The Household Means & Ways

The dumpster arrived this morning and the kitchen remodel kicks off this afternoon. It's been a tough week for us trying to narrow down what is left of our choices and has included an 11th hour addition and removal of work which I'll discuss in an upcoming post. The main take away this week has been living within our means in all ways: physically, emotionally, and monetarily.

This was a common phrase in my household growing up. It stemmed from money issues that everyone has and both my brother and I had eyes bigger than our stomachs and pockets. It was a hard lesson to learn and  it took years of bad debt for me to finally get the idea that living within my means was not just an old fashioned idea but a very prudent way of life.

I still have money issues to a much smaller degree than I did in my 20's. Budgeting is easy, sticking to the budget is hard especially when one is doing home renovations. In our household, Jeff is the breadwinner easily even when he's off work for months at a time and that makes budgeting for renovations a bit tricky as when he is home, we're doing remodeling but he's not working and when he's working he's not home so we're not making changes and cleaning things up -- it's a bit of a catch 22 really.

One of many 'dream homes' on Pinterest.

A harder thing still is keeping my idea of a dream house/kitchen/bath/etc in check. Pinterest was a huge help in putting together my ideas in a visual way that I could explain things to Jeff, but the downside is having these huge ideas and trying to fit them into the space we have with the money we've saved. It does me no good to lust after a garden design that requires acres of manicured space as that is not the home I have, nor is it likely that I will ever have that home. Same with kitchens. I can look at these gorgeous kitchens from magazines, but the reality of what my house is verses what I pin may be gulf sized in variance. 

Once I realized that I could actually live within my means and design a home space that was functional and reflected our tastes without being cheaply manufactured, or something I'd be bored with in a few years, the social desire of keeping up with the Jones' flat-lined. My goal is to finish this house, room by room, and leave it alone so that when we go to sell it in 30 years, it's fabulously outdated. I *want* to be the little old lady with the kitchen that is Soooo 2013, mainly because I want to love the space I have enough that its functionality permits me to make preserves and sweets for gifts, and lavish dinners for family and friends. I want that, those memories, more than I want the trends. It makes it much easier for us because we don't have a plan to move, or sell, for many decades barring something unforeseen. 

It's an unfortunate bummer that it took me decades to figure out why living within ones means and ability is so important.

The flip side to DIY is knowing when to fold them, as it were. Again, Pinterest has a bajillion and ten (I counted) DIY examples and a lot of them are really good... but. But. Some things should just be left to the professionals if one doesn't know what they're doing, has not used tools before, or really 'functional' means macaroni art. Which is not to degrade macaroni art whatsoever, but you might not want someone who touts that as their mechanical and artistic ability putting up wallpaper, right? We each have our skills and pitfalls. Knowing that we can't do everything is not a bad thing at all.

And so the big renovation begins. Tonight we'll pause with a bottle of mead, make offerings and really take a moment to appreciate each other for all the crazy and good points leading up to this moment.

Besides, you can't really go wrong starting out with mead, right?

This Kitchen Will Be The Death of Me

My post today had originally been something a bit more thoughtful on the whole how it is that I practice and perceive being Heathen.

Instead it's about the kitchen. Why the kitchen? Because the boyfriend and I are gearing up for quite possibly the biggest project we've ever undertaken together. We are taking this:

That right there? Some kind of Sexy. 

and trying to turn it into say, this: 

Gorgeous. Bright. WHITE. 

This of course poses multiple dilemmas. One, money. Two, time. Three, our kitchen is not from a magazine and is roughly the size of a large post stamp with eight, count them! eight egresses of some form or another. The stove cannot be moved to an outside wall, so there is no vent unless I do a recirculating vent (which has been the point of many a frosty argument between my darling dearest and I) The fridge really must be recessed otherwise it eats up a good eighth of our floor space. The sink is currently in the galley which is great when I want to ignore the dishes for a week (don't judge!) but if one is going for something resembling hygienic, perhaps it should be a bit more you know... in the way. Which interrupts every other design dream I had. 

The galley. Of Doom.

We have a few weeks if we are lucky of Jeff being home. We have the cabinets stored in our basement, an awesome craigslist score from February. We just have to you know, gut the two layers of sheet rock, plaster, lathe, and all that, rewire everything, put new sheet rock back up, and ... then we can put the cabinets in? Except that in between now and then, I am fussing over the semi-original design plan that looked like this: 

The pretty mock up the cabinet people did for us... and then wanted $14,000 to build the cabinets. Not the counters, not installed. Just.. cabinets. No. 

Which is lovely and mostly wonderful, and basically... turning the galley (to the far left of that picture) into a butlers pantry (say it with me now, ooooo!), putting a normal sized sink in the island with a dishwasher and just giving up on my absolute need/lust for a marble island, and ... trying to convince the boyfriend that we can put a small bar area in the galley. With a prep sink. Which when I mentioned, he actually looked like he might help me pack. 

The other thought was putting the sink to the counter area to the left of the main room (marked in red). Eventually the area to the right of that which is currently all brick from the main chimney no longer in use, that will all come out. So we could put in a bit more counter and cabinet. In like five years when we redo the roof and the chimney comes out from the third floor on down (The expression on Jeff's face while trying to explain to me WHY we can't take out the chimney only in the kitchen? Poor devil. Someone buy him a drink, will you?)

I forsee a long weekend of pencils, pizza, and alcohol while we hash this out. Gods help us. 

The Main Bathroom, or How We Knew We Were on the Right Track

Narrow, ugly, not functional. 

A very cold day in January we found ourselves in our new-to-us house with friends, sledgehammers, buckets, pry bars, and masks. We we going to begin the process of ripping out the yellow and blue tiled cave of a bathroom. We thought it would take a weekend to gut. We thought it would be dirty, but mostly easy work. After all, we have burly male friends who love to blow things up! How hard could it be?

That phrase -- "How hard could it be?" is every first time homeowner/DIY's first, and unlikely last, mistake. 

The house itself was built around 1902. It's a lovely, simple prairie box/four square design. Sears & Roebuck sold these houses back in its hay day for a few hundred dollars. It was an immediate success being that it was simple, easy to customize and modernize, and could look luxurious for a pittance of what the old Victorian houses cost. 

The haze of debris does not deter

Because our house was in such a bad state (read as uninhabitable), we needed to get a special loan (203k for those of you who are home-loan savvy) which meant we needed to have contractors lined up to do a lot of the major repairs as most banks do not really want your random homeowner doing the work for a lot of good and weird reasons. To save money on the loan, we worked it out with our contractors that we would do the demolition - get everything in the bathroom torn out down to the studs and cleaned up so that they could come in and redo all of the plumbing, the electrical, the wallboard, the new bathtub, and the tile. We were responsible for the hauling away of all the old materials and purchasing the fixtures. 

But before they could do their work, we had to do ours. There was plaster, horsehair, and lathe. Old cast iron pipes. And before we could even get to that we needed to get through the mortar and tile. At first, the guys thought this was AWESOME. I mean, here we were saying please, put holes in our walls.

Three hours later it was much, much less awesome.

By the following weekend, there was talk of setting explosives.

Three hours in and barely a dent. A lot of mess, but not a dent. 

Three inches of mortar on top of peaked joists. Hitting the walls with sledges barely cracked it. The overhead storage that made the bathroom such a cave did.not.want.to.come.down. We had men hanging from the rafters, we had men bracing themselves in bathtubs while trying to pull off the metal lathe, we had men throwing the 1930's cast iron built in (not claw footed) tub off my bedroom balcony into the yard below on Super Bowl Sunday.

In short, we had absolute chaos. And pizza.

Dear Clark, I'm going steady with Jim. Love, Pat 

In the midst all of this, we started to find clues to the personality of the people who lived there before us. An old playing card tucked in the wall. Newspapers from 1937 when a years subscription cost $9.00 used as filler for the ceramic soap dish. Our favorite, the literal Dear John letter that must have been stored in the attic and fallen into the bathroom ceiling - a letter from a woman who had decided to become an airline stewardess and date another man, dated 1958 in envious, looping script.

Binghamton Press, 1937.

While all this was going on, I was also scouring the craigslist ads for fixtures. We knew we wanted to keep the history of the house in mind when we added new details so I convinced (begged/pleaded) the boyfriend to purchase a gorgeous double ended claw foot bathtub, brand new. I found a pedestal sink, also new, for cheap on craigslist,and we got the faucet on sale. The light fixtures might be another story altogether but sufficed to say I do have a crystal chandelier in my bathroom and I do not regret it for a moment. Even if I have been mocked mercilessly by my loving peanut gallery.

The tile though, that proved to be a sticking point. When I thought about the bathroom, I wanted my baths to remind me of being in the warm waters in Corfu. The tile had to be just right -- matching my desire for a mini vacation and the history of the house -- white hex tile then. And we found it, not cheap, but from a small, local shop that had done work for my parents marble bathroom.

Horrible picture plus cat! 

Of course, once we had ordered it and paid the deposit I got cold feet which my boyfriend pointed out was quite possibly the worst time to feel like I had made a mistake as the money had been paid and there were emphatically no refunds. I fussed about it for a few days and finally gave up, telling myself it was floor tile and my life was not going to be made or broken by the size and color of my flooring.

That was the day the guys found that same exact tile in between the floor joists from the first version of the bathroom, small white hex tile perfectly matched to what we had purchased. I knew then that we were getting somewhere.

Even though the bathroom took the better part of a year to complete even after the contractors had done their job, I can safely say it was worth it. All the swearing with the measuring of the board and batten, my paint splatter that I had to scrub off later, my bitter disappointment with shower curtains and the complete lack of anyone understanding my vision and you know, having it on sale, all of it came together into a room that I love. There are still things that need touch-ups or finishing: the octopus stencil on the dresser, finding the right prints for the frames, a small shelf behind the shower for our soaps and things. All that being said, baths have never been quite this delicious.

house buying, home building

I took a hiatus from blogging and took refuge in my old livejournal account to get me through the last couple of years. A year and a half ago, we bought a new-to-us 103 year old house that was in dire need of repairs and that has had pretty much all of my attention. Our poor friends have humored our pretty constant barrage of "And then this happened! And This! And now we need to do this, this, this, and are you free next Thursday night because we need to rip out/repair/haul away something else?"

The scary picture. The steps alone were worth a pause. 

It has been exhausting, on all possible fronts.

But with the transition of the physical comes change here as well. I'm back to writing, working on improving my lackluster photography skills (you'll have to suffer through my awful shots for a bit longer, sorry!), and most importantly getting back into my craft and communion with my ancestors, spirit of place. Our home is a work in progress which is both frustrating and amazing. Over the course of the time we have worked on the house, we've grown closer -- both the boyfriend and myself, and us with this house.

As I posted forever ago, each place has a spirit. This genius loci is a guardian spirit, a feeling, a tickle in the back of one's mind that one is being watched even though no one is obviously there. Different cultures from the Romans to the Orient to the Americas all had versions of this spirit and always recognized that the spirit was powerful in that place, should be respected, and could be called upon for guidance and favors. Offerings would be left, prayers said, and communion was constant though not necessarily highly ritualized as we modern pagans like to be. These practices, these artful leavings, have been largely forgotten in the hubbub of what our world currently is, but much can be gained from the simple communion with that place that is Home.

The dogs exploring the disaster that is the kitchen. 

In our home, we were aware of the Spirit the first time we walked in. The house felt - for lack of better word - forlorn. Even if you subscribe to less hooky explanations, the whole house was in obvious disrepair and neglect. The previous owners had run into some super bad personal life messes which led to not being able to make the mortgage, let alone repairs, and eventually this led to busted water pipes, a kitchen that hadn't been updated in decades, old wall paper and plaster peeling off the walls due to other water damage from the roof, and grime inches thick in some places, and that was just to start. Some of it was just poor handy work, impatience run rampant, and lack of training or know how.

But because we are who we are, because we worship the way we do, we listened to the house. A lot. When we started ripping out the battered and mostly missing drop ceiling in the basement, we talked to the house. We said out loud everything we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it. Even before we bought the house - which was a saga in of itself - we were in the house several times and each time we whispered how much we wanted to work with her.

In the end, it was those whispers and our super awesome Realtor (who thought we were crazy but totally worked her own awesome magic) that finally got it and us on the right track.

And while we have reached a fair accommodation with the house, and the spirit, I still make offerings of incense mainly, or sometimes cut flowers, sometimes honey, at our main fireplace. I tell her frequently how much I love her and how happy we are to be there, sharing these moments with her and stories of her. We uncover bits and bobs of her history when we tear down the walls and gingerly recreate the what might have happeneds and hope that we are just part of the middle, that with our work and patience she will out live us by another hundred years.

The door knocker. How can you not  fall in love with this? 

So upcoming posts will focus on what we found when we found our house and how we've managed to make it our home. There will be a lot of DIY crazy, hopefully some decent photos, and some musings on the spirits we've encountered.

Nature 2, Eithne 0

If things had gone according to plan, I would be getting ready to put four less-adorable but by no means less awesome chickens into their new home this weekend. I would have had a sturdy coop built, complete with a run. I would have pictures of how awesome this coop was, how it blended in with the neighborhood, how safe it was from our natural urban predators of ally cats and chicken hawks. I would be regaling my neighbors with how awesome chicken poop is for the garden and teasing them with promises of fresh eggs.

The plans I paid for. Do you see how serene everyone looks?  I was going for serene. And chicken poop.

If things had gone according to plan that is.

Things did not go according to plan.

The arrival of the chickens went as smoothly as could be expected. We had issues with temperature control once I got the peeping balls of adorableness back to my house. Within two days I had lost the first Australorp. As near as we can tell the stress of the two moves was too much for her and it did her in, despite my trying to nurse her by dipping her beak into sugar water. I should have known when she stopped protesting my picking her up that it was not going to end well.

The Four before All The Bad happened

So then there were three: An Australorp, a silver laced Wyandotte, and a gold laced Wyandotte. Three birds is an acceptable city flock; our city says we can have up to four in town so long as there are no roosters. Things were going mostly well - they were messy and loud and were absolutely determined to kick their poo into their feeding bowl - but they were otherwise adorable. I had read up on intermingling my dogs with the chickens and was determined to get everyone working together. I even thought I was on the right track when Brody, our youngest dog (aussie shepherd/shar pei mix) defended the chickens from the then-foster cat Henry.

My dainty Australorp

One by one I would handle the chicks and let the dogs sit with me, getting close enough to sniff and lick if necessary. Brody was absolutely gentle, curious, and made the very funny move of dropping one of his fluffy toys into the bird crate one afternoon - his way of saying hey, lets play! Henry, the then-foster cat, would sit by the door to the room the birds were kept in with the intense expression of trying to make sure I understood he really just wanted to watch the birds at our neighbors feeder across the street. Really. Promise.

And then Skye.

My fluffy hunter to the left and a blurry Brody to the right

You see, we have had experience with Skye and chickens before. Our friend Ravyn had chickens at our last apartment and one very terrible afternoon the dogs went outside while the birds were also outside. The result was Brody trying to play by running through the middle and sending birds flying every which way and Skye doing exactly what her breed mix does best: going in for the kill. The short version is Ravyn had a very injured Guinea fowl and I had a hell of a time trying to figure out how to get the dogs to leave the birds alone.  I thought that *this* time, if I raised the chickens by hand and around the dogs, nurture would win out. Or even fear of me would win over Skye's natural instinct.

End result: Nature 2, Nurture 0

I came home to find the only trace of the silver bird was three feathers, two of which had been broken. Nothing else and this despite a crate lined in bird netting and wire - somehow it had managed to get out or Skye had managed to ... well. Pull it out. All this coupled with her sheepish look and slinking away from me anytime I went near the birds gave me the final clue in from the universe: She would hunt them. Period. This would not be a restful experience of going out and collecting their eggs for breakfast while the birds roamed the yard and Skye rested in the shade of a tree. A Disney movie my life is not.

The remaining birds were trucked back up to Ravyn's to be re-introduced to the rest of the flock from the same hatching. I couldn't in good conscience keep them knowing full well that they would be happy meals with wings for my fluffy hunter. I would resent Skye which ... was not at all part of the plan. She is a gorgeous, protective, sweetheart of a dog. If it's her or chickens, well. We keep her.

Before!

After! and still no coop!

So now there is no chicken coop of awesome. No chickens. My backyard is still pretty dismal despite the excessive labor of removing the tree, the old play shed, and straightening out our fence line. I'm told next year we might get a jacuzzi which might be enough to assuage my guilt of not having a urban farm... so long as there is wine and starlight with which to enjoy the bubbly joy with. Next year.

This year is no chickens and ... a kitchen remodel. Er. Gutting. Gutting first. But that will be a post for later.



If you're interested in all things chicken and where my little darlings went, check out The Ladies facebook page, aka. the most spoiled hens ever. Ravyn posts pictures and funny moments from all the critters in her household. 

Spirit of Place

In a previous post, I mentioned the idea that all spaces have and hold memories - memories that include ourselves as well as the before and after us. 

I'm not sure exactly what it is that makes a place sacred. Is it intention? Ritual done again and again? Is it that the place itself is sacred and we stumble into it with spirits thirsty for connection? Or is it as some of my peers have suggested and really, all space is sacred, we just see some places as a little more sacred than others? 

Even as a child, I would feel a difference between places - the quiet of a thicket of young pines had a very different feel to it than the deeper parts of the wood behind my home. The small white church that we traveled to infrequently felt quieter than the larger churches I would love later, and the sense of sacred would feel the most potent to me in the candle lit quiet, hours before others would show up for the midnight mass on Christmas Eve. It was in that quiet that I could feel what I believe now the Spirit of that space singing. 

The places that I found in my travels felt very potent. In Ireland, I found a moss covered rock that I would scramble to and sit on, pausing to breathe and try to listen to the land around me that was constantly humming and thrumming, and yet so much quieter than the home I had left. The tree was both my guide to the rock and what I used to meditate, focusing on the way the light transitioned through branch and leave to the glittering stream. I often left offerings in the trees on the bank and before I left the last time, gifts of lavender, breads, and words adorned the crooks and crannies of the trees on the bank and on my favorite rock. 

Just as these spirits live and infuse the lands around us, the spirit of a home is a very real creature. House wights, brownies, the helpful ones, Lares, Tomte - there is no shortage of stories surrounding these spirits and I never lacked for places where Spirit was in abundance. Even in the newer homes, built from hand and love and with tears as well as joy, those homes were already Present and full with their own personality. When cared for, they rang with laughter and when neglected, things would go missing. Land of course had its own song and the songs varied from Soldiers rock (further down the stream from my rock) and Bantry Bay, to the Burren further north. The songs were as beautiful and haunting and old as the Spirit that moved through each space - home or land or sea. 

I have never found it easy to work with the spirit of my home, in any home. My childhood home was not a particularly pleasant place and I was depressed to discover that after it had burned to the ground it was rebuilt with a new family making the mistakes I remembered being made from my own family. It occurred to me on more than one occasion that perhaps not even flame could clear out those hauntings and that the spirit there needed something else. In homes following I would attempt to connect to a place but feel adrift, later realizing that I wasn't listening to the place but instead trying to impose me and all my me-ness on it. Older now though not necessarily wiser, I try to listen more and leave offerings rather than ... impose and request. 

I think perhaps that the mountains and streams in my wanderings taught me something of patience and of being open. Those same mountains and streams have seen many of us wander through, leaving our mementos and footprints to be washed away and still they remain.  

Memories and Meatloaf

Food is a curious thing. My first memories of food are fleeting, full of the foot stomping and whining about what I didn't like (lima beans, kidney beans, wax beans, beans in general, tomato soup, fish, soup in general, the list was extensive) and the smells from the kitchen of the things I did love: pastas, roast beasts, cookies - this list really was more extensive than the dislikes.

My relationship with food is in some ways a story of my relationship with my family. Memories of my fathers mother, Margaret - or as she was known to us on better days, Nonie - are often unpleasant (such is the joy of alcoholism) but the few memories I have of her that are good I keep close. 

Nonie was the kind of cook who was more battle-proven in the kitchen than she was neat. Every pot and pan, every spoon (every spoon), all the little tea towels and pot holders would be used in the process of making one pot of homemade spaghetti sauce. Splatters coated the cabinets and counters, cooking on to the stove top while the day long simmering went on. She was a walking disaster, but her sauce was pretty damn good just the same. 

The first memory I have of really helping with dinner is making meatloaf. It was one of the grossest things I had done at that point in my short life because it involved getting my hands into the dish and squishing every thing around with my fingers. As an eight year old with texture issues? Massive Ick. 

Yet the memory remains. The recipe remains. Nonie passed away several years ago and it feels like only just in the last few months that enough time has elapsed that the sting of what life was like with her is not so biting and the lessons that were buried in the dark are coming to light. It's never about forgetting the things that hurt, but instead about taking all of the things that make up who we are - who I am - and honoring those pieces as they make the whole. 

So in honor of that, I give you my version of my grandmother's meatloaf. 

Ingredients - all portions are ... eyed and not necessarily exact.
Ground Beef - one good sized package. 2lbs ish.
Sausage - I use spicy Italian sausage, poultry if I can find it because it's leaner meat. Pork works in a pinch though. 5-6 normal links.
1 egg
1/4-1/2 cup of breadcrumbs. (if you have stale bread, or almost not usable bread, you can make your own)
1 medium yellow onion
garlic - I use approx 2 tablespoons of the pre-diced garlic
salt - to taste. 4 cranks of a salt mill, 2 tsps
pepper - as above
basil
marjoram 
red pepper flakes 
Worcester sauce - 1 tablespoon
bacon strips - approximately one package.

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and lightly grease a 9x5 bread loaf pan. Add all the ingredients to a large mixing bowl. For the sausage, you'll need to extract the meat from the casing... There is really no neat way to do this. Just grab an end with one hand and squeeze down the casing with the other. Don't use my onion chopping as an example of what your onions should look like. My grandmother is tsking right now, I chop poorly.

And then you mix. Hands in, squish it all around. I've tried to make this before using a spoon - several in fact - and it doesn't mix the sausage and beef like you need to to make the texture consistent. I recommend removing all rings and things before this procedure - and obviously, wash your hands. See my onions? not so fabulous with the chopping. I should note Nonie used a food processor. She was really amazing at using all the dishes and things in the kitchen. Really.

Some people add ketchup to their meatloaf, but I'm of the opinion that particular condiment is disgusting. If you feel that your meatloaf needs to be moist, I suggest adding spaghetti sauce, tomato sauce, or even a can of diced tomatoes - approximately 1/4 - 1/2 a cup should keep it nice and moist.

Once everything is mixed and you're satisfied with the consistency, shape the meat into a ball and put it in your loaf pan. If you have a lot more than the pan, just pile it up on top like a muffin. I usually have enough so that it is a bit more than just level with the pan.

My grandmother would then slather ketchup on the top of the meatloaf unless I protested, in which case she'd put some more spaghetti sauce on it. This layer helps keep the meatloaf moist because after cooking for an hour, a lot of the moisture will bake out. My particular addition to this loaf of meat is bacon - because everything is better with some oink in it. I also think she would have approved of this like she approved of my eventually stuffing the meatloaf with cheese and spinach. (FYI - cheese stuffed meatloaf is not stuffed, it melts out but leaves a fantastic flavor. Someday I'll try this after freezing the cheese and rolling it in something.)

Lattice work looks amazingly complicated but it is very very easy to do. Take four strips of bacon and place them longways across the pan. Then take one strip of bacon, cut it in half, and place it on top of one end of the bacon. Slip it under every other piece of longways bacon. This begins your pattern. I find it is easier to take the pieces that are then going to be on top of the next piece of short bacon and flip them back so they're out of the way and then just laying the bacon down and repeating until you're done.

Tuck the edges of the bacon into the pan so it's all nice and neat.

Bake at 350 degrees until a thermometer reaches 160 degrees internal - about an hour and a half in my oven. The meatloaf is done (or very close to) when it pulls away from the sides of the pan (like bread! hence loaf!) The bacon doesn't keep it as moist as sauce on top and does add to the fat content, but it is very, very yummy anyway.

~*~ 

As I go through the year more stories of Nonie will find their way in - I hope for the better. She was basically the only grandparent I had in my life until I married into a family that had grandparents alive and kicking - which is a whole other story for another day.