Brooke here: In between the renovations, I’ve been keeping a notebook of the various sundries that have popped up in conversation regarding the house. The inconsistencies are pretty glaring, especially when they show up in writing; I mentioned a while back how everyone swears up and down the Jarrells had this house custom-built, but that […]
Brooke here: Pool and fence projects are coming along well. I’ve actually been swimming in the pool, although mostly to haul a sump down to the bottom to blow the pipes clean (perhaps a mistake: it was fresh water and the pool company had overshocked it with chlorine, so I spent the rest of the […]
Brooke here. We made less progress on the stairs than expected. 6″x6″x8′ timber is heavy. Go figure. And I smacked my hand with a mallet. And there was a tremendous storm last night where we lost some very large branches which need to be cleaned up… And, and, and… And it’s National Poetry Month! It […]
Brooke here: A friend who is an excellent seamstress* is making us some new cushions for a window seat, and she took the (six-decades-old and nasty as a cat’s box) existing cushions with her. The bare surface of the window seat is now exposed, and we are for the first time looking at the lovely […]
Brooke here. Zu recovered beautifully and without the need for surgery, although for some reason the entire house now smells like Bac-Os. Go figure. Last week, Mary and Elizabeth gave us a copy of Remembering Randall, the memoir of Randall Jarrell written by his wife, Mary von Schrader Jarrell. There’s some serious weirdness in this […]
Brooke here: While I wait on a plumber to make sense of the washing machine — it turns out we were right and waste water does not want to travel eight feet straight up and through a series of bends — here’s a lengthy article on the death of Randall Jarrell. It mentions the book, […]
Brooke here: Remember the previous post? The one in which we discuss how to plug a bunch of deadbolt voids? I didn’t think it important to mention at the time, but those deadbolts didn’t actually lock. When we closed on the house, the previous owners threw handfuls of keys at us, none of which worked […]
Brooke here: Except for the bathrooms, which don’t lock at all, every door in the house has a deadbolt. We’ve been here long enough to not notice them, but when you first walk down the hall there’s an unnerving tap on your midbrain because your subconscious would really like to know why you’re in a […]
Brooke here: August was interesting. I didn’t want to mention this online (aka: daring strangers to find where you’re keeping the unattended stuff), but we haven’t been living in the Jarrell house. See, we had this great idea. We’d buy the Jarrell house and do the major repairs while still living at our old house […]
Brooke here: While working in the Labyrinth, Elizabeth and I explored the future wine cellar. Brown and I had done little more than glance in and shiver, but there was some interesting stuff in there. We were, for example, especially interested in preventing an impending ceiling collapse (For the record, we’re almost positive the concrete […]
Flying by night 