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My Profile
Fairytales for a Practical Princess - 2008-11-30
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9:55 a.m. - 2003-04-30
My kitchen sink arrived yesterday! A blooming miracle. Dave at Plumb King said it would take at least a week, maybe more if the regional warehouse was out of stock. 3 days. It got here in 3 days. Ordered it on Saturday and picked it up yesterday. Okay, nobody except Hercules could "pick up" a humongus cast iron and porcelain sink, but you know what I mean. The old sink at the Hobbit House was still usable, but it's a nasty shallow thing, barely bigger than your average bathroom sink. It's doubtful I could even fit my spaghetti pot under the faucet. So what with Mike being in the business and all, we were able to snag a gorgeous sink for about half of retail. Ditto the drain baskets, and the faucet was a special order that a customer never picked up, into the clearance section it went and Mike got a $400 faucet for $75.00. And I'll get everything installed for the low, low price of a kiss and a "Thanks, Honey." The whole renovation has been like that. Except for some weekend workers who got paid coolie wages, redoing the house has only cost us for the materials. And 90% of the materials were bought at the tradesman price, not retail. We totted it up and realized that by the time we're through we'll have done a $95,000 renovation for about $19,000. Not too shabby. Of course Mike's time technically costs us, when he's working on our house he's not making money working on someone else's, but winter is a pretty slack time anyhow. The usual furnace crisis's, and the occasional hot water maker installation, but as anyone in the building trades knows, winter=starvation. Very few customers have the forethought to have their central air installed in January. Nope, they wait until the first hot spell in July and then call Mike screaming, crying, and begging for him to come put in their a/c TODAY! I have this rather mean spirited fantasy of getting the previous owner (she of the ducks with hats stencils and horrible wallpaper) over to the house on some pretext and showing her what she COULD have had if she’d had some ambition and some taste. Because really a lot of the stuff we’ve done was more labor intensive than costly. Stripping the woodwork for instance. A couple hundred bucks for stripper and supplies, a lot of elbow grease, and some time and gone is the gloopy pinky beige mess. The pocket doors and the wainscot wall beneath the staircase GLOW. Ditto the copper finger plates around all the doorknobs. Simple things, but they make all the difference. Hell, just oiling the bathroom vanity and linen closet and $8.00 worth of handles to replace the broken ones and the bathroom looks damn spiff. The kitchen too. The cabinet handles are copper. Oxidation and grease turned them black, but I spent a snowy afternoon rubbing them down with Nevr-Dull and they shined right up. A quick clear coat job and the handles will stay coppery and shiny for a good long time. Maybe I’m being unfair. I don’t know all the details of her life. I do know she had one of the messiest, most acrimonious divorces I’ve ever heard of. For the past couple years she had bigger things to think about than cabinet handles. And what’s cheap to me might be very dear to someone paying lawyers and replacing her car’s windshield twice after her soon-to-be ex smashed them. Anyhow, back to my new kitchen sink. Had a bad moment when Mike put the template on the counter, it looked like I might lose a drawer, the sink is THAT big. But the template is the footprint for the top of the sink, it’s narrower beneath and will snug down nicely between the drawers on either side. The sink is a double bowl. One larger one and a smaller one. The larger one is big and deep enough to bathe a dog in. Okay, not a golden retriever, but a beagle would fit. This is important. After Alex leaves for college, Mike and I have agreed to get Wolf a dog. A dog is not a big brother, but it will be good company for Wolf. Someone to play with and hug and talk to. Wolf loves his kitties and they love him back, but no cat plays fetch or will catch a frisbee. Wolf is a rough and tumble kind of kid and a dog will be a good playmate. I’m not a real doggy person. I like other people’s dogs, but have no aching desire for one of my own. Dogs are destructive, noisy, and they smell. The smelly part I’ll deal with by bathing the darn thing at least once a week in my lovely new kitchen sink. The destruction and noise? Well hell, I DO have children, and strewn garbage, shattered lamps, scratched floors, and howling at 3:00am are no big surprises. Neither is the occasional pee-pee puddle on the floor. I’ve spent the last 18 years teaching critters to sit, lie down, shut up, shake hands, get down, and where to make poopies. To my way of thinking a dog will just be a really short hairy kid. Happy Hump Day, y’all. ~LA
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