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I learned the other day that groundhogs, those marmots we mostly only think about in February, eat dandelion heads (be sure to click that link—it’s a great photo). Why isn’t somebody renting them out at this time of year when the lovely little lion-heads are transforming into seed shooters and threatening neighborly relationships everywhere (or at least in my backyard)? Think about it—they would be a cute, green … er, brown, organic alternative to ChemLawn.
My neighborhood bespeaks classic, working-class Chicago style—belts of bungalows broken up by rows of two-family homes and the occasional oddball like my house. But even when a series of houses sprang from the earth looking the same, there’s no telling what one’s future might hold. Witness this two-flat:
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I really wish I had seen this work in progress because it must have involved at least multiple paint cans and brushes—and maybe multiple painters, not to mention the ladders. I wonder whether its neighbors are now feeling drab?
It’s been a while since I put up full frontal pics of the house, so here’s the latest. Here you can see the two faces—both sides with that vivid red show brick. The house was built like this because it was the first one on this side of the street, so its side face was visible from the main street that crosses ours. Now there is a house to the left of it, put in by the daughter of one of this house’s owners in 1961. Thankfully, she preserved a healthy distance between this house and the smaller one she had built. The one to the right moved in in 1926.
We took these so I could ponder changing the color of the eaves (which really need a paint job; you can’t see that because there’s still aluminum up on the front) and the window trim (which is eggplant color—not historically appropriate and a whimsical addition in my jubilation at removing their aluminum straitjacket … but it still makes me happy even though it needs yearly touch-ups due to our lousy paint prep and the dark shade). I feel like the white parts blare, and I’m tempted to tint the eaves and window trim a light green the shade of weathered copper. I’ve seen some lovely old houses with this sort of red/yellow/aged copper combo. But I’m wary of adding more colors to this palette I’ve already been poking at with the light grey porch parts and window sills. However, the original roof (or the last 3 layers before we got the tear-off) was green. The red and yellow bricks carry such a saturated hue that I don’t think other strong color is needed; yet at the same time I’m having a complete block on the notion of painting the window trim white, as it originally was—even though it would likely be more durable than tinted paint. The white you see around the windows now is the backs of the sashes and the triple-track storm windows. I’d like to replace the storm windows with something more subtle, but I don’t think that’ll be in the budget for quite some time.
In these last two shots you can see the odd, partial-octagon bumpout (remember, there’s a square-sided bumpout on the other side). Also, there’s the natural-again wood around the lousy steel front door, including the blocks we had replicated. The ipe front porch and cedar lattice are still in the process of greying out to match the porch posts.
I still don’t think that porch roof looks right. But we’ll have to dive into the phase 3 of the porch project before I can peek at the original brickwork and see whether it matches this profile. If anyone has any ideas about my color conundrum, I’d like to hear your thoughts.
Somebody went berserk in our side yard last night and attacked 3 of the 5 trees we’ve been growing to shade the south side of the house. They were snapped in half—all in the same way in the same spot on their poor, young trunks.
The ones on the ends are/were birches that my dad raised. And the one in the middle is/was the hornbeam I searched high and low for last year.
I was able to order another hornbeam, though of course we’ll be starting all over in trying to convince the plant take on this new job. We’re trying to figure out how to make sure this destruction doesn’t happen again. And, well, there’s really no way to do so. We live in the city off a major street near the alley, and our side yard is an unusual, inviting spot for anyone looking to duck away from attention momentarily. One night the cops came ringing the doorbell just after midnight asking if they could look in our back yard because they’d seen someone come running out of this area; they suspected the kid had tossed something illegal over the fence separating the side yard and the back yard. So I guess we could fence it all in, but I’m resisting taking this route because I think it would change the nature of the property and the neighborhood. But what if the neighborhood has changed already? Of course, kids swipe my flowers all the time, and that irks a little, but it’s probably because mine is one of the few houses on the street with flowers. And there was the baluster-kicking. Sigh. We’re planning now to put up a security light, but it’s a trick to make sure it doesn’t bother our neighbor. It just makes me so sad that people can be so pointlessly mean. Most likely it was just a thoughtless strike from an inconsiderate person with too many problems to think about others. But oh, poor trees.
This morning my office experienced my new-kitten lateness.
This little guy (we think) first appeared last night, gnawing on the other outside cats’ food. He scampered away when I approached but then peeped back out and got interested in me when I unleashed my high-pitched kitten noise (eeeeeeeeeeeeeee—I read somewhere that kittens will respond to that). And he appeared when I went out to water plants this morning, so I did the crazy cat-lady thing and fetched him some canned food. Had to hold off the other cats so he could eat it. But they all seem to get along pretty well, except when there’s treats to scramble for—Ebenezer hissed at him then.
The man of the house has dubbed this critter “Little Boots.” That is what Caligula translates as. Um, gulp.
On the way to work the other day, I noticed a neighbor scraping paint off the old windows on the fabulous bungalow nearby. Scraping paint! As in fixing the old windows—not ripping them out. It fills me with glee, this sight that is so very rare these days.
I hope this helps inspire our other neighbors to renovate rather than trash.
On Saturday night, we had our first grilling session of the season—hot, smokey bliss. Later in the night, we saw a flash out of the side of our eyes and found another sort of flame ruling the night.
In the foreground you see the Charles Joly lilac rising above the lattice privacy fence that shields us from the alley; on the right is the gutter angling off the garage. In the background are the flames consuming the 2 flat behind and one up from us.
I have a visceral, personal reaction to housefires. Ever since 1990, when my new apartment in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y., was decimated on Christmas Day while I was at work, I have been painfully aware of every siren and truck that flashes by. So I went out into the alley and gawked at this, along with neighbors and passers-by. I should go on and say that it doesn’t appear that anyone was in the structure, that maybe it was abandoned and this an insurance job—but even that rationale doesn’t contain my internal reaction.
The most horrible and haunting thing is that even after the firefighters had poured on enough water to quench the hate and hacked the hell out of the roof of the back section of the house, they continued breaking out every window in the place. That produced a ringing, stinging, hideous cacophony of destruction that I still replay in my mind. As I absorbed it, I kept calculating: OK, my house is brick; maybe a smaller likelihood of being felled by flame? Upstairs windows are that hideous vinyl; it wouldn’t matter if they destroyed those. They’re not going to crash out my restorations, are they? How could they? Wouldn’t they see that wavey glass and stop!?!?!
Ugh.
On my trudge from the bus stop to the front steps, I saw this from 100 paces away.
This would be the balustrade we installed in the fall, er, early winter. OK, I’m looking back in the blog and noticing we never did post when we put it in. But it’s new, dagnabbit! The man of the house says it’s his mischievous youth catching up with him in the guise of the neighborhood kids because the obvious way to do this is to kick it out.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. We give great candy on Halloween, dammit.
Our house has lost many doors over time. Most notably, its front doors. It has also lost four interior doors; and, OK, I’ll admit that having six doors in one kitchen wasn’t a brilliant plan to begin with—but why oh why couldn’t they have tucked those spares into a corner somewhere?
So I’ve become a crazy door lady. My tolerant sidekick and I carried home half-a-dozen old doors this year, just from the alleys near our house. One I gave to another old house owner via Freecycle. And the others I’m hoarding for the time being on my side of the garage with the straw for gardening and the 1972 BMW motorcycle that has been become an house-restoration widow.
One of these is the front door from a 1910 house nearby; another is the front door of a 20s house. And several of the interior doors have the same hardware as what’s in my house—in better shape than some of mine, with the original finish still fairly clear. Alas, several of them have joint compound spots all over, and frankly I bet that’s why they got tossed—too much trouble for the busy, busy people of today. 
