One final(?) glorious childless autumn Sunday

It is an absolutely stunning fall Oregon morn, the kind you sense won't be seen again the rest of the year. The sun is out. The air feels light and crisp. The vine maples leaves have donned their burnt-orange costumes. It's a complete contrast to yesterday's blah rain.

I woke for a run through the damp woods of Tryon Creek State Park and decided I couldn't be done with this morning. Not with an extra hour to this "fall back" day and more rain in the forecast. Leaving Sarah socked out on the couch, I tucked The New York Times under my arm, along with The Sunday Oregonian's business and commentary sections, and walked six blocks to Peet's Coffee. I ordered my favorite -- a traditional cappuccino -- along with a piece of mulled apple cider coffeecake from Portland's Black Sheep Bakery. Then I sat and absorbed reviews in the Times that made me want to add five about books to my bedside reading pile - books about the historical and socio-political underpinnings of Iraq. An hour later, I walked back home knowing full well that I won't crack a one of those books over the next several infant/toddler-rearing years. And it might be the last morning that I get to spend alone with a yummy cup of java and the Sunday papers for a good long time. I'm grateful for it.

Now, time to compost the tomatoes and dust the bookshelves.

Sarah, meanwhile, has finished knitting booties for our child.



She hopes to have time to finish a matching cap.

Colors and a bit of poetry

The exterior's done. The paint is on the walls. Doug & crew are working on the trim.





We might just have half a house by next weekend!

The question is: Will we have a baby too?

We're nine days from the due date. Sarah feels good. She's been off work a week. Good thing, too. She gets tired more easily these days.

Back to the house. The color choices ended up being:

Sumatra for the kitchen.




Olive for our bedroom.



A light cream for the baby's room.



Reef for the bathroom.



And Metro's khaki-colored recycled paint for the hall and mudroom.



Lemme tell ya. For a recycled paint, it looks great.

Doug & crew might have only a week of work left before we all wait for the kitchen cabinets to be delivered. We're gonna miss these guys.


That's Doug with his son-in-law, Paca. Doug just met Paca weeks before Paca married his daughter. Paca came here with his children this summer from Jamaica. Not sure how he met Doug's daughter. But he's now working for her dad.

Nacho continues to be a man of pleasant surprises. Late last week, he walked up to the house with a book of Garcia Lorca poems. The book published Spanish and English versions of each poem side by side. Nacho likes this because he can practice his English, which is already good. These days, however, Nacho says he doesn't get much reading done during his 90 minute bus commute from North Portland to our house. That's because he's found a couple of friends on the bus -- a high school student and a middle-aged woman -- whom he talks to each morning. Doug saw him talking to the woman once and began ribbing him.

"Hey, Nacho! Better hope your wife doesn't find out about that lady friend of yours," Doug said.

Nacho shrugged him off.


(Nacho, his "lady friend" and a book of poems in his hand)

Impressed by Nacho's choice of poetry, I pulled out a similar book of Pablo Neruda love poems and loaned it to him. Doug, almost on cue, stuck his head between us.

"Hey, Nacho. You gonna read some of those to your lady friend?" Doug asked.

"I read them all already," Nacho said. "I read them before I knew my wife."

Turns out he read poetry as a young man to pass the time while selling newspapers on the streets of his Mexican hometown.

That's our Nacho.

Progress, Paint and a Rock Star

Well, the drywallers showed up.

They put up plastic. They sprayed. They left without cleaning up.

Nonetheless, the place is finally looking like a home.

Now, we're choosing paint colors. You know the routine. Spend $50 total on six quarts of paint you'll never use just to slap some large samples up on the wall, only to realize you need to go one shade lighter for each color you've chosen.

So, we're debating. Should it be Devine-brand Olive or Devine Sumatra in the bedroom? Eddie Bauer Calico or Devine Sumatra in the kitchen and nook? Devine Bananas or Devine Olive in the baby's room? Devine Reef or Sherwin Williams Milk Pail in the bathroom?

While we were shopping for paint at Sherwin Williams on NE Broadway in Portland on Saturday, Janet Weiss, drummer for Sleater-Kinney, walked in. I about freaked in my mild-mannered way. I really admire this band and her drumming in particular. But, I decided not to ask her to sign our paint samples, both out of respect for her domestic decorating needs and out of fear of annoying my wife (Plus, I couldn't decide: Should I have her sign in Sumatra or Calico?). I couldn't even tell you what paint colors she chose. I can just say she wore a knitted hat --much like the one in this photo, only black -- the entire 30-40 minutes she was in the store.

Doug, Nacho and his other assistant, Paca, have almost finished the back porch, and I must say, it looks better than our front one.

(That's not Doug. That's Ron Downey, the contractor installing fir flooring in our bedrooms).

Doug is quite proud of the porch, too. Said something about being glad to work on something fancy for once. Not sure what that says about the rest of the house.

Nadir

The refrigerator occupies a space in the dining room formerly claimed by our table.
A fine layer of drywall dust laces the keys upon which I type.
Our sink and electric stove sit beneath a blue tarp on the ground in our backyard.
Black erosion control fencing greets visitors along our front sidewalk.

This week marks the 14th of active remodeling and, possibly, the worst week of all. Grandma and Grandpa Huns left Wednesday, but not before Grandma walked into our bathroom Tuesday noon to find a puddle of smelly water ringing our lone toilet. The suspected cause? An overflow. The culprit? The darn drywallers.


The good news: The house is almost sided. Doug & crew got the gutters on yesterday hours before it rained. Grandma and grandpa cooked things like potato soup and hambuger-mashed-potato casserole to freeze for after the baby arrives and helped wash two loads of baby clothes at the Lakeshore Hotel.

Also, aside from touches of morning sickness, Sarah still feels well. The baby has dropped. The midwife gave her a good bill of health Monday. All seems on schedule for the critter to arrive three weeks or so from Monday.

All, that is, except for the house.

Last night, Sarah said after dinner of canned-black-bean-and-frozen-sweet-potato burritos, "Just remember, Brent. Tomorrow is the worst it's gonna get."

Tomorrow's here. Will the drywallers be? What havoc will they wreak?

Let's review

You may recall our house:




It's cute and quaint but too small. Two bedrooms, one bath, a full basement. Less than 900 square feet of living space.

That's an apartment, for crying out loud!

After years of debate and house searching--should we move? should we stay? move? stay?-- we took the plunge. In late February, we hired a contractor.




Less than a week later, this happened:




A positive pregnancy test!

What were we thinking?!?!

Then started a series of delays.

First, our contractor fell off a ladder and broke both wrists. We stuck with him.

Then, the city required us to create a drainage system for our house. So, we hired a geotechnical engineer. This guy spent not one week, not two weeks but four weeks coming up with a drainage plan! And it didn't pass city approval!!!!!!

We were miffed. But we tried to forget it all when Grandma and Grandpa Huns took us on an Alaskan cruise.



We had a great time. We caught salmon, saw whales, kayaked a glacier-fed lake, watched a glacier calving, ate like royalty and thoroughly relaxed in our balcony rooms.



By then, Sarah had started looking pregnant.



We returned home mid-June. The engineer's second plan failed again. We fired him and hired another one. This person, Craig LaVielle, had experience in Lake Oswego. He came out the next day and finalized a report that passed the city within a week.

Our contractor, his wrists at 85%, started work.



That's our contractor, Doug Gaylord, on the left. One of his early assistants is standing in the back. And that's "Nacho" drinking the soda.

When we first met Doug, he spoke about his assistant "Nacho" quite often. "Nacho" this. "Nacho" that. "Nacho's a good painter," he said several times. We kept wondering: Why does Doug call this guy "Nacho?" Was he being insensitive?

The day the project began, we finally met "Nacho." We asked him his real name.

"Ignacio," he said.

"Is Doug the only person who calls you Nacho?" Sarah asked.

"Everybody calls me Nacho," he replied. "I'm the original Nacho. I was Nacho before Doritos."

Nacho it is, then.

The photo above was taken Aug. 5. Doug & crew actually started around July 13th.

They abided by Lake Oswego's tree-protection ordinance and fenced our towering cedar.



They ripped off our back porch.



They dug the foundation and set forms.



A subcontractor poured cement Aug. 5.


(Hard to believe that was two months ago!)

Then, Nacho and Doug started the floors.



Then the framing.





Meantime, we bought a baby swing. We don't know whether a boy or girl will be sitting in this. We declined to know the sex ahead of time. We prefer surprises. As you can tell from this undertaking.



Our cat Moppet enjoyed exploring the new environs.



She often hid in the woodpiles.



Our dog CeeCee may be 12 years old, but she caught two squirrels this summer, and promptly burried both.



Our new bedrooms started taking shape.



They started on the roof Aug. 29.



The roof proved difficult. It took Doug longer than he expected to measure and cut the joists and challenging angles to proper lengths. He did a great job, though. Wasted no wood, he said.





By Sept. 2nd, the back porch was taking shape.



Sarah's parents visited Labor Day weekend. Grandma Bettie felt the baby kick.



Grandpa Brad and Brent went fishing out of Astoria. There's the skipper and Grandpa Brad with a sockeye salmon grandpa bagged in the Columbia.



Finally, time to enclose the house.



Sarah packed up the kitchen for demolition. Check out those overalls.



Our existing spare bedroom got ripped down to the studs to make way for our hallway and new bathroom.



The kitchen demolition revealed original fir floors underneath, but not quite enough to preserve.



Our dining room became our kitchen, as it remains today. What a mess!



Doug & crew came to finish the kitchen demo on a Saturday.



We took off for the coast and one last childless three-day weekend, this time at the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport.



The Sylvia Beach is a B&B that names and decorates each room after authors. Hemmingway. E.B. White. Agatha Christie.

We stayed in the Sigrid Undset room. We'd never heard of her.




Nice room, though.



We spent an afternoon at Yaquina Head ....



....watching whales....



We came back to a kitchen twice the size of our old one.



We were flabbergasted and thrilled.



Doug gloated.



That was Sept. 19. Bad news followed. Our kitchen cabinets, we learned, would not be ready until December! That was confirmation of our greatest fear -- that the house would not be ready in time for the baby.

We learned this while Doug took three days off to go hunting. We also scrambled on a rainy Friday morning to keep our basement from flooding, since there were -- and are -- still no gutters on the house and since most things we own are now in the basement. Water crept across about one-quarter of the basement floor, but we saved all but one baby item from getting wet.

So, we moaned and groaned for a few days and eventually got used to the idea of feeding a baby with no kitchen.

Late last week, we learned that Tureck Wood Flooring, two brothers who finished our fir floors a few years ago so perfectly, would not be available until Dec. 15 to finish the fir we're installing in our bedrooms. Trouble is, we can't bring ourselves to go with anyone else. The Turecks are too good and reliable.

Progress on the house slowed visibly the final week of September as the electricians and plumbers did their stuff. Yesterday, however, we took another leap forward. Doug and Nacho began siding the exterior.



They also built some much appreciated steps to the mudroom, where we access our basement.



They removed the sink and remaining appliances in preparation for the drywallers ... who failed to show up today as expected.



The excavator did, though, to the delight of Jack, who was visiting his grandmother across the street.





The excavator, also named Doug, went to work digging trenches for our drainage system. Whatever it is.



Grandma and Grandpa Huns arrived in town last week to help us out. They've cooked us meals to freeze, helped clean up around the house and walked CeeCee midday. This morning, we took them to the Portland Farmer's Market.





Grandpa Huns tried out a glider for us at Segal's for Children furniture store.




We returned to more mayhem and madness....





There's a lesson somewhere in all of this. Maybe we'll figure it out by the time our child goes to college and we've paid off this addition. Until then, we'll keep you posted. Remember, the drywallers are supposed to come Monday.