Perseverance

One of the things that really bothered me when we began remodeling our house was losing some of the plants that we really liked. I could care less about the cherry tree that kept regrowing each time we cut it back, and I certainly had nothing but hard feelings for the poison ivy that was creeping down the basement stairwell. It felt like I was giving up on the things that I liked, but there simply wasn’t time to dig up and relocate all of the plants we wanted to save — the butterfly bush, a Carolina Allspice bush, a hop plant, and about a hundred wonderful little lily of the valley flowers in shades of white and pink.

Ben made an effort to dig up the butterfly bush that had taken residence outside of one of the windows on the north side of the house. The bush was only a couple of years old, and had appeared on its own one summer. It had taken root from seeds from another butterfly bush that we had planted years ago in another part of the yard. The old bush wasn’t doing too well because it was in a shady area of the yard, but this new plant was in direct sunlight, and its trunk was at least three inches in diameter. However, the root system was buried in dirt that had the consistency of concrete. That Saturday, the temperature was about 98 degrees and after about 10 minutes, Ben announced that it would simply be easier to purchase a new bush after the construction was done. We decided that would apply to about everything else, too.

In the last two months, all the plants that were in the small garden at the front of the house and those along the northern side have been cut down, trampled by men and machinery, crunched under roofing beams and drywall and toolboxes, and trampled some more. The grass has long since receded from the front yard, no doubt heading for better pastureland.

It seems that we gave up too soon on these plants. The butterfly bush has staged a comeback, and a multitude of branches are springing out of the old trunk. It’s only about a foot and a half tall at this point, but it’s a vigorous grower — it’s only taken about two or three weeks to get this big. We might still have to move the plant out from the porch a little, but now at least we have the time to soak the ground and dig up the plant when it goes dormant in the late fall. The best part is going to be when the plant blooms next year, because those fragrant purple flowers are going to be right off our new porch, right where we can see and smell them. And the butterflies are going to be there, too.

Cape Cod Redux

This is my house before it lost its top. Literally. The upper story was simply cut off, just like taking the top layer off of a layer cake. Too bad there isn’t any icing…

In the second photograph, the house has had its new second story put up. The outer walls are in place and ready for siding. The roof is papered and shingled, as well as part of the porch, although it’s not visible in the picture. It’s just not in the budget for aerial photography!

The wraparound porch is partially constructed, with the back and side decks and roofing in place. The contractors have just begun work on the front porch. When we were in the planning stages of the project, I was initially a bit tepid about the porch idea. I have spent the past few years inside, hiding from insects, heat, and noise, all of which seem to be ongoing issues for this neighborhood. Now that the porch is real, it seems like my enthusiasm for it is picking up. It’s going to be a bit of a lifestyle change for us to have all this space. I just hope the amount of junk we have doesn’t expand to fill the space available!

From Under the Porch

The Bad Karma Cafe’s trek on the road to becoming a real nice house began on last Monday. The back porch, which was an unkempt claptrap appendage that ran the width of the house, was removed. The house looks funny now because the back door is several feet above the ground and looks like it’s floating randomly in the middle of a wall.

I can’t say that I miss that porch because it was a real mess, and we really didn’t use it because the porch was piled with so much junk that navigation was almost impossible unless you could levitate or walk through walls. We blame that on not owning a shed, except that now we do own one, and the shed is filled as well as the porch! Truly, one’s belongings expand to fill the space available. But a more practical reason that we didn’t use the porch was that the floor hadn’t been constructed well and was sagging to the point of breakage in the middle and was dangerous to walk on.

Leftover windows, apparently from a garage somewhere, were used at both ends to create a partially closed-in area. The windows were atrociously ugly and the kind of thing you don’t want to show to strangers. Or family. On the other hand, there was a somewhat nostalgic feel for the windows because they reminded me of a TV show that I used to watch as a child — namely, Green Acres!

The northern end of the porch was partially closed in, with a lower wall of wood and the uppper wall again adorned with the hideous garage windows. Some of the panes had breaks and English Ivy had found its way into the porch. The ivy had woven itself into the junk so intrinsically that there was a mass of plant-junk-porch that was on its way to becoming a single entity. Sort of like how carbon becomes a diamond, I expect.

But speaking of diamonds, there were some gems to be found in the debris. The contractors had removed the porch in one day but hadn’t yet started hauling the pieces away. There was an antique bottle in perfect condition, sans dirt, and a dozen or more newspapers dated September 1951. Some sections were rolled up and seem fairly clean. Others had some torn areas and were breaking apart. For the most part, the papers were brittle but readable. I have bagged them up and put them somewhere safe, away from the construction area.

It’s going to be interesting to look through the papers. There are headlines related to the Korean War, advertisements for groceries and clothing, a home section, and a weekend magazine. I am going to clean up the papers and photograph them. I’ll be posting images here, so check back.

The Bad Karma Cafe

Our house earned the name “Bad Karma Cafe” years ago, after a number of disasters struck it in rapid succession. The first thing that happened to it was a fire. Then it was struck by lightning. Then a large tree branch fell on it. Any of these events would have been enough to completely demolish a lesser house, but not the Bad Karma Cafe. The house might have had bad vibes, but it also had staying power.

After each incident we were able to patch up the house, more or less, and keep going on with our everyday lives. We even moved out for a few months after the fire while the insurance company sent out contractors to work on the house, but we still kept to our routine. I don’t want to make it sound easy, because it wasn’t. We also had other neighborhood problems — renters who set bonfires in the yard, a crackhouse on our street for three years — yeah, such a nice place. But none of those things managed to completely break us or the house. Perhaps by then we were just numb.

Then in September 2001, an F3 tornado ripped through College Park. We felt sure that it was coming for us. We had just bought a new car on the previous Saturday, and we were sure it was tornado fodder. After all, didn’t we still live in the Bad Karma Cafe on Irwin Alley? Ben had nicknamed our street “Irwin Alley” in homage to Irwin Allen, nicknamed “The Master of Disaster,” a film producer who made many disaster movies during the 1970s. It seemed like a fitting address for the Bad Karma Cafe.

It’s true what they say — a tornado does sound like a freight train. We could see the leading edge of the storm (not the funnel) from our front porch, and raced for the basement to wait it out. Fortunately, the tornado stayed to the west of Route 1, which is just three blocks from our house. We fortunately had no tornado damage, and that was when we knew that the Bad Karma Cafe’s luck had changed.

This week the Bad Karma Cafe is starting on a journey to have a major face-lift, or more exactly, a roof-lift. After 25 years of patching the roof and drywall and other things too numerous to list, we’ve managed to get enough financing to have major renovation work done on the house and really fix its problems. After all, duct tape only goes so far! Currently the house is a one-and-a-half story Cape Cod, but we’re changing the house to a full two-story structure to maximize the space upstairs and allow us some breathing room. I’ll be adding before-and-after photos as well as a running commentary of the process. Stay tuned.