The Authoring of One’s House
I think I’ve technically been remodeling since… September?
You know… Right after we moved in to our new home and out of our… 7 week stay in the Casa de Comfort Suites or some other bullshit monicker about what a great stay a 2-room “Suite” is for 2.5 people and 2 cats and 40 computers.
I’ve been really, truly hustling it all lately–I’m teaching my second class this semester that starts on Wednesday. It’s in Web Design, which I find misleading, but that’s another post altogether. I’d never taught the Flash ActionScript course before, so it led to a lot of scrambling from Thursday to Wednesday to get my knowledge together for the upcoming class.
Inbetween those harried times, I’ve tried to keep a rigorous schedule of shooting at the Gun Club, “hanging out” with my neighbors, being a father and a husband.
Oh, yeah. And remodeling the house.
There’s been an on-going joke(?) with us–Nicolle said that once we had a house with more room, we could have another kid. Now that we’ve got said house, we really don’t have more room because the basement is entirely unfinished.
Which is fine; I kind of enjoy having my office on the 2nd floor, next to Sydney’s room and the street so I can pretty easily know what the hell’s going on and respond to my daddy duties quickly.
But that also means that my office cannot be a bedroom for another baby.
And at the same time, with new home cometh new mortgage and new desires–that means a bunch of new things like furniture, window treatments, tools, mowers, trees and a never-ending list of other stuff.
Be careful what you wish for, right?
Right.
So now, we’re waiting on the ground to defrost enough so that the landscaper guy can come in and put a paver brick patio under our deck. Our deck is something like 12′ x 45′. Yes, 12 feet by 45 feet. It is ginormous and I’ve had smaller apartments and I love love LOVE this monstrosity.
But underneath it, we have a large space that basically looked like a lot of dead sod at the end of last year. When you’ve got an apartment-deck, you tend to block all life-sustaining sunlight from the ol’ flora and fauna down there.
Enter big-ass paver brick patio, complete with firepit, under a deck that’s going to have lots of sound and lighting and such.
Well, a little.
I’m running enough electrical and dimmer lights for underneath, as well as a couple of motion sensors for the outer yard. I’m also running an outlet that will have cat6, cable and RCA inputs so that anyone can wheel out a television for a game, plug-in for non-wireless access to the ol’ network and plug-in their iPod or iPod-like device to pump through the sound system, in the event that they choose not to utilize those touchscreen jukeboxes that I’m building.
Yes, I’m a nerd.
I truly am.
Genuinely.
And loving it.
Well, as soon as I get back from returning this shower that’s too small to fit into my bathroom that wouldn’t give you enough troom to cop a squat if I tried to drop it in place.
The more I think about it, the more I think that I truly would not be happy if I didn’t have all this crap to do.
Guess I’m mostly happy these days.
Cool.