with it.

However...

This year I'm giving real vegetable gardening a try for the first time ever. We have all this property and eat a lot of veggies, so it would sort of be ridiculous not to at least try. So Ez built three 4' x 8' raised beds over the past few weekends. Yesterday I planted the first batch of seeds for some cool-weather crops -- peas, broccoli, lettuce, two types of kale and two types of carrots. (Johnnie helped by dumping a handful of carrot seeds over a row of lettuce I had just planted, so we'll see how that turns out...) I'm also planning to do tomatoes, beans, spinach, summer squash and basil. Despite my dismal record at keeping plants alive, I remain hopeful that we'll be able to harvest a little something this year. If nothing else, I'm happy to have a project that will force us to spend more time outside.

Are there any organic vegetable gardeners out there? What knowledge resources do you use? Any tips? What are your favorite seed and plant sources? I've spend hours and hours researching on the internet, but I would love recommendations for books and websites you find particularly helpful. (Keep in mind, I've had to google things like "how to plant a seed.") Please email me or, even better, post in the comments so others can benefit too!

DINING ROOM FLOORING

The weekend brought both good news and bad news. As the sad part of the story goes, Johnnie and I were supposed to be in Florida over the weekend on a five-day, girls-only vacation with my mom. On Thursday, the night before our flight was to take off, mom called and said she had a fever of 103 and the trip had to be postponed. It was a triple bummer because a) my mama had the flu, b) our trip got canceled AND c) Ez's surprise weekend project -- installing the dining room flooring while we were gone -- was no longer going to be very surprising since we'd be home to watch it happening.

But the good news: hello, dining room floor! When you last saw our dining room (above), it was ceilingless, dirty and had its own flooring piled up in the middle of the room. Not cute. It was an improvement from its original state, but still so far away from being usable. Now we're another step closer.

Johnnie was happy to supervise Ez and his childhood buddy Chris while they worked and to test out the first couple boards for us. (Please pardon, as usual, the low quality iPhone photos.) Honestly, being the lazy renovation blogger that I am, I don't know what kind of underlayment/moisture barrier they used. It is obviously very red and has little pieces of Styrofoam in it for cushioning. It's probably not very earth-friendly and I'm sorry about that. If anyone is curious about what it is exactly, I can look it up.

For the flooring, we're using tongue-and-groove pine (yes pine) that was milled by an Amish guy my dad knows. We have used pre-finished hardwood flooring in other (newer) parts of the house, and it looks too shiny and new to go with the more rustic feel of this room. We actually wanted something that will show some wear over time. These were also the widest plank boards we've installed yet, and they went down amazingly fast. (Pneumatic flooring nailer for the win!) It would've taken us days to lay this much flooring using the short, two-inch-wide maple boards we used upstairs. 

So now we have a giant wood box for a dining room. Wood, wood and more wood. The plan is to stain and seal the floor and paint the wood planked walls and ceiling to tone down the wood a bit. I mean, I want it to be understood that it's wood, but maybe have it be not so overtly woody on every surface. This isn't Texas Roadhouse. Also the ceilings really are as low as they look. That's the reality of old houses, so there wasn't much that could be done. (Except try not to jump up and down with joy too vigorously when the floors were installed, so I didn't hit my head.)

After my emotional outpouring last week, I don't have a lot of words left to say about this except it is SO NICE to see such a big project (as in, surface area) get checked off the list. It feels big. It still needs to be stained and sealed, but at the same time it still feels like it deserves a big check mark to honor the forward progress, don't you think?

EMBRACING THE UGLY AND LETTING IT GO

The other day the husband and I had a little bit of a heart-to-heart about the house. There were tears afterward (on my end) because it meant coming to grips with how unhappy we are in this house, for various reasons. After four and a half years, we still don't feel like this place is our home. Many, many things have gone wrong along the way. I've had to make many compromises and watch as some of my favorite features of the house -- the wide plank floors, the kitchen fireplace, etcetera, etcetera -- had to be destroyed or replaced due to structural problems. It sucks up our money, our time, our energy. It's never, ever clean despite my constant efforts. Working on our house has gotten in the way of making and maintaining friendships, enjoying our hobbies and just hanging out as a family.

Though I am genuinely thankful that I have a roof over my head and running water, I hate that we've become slaves to this place. All we see now are the mistakes and poor decisions we've made, and the endless work we still have before us -- and that's not what "home" should feel like. Plus all that negativity is just not healthy mentally, emotionally, spiritually or physically. I don't even like writing about it, but I feel blogs like mine often lack transparency about the difficulties and the un-pretty things that happen beyond the edges of a carefully framed photograph.

What prompted this conversation was some bad news about our garage. The garage is at the bottom of a slope and surrounded by trees, and every time it rains we basically get a mudslide directly into the garage. Ez met with a guy who clears and grades land to get an estimate about fixing the drainage problems. After looking around and scoping it out, his recommendation to us was to knock it down and let it go.

Despite how it looks on the outside, the garage has a sturdy structure and a really nice metal roof. It just needed new insulation, sheathing and siding. Not exactly a weekend project, but nothing we couldn't handle. But because the previous owner built the garage at the bottom of a slope so close to the trees, there are giant root balls under the cement slab. In addition to likely compromising the structure over time, they will make it extremely difficult to dig proper drainage channels. It can be done, but not without lots and lots of work -- i.e. lots and lots of money. In the end, the garage will be worth less to a future buyer than what it will cost to fix it up.

Let it go. That was a tough blow, but it wasn't just that. After seeing my husband's weary frustration beginning to show, the bulldozer guy took off his hard hat and got personal. He said he understood what we're going through. He and his wife bought an old house when they were young, tore it apart and worked for many years to put it back together again. They never felt settled; whenever they tried to relax, all the unfinished projects loomed over them. When they finally finished it, they sold it and bought a modular home from a builder -- the kind where you pick out the finishes from a catalog and they deliver it on your property in three pieces and put it together for you. He said letting go of their house and moving into something completely void of thought or the memory of toil was the best decision they ever made.

Let it go. It didn't take much talking for Ez and I to agree we should no longer view this house as our "forever" home. And, as painful as it is, it felt good to admit that. Of course we can't sell any time soon since there's so much work left to do, but having that option in front of us, even a few years away, was liberating. It gave us leave to give up on turning this disaster into our dream home and instead to just finish it. Whether anyone will ever want to buy it is a worry I try not to entertain; what the housing market will look like in five years is anyone's guess, so I want to choose to have faith that it will be okay. And I know that it will.

In the meantime, we are pressing forward. With Johnnie as my shadow it's hard for me to help Ez with the bigger projects he has in the queue, but I'm determined to start working on the smaller things that will make it more comfortable around here -- things I've been putting off because we have so many bigger fish to fry. Things like installing those freaking cabinet knobs in the kitchen already(!)... hanging pictures... organizing the kitchen for real... planting vegetables, trees and flowers... These things I've neglected have just made it all worse. While in some ways I think taking care of these little details will be like putting lipstick on a pig, in other ways I think it will make a big difference in how we feel in the house. It's worth a shot and I'm looking forward to it. So I don't know what the long-term future holds for us and this house I call Thirtyeight20, but I'm so ready to let it go. Whether that amounts to a change of address or just a change of perspective, it's time to stop letting it get to us.

PS - I'm really sorry if this post sounds whiny and ungrateful for how blessed I really am in this life. I'm just trying to be real about the kind of toll a project like this can take... and it's not as pretty as Pinterest might lead you to believe! xo