Take a look...

...this could soon be gone.
I know, there's nothing "Wow" about a plain white room with no pictures or fancy pillows, but believe me it's a big improvement. (See: "This wallpaper exploits women", Aug. 15.)
I spent the tag end of the good weather clearing, stripping wallpaper, repairing plaster, painting, stripping woodwork and installing new light to get us a real bedroom. Now, if we follow through on plans to DO SOMETHING about this cold, run-down pile, 10 years of DIY will be ripped out. Or the house will be sold, then it will all be ripped out. I'm okay with that.
Today I went to meet with a designer who specializes in strata conversions - turning houses like this into multi-unit buildings. Award-winning. One of his recent houses is going to be in Architectural Digest. After all these years of imagining what could be, and often being told it was nonsense, it was amazing to watch this man place a tracing paper over the original house plans and draw exactly the side-by-side duplex split I had in mind. All the challenges and questions about parking, sloping floors, excavating the crawl space, creating new entrance doors...all had workable answers. The cost estimates were lower than I had guessed - that never happens! I was told this house is a rare thing, a gold mine. A big house on a big lot with great "setbacks". If we decided to sell, not renovate, he said the developers would have a bidding war over it.
I left feeling like I was in a dream. Perhaps I was. I don't think anyone here is going to believe what I was told in there.

Escape from Fallingdowne

You ask how it got that name? Well, okay, you didn't. But it's a nod to Frank Lloyd Wright and his house, Fallingwater, and another kind of gesture to that very Victoria penchant for attaching pretentious vowels to names, like Ocean Pointe.

It's not falling down any more, since we lifted the back end of the house and replaced the buckled foundation a few years ago, but it still has a pronounced lean to it. And now at last we might be able to do something about that.

We've agreed we've spent enough cold drafty winters in this ramshackle place. I've wrecked my joints and my lungs stripping and sanding and replastering and painting as many surfaces as I can get to in my spare time. And stopgap repairs by electricians, plumbers etc. just don't fix what's deeply screwed up and broken about this house.

So we're investigation the options, which seem to be: A full update and renovation - replumbed, rewired, new windows, new roof, insulation, new kitchen and bathrooms, everything (and level floors, please); converting the house into a side-by-side duplex and selling off one of the strata units to pay for the work; or selling and finding a new place that is warm, up-to-date and where all the lights work.

Oh Inez

Inez is back on the market. The house near the Gorge on Inez St., that is. Looks like the sale collapsed. Now I will be tortured anew with thoughts of how it could be transformed. Here are some of the really icky pictures I didn't show before.

Getting wired on Friday night

Presenting The Light Fixture From the Dump:



Rewired, refinished and with nice new antique-reproduction shades. It's another one of my expensive bargains, but unlike many of those, it's definitely not junk anymore.

No more euphorbia euphoria

The last two days I've been trying to get the garden under control here at Fallingdowne. The weeds are rampant, particularly the couch grass (is that how you spell it?) that invades everywhere and defies weeding and smothering. I'm clearing great swathes of fussy things that are hard to weed around, and will try to smother it once again. Almost 49, and I'm warming to the idea of "low-maintenance" gardening at last.

For a while I had a bit of a mania for euphorbias, with their weird colours and big billowing stems and otherworldly flowers. But I've decided to rid the garden of plants that maim and disfigure, and these are the worst offenders. I have several lasting scars where the sap of these plants has burned my skin. I will keep a couple; the "chameleon" with its early spring show of bronzy purple, and the giant in the back yard, partly because it's too big and scary to take on right now.

This wallpaper exploits women

So the fancy new bed frame required a new mattress and box spring. And the bedroom was too awful to even let the delivery guys see it, so it was time after 10 years of squalor to clear it out and fix it up. Scrape off the despised textured ceiling, remove the crooked picture rails, wash off the residue left on the walls by the old oil furnace. And wallpaper removal: Who knew that two layers below the beige stripes on our wall lurked scores of naked young women?

Oh yeah, the dump

A lot of catching up to do on the blogging, obviously. Here's the light fixture I found on the latest trip to the dump. I took it to Water Glass Studio to get rewired and refinished in an "antique brass" colour. So it is no longer free, in fact it's damned expensive. But probably $150 less than buying one of their ready-mades, which are beautiful.
I'll add a photo when it's finished.

Call me Miss Tint

I love the difference you can make with a couple of cans of mistinted stain from the bargain shelf at Home Hardware. Okay, the colours aren't the very best (blue-ish grey and "black spruce", which is definitely brackish greenish.) But it beats flaking fake-cedar-orange.
The deck in Fernwood was in serious need of attention. It's not the most stylish deck, and probably has only a few years left before major repair or replacement, but a good pressure washing and a couple of coats of stain will help extend its life and make it look a bit less godawful. It was a good way to spend a very hot day while thinking about whether we could really take on another derelict house project at this very moment.

A really good (bad) one

Checked out this little house by the Gorge this week. It would have been an ideal project: Loads of charm, and filthy enough to keep the competition and the price low-ish. Vacant for a couple of years, we were told. Needed a lot of work (a bathroom, for one thing), but room in the basement for a nice suite. Cobwebs so thick they hung like mesh curtains in some of the rooms. Much speculation by Morley and me about the source of the stains on the ceilings.
Alas, must take a pass on this one. It's perfect, but the timing is wrong for us at this moment.

Good night little house

Hard to imagine I haven't back to the little house. On closing day I mowed the lawn one last time, added more cardboard under the mulch where weeds were coming through, planed and hung the closet door (ran out of time, so the new owner has a bit more planing to do), put a second coat of trim paint on three windows. Dug a couple of dozen potatoes from the garden to bring home. Then off to work, no ceremony or celebration.

Handed over the extra keys yesterday and got the cheque from the lawyer's.

Took it to the bank ("you can take this to the bank" as they say) but couldn't
deposit it - ooops, needed both our signatures, and a week's hold on the funds. How come whenever I have to provide a cheque for this stuff it has to be certified or a bank draft, but we get paid with the crappy kind?

Anyway, it was great to receive congratulations from the circle of women there who helped make it happen - they figured out ways to get the financing for an amateur who usually doesn't have enough loose cash to buy lunch, let alone a house in need of a major cash infusion.
There is one woman in particular who has a kind of brilliant and creative approach to financing. She showed me possibilities and strategies I could not have figured out myself. Some time back she had been off work for awhile, for health reasons. I have been so grateful for her support.

I found myself uttering to her some observation about how this project went pretty well "according to plan."

Then on my bike ride in to work I couldn't help feeling stupid and smug, for saying such a thing when so many things in her life and the lives of other people I know and care about are so clearly not going according to plan.

Return to Fallingdowne

This is what I've been missing these weeks and months of rushed renos at the other house. It's so nice to just sit and look.

Sold

Didn't need the rugs after all. The new owner didn't see them before putting in his offer, but now I have more floor coverings for the pets to pee on at home.
Still need to complete many smaller tasks around the house and yard: Finish taping the plastic in the crawl space, caulking, painting and keeping the plants alive. It would also be nice to spend a bit of time just being there before turning over the keys on July 24th.

Change of scenery

Steve and Wynne's tree in it's new home. So far the leaves aren't shrivelling up.

The Anti-Austerity Program

Open House number three today. There's an accepted offer on the place, but it is conditional on this and that, so we have to keep up appearances...

Rob took his sofa, box spring and mattress with him so there was much scrambling this morning to find approximations of living room and bedroom furniture.

Haig and Ann loaned me their inflatable mattress, which has a slow leak, but held out for the two-hours. I dragged my formerly beloved and mistreated Art Deco armchairs out of the basement and screwed the loose pieces back on.

Vallee, who lives across the street had offered a painful assessment of the house a few days ago, when there had been no offers after a week and a bit. "Austere" was the gist of it. Too white, too bare, needs rugs, light the fireplace and candles, do some seduction. When the neighbor is an interior designer, I figure it's probably a good idea to listen.

So I went a bit rug-crazy. One from the rug store, two from the auction, one from a thrift shop, and I even brought over our living room rug. Vallee gave me the pretty candlesticks.

The result: lots of compliments at the open house and a couple of people very interested, I'm told. Will there be any more offers? Will it matter? Who knows? What do you think?

Why I love the dump and I don't care who knows it

Where else could you find a fabulous antique display cabinet like this, for free. Or slightly damaged tin ceiling tiles that will make great picture or mirror frames someday? Or a beautiful wool hall runner. Okay, the cabinet needs some work, and a place indoors really soon. But it was irresistible. Like the little derelict house. Is there a pattern here?

Moving violation

Here's Johnny and Debbie's Tree Service. Wynne and Steve next door offered us this beautiful weeping tree which had outgrown its space. It took a long time to dig up, and it was heavy. With tarps and rope and an old wooden wagon we got it to the car but this was the only way it would fit. We drove very carefully to the little house to avoid coppers and inadvertent pruning of branches or pedestrians' heads.

It looks stunning it its new spot. Pix to come.

Roll the credits

People always ask if I do all the work on the house myself. Noooooo...not even close.
So it's time to recognize the people who did all the actual skilled work and fixed all the stuff I screwed up:


Rochelle Relyea: Pardon the lousy photo. Here's a better one:





International model-turned renovator (Maybe you've seen her on the cover of Elle. Really.) A great eye for design and cost-effective problem-solving. Her time is in high demand so I was fortunate to get some of it on very short notice.

Joe Penney: Lucky thing that Sara passed Joe's name along. He seems to know how to do everything, well. Installed windows, cabinets, flooring, doors and more. I don't think I could have completed this project without his help.

Canstar electric; John, Bill and Evan: Fast, John had great ideas for lighting and wiring options. Bill is very funny but can be hard to understand when he speaks English. Evan's a lovely young guy who seemed to spend a lot of time crawling in the crawl space.

David's Plumbing Service: Which is really Bob and Wayne. Why do plumbing companies always seem to have names that bear no relation to the plumbers themselves?

Kathryn Mulders: Nice job tiling the kitchen backsplash and shower surround.

There have been other great helpers, but I didn't want anyone to think I deserve the credit for all this work.

Before n' after

I had hoped Madeline would bring home the bacon in the office lottery pool so we wouldn't have to sell. But no luck, or not enough of it, anyway. So the sign is on the lawn, and people are tramping through, pronouncing it "too small" or saying they don't like crawl-space houses.
Funny how the houses in your price range are never what you're really looking for, whatever your price range is.

garage sale leftovers

Passed up this cute bed frame at a garage sale a couple of weeks ago, but lucky for me, so did everyone else. It was still there, waiting for me on the lawn, when I realized I needed something for the front room.

Myrtle

I heard someone calling me beyond the back fence and when I went over Myrtle introduced herself. She had been waiting to present me with a rose bush she had started for me. A welcoming present. She was disappointed to learn that I was not going to stay.
Myrtle's house is surrounded by terraced gardens. Vegetables in the corner nearest the fence line, lilacs and vines and her darling roses.
She thinks the one she gave me is called "American Peace". The flower is a lovely clear pink. I felt guilty and apologized repeatedly for failing to move in to the place, but I'm expecting the next owners will be the staying kind.

Here it is....

http://samsar.qti.net/vrebEpic/mldetail1.asp?ID=2ec4hn7&agcode=1713

Never done

It's almost ready but so many small details are nagging. Sanding and painting touch-ups. Installing bathroom towel bars, getting the pea gravel and bark mulch out of the driveway and into their places. Plants into the ground. Install the new garage window. Install new doorknobs. Caulking. Another coat of paint on the fireplace bricks. Hang mirror and pictures, bring furniture. Clean. Clean. Clean. It's probably good that it's not quite listed yet - maybe later today?

Meanwhile things are breaking down and disappearing. Losing the cellphone is a sure sign that things are reaching stress meltdown point. Both lawnmowers have cacked out; well, the newer one is making mysterious rattling noises and the other just quit. The computer went on the fritz. Even my watch has stopped keeping correct time. I've been too rushed and busy to deal with any of this. Haven't even had time to put down the paintbrush or shovel and take pictures. So I'll post some "not-quite-after" photos of the back door project and Bindweed Alley (or is it Allee?) without the "befores." You'll have to take my word that it was really really bad before.