At Sixes and Sevens

Life, as I have often explained to Jeeves, is just one d——ed thing after another. - Bertie Wooster, not William Barr

Well, we just passed the one year anniversary of our time here at Willow Greens Farm, and it seems both much longer and much shorter than twelve months.  We started with a flurry of activity (buckets of Farrow and Ball Card Room Green paint, falling trees, and trips to the hazardous waste collection site), and then fell into an endless abyss as the activation energy of these projects trundled their way toward something that looked like progress.  But the bubbles are coming to the surface of this mad cocktail of home improvement.

And while we spent January wishing something would happen, prodding recalcitrant contractors and comparing competing bids, April has us smack dab in the middle of more than we can handle:

A sense of completion. Mel’s ideas helped us create the ideal space for reading and listening to The Archers

The Bathroom

The bedrooms and makeshift bathroom in the original section of the house are ugly, bordering on nasty.  Updated in the 1980s with the same baby-shit yellow paint that adorned the downstairs, the upstairs also features vintage room air conditioners, some god-awful tile, and nary a right angle in sight.  While there is nothing we can do about the geometry, we can bring a designer’s eye to the space.  Enter Melanie Alport and her excellent mood boards.  We’ve known each other for years, we speak the same language and she knew the exact aesthetic we were seeking.  Her ideas had already helped us to transform the downstairs and we are busy sourcing furniture from the DC auction scene and making plans.  But first, this:

Trust me, this looks better than the old bathroom

The Arrival Court

The most extensive landscape project, to date, is the creation of a welcoming space in the front of the house.  As things stand, everybody—family, friends, visitors—enter through the side entrance.  We’d like to channel at least some of that traffic through the front door and take advantage of the long sweeping driveway.  After playing hide-and-seek with the septic tank, Daniel Robey created the “Arrival Court” concept which requires more than just stacking stones and laying gravel.  After all the grading and drainage work it will be brilliant, but today it looks like this:

The Arrival Court. I look at this and think, “Man, what I couldn’t do if I had my own concrete mixer.”

The Fencing

When we arrived fresh from the city we thought we would enclose the entire space in a dog-secure fence, giving current and future dogs free run of the property.  We soon realized this would be both impractical (the dogs would be so busy chasing squirrels, chipmunks, groundhogs, rabbits, and foxes that we would never get them inside) and extremely expensive (just try pricing materials these days.)  So we decided to enclose an area around the barn and raised beds to slow the deer and allow us some canine companionship while we garden.  And as I needed something to do to stay out of trouble, I took this on as a DIY project.  Again, it will be great, but right now it looks like this:

The tribulations of each of these projects deserves its own post, but for now it is mostly a collective sense of potential accomplishment, and a recurring feeling of dread that gets me up each morning (if you define awake in a cold sweat at 4:30am as “getting up each morning”). But who am I kidding, this is what I enjoy.

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NB. While researching a hand winch for the fence project, I came across one of those funny linguistic things that drives me nuts:  What is it with the American rural male’s propensity to add the word “little” as an adjective to everything, including things that are objectively not “little” at all.  “Yeah, he’s a good little bull.” Or “I love the heck out of this little truck.”  Now combine that with the fact that in fully one-half of the reviews for winches (in American vernacular, “come-alongs”),  the reviewer refers to them as “wenches”.  Then go for the trifecta of assigning a female gender to gender-neutral items (we’re speaking English, not French here) and you get the testimonial: “I really liked this tool, she’s a good little wench.”  C’mon man, you’re better than this.