in which www.saipua.blogspot.com becomes a home renovation blog

At some point I had envisioned a formal portrait of us in front of our house. You know...real stoic and shit. We might get around to it one day. That fantasy was followed by pictures of me in a fields of flowers I had grown myself, snip-snipping, but pictures like that require too much effort to stage. It seems life blows by while you're desperately trying to set shit like that up. Maybe one thing I've started to understand about farming - in the microsecond we've been at it - is that time is of the essence.



But more on the gardening part another time. Tonight, we talk plaster. But Wait! Safety first! Cue the plaster-removal-hazmat-suit-striptease please!!!

So in a time before sheet rock, or even the time when a contractor was a person you could call for such matters; people used to mix gypsum dust with water and horse hair and then slather it over thin parallel strips of wood called lath to make walls. Bear with me, I'm learning.

Through a quick series of events it became clear to us that if we wanted to really "fix up" our little money pit (and this is where we shrink down to micro type - and if you're already bored with the direction of this post, as someone like myself may have been in the not too distant past, than please skip ahead. Lets play choose you're own adventure! ready?

You fall into a property with a 200 year old greek revival that has never been renovated. To be clear; Ever. A reputable contractor advises you to tear it down and put up a module. A second opinion lands you with a builder named Ivan who strikes you as so trustworthy, so right as rain, it's rather off-putting. (Read: NYC Contractors) Anyway Ivan... he throws around practically pornographic series of words like "wood cooking stove" and "staircase to the sleeping loft" like there's no tomorrow. One thing Ivan makes perfectly clear is that the house will continue to fall apart unless you get all the moisture out of it - you have to put in a new dry foundation. Ivan is smart, and he talks about the house in terms of it being a "museum piece" which sure is neat. He suggests you pull out all the plaster walls and lath to relive downward pressure on the foundation for when his crew jacks up the central beams...

Do you follow his advise and run to Ace Hardware for respirators and a crow bar...?

-or-

Do you.. --- actually there is no other path in this story, so shall we just quietly exit this little game? Those books were always mildly disappointing in the end, were they not?



So for the past few weeks I've been orbiting between plaster removal, plantings and making weddings. On plaster days we make a little coffee, fry some eggs on the grill and then suit up hazmat style. We work all day ripping off layers of wallpaper (7 layers deep in some rooms), chipping away at plaster, horse hair and lath and hauling the debris out in (what use to be flower) buckets. We spread it through the forest in a thin line, the first layer of what will become a path through the woods to the beaver pond and eventually my walled-in secret garden.



It sounds all very charming doesn't it - and there are a few small moments that it feels charmed. Not the moment when a iota of plaster lodged in my left eye for an afternoon, or when we found a rapture of century old fly carcasses between walls, each of us silently whispering to ourselves "museum piece, museum piece" as we vacuumed them up with the antique hoover left in the house from another era.

We'll see.