A Million Words

I have been scouring the internet for advice on how to clean untreated wood, and I've come up dry. I found articles about cleaning wooden furniture, routine cleaning of wood floors (almost all of which have some kind of finish), and washing outdoor decks. None of them seemed suited to my problem -- an untreated, semi-post-and-beam ceiling with about 40 years worth of woodsmoke, pollen, and general household dust built up on its surface. Last fall, I washed it with a wood cleaner, diluted in water and mixed with bleach as directed on the bottle. I slopped it on with a rag, scrubbed it with a stiff plastic scrub brush, and wiped it down with another damp rag. It looked a bit cleaner, but it wasn't significantly brighter, and now, after a winter of construction dust, you can't tell the difference. I read that oxygen bleach is the active ingredient in most wood cleaners, so I decided to try an experiment. I found some of my sister-in-law's oxygen bleach near the laundry ...

I haven't been posting much lately, and don't have much excuse, but I'm logging on today to report that there is visible progress in our house renovation -- the floors are in (mostly): In addition, we spent the entire day Wednesday on an expedition to Ikea to pick up the kitchen cabinets, which are piled in the basement, waiting for the plumbing, wiring, insulation, drywall, and painting to be done.

So, we have moved back to the Vineyard, back to my parents' house, and are renovating the house that I grew up in, summers, and lived in for a few years here and there in my earlier adulthood. It's all on one big lot. My parents built the original house in 1971-'72, but in the mid-90s, they decided it just wasn't big enough to serve as their primary residence... especially since it had (horror of horrors) only one bathroom . So they built this house, which is about two or three times the size of the old one, and has three and a half baths. The two houses share roughly five acres, most of it covered in scrubby oak and pine. People have always said to me that they think this is a beautiful part of the island, but I've never been enthusiastic about the landscape immediately surrounding our house. I find it dull and a bit closed in. The trees loom over the house, making it feel dark except when the late-afternoon sun hits its more open northwest side. In hopes of remed...

When I was about Nova's age, my parents built a house in the woods. We lived there summers and weekends while I was growing up, and later, when we moved further away, other people rented it in the winter. The place has housed quite a menagerie over the years, and it's held up OK, but decades of wear and tear and sweating slate floors have left it almost uninhabitable. When I arrived home in late July, the house smelled of mold and abandonment, so much so that it was difficult to breathe inside. Some of the mold was the result of recent water damage, but it had been growing over the years, especially during winters when the house was unoccupied. In any case, the work was already well underway. In the photo bellow, you can see the new dormer: In the former upstairs, there were three small bedrooms, a nice library nook, and a virtually windowless storage nook. The dormer creates a whole bunch more space in two of those bedrooms, and gives them closets. My parents also wanted ...

We arrived in the US two weeks ago today, after several exhausting weeks. During our final two and a half weeks in Ireland, we visited London, packed up the apartment, and tried to keep up with the normal round of daily activities. Meanwhile, I wrapped up the rough draft of the Regency romance I'm working on and battled one of the most exhausting head colds I've ever had.  Nova sprouted her final eye tooth during a whirlwind trip to Edinburgh to visit a friend, and started putting words together.  Mike sorted through his entire collection of games and books, and shuffled everything over to his father's new attic.  Our final day in Ireland was spent cleaning the apartment and dealing with our landlord. He had seemed like a decent enough landlord up until that point, but he walked in that afternoon affecting a "very angry" mood and roaring that the place was "very dirty" (it was a hell of a lot cleaner than it had been when we moved in), and making up spur...