Well, basically what it says above. Ronin has grown like 7 feet, weighs in at a whopping 30 pounds, and can read simple words when she’s feeling obliging. She is intensely willful and inordinately contrary. We like to say that she inherited the contrary gene from her great-grandma Nikki. She loves to sing and is constantly making up songs about random things, like a little mosquito, a bird flying to its nest, a little blue car.. She makes up unusual melodies and even attempts to rhyme her verses. Driving in the car on short trips around town is no longer fraught with peril; she sits tight, sings herself a song, and most importantly, stays awake (usually).

Summer was brief and very mild. I didn’t get my tomatoes into the ground until June and they are just now fruiting (but they are fruiting lots). I also tried to grow arugula and as soon as the plants got large enough that I felt I wouldn’t be depriving them of their only mature leaves to make my salad, they all bolted. Lame!

Earthday: Ronin danced with the hippies and rolled in the grass.

Ronin and the other kids peeking at Kricket in her caterpillar puppet.

I painted a little snake on her arm. What then followed was an introverted hour of intense concentration while she carefully picked all the paint off with her fingernails. Temporary tattoos are also far more temporary than they should be where Ronin is concerned.

Hiking in Forest Park. Ronin wanted up.

Our summer was really very low key, yet we kept very busy. We went to the river or lake, hiked in the woods, and biked around our new section of town to one of the many different parks. We did a lot of cooking and eating al fresco while the kitchen was dismantled. Here I am cooking a caramel custard on the back patio amidst the construction debris.

Ronin finally got her bunkbed. It took us long enough. We were given this one by Joshua’s mom, who used to use it in her classroom for puppet shows. It’s way sturdier than the IKEA one and we didn’t have to monkey with it to get rid of the lower bunk. Unfortunately, it had been stored in her garage for two years and had some mildew on it. I scrubbed it and dried it well before we assembled it in Ronin’s bedroom but by the time we got it together, both of us were coughing, had tight throats, and just general allergy-yuck symptoms. So, to Ronin’s intense and vocal disappointment (we felt so bad), we took it apart and brought it back outside, where we stewed over what to do with it. In the end, I sanded the entire thing, sanded away all mildewy spots, and then lacquered it with many coats of the stuff I finished the floor in the kitchen with. It no longer smells and it looks quite nice. We got it back up in Ronin’s room soon thereafter and she LOVES it.

Bunny and Nigel love it.

All the guys got to sleep in it the first couple of nights. Now she’s back down to Nigel and sometimes one other guy.

Underneath is a little playhouse. We have curtains that enclose it and I thought I could cut little windows, a door, and paint cute things on it.

She has never before shown any sort of irrational fear to anything but just lately she has voiced some concern about a moose in the walls. Also a knocking in the bathroom closet. Neither of us are sure where this came from. She always wants us to open the closet so she can look inside (there’s a toilet plunger in there, which I suppose is scary in its own right). It was bound to start at some point I suppose, but still, we’re trying to figure out how best to respond so that that they fade rather than grow more intense.

Joshua signed her up for a gymnastics class and she loved it. She is strong and fearless (when it doesn’t involve moose) and can hang on a bar almost indefinitely. She likes the bars and the “balance bean.” We originally thought we would put her in ballet since she’s still mad about it but the ballet classes seem to be less structured for this age group. Maybe when she’s a little older.

Some before photos of the kitchen. People were telling me (people who had never seen it in person, that is), that the kitchen didn’t seem so bad. And it wasn’t as bad as the bathroom or anything, but I pretty much had it in for the kitchen from the moment I laid eyes on it. I hated the floor tile, I hated the counter tile, the cabinets were all too small and just funky, and the insides smelled like squashed ants. Even though there were no ants in sight. Squashed-ant smell drives me utterly nutballs.

I took a bunch of close-up photos to illustrate just how nasty it really was. Behold:

Ugly exposed smished particle board bits. These were in most of the cupboards. I guess at one point, the hinges ripped out and were re-mounted elsewhere..?

Nothing was square. (This is how this cupboard closed; it’s not supposed to be ajar.)

I have no idea what the story was on the back panels of the cabinets. I couldn’t have possibly come like this, could it?

Oh look: greasy drippings behind the cabinets! How wonderful. I guess that wall has to go. Now, what do you suppose is behind the stove fan?

Mmmmm, tasty. When we removed the rectangular vent that went up to the ceiling, we discovered that the fan was actually just venting into the wall between studs. Not actually outside.

Seriously?

Demolition went fairly rapidly. It’s easy to bust apart cabinets when you don’t care about scratches. We took easily three tons of CRAPOMGWTF to the dump (had to rent a moving van to get it there). You do not even want to know how many mummified rats and mice we’ve so far removed from the innards of this house. Between this and pulling the ceiling down in the basement (did I mention?), Joshua expected to be stricken with hanta virus at any moment for a good 4 weeks (we did our internet research).

We initially thought that we would not have to remove any walls. HAAAaaaaaaa! Probably should have taken them all out but we’re stubborn that way. Complicated keeps the mind snappy. It takes a something-something to blend new crisp sheetrock into 100-year-old uneven plaster. That something is Crazy.

We had our usual round of setbacks. I spent about four billion hours agonizing over the perfect turquoise color to paint the walls and what I picked out ended up looking freakishly kelly green in our house. I then spent about 3 minutes picking out the substitute and it was fine. Perfect, even. Joshua ended up starting a plumbing project that eventually encompassed the entire rest of the house just trying to replace a sink in the exact place the old sink was previously.

Here we’ve just laid the countertops over the lower cabinets. Suddenly there was an end in sight. That hole with the stool? That’s where a mechanical DISHWASHER is going to go. And do you see those kick-ass wooden butcher-block counters? I DIE!

OH la la.

OH LA LA!! The stove is this crazy huge black monster that we didn’t intend to get but randomly ended up with and now are SO HAPPY we did. It’s the best thing I’ve ever cooked on: gas top, convection electric oven. And ventilation! HEAVEN!

I would have liked to have cabinets that went all the way to the ceiling (even though we have to use a stool to reach the uppers as it is), but this was the best we could do. I plan to put little half-rounded shelves to the right of the window. I have a bunch of light-seeking little succulents and what-nots that want this space.

And the new shiny sink: I have lusted after that sink for years. I have a love/hate relationship with IKEA, but mostly love.

Here you see our crazy humongous steel refrigerator. I was lobbying for the tiniest refrigerator you could buy—preferably one that fit under the counter. We would then have an auxiliary freezer in the basement or whatever. Joshua wanted a big ol’ side-by-side thing with cold-water jets and an icemaker. I won first and we ended up first buying a very small (but tallish) fridge, but it was freakishly loud and sounded like an irate flock of birds every time it kicked into gear, so we took it back. Then Joshua won and we ended up with this thing: it’s one of the highest energy rated beasts out there and with all the rebates and tax whatnots and sales (we had an armory of coupons), it ended up being about the cheapest option. We win!

We eventually intend to add cabinets over the fridge and to the left, but were still figuring out what exactly we want.

Oh, don’t mind my child; she’s having a total fit on the floor.

Oak countertops!!! I love them!

We had these crazy plants spring up out of nothing right after we moved in. They grew insanely fast and had cool succulent-like speckly patterned stalks and wavy fanned leaves. The neighbor told us to “pull it out; the flowers smell really bad.” We have one in the front next to our steps and if I pulled it out, it would have revealed the unattractive rhododendron stump and some ancient paint chips, probably loaded with poisonous lead. I made the conclusive choice to leave the plants be when I saw baby ones at a local nursery. I figured that if people paid big bucks for the things, they have to be good.

They grew tall. They grew lushly. Then they started to form long flower spikes. OH BOY!

Very body-snatcher looking.

And finally, it opened!

I at last looked them up and they are Dracunculus Vulgaris, commonly called “Voodoo Lily,” among many other names (that’s the coolest so we’ll stop there). The flies, as you can see, love them.

And it really does stink. Everything I’ve read about them say that the smell lasts a day and then goes away but they lie, unless there is another bloom hidden in the foliage there somewhere. It’s been days and I still catch wafts of it now and again from across the yard. It does savage battle with the neighbor’s giant honeysuckle on a nightly basis (planted, no doubt, to counteract the decaying varmint smells coming from my yard). I thought about cutting off the drooping flower but then I saw how it was supposed to mature into these big orangy berry things, and now I have to wait it out. The one by my front door just went off yesterday so we’ve kept the door shut. The mail lady probably thinks a raccoon croaked under my front porch.

In very pleasant-smelling flowerdom, allow me to introduce the pale pink/yellow peony:

which smells awesome, and the dark pink, which smells curiously like chocolate peppermint:

Right.

And the floor will be totally low-key because instead of putting in something new and clean and brand new and fresh and easy. Probably really easy.. We I decided that the douglas fir likely to be underneath would be much cooler if we refinished it. Seriously, imagine: One HUNDRED year-old doug fir, trees felled by burly dudes with hatchets and blue oxen or somesuch right there on our very floor. We just can’t cover that up.

We chipped out the old, ugly, poorly laid tile, which was a pain in the ass. We then pried up the cement board underneath it (a bigger pain in the ass, plus carcinogenic and all that good stuff). Then we had to remove the gnarly looking plywood sub-flooring held in place by no less than eleventy frillion two-inch screws. We’d remove screws until our eyes bled and our backs were surely crippled, then try to pry up the piece, and lo! One lone little fucker holding it down somewhere.. We’d hunt around until we found it, then kill it with fire and all that, and again try to pry up the piece (triumphant at la-). But no! Blast!! Another bleeding screw somewhere. It was not pretty. We got it all up in the end though and here’s what we beheld:

Hmmm. Rustic.

But fossilized mortar is no deterrent for the Optimistic One and I was all “Suh-WEET! This is going to look GREAT!” Joshua, ever the skeptic, was skeptical.

I rented a big sander from Home Depot and fired it up with some 24 grit, which is seriously like three or four good-sized boulders glued to a swath of tough paper. It’s scary.

Then of course there was a lot of filling required. We used up two large containers of the stuff because it kept sucking down into the floor boards. I couldn’t figure out where it was going. It just disappeared and we put more on top. The end.

It looked really awesome and I was super optimistic all over again when confronted with this spectacle first thing in the morning.

But it finished out to look like this:

And after applying only the first round of floor finish (it will have four-five layers in the end; five probably, because I’m crazy), this:

DAMN SAM! I’m satisfied. Now we can work on those walls.

I was actually starting to get used to it. Comfortable. The toilet works, the sink works, the shower works. Do we really need the walls? I see now how easy it would be to just spend the rest of one’s days without cupboard doors ever installed. I mean, you can put the dishes away and that’s close enough.

But then, whilst sitting on the toilet, I would see a gaping hole with all this antique grunge and splintered flooring/wall/general ickiness and the underside of the iron tub (tubs are only pretty on the top side, if you didn’t know), and next to that, a gaping hole down into the very basement of the house.

And I try not to look down there when I’m in the bathroom lest I catch a glimpse of monsters, say, sneaking across my view-spot. But I always have to look and it stresses me out. And to take it even further, you don’t want monsters—or faeries for that matter—ever actually coming up through the hole into the bathroom! GAH!! Monsters and faeries should never be seen. And so I started complaining in the general direction of Joshua to get the hole closed up (there was some complicated plumbing stuff to take care of that he was putting off until forever). And with that (plus about a million other teeny little annoying things), voila! Fin.

Entering the gleaming new bathroom! Here are the old photos to compare. I did two-inch hex tile on the floor and wainscoting on the walls where I assumed I’d just be covering up the scratched wall after chipping off the old green and white tile (HAHAHAHAcough). Little did I know the entire wall would need to come down. By that point though, my Design Plan was lodged solidly in the gray matter and there was nothing to do but go with it.

Sink Plan I was to have a wall-mounted sink but it became tragically clear that it was not going to work (for about seven different unforseen reasons). We went with Sink Plan II, the Ikea Lillangen, which though it was my favorite sink, I didn’t pick it originally because I worried the Mod would clash with the Ye Olde. But it seems to work surprisingly well. And it’s strong enough for Ronin to hang from like a jungle gym, her favorite bathroom activity.

Moving around the bathroom… The toilet and Ralph, the glowy night-light thing that we’ve kept in the bathroom even since the rat incident.

Yep, another shot of the toilet.

Closet we built into that useless and weird corner nook. Voila: no longer useless or weird! This is Ronin’s favorite place to hide when we play hide-and-seek. She usually comes into the bathroom while we are brushing our teeth or whatever, spies the closet and climbs inside, then has the bright idea: HEYMAMAMAMA!!! Let’s play hide and seek! I’ll be the hider and you count! I start counting and she closes the door and giggles madly. Will I ever be able to find her?

Um, still no shelves yet though. So actually kind of useless.

The tub! I used white subway tile with a line of 1″ glass multi-colored blue guys just to be superfancy. And also so you can see exactly any deviation from the level in my tiling. Which didn’t happen of course. We also broke down and had a guy come and refinish our tub. It pretty much gleams. I had thought I would get some amazing shower curtain to complete the look, but couldn’t actually think of what to get, so we are still using the curtain from the old house. I discovered that I really don’t have strong feelings for shower curtains.

The other direction, Ronin’s bath toys, shampoo, etc.

The door. Still haven’t painted the trim yet and the doorknob/lock/whatsit is all jimmied up. This will be fixed probably never.

And lastly, the medicine cabinet. If you remember, the old one was unacceptable and all new ones were ugly. So I made this one from scratch. I found the old beveled mirror at the salvage place and built the box for it. The box is absolutely square down to the mm, but the door was not, as I later discovered, and required much planing and foul language to make fit in the end. It’s a wonder I managed to finish the touch-up paint after all the drama.

We also got the porcelain light fixture at the salvage place. The picture on the wall is something Joshua has been hauling around with him since before we met; it’s been on our bathroom wall in every apartment and house we’ve ever lived in. However, it always used to hang sideways (just because the mounting hardware was on that side); we only for the first time adjusted it so that it hangs right-side-up. The jury is still out as to which orientation we prefer.

Inside the cabinet! I built little shelves to fit with the things I wanted to put in the cabinet (e.g., tall enough to accommodate the electric toothbrush, etc.).

Time to start ripping up the kitchen. Or should I build my studio first?

This weekend we went to a bird festival/show/thing in the rain at Sellwood park. When it really started to pour, all the children crowded under the craft tent to color bird masks and wings. Ronin colored her mask and called it “Medicine Crow.” We looked at each other all, huh. I have no idea where she heard that but I’m guessing there must be a northwest coast native storybook at her preschool with similar artwork. Crazy!

Perhaps two or three times per day she’ll dress up as the Medicine Crow and run around the house for maybe two minutes. Then she deposits the wings and mask somewhere inconvenient and goes off to make more messes.

The wings are still in the process of being colored. The detail though has been rendered in blue glitter, which falls off everywhere she goes with the wings. Of all the debris I find myself digging out of the rugs, couch, and various crevices of the house, glitter is by far the least annoying. Rather pleasant really.

The bathroom is almost done, I think. Everything seems to be just about ready to be finished except that it is waiting on some other really minor thing that probably involves a trip to Lowes to buy some lame part that they probably won’t have (but Home Depot might). We can at least take showers now. That happened only a few days ago.

In other non-construction-related news, Ronin desperately wants a bunkbed. Like, she has never actually really wanted anything before in her life, mostly because her attention span has generally been acute and fleeting. However, she has fixated on the bunkbed and talks about it at length. Repeated trips to Ikea in futile attempt to purchase things they are always out of does not help any (the bunkbed in question is from Ikea, naturally).

We are not too worried that she’ll fall out in the night; she has managed to grow into a fairly low-key sleeper, astoundingly enough. We thought we might remove the bottom bed and make a play-house for her instead. She would LOVE that, and how adorable would that be anyway?!

In the end, we set up a chart on the refrigerator with spaces for 21 stickers. At the end of each day if she is non-combatant about dinner and eats—nay, acknowledges or even just licks—one or more of the vegetables on her plate, and if she gets ready for bed without a major meltdown, we declare the day a raging success and she can pick out a sticker to stick on the chart.

She is beside herself with excitement over the chart but I’m not entirely sure she really gets the concept. She has never been one to be swayed much by bribery. We’ll see how it goes.

So, I figured that it would take us one, maybe two days to totally demo the bathroom, a day or two to lay and grout the tile, and the last day would be spent replacing sink, faucets, spigots, painting, etc. Maybe we could create a built-in closet as well in the weird little nook behind the tub. That would go up FAST. All we were doing was knocking down the tiles on the walls and replacing it with wainscoting, then replacing the floor and tub surround with tile. I could probably get the entire thing done in two days actually, all by myself.

It took us two days to demo, yes. But then it took us two or three more, one of which was mostly spent standing in our demo outfits staring at the mayhem in confusion and horror. Every time we thought we were finished, we’d decide that it would really be better to just take out the entire wall. That and pick out/remove all the plaster. Of course, we should have gone crazy from the very beginning and tore all the walls straight down to the lathe but I kept thinking we needed to keep it “minor.”

And then of course I decided I hated every single medicine cabinet out there in the world—that is, aside from those adorable little vintage wooden ones. Which are ridiculously expensive, even for the totally messed up ones that need a ton of fixing. I called all the salvage places within 50 miles of Portland (believe me, there are many) and it was not heartening. It’s just a stupid box with a frame and a mirrored door. HOW HARD COULD IT BE?! That’s right. In the end, I decided to build myself one from scratch. It was the only way.

I scouted out a bunch of sinks too at the salvage places but all the cute vintage ones were too big for the narrow bathroom. Or else the spigot would be too low and Joshua rejected them. I waaanted a salvage sink but in the end we bought a totally non-offensive new sink for $32. Which was, of course, cheaper than any of the salvage sinks I had scoped anyway. Blah.

Then there’s the tub. It’s totally chipped and scratched and the finish is stained and dull. We looked into replacing it but the concept of somehow prying free a 500-pound cast-iron tub and wheeling it out without tearing up all the walls and doorframes in the house was making my brain clench. Joshua seemed to feel that this would be a cinch. We looked for a new tub but I hated pretty much all of the cheap options (figures). The Internet told us that you can actually have them refinished and the results are apparently amazing. I’m a little skeptical but we’ll see. We also have been entertaining the idea of doing it ourselves (because we’re stupid like that) with two-part epoxy boat paint, some turtle wax, and a buffer. We’re undecided as of yet but we may just end up shelling out the $400 to have it done professionally. (That’s another thing: everyone told us that it would be no more than $250 to have it refinished but all the quotes I got were running upwards of $400-450. People can be so wrong sometimes.)

What was behind all those walls was scary. Forty year-old mildew stains, three different wallpapers, ancient linoleum (it had an interesting slate-like texture; petrified?), old tiles, old tile backing, mid-century style pink paint, a pair of underwear, weird insulation (?) sheets made of what appears to be hair, and an old wooden domino with a dragon on it.

I did not factor in the fifteen thrillion billion trips to Home Depot and Lowes (because they have different things, damn them) and the time we would waste gazing blankly at the plumbing parts while Ronin went absolutely apeshit with boredom. Ronin does not do well when she senses that our attention is elsewhere. We, in turn, cannot think straight when she is shrieking, “MAMA! MAMA! MAMA! MAMA! MAMA! I! WANNA! SEE! THAT! THING! UP! THERE! ON! THE! SHELF!” It’s a vicious cycle that ends up with us spending two hours in the store trying to buy six things, four of which will end up needing to be returned.

[Oh my poor eyes. I had almost forgotten how awful it was.]

Right now we’re focusing on getting the plumbing back to functional before we move in. Currently the toilet is sitting on our back patio next to the giant pile of rubble (we are classy like that). It’s a good conversation piece when introducing ourselves to our neighbors over the back fence. But progress is slowly being made. Joshua is over there right now, battling the under-sink pipes. We have most of the walls back up, I laid the tile floor and yesterday I grouted. It looks bleeding spectacular. There is hope yet.

It all happened very fast. We viewed it and put in our offer the first day it got listed and our offer was accepted. We did inspections the following Tuesday, and the Tuesday after that, we had the keys! The whole process took 11 days.

[Main living/dining area. Floors were just refinished and smell wretched; place needs some airing out. But the floors are beautiful! I’ll be doing some painting, by the way. That maroon moulding is distracting.)

We’ve actually been sort of kind of looking for a long time. Almost a year ago, we had the winning bid on a house at auction. The auction guys were all over themselves the moment it closed giving us instructions: RACE to the bank and get a cashiers check for the earnest money, overnight it FASTFASTFAST or else face penalties and fines and bad credit ratings and an IRS audit and who knows what else. So we did and then we didn’t hear anything from anybody for two weeks, when we got our earnest money quietly returned to us in the mail. Apparently the bank decided that they wanted more money than our winning bid and rejected our purchase. WhatEV! (Ironically, the house got relisted, went to auction again and the winning bid rejected, got relisted a couple more times and finally sold 9 months later for less than our original winning offer. We were so over that house by then.)

The next house looked pretty good except for a slight weirdness with the lot: the city seemed to think that it was only a half lot (the other half owned by some construction company) but the ad very specifically described a luxuriously large lot. We made a huge stink about it from the get-go and they assured and reassured and doubly-assured again (we really were pains in the ass about this point) that indeed it was in fact the entire lot, that the city was just behind in updating their files after the foreclosure, blah blah shut up already. They even sent us what appeared to be a title report that very plainly stated the property as being the entire lot and at last we had our offer accepted and did inspections. Then a few days later, we got the news that, um, yeah, there seems to be a problem with the title. We backed out. It was a complete waste of time and money and we were totally pissed because we had been asking about the lot since before we even went to go look at the property. Basically, what happened is the previous owner quietly split the lot and sold half to a construction company. Then foreclosed on the entire property (and Bank of America didn’t do their homework). BofA relisted, again stressing how big the lot was. It was weird, like they knew all along and just hoped we wouldn’t notice.

I guess that’s what happens when you are hunting in the bottom of the barrel. It’s you versus all the other loonbats out there. We do seem to draw more than our fair share of the absurd though.

[Bedroom and hallway between bedrooms, bath and living area. Floors are refinished fir here.]

Finally we came across this house. We looked at almost all of the very cheapest houses Portland had to offer for a long time and this was the first place that was not actually gross, or needing epic fixes immediately. In fact, it was nicer, bigger, and cheaper than our current rental. We could just move in immediately if we wanted! It only took us a year and we went through four different agents in the process.

[In person, those cabinets are WAY ricketier and ill-hung and super crappy. They look almost decent in this photo but do not be fooled. The kitchen has to go.]

[This yellow blurriness, incidentally, is why we never have any good photos of Ronin anymore. She will not hold still for anything.]

So immediately upon taking possession of the place, I shifted into princess mode, bought about ten gallons of paint in ten different shades of beige/gray, and ripped out the bathroom (this is, after all, my big moment!). And now it looks like this:

Now I just sort of want to put the walls back on again.

Here’s the recipe for the ice cream. The bacon is just bacon. Well good thick bacon (uncured apple smoked from Trader Joes).