This old house.

I never got around to doing holiday cards this year, but if I had done one, this picture of Henry demolishing the bathroom would have been a good candidate for a Happy New Year card.

Progress on the house has been slow, but steady. Someone recently told us it would be easier to build a house from scratch than to do what we are doing. I agree. When we bought the house we thought we would be able to renovate room by room, but it turned out to be impossible. We have gutted almost the entire interior on all three floors at this point. We removed the old gas baseboard heating system and replaced it with radiant floor tubing and had to demolish the ceiling on the first and second floors to do that. The house had drop ceilings in it and when we opened them up, we found that a previous owner had literally chopped out the original walls at the drop ceiling height and destroyed the beautiful plaster crown moldings.  Aside from two plaster ceiling medallions, nothing was left worth saving. So it all came down and we were able to run the radiant tubing on the underside of the floor joists.  We are in the process of replacing all the old electric. We have a new panel and actual switches now on the first floor. Eventually the second and third floors will be electrified. We do have a few plugs and switches now, but they all need to be rerouted, since we have completely changed the floor plans.  By the time we are finished we will have also replaced most of the plumbing, since all the sinks and tubs in the house are in different locations than they were when we bought the house. 

The basement has some new walls coming in- this will eventually be my art studio. 

This is a good view of the radiant tubing and the new electric, along with my new archway in progress.


We are working on the bathrooms on both the second and third floors right now because we can't move on to other projects until the plumbing is rerouted. The third floor bathroom needs to be rearranged and the tub and sink moved so that A) the bathroom is accessible from the hall, and B) because the tub plumbing is hanging in the middle of the kitchen ceiling below it. Once we redo that bathroom we can create Henry's room, our room, and the kitchen below. And electric needs to be run to all these places and it is much easier to do before drywall goes up. Sigh.

Third floor bathroom after Henry got done with that wall:



Second floor bathroom that is framed and almost ready for tile and wainscotting. I am working on this bathroom quite hard right now because I just need one finished room in this house. And it is only 4' x 4'. It does seem possible. But of course I can't finish the ceiling until the upstairs bathroom plumbing has been rerouted. Which means that the upstairs bathroom may be done first. A never ending conundrum...



In the meantime, here's my tub in what will eventually be the dining room:



And another one, under the stairwell which I am using for my paper recycling bin. I don't even know why we have this one, other than my neighbor was throwing it out, and I just can't let a good clawfoot go to waste.



And yes, that staircase needs to be replaced, but it will have to wait until we have rerouted that tub.

Happy New Year!

Yep, I’m back on the blog roll after quite a long hiatus. Sometime back in June or July of ‘09 I got really depressed about the state of our home progress and gardening failures, and quite frankly, just couldn’t muster any enthusiasm to write about it. Recently however, filmmaker Jay Weichun featured us in his documentary, Growing Food on Staten Island, and at the premier of the movie, a couple of people asked me about the blog. So, here we are, back by popular demand! Mostly, I hope it will help me keep track and appreciate the small steps we are taking in our lives to create a more sustainable home. Even if they sometimes seem like very, very small steps.

I think I last left the blog in the summer after helping to start the community garden in Stapleton, and as my garden at home was doing quite nicely. Unfortunately, the community garden pretty much tanked due to various reasons, and my gardening efforts at home had their ups and downs. My most beautiful plant this year was Pineapple Sage. I picked this seedling up at Gerardi’s one day and it turned into the most spectacular plant of the season. At least five feet tall and it bloomed and bloomed these beautiful red flowers up until mid-November. Virtually everything else in my garden was wilted and dead by then except for this glorious plant which seemed to thrive as the weather got cooler. And it made a lovely pineapple flavored tea, bath tonic, and cooking spice. I’m sorry I didn’t get around to drying any leaves. I half expected it to never die; but then one day, sadly, the frost finally got to it.




The seed catalogs have been arriving in the mailbox and in the spirit of the new year and regrowth and regeneration, I couldn’t help myself but order a whole mess of seeds. I am hoping to do a more ornamental edible garden next year. Nothing crazy this time, just more diversified beds rather than beds with a single crop each. It has become increasingly evident that we cannot grow enough food to sustain our family throughout the entire year. At least, not with full time jobs, and a kid, and the house construction, and dreams of making art. Trying to be a full time farmer on top of everything else almost broke me this year. I decided that in order to sustain my sanity, we have to be moderate in what we try to do. I can grow what I can, and what I can enjoy, and try to do my best to supplement our diet with somewhat decent choices at the lame grocery stores on the island. But I digress.

Last year I experimented with some wacky tomato trellises, one of which I had planned to wear but disastrously did not account for the weight of dirt once you apply water to it. The rounded arch that we built out of embroidery hoops and bamboo was also unsuccessful because the water just drained right out of it and I ended up with dry, dry plants that produced little edible fruit. Apparently on both projects I forgot the age old sculptors rule, “gravity sucks.” But I still like my trellis and think it is pretty. Perhaps I will just grow vining plants up it this year. Peas, or some of the purple pole beans I just ordered.

Other gardening efforts that were less than successful last summer: the squashes succumbed to some kind of fungus, the cabbages were eaten by some sort of beetle, and the tomatoes cross pollinated with each other and I got a mish-mash-brandywine-wild cherry-old Virginia hybrid that was ok but not great.

On the other hand, peas were spectacular, as were green beans and broccoli. I even got quite a few habanero and jalapeno peppers which I haven’t had much luck with in the past. I tried carrots in containers this year and they were much better than the ones I had planted in-ground the year before. Also, now that everything else has died, I am noticing that there is an nice onion patch still there that I had forgotten about. I don’t know if I should dig them up or just leave them till spring. I think it is ok to leave them in the ground.  I'm sure it is frozen solid at this point anyway.

So with the new year, starts the new blog, and hopefully a new, more positive outlook on my part. Stay tuned next time for news of our ongoing construction projects inside. And trust me, if my gardening projects last year were disappointing, wait till you see the mess we have made in the house!