House

Mark also has an excellent page with pictures that he took of the new house during the final inspection.

	Farewell to our wonderful house in Pasadena! December 2012 sees us move to Saint Paul in the midst of a Minnesota winter. The new house is as charming, even more so on the inside, but with perhaps less curb appeal.
	The two houses are of approximately the same period, but heating concerns have certainly affected the choice here to build high and compact rather than low and spreading. The decoration on and in the new house shows, I think, a greater willingness on the part of the builders to engage in expensive detail. But in my opinion, the effect outside is not as pleasing as in Pasadena.
	Now, writing in late November 2012, before any of our stuff is here, there’s not much I can profitably photograph. But here’s the knocker on the front door, not of the same period as the house (1913), as you see. But I see no reason to replace it. The message beneath is the familiar Céad Míle Fáilte, “A Hundred Thousand Welcomes”, but I think I might just replace it with pedo mellon a minno, “Speak, Friend, and Enter”. Too pretentious? How about, instead, “Enter, to grow in wisdom”?
	The house is at the stub-end of its street: the block just ends at a railroad right-of-way whose single track seems to be used by several freight trains a day, which can be fairly noisy, and the Empire Builder, the Amtrak train between Chicago and the Pacific Northwest. But the trains don’t disturb us, in fact, we kind of like the sound. Just the other side of the tracks is Ayd Mill Road, a sort of restricted- access highway set into a vehicular trough. So we are indeed the Dead-end Kids.
	This snap shows the top of the short flight of stairs leading to the landing from which the stairs to the second floor continue to the right. We imagine that originally there might have been a similar short flight coming from the kitchen, just as there was in our house in Providence. And maybe some previous owners of the house decided to expand the kitchen, forcing the abandonment of the other stairs. But now, there’s just a pierced wall there, which I like, ’cause it’ll allow me to see who’s at the front door when I’m cooking. Mark, on the other hand, predicts confi- dently that the cats will use this feature as a shortcut between the front room and the kitchen.
	Although this picture was taken rather later, it still is a good display of the elegance of the house. This dentil work appears on the crown molding of the living room and dining room, the two formal rooms of the house. Pass your mouse over the image to see a closeup.
	Serious snowfall on Sunday, 9 December, our third day in Saint Paul. We went on foot to Unity Church, about six blocks away from our temporary base in Dar’s apartment. This snap shows Mark walking back after the service. You can get the same in double size, just hit your “return” button to get back here.
	11 December, one of the neighbors offered to shovel our walks, knowing that we were unable to get to the house. I’m not used to this neighborliness! Tomorrow, the movers come, and it will be a busy, busy day.
	This lovely symmetrical Spruce standing in front of the garage dominates the back yard.
	This picture and the next one, taken on the day of the unloading of the van, shows how everything looked before we started unpacking. The packers took two days, and we expect that the reverse operation will take us several weeks, maybe even a month. (12 December)
	Cartons everywhere, chairs ignominiously upended, a picture of true chaos. (12 December)

	All the above pictures were made shortly after the delivery of our excesses of stuff. Here we are holed up on New Year’s eve, with the temperature diving below zero F, still emptying cartons and flattening out packing paper, but as you see, leaving things out on horizontal surfaces to be put away later. I should point out that a lot of the pictures, such as this one, have been done with extreme wide-angle optics, which makes the space seem far roomier than it is. (31 December)
	Two weeks back, the kitchen was so jammed with unopened cartons that we could hardly get around. Now, though there’s a stash of stuff for the next flea market in a carton on the floor, the kitchen is a pleasure to work and cook in. We originally hoped to put our computer desks here in the kitchen temporarily, but we couldn’t get them through the kitchen door, so Mark has his machine on a card table here, while I have mine on the little spinet-desk that Michael and I grew up with. Both are unacceptably rickety, and we’re looking forward to getting a proper office set up on the second floor. (31 December)
	It was bitterly cold on New Year’s Day, but I stood on the top step of the stair to our front porch and took this picture across the street. You can see all the even-numbered houses on our dead-end block. (1 January)
	One month from the arrival of the movers’ van, we still have a lot of unopened cartons, mostly in the basement and on the second floor. But here in the living-room, we think we’ve settled on a good arrangement of the furniture. (13 January)
	The living-room from the other direction, maybe you can compare this shot with the one from 12 December, just above the thick horizontal bar. (13 January)
	You can just barely see the stack of packing-paper on the sideboard at the left, and the two emptied but not knocked-down cartons show that we’re still in the process of unpacking. The undifferenti- ated mess on the dining-room table seems to be resisting our express desire to put it all away. Note that we do have the storage space, just haven’t bit the bullet. (13 January)
	Yesterday, the twelfth, Mark helped me* put together the shelves you see at the extreme left, here in the basement, and I had already been working to put up the peg boards you see at the extreme right. In between, loads of unopened cartons. (13 January) * Meaning: he let me watch while he did it.
	People have written us and told us that the house looks so roomy. Well, folks, I have to say that you got that impression because of the optics I’ve been using on my camera. You’ll see the true situation when you visit, namely that the whole house is noticeably less roomy than either the Pasadena house or the one in Providence, which we left in 1998. It’s true enough that all three houses have (or originally had) four bedrooms, but in this one, two of those were supremely tiny. One has been turned into a comfortable bathroom, the other is so small only a child’s bed could fit in reasonably. Downstairs there are only three rooms: kitchen, dining room and living room. The kitchen is indeed big, because it benefited from an expansion some time relatively recently, and we will have space to sit and have breakfast if we prefer that to breakfast in the dining room, which has been our practice since 1991. (19 January)
	We’ve gotten the dining room cleared out mostly now, and you can see the arrangement of things in this wide-angle shot that I made by holding the camera well above my head and pointing it downwards. And knowing that the rug is 9' by 12', you can get an accurate idea of the size of the room. Way over to the right, you can just make out a mess of packing paper on the sideboard, and a black smear that’s a cat lying on it. You can get a bigger view by clicking on the picture. (21 January)
	On the twenty seventh, we had a nice snowfall, which the short clip to the left shows very well.
	In Pasadena, I had to do my woodworking out in the garage, and so I was glad to move to a house with a proper totally unfinished basement. But as I mentioned above, this meant buying a sturdy set of shelves at the very least, for storing some of my stuff. More than that, I needed some- thing to put my drill press on. And I have a couple of other power tools, less often used, that needed someplace to put them on when I want to use them. So I decided to build myself a sturdy table from a sheet of particleboard and 2×4’s and 2×6’s. So here I am, with the table pretty much just begun, two of its legs bolted into place. (30 January)
	The legs needed D-shaped holes, not exactly mortises, for me to reach in and tighten nuts through. Here I’m using a 1½′′ Forstner bit, fast-, clean-, and cool-cutting. Later I used a mortise chisel to make the straight sides. You can pass your mouse over the image to see a close-up. (1 February)
	There’s the finished table. There’s never enough room to put things on, and now I’m wondering whether I should have made it 2′×8′ instead of the 2′×6′ that I chose for the design. Too late! (4 February)
	On Friday, 22 February, the countertops were delivered and installed for the new cabinet over the washer and dryer, as well as the new island in the middle of the kitchen floor and the newly set-up computer-room and office upstairs. Here you see the island, ready to be worked on or sat at. You can click on the picture for a larger image. (26 February)
	Flanking the window, our two work areas in the new computer room. This picture was taken just three days after the table (counter?) was installed, and already it’s as messy as if we had been here a year. You can click on the picture for a larger image. (26 February)
	It’s mid October of 2013 now, and I see that I have not been keeping up. In the intervening time, Mark engaged Renegade Gardener, Don Engebretson by name, and asked him to redesign our front and back yards. The results have been spectacular, and they should get shown here. I’ll go through my files, and see what I can find to detail the changes, and take more pictures before leaves fall and snow flies.
	The very first step was to replace the sloping and unmaintainable lawn in the front with a stepped configuration with walls of varicolored stone. Don is a master at the craft of laying stones, painstaking and perfectionist, and has a varied palette to use in making the walls. Here he’s working with one of his crew in the earliest stage of the construction. (16 May)
	A month later, the lower wall was completely done except for the top course, and the upper was mostly done. (17 June)
	(29June)