Harry Potter and the Magic Thong

The arrival this summer of the final installment in the Harry Potter series will probably go uncelebrated at XXXX 17th Street (my lot’s current address), because I am busy reading about houses and homes and the business of building a dwelling and a life. Why? Because I read a book about everything. New dog? Read Caroline Knapp’s Pack of Two. Suddenly single? Read Bachelor Girl. Move to Hollywood and write for now cancelled detective show? Read Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her. I’d probably read a book about nail clippers if I thought it would improve my home pedicures (I’m pretty certain there’s not an entire book on nail clippers, but there is a fascinating essay about them in Nicholson Baker’s collection, The Size of Thoughts.)

Sarah Susanka is to the small-scale homebuilder what Rachael Ray is to everyday gourmets (and I thought I’d never use an analogy again after the GRE). Susanka’s columns in Fine Homebuilding and her books, including my favorite, Not So Big Solutions, advocate functionality within gracious design and architectural artistry that serves lives rather than egos. Her books have been inspirational and influential as I plan my new home. Thanks to her, I’ve learned that a home’s entry begins at the curb, remembered to build a mail-sorting station, and tried to design a house that encompasses my values and my lifestyle as well as my future. Also, I've been persuaded to do without the indoor pool.

On the opposite end of the library, we have the Not-So-Small book. House as Mirror of Self by Clare Cooper Marcus weighs as much as my cat and references Carl Jung in the foreword. This is generally a bad sign as far as leisure reading goes, unless it’s a sentence like “Matthew McConnaughey tossed aside the boring book on Carl Jung and went to surf the internet for librarians.” House as a Mirror of Self is a serious book, with lots of multi-syllabic words and references to the psyche and intense passages about recreating our childhoods and constructing our realities. It made me think, and that’s not such a bad thing. But mostly I just want to build a really cool, affordable house near the Farnand Five and the Caldwell-Ringlers and have fun parties and be able to walk to Village Books and Mambo Italiano in five minutes.

Somewhere in between Susanka’s practicality and Marcus’s intellectualism lies Winifred Gallagher’s book, House Thinking: A Room-by Room Look at How We Live. “The orverarching insight that unifies our dwellings and this book alike is that home exists as much between our ears and in a building," Gallagher writes. She mixes history, psychology, and interior design to create a unique, highly readable, and intriguing glimpse behind the doors of American homes.

Alexander Master’s account of the life of an adrift man in London, Stuart: A Life Backwards, gives me much to be thankful for—both because it is funny, original, and deeply moving, but also because it offers an entirely different glimpse into what it means to have a home. Stuart, who is often drug-addled and floats on and off the streets, in and out of shelters and subsidized housing for most of his adult life, nevertheless manages to carve meaning and joy out of his existence. While I am thankful for all that I have—a warm shelter, a home-to-be built to my specifications, and family, friends, and mementos to fill the space, Stuart’s story is a powerful reminder about the most important places of all—the invisible ones that hold us steady, give us hope, and make us whole. And what is home, after all, if not these things?

You don’t have to be building a new house or moving from one to another to engage in thought and discussion with your live-alongs about the space you occupy. I encourage you to stop and reflect on what makes your dwelling meaningful. If you do read what I recommend, support your local bookseller. Community and community-maintained businesses are a part of the place we all call home.

I Dream of Cleaning

I pull the Vanbulance into the park-n-ride next to Diane Thursday morning. “Where’s Laural?” I ask. Diane shrugs, and I immediately plunk my head on the steering wheel. “Oh, shit.” I was supposed to have picked Laural up on the way to the carpool, but in the whirlwind of planning my ensemble for the Bellingham Wig-Out, the Ski-to-Sea Race, and the flurry of pre-dawn cleaning I’ve been doing around The Product That Is My Home, I somehow forgot.

The backstory? One of my real estate agents (not the one I used to be married to) called yesterday. “The walk-through went great!” He told me. “The other brokers liked the place. There was no detectable cat smell.” “That’s good,” I replied. “You might want to double-check the kitchen, though,” he continued. “There was a smear on the front of the dishwasher.”

Hence my increasingly vigilant morning routine: arise, greet the day, stumble from bed, do bathroomy-stuff, sanitize toilet, make coffee, sanitize sink, make toast, sanitize countertop, shower, sanitize shower stall, get dressed, make bed, arrange throw pillows, sanitize cat box. It’s something of a miracle that I have the energy and time to even go to my job. Not to mention the fact that Clorox Super-Shine Bleach Formula Spray has eaten a hole in my cerebral cortex, apparently in the picking-up-a-friend-for-work lobe.

The morning of the forgotten Laural, I attended to my usual array of OCD-inspired bleaching and then stepped in something squishy that had once been in my cat’s belly, so I had to scrape that off the carpet. Makers of Friskies must be in collusion with manufacturers of carpet cleaner. [Mr. Burns voice] “You guys dye the cat food bright orange! And we’ll cut you in on our profits on Extra Strength Cat Barf Removal Spray!” [Cackling, rubbing of palms.]

Stinky and I were kicked out of the super-sanitized and de-barfed condo on Saturday while an open house was held, so the cat sat in the Vanbulance while I tackled another cleaning project: removing the remains of the shed from my lot. Although I invited everyone I know, the only person there for most of the day was the one who was paid to be there: my builder, James Bradbury. My mom stopped by with a baggie of fresh cookies and Charlie arrived in time for me to attend to my responsibilities as the captain of the 2nd place Women’s Recreational Ski to Sea Team, Kiss My Tiara.

As we hauled what amounted to 3,362 pounds of boards and crumbling tarpaper, James and I had plenty of time to discuss important building-related issues, including, but not limited to 1) the genius that is the magnet sweeper; 2) his heroic act as a ten-year-old involving a drill, a garage, and his father’s jagged tooth, and 3) writing as therapy.

Evie may be howling twenty hours a day as her tiny teeth wiggle their way through her gums, and I may be tapping my feet, eager to move my purple reading chair into the study that exists only in the invisible void between paper, brain, and twenty feet of air above 17th Street, but we are both processing the torture and the tedium through writing. Yes, teething sucks. Yes, building a house involves a lot of waiting. But much is relieved when we look for the humorous, the unusual, and the fascinating to report upon.

Words are calming. For James and Jennifer, they penetrate the shrieking of a teething baby. For me, they soothe the anxious foot-tapping. They give us all a direction for our energy and our angst. I consume myself seeking them out and arranging them, sweeping up those that clutter my peace and using the others to build a quiet home for my thoughts and a solid shelter against worry.

An Egress[1] is Not a Bird

It’s been said that a homebuilder makes about 7000 decisions in the course of the project, and given the number of new vocabulary terms I’ve learned so far, I’d say that is off by a few thousand. Fortunately, I love words, so I’m eager to add to my repertoire. Not so fortunately, many of the words I’m learning will only be useful for the next six months and after that they’ll just be clogging up brainspace that might be better dedicated to things like Scrubs re-runs and Mariners stats and fermentation.

The first word in my new dictionary is estimate. An estimate is a fake price that a business suggests it will charge for what later turns out cost twice as much. Example: “We estimate that the landscaping outside your condo will cost a couple hundred bucks.” (True cost=$551.35). An estimate can also be a delightfully optimistic but nevertheless inaccurate approximation of how long a project will take; for example, anything estimated to take one week will take 21 days; one month=three months; two months=sometime next year. Just for fun, a homebuilder can make her own estimates, too, such as “oh, it’ll take me about a day to tear down that shed on the lot,” and “I should be able to clear that pile of rotten lumber and broken bricks in about two trips to the dump.”

The folks at Cascade Joinery have kindly underestimated the cost of the complicated vaulted ceiling in my future great room, and have taught me a few new words in the process. The 24x17 space will be sheltered by a Douglas Fir tongue-and-groove ceiling supported by a king-post truss and insulated by panels called SIPS, which I’ve heard more about in recent weeks than I care to discuss. I’m not even going to mention what the “estimate” for this project is, but I will say that it involves a crane, and I know that will cost more than 6 months worth of payments on the Vanbulance.

Like the lingo of timber frame construction, with its ridge beams, collar ties, rafters, and struts, there is an entire lexicon devoted to windows, as well. The great room and master bedroom will feature double-hung windows, which according to my sources are “classic in appearance and offer excellent control of ventilation;” and clerestory windows—a high band of narrow windows; the study and other bedrooms will have casement windows, and the front door will be flanked by long vertical windows called sidelights. None of the windows will have mullions, which are grid-like lines that divide large windows into smaller ones.

Like the terms in the preceding paragraphs, most of the vocabulary I’m learning is plain and functional, unlike the impressive architectural terminology I learned in college humanities class. But unless I change my plan and build a Gothic cathedral complete with flying buttresses, the most exotic-sounding feature of my home will be the French drain that surrounds it. I do believe that almost any process can be endured as long as I try to learn something from it. Yes, I’m spending my life savings, but now I know what a silt fence is! Maybe people should get a degree when they undergo this process—an SBH, or Survived Building House degree. Surely the accumulation of this terminology is the equivalent of a few quarters at university. God knows there were semesters at WSU where I learned less.

[1] It’s the amount of space required by building codes that will allow firefighters to enter a window or a resident to escape.

Mi Casa es Su Casa…or Somebody’s Casa…I Hope

So far, the most stressful part of building a new house has been the process of trying to get rid of the old one. My condo, which I purchased new in 2004, is now officially For Sale, and besides knowing that strangers are going to be peering into my closets and cupboards and snooping around my bookshelves and refrigerator (so many condiments! so little fruit!) there are a host of other nerve-rattling issues at hand.

For one thing, I have to keep the place perpetually and unnaturally clean—no more stand-up snacking in the kitchen and leaving a puddle of crumbs on the floor. No more avoiding the cat box for 5-7 days. My kitchen smells like bleach. My sinks are toothpaste-globless. I can sanitarily lick the bathroom floor (not that I’d want to). I can see through the shower door. If I need something to wear, I actually have to look in the closet, since I’m no longer maintaining what Urban Dictionary.com calls a “floordrobe.” Most extraordinarily, I arise each day, make my bed, and daintily arrange the throw pillows in an eye-pleasing pattern (stripes/solids/stripes/solids). It’s almost like they planted the For Sale sign in my front yard and I turned into my mother.

Prepping to sell the condo, I did some research about “staging” it for sale—which is pretty much what it sounds like. “Stop thinking of your house as your home; think ‘this is a product to be sold, like a box of cereal on the grocery store shelf’” one site advised. The same web page suggested that I arrange all my coffee mugs with the handles facing the same direction and alphabetize my spice jars. WTF?! People see that, and they’re going to think the place is possessed by the ghost of Julia Roberts’ husband from Sleeping with the Enemy. I’ll spring for the expensive cat litter that clumps together and makes poo smell like pinecones, but I am NOT alphabetizing kitchen supplies.

The Bellingham real estate market is a little saturated right now, but my place has a lot to offer. Even if it weren’t my house and it was a box of cereal, I’d still think it was more Kellogg’s than Food Club. The location is prime—a two-minute walk to stores and restaurants, Padden Creek trail, and Fairhaven Park—and my neighborhood is clean. There’s even a nice woman named Joanie who walks around collecting cans and bottles, and the bi-monthly 4 a.m. street-sweeping keeps Old Fairhaven Parkway sparkly. It’s generally pretty quiet here, except on Sunday mornings when the church across the street is blasting its live Jesus rock. Forgiveness and eternal joy have never sounded so unappealing.

I also have an attached garage (a cozy home for the Vanbulance), a fireplace, and gorgeous custom-made built-ins created by James Bradbury of Sycamore Woodworking and Building. My books and pets and craft supplies have always felt safe and warm here. If the site on 17th and Donovan hadn’t become available when it did, I would be staying in this condo much longer. But one home is enough, and this one will be perfect for someone else. Throw pillows not included.

Boise Naked Yoga Home Design Consultants, Incorporated, Wanda Teetlebound, CEO

Approximately 3 decades ago, I was traumatized on the squareball court at Roosevelt Elementary School by a brown-haired fourth grader in round glasses who called me “little girl.” Shortly thereafter, she became my best friend. Besides swallowing the tiny white car from my Game of Life and co-authoring “Grrr…Monster Poems Galore” with me, Amy B. has also been my companion in countless projects and adventures including, but not limited to, home design.

I recently unearthed one of the many floor plans that I designed with Amy during our dream house phase in 5th or 6th grade, a time (c. 1979) when we were weirdly enchanted by the idea of sunken living rooms, indoor hot tubs, and glass grand pianos suspended from the ceiling by chains. We also appear to have been oddly prepared to house entire extended Chinese families, as most of our plans have 5 or 6 bedrooms.

Although the actual floor plan for my new real home is done (and it doesn’t have a hot tub or a hanging grand piano), there are many interior design issues about which I require consultation, things that are more fun to talk about than SIPS and French drains. I needed a few days to luxuriate in the fantasy home inside my head, and to fill it up with warm colors and lots of throw pillows. So I headed to Boise, Idaho, to confer with Amy about the house and its many needs.

Amy just got back from the Great Wall of China (not pictured...that's me, Copan, and Beso at Diversion Dam on the Boise River), so her consultation included tips on channeling the chi in my new house. I’m not really into the whole feng shui business, probably because I’m just too lazy to study up on the best way to arrange my waste paper baskets for ultimate health and good luck. I do wish there was a way to fung-shooey my refrigerator so that I’d be attracted to celery and low-fat cottage cheese instead of leftover pizza. Instead I learned I’m supposed to consult a ba-gua chart to select the harmonious placement of rooms; I should use red paint in places where I want strength, and I should create an altar or sacred space in my home that includes elements of water, earth, wind and fire, and “supports, focuses, and enhances my inner being as well as the dreams I am manifesting in my physical world.” I wonder if a wet bar with a looping, continuous recording of “Shining Star” would count.

Besides her feng shui expertise, Amy also has a solid grasp of the Colorful Me Beautiful principles (we’re both Summers), so we talked about how to choose paints that would complement my complexion and hair color, while at the same time, shaping and toning my thighs and adding definition to my arms. I’m still planning on a lavender bedroom, a livingroom-kitchen-dining room in deep blues, rich reds, and lots of wood; one yellow guest room and one sage green one, and bathrooms with small mirrors, low lighting, and lots of big fluffy towels for my guests.

We’ve got the ambience all put together, me, Amy, and my imagination. Now we just have to build the house that goes with it.

This Land is Their Land

About my relationship with ants: I mostly don’t like them. When I was six or seven-ish, I stepped in an ants’ nest across the street from our Azalea Place home, ants crawled up my legs and into my sneakers, I wet my pants and the neighbor lady brought me home crying. At WSU, I lived in a scary, porn-studio-esque apartment one summer and poured a bowl of cereal for breakfast AND IT MOVED, crawling with members of the same ant family that had, only days before, feasted on whatever food shred I’d left in my toothbrush. I didn’t wet my pants, but I will say that I haven’t eaten Raisin Bran since 1989.

So I am, understandably, undelighted to lift a concrete block from its station on my empty lot and discover a swarming colony of formicidae Hymenoptera. You can crow all you want about ants and their mind-bending feats of organization and industriousness, but to me they’re still shiny, squirming, crack-penetrating dirt-diggers and they can’t be trusted. Not so millipedes, with their even more pronounced wriggly shininess and the way they look like miniature thousand-legged land-dwelling eels. But millipedes (thankfully) don’t bunch together in teaming armies of ick. They’re lone operators, and you know when you see one, it’s not going to be immediately following by a thousand others that swarm over your half-eaten turkey-and-avocado sandwich while your back is turned and skeletonize it 2.3 seconds.

Wasps, potato bugs, earthworms, and spiders are among the creatures that call my future home their current one. I’d feel guiltier about displacing them if I had more fondness for insects; I’m hopeful that they’ll find other accommodations as the project progresses and their hives, colonies, nests, and holes are molested by the excavator and crushed by the inevitable turquoise construction-site Porta-Potti. The “really big mouse with the long pink tail” witnessed by my ten-year-old helper Miles, however, can go ahead and slither under the next approaching WTA bus.

I feel worse about the eradication of the flora than I do the fauna. Although you’d never know it to look at the withering cacti in my home, I am a plant person. If it were nutritionally feasible, I might actually become a carnivorian, and not just because I hate the taste of cauliflower and cabbage. It pains me that I won’t be able to salvage all of the greenery on my lot. The house has been designed specifically to spare the chestnut and maple trees on the south side, as well as the shrubbery that forms a natural fence along Donovan Ave. and Arlene’s place to the west. What I can’t save, sadly, are the twelve-foot lilac bushes in the northwest corner (future garage), the huge alder in the center of the lot (future kitchen), the holly bushes—dangerous skin-scraping beasts though they are—and the wild raspberry plants scattered around the property (future everything).

Walking away from the property to my for-now home, I step over a beetle on the sidewalk, hesitant to hear the crack of its tiny shell under my dirty foot. I look back at the lot and see both a house, and a home. A 6000 square foot biosphere alive with a million squiggling, tunneling, worming pieces of the universe. The dirt and rocks, the flowers, the trees, the rustling leaves—it’s a wonder that we can build houses or drive cars or eat anything for the beauty of it all.

I’m feeling very Darwin right about now, very Survival Of the Fittest, and not necessarily in a good way. In order for me to build my shelter, I have to disrupt the homes of these ants, millipedes, rats and spiders I claim to have no warmth for. I have to uproot trees that have known no other ground. I have to balance my This Is the Way the World Works sentiments against the reality that once again, the strong overpower the weak just because we’re bigger and we have sharper, noisier tools. Then again, those ants might just be back.

Sarah Circles the Blo(g)ck

In the space that will eventually be my guest bedroom, Kosha lies stretched out in the sun, his snout barely visible behind the weeds. He looks like a lion hiding in wait on the Serengeti, except without the motivating killer instinct. The most he's done all afternoon is circulate the lot to sniff desiccated piles of dog shit and lick aggressively at the spot where his balls used to be. I know a little about how that feels--the sense that something should be where it isn't. Unlike Kosha, however, I can remedy the situation. It's what I'm doing right now.

It's Saturday at 11 a.m. and I've donned my junkiest jeans--Levis blotched with "Dylan's Grove," the paint I used in the guest room at my previous house--a BE Tiger t-shirt, and new pigskin work gloves. The Vanbulance is parked on 17th Street, top popped, I've cranked the Johnny Cash, chilled the beer, and greeted the nine-year-old neighbor, Sarah, who’s riding her bike up and down the alley. Today begins Phase One of Belben Builds a House: emptying and tearing down the decrepit, Boo Radley-esque wooden shack on the northeast corner of my empty lot on 17th and Donovan.

I open the doors timidly--the shed is dark and filled with a creepy assortment of damp mysteries that suggest a certain CSI excitement--a head in a bucket, maybe, or a partial skeleton or at the very least, an abandoned diary that hints at some long-forgotten misdeed. But what I find fails to deliver on the promise of my morbid imaginings: rotting window frames, mismatched sawhorses, rat crap, and a warped U2 Achtung Baby cassette tape. Even the creepy-crawlies fail to appear, the wasps' nest long abandoned, the spiders dry and curly, the ants and millipedes seeking sustenance outside. A dozen rusty tools sink into the husks of a thousand horse chestnuts littering the floor, all of it suggesting the shed was never the site of anything more interesting than discarded home improvement projects and an abandoned appreciation for Bono.

I spend the day dragging the contents of the shed to the corner, creating an impressive pile of rotten lumber and making myself available for neighborhood viewing. Apparently action on this long-empty lot qualifies as drama for Marvin, who registers his friendly annoyance that my new house will block his view (I invite him to come over once the place is built to join me for a drink on my veranda, where he can enjoy my view); Arlene, the independent retiree next door who welcomes me warmly, and the very aged, bathrobe-clad Lucille—who comes out of her house infrequently enough to have earned the name “Reclucy”—who wants to know which trees will be spared and which sawed down. Most importantly, my friends Noah, Dana, Laural, and Tom offer water, their bathroom, a wheelbarrow, and much companionship as I begin establishing my life just yards away from their home.

Despite my disappointment at the shed’s content, the purging is satisfactory—the hauling, piling, and pounding is cathartic; I’m not just sitting around waiting for the house to be built anymore. But besides that, besides making progress on the physical preparation of the property, I feel like it’s become more than just a vacant lot adjacent to other people’s homes, it’s becoming a part of the neighborhood. And me? I’m becoming a neighbor.