DIY?

Since last I blogged, Guyago and I bought a house, moved to the burbs, and got married. The house was built in 1891.

Our house was a hundred years before I celebrated my sixteenth birthday. Here are some fascinating things that happened the year our house was built:

The “Music Hall in New York” – now known as Carnegie Hall – had its grand opening and first public performance, with *Tchaikovsky* as guest conductor.

The first ever long-distance transmission of alternating current happened in June near Telluride, CO.

France and Russia concluded a defensive alliance. France. And Russia.

Stanford University opened its doors.

Basketball was invented.

Some important and seemingly long time ago people were born that year: the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, Zora Neale Hurston, Cole Porter, and Henry Miller.

Other important people died that year. William Tecumseh Sherman, Georges Seurat, P.T. Barnum, and Herman Melville.

I like to think about what an interesting time it must have been for the people who were building their new home that year. Building it on a quiet, leafy street where, six scores later, I would be sitting in their kitchen, streaming Pandora, typing away on my Mac book and updating my blog.

The house has its grace and its beauty and it has its pains in the ass. For instance, the front of the house was originally a porch. At some point, and I’m guessing that to be around 1920, one of the previous owners enclosed it and made it a gorgeous, large sun room, lined with windows on 3 sides and the front door on the fourth. I totally get why they did that… they took space you can’t claim on a real estate listing and turned it into prime square footage. But, I don’t think I’ll ever understand what could have prompted those folks to put the front door on the back side of the room, facing not the street but the back yard… That’s one of the pains in the ass. I’d like to put pumpkins out on my door steps on Halloween, or decorate my door with a cheery Christmas wreath at the holidays. But…. why? No one sees it. However, it is awesome when you get a fed ex delivery.

Another, more important pain in the ass is the 1,000,000 projects we have to do to update or to correct or to make sane various areas of the house. Don’t get me wrong – the house was move-in-ready when we bought it. There is structurally nothing wrong with it and it is a good looking house. However, little things. Like, the sliding glass door in the kitchen leads to… nothing. What begs for a deck is just a four foot drop to the patio. So, you add it to the check list. How about the absolutely disgusting 1960′s orange linoleum that lines the stairs to the cellar? Yep, add it to the list.

It’s Saturday night and guess what! Guyago’s in the basement cutting wood for the cabinet above the stove that we can’t yet use because it’s half filled with the range’s ventilation unit which is surrounded by gross pink insulation. So, at 8:15 on a perfectly good Saturday night, the poor sucker is downstairs, cutting wood to box it all in so I can put my spices on either side of it.

What am I doing? Well, I’m taking a small break between ripping old drawer lining out of all the kitchen drawers and replacing it with something that doesn’t include pale blue stripes and pink hearts. Later, I’m going to take photos of the weird room in the cellar just beneath the kitchen so we can determine what type of insulation we need to buy to replace whatever is down there now so our kitchen floor isn’t an ice sheet in the winter. And, I’m also about to go find the right drill bit to take the stair edging off the disgusting orange stairs so we can chip off the linoleum and replace it with faux wood stick on linoleum.

Did I mention we’re first time home owners? Sometimes, when we’re doing something like, oh, chipping away 75 year old plaster from the basement walls, I think, “We could be living in a condo in Bucktown…”  But, we’ve only been here a year and 4 months and we’ll be here for many more than that. I hope to use this blog, which chronicled my move to Chicago as a way to keep track of it all.

I leave you with some ugly orange linoleum:

Orange 1960′s linoleum! Possibly installed when the house was already 100 years old..

And after…!