Counterweights

The spinnaker set packed up this weekend, the regatta over, and this picture from the event's amazing official photographer, Tim Wilkes, certainly described how I was feeling today: atilt.

(Take a look at the water color, by the the way, and then think about our guest room baths.)

Darren and Santos were at the house, caulking and filling back and side walls and being incredibly supportive. Yet it was one of those days when it all seemed as if the boat was about to flip.

Maybe it was the hundred or so details I still feel iffy about -- every doubt, ding and dread -- or a bad case of so-close-and-yet-so-far, or my fears of Code Enforcement and the certificate of occupancy. . . .

I try not to let the guys know when I'm in one of those moods, so I was concocting reasons to take my worries elsewhere when Franklin pulled up to work his continuing magic on drywall. Then Arnold swung by, and then his lady friend from the thrift shop up the street to look at what we've done to Marvin's house, and then Matt, another floor guy, to scope out the job for a bid.

I was showing Matt around, and we were upstairs, with Franklin working away in the upstairs bath, when he said to me, "You're really mellow for someone at this point in a project. That is so amazing."

I almost felt like crying, but I said to him: Well, I could take it out on myself and everyone else, but I'd rather just keep going with a smile.

And it occurred to me later that I was so lucky: Everyone here is on the same side of the boat, using every ounce of his weight to get that extra inch, that extra second, toward the finish line. Another truth: Weights vary, but when people apply all they have, that's all they have, and you can't ask for more.

Franklin is a great case in point. (This is my favorite picture of him, mixing mud last month.)

"You know, Mr. T, this is gonna be a real pretty house." I thanked him again for his great part in making that way, and mentioned how much trouble the tile guy had with the surfaces he was now repairing.

"Well, some people wake up every day wondering what's gonna go wrong. What an awful way to live."

A-men, brother. And I went away wearing the smile he'd given me.

Red squared

Days of our lives, conch-style

I was walking down Simonton just after 2, and I'd already pointed one gaggle of tourists toward Schooner Wharf and another toward Ft. Zach.

I heard the two guys at a guest cottage north of Petronia before I saw them: One was fiddling with something under the hood of their truck at the curb, talking with the one on the porch.

As I got closer, the one on the porch hailed me: "Can I ask you a stupid question?"

I told him I love stupid questions.

"Is this Friday or Saturday?"

Friday for sure, I said.

"Thaaanks!," he said, grinning and nodding to his friend. Then to me: "I'm sorry to . . ."

I cut him off. No need to apologize. One reason people come to Key West is to lose track of time, and I was glad in their case that it was working. To them it really meant another day in paradise.

Agony, ecstasy, etc.

Not so much the Irving Stone novel or the movie, though I did tell Roy and Darren that it would be interesting to see them give our big ceiling the Charlton Heston treatment. (Lord, do I have to take the Rex Harrison role again??)

I think Darren's agony tonight is going to be the sunburn he got today. Even early, when I got the picture, the sun was doing its thing pretty mercilessly.

My ecstasy came early: Arnold and Mr. B had been hanging doors -- without the Macon crew who had been planning to bop down to aid the effort -- and were more than three-fourths done by the close of business Friday.

They look even better up than I'd expected, and now the agony (if you'll pardon the gross over- statement): Do we pickle them, like the V-groove, as planned? Or do we finish them with a dark cherry stain to match the floors? Pickling would be far more Keys-casual; staining more traditional, and maybe a bit more elegant.

Elegant, schmelegant, I think they'll look like a million bucks either way -- but it's a question I'm going to ponder for a few more days.

The doors come knocking

Arnold and Shawn have been working on the doors for months now -- one of the joys of a handmade house is that nothing is quite off the shelf, and to complicate things, Robert and I had the architect specify solid wood and lots of louvers.

(We had some unfortunate hollow-cores in Chicago, and Tennessee's really heavy doors spoiled us; besides, Key West's humidity means louvers are a great antidote to mildew.)

So they were all special order, and we've been waiting, waiting. . . . Just yesterday, Shawn said they'd been delayed yet another week. But early this morning, Manley-De Boer, our lumberyard, called to say they'd be delivered in a few minutes.

The truck pulled up, and a big, burly guy about my age handed the doors down to the whole crew -- the painters scrambled, too, to help us shoulder them into the house.

They're beautiful. The louvers, mostly on closet doors, are sturdy and perfectly set. The "four-lights" (with four panels set into the frames) are heavy and a pleasure to run a hand across. "Furniture-grade pine," said Arnold, who explained to Darren the painter that joints at the panel edges, which looked like 90-degree angles, were really quite complex routs. "Those are really nice doors," said Roy, who was already dreading painting the louvers but figuring the best strategies to get it done.

"Mind if I take a look at the house?," asked the delivery guy, his truck still idling in the street.

Of course not, I said, and took him through.

"Wow, nice!," he said. Thanks, I said, and shook his hand and introduced myself.

"Scott De Boer," he said in mid-handshake.

Short pause. (Well, enough time to think, "Manley-De Boer.")

I gestured at the paneling and grinned: I think you've sold us . . . well, all of this, really.

"I know," he said. "I noticed your deliveries. I just wanted to see what you did with it all, and it looks really great."

I thanked him and asked him to come back when it's finished, and he promised he would. Or wood.

Bright birthday, Mr. B

I broke out the birthday banner for Brantley on Thursday, and hung it in the same space where it had been for Arnold last week.

Earlier in the morning, Roy had painted a few boards on the porch with the finished yellow color -- and when you look along the top of the picture, you can see the relative pallor of the primer.

The full color is bold, no doubt about it, and the white porch rails set it off a lot better than raw lumber did.

Martin, who takes care of some guest- houses along the street, stopped to say how much he liked it. So did a few total strangers passing by.

But the guys and I were mostly toasting Mr. B. We had a case of champagne -- OK, since he doesn't drink, it was a cooler full of Sprite -- and cupcakes and a card. Plus one of those candles that relights itself 10 seconds or so after you blow it out.

After the third or fourth relight, it was good for a great laugh.

Hand-made goods

Arnold found some plastic caps for the fence posts -- they screw on, they're paintable and they'll never rot -- and after showing them to me went back to the drawing board.

He cut some squares out of our leftover deck wood, made a few passes through the table saw (since he'd packed up his radial-arm saw), and studied the result.

He made a few adjustments and then cut out caps. "If you bought these things from Strunk, they'd be 8 or 10 bucks apiece," he said. "I can make the whole batch in, what?, 20 minutes?"

Franklin took a look at the stack when he came through the other day, and said, "Man, these will be sittin' on the ground when the posts have rotted away in a hundred years."

So Brantley countersunk and drilled them (you can't get a nail through the wood), leveled them on top of the posts and Arnold fashioned a trim to marry them to the posts.

He gave them his highest compliment today. After stapling the trim on, he pulled back and took a hard look. "They'll do," he said.

110 in the shade

No, not the air temperature (that's about 82), but the visual heat.

A cheery face

Roy had the porch ceiling primed in sky-blue early Wednesday, it and was wonderful.

The fresh paint showed every place that needed extra spackle or caulk, and the laths blended against the ceiling as if they'd been there forever -- just the effect we were hoping for.

It was another of those times, and they're coming more frequently every day, when I choke up and think: Ref would have loved this.

There was another one waiting for me when I got back from lunch.

(Incidentally, it was Mike's fantastic tuna melt at Flamingo's Cafe, where Jody the waitress had a different take on the yacht crowd. "Oh, the crews on those boats," she scoffed. "Cheap, cheap, cheap. You know, they come to town with one pair of underwear and a 20-dollar bill -- and they don't change either of 'em." But I digress.)

While I was away, Roy and Darren had put a coat of tinted primer on the front, and Santos was starting on the den porch wall.

It's just tinted primer, so it's a shade or so less intense than the final color will be. "Bright," Roy said. We went across the street to take another look, and he said, "Actually, I like it a lot."

New folks at Fausto's

The international regatta is in town, so there are a ton of yacht folk here. You can tell at Fausto's, because they're nicely dressed and well-mannered and all that, but their accents aren't quite local, and they're not quick at punching the right buttons on the credit-card checkouts, and Joe and Darrell have to guide them through steps to confirm their transactions.

Turns out one of them is Frederik, crown prince of Denmark, captaining his Farr 40, taking on all comers seaside with a few security guys dockside.

Unassuming, nice smile, knows how to navigate far more than a good race.

Like buttah

I like this picture for several reasons:

▪ It shows what Arnold and Mr. B were doing today -- cutting trim for the doors, which are supposed to get here Thursday.

▪ It's an angle you haven't seen before, shot from the loft, facing the front door, looking straight down to the little guest room door.

▪ If you click on it, it shows how the paint interacts with the grain to make a fine pickle indeed.

▪ It does justice to our yellow. Arnold's shirt is yellow.

▪ It's a cool angle on the pineapples, which have come a long, long way from that first stencil I found on the net.

Ding, ding, ding; patch, patch, patch

We called Franklin, our drywall guy, to come look at the bathroom walls over the tile -- there's some smoothing to be done over the WonderBoard, and he's the smoothest guy around.

He also had asked to come back once the primer went on, because any flaws show up so much better then, and he wants his product to be as close to perfect as it can be.

Most of his work is flawless -- you should see the soffits close-up -- but red shows every little thing. So there we were, using blue tape to mark tiny seam lines, a few nicks and what appeared to be built-in flaws in the drywall. Skim a little, sand a little, and voila.

Some were amazingly small; some show only in a certain light; some show only from a certain angle; some probably only show up at the full moon in months without an R. I appreciate Franklin's eye for detail, but I told him not to kill himself.

Also on the paint trail, Darren finished up the primer on the picket fence -- it looks quite . . . Mr. Blandings -- and he, Santos and Roy started caulking the front porch wall.

Roy and I took a drive out to Stock Island to return a bad set of scaffold wheels, and stopped at the paint store on the way back to pick a nice shade of sky-blue for the exterior soffits and porch ceiling (keeps the birds and bees at bay) and then order the shade of yellow that the Historic Architecture Review Commission approved for our exterior.

"Wow!," said the paint guy, who assured us he mixes his own special formulas for yellows, since the sun is so relentless here and bleaches out lesser stuff. "HARC approved that?," he asked. I assured him I had the certificate.

"They must want to make Key West visible from the Space Shuttle," he said.

He who laths last . . .

. . . Is going to save himself a whole lot of puttying.

When Ref and I first took a really hard look at the porch ceiling almost a year ago, it was hard to overlook the ravages of 120-plus years on the planks.

All those years of scraping, rotting and insects meant it didn't look good -- so he thought we should sand, dig out the rot and then putty and caulk, finally running a finger-bead down the seams.

He had Nate start scraping, sanding and digging. Then Ref went into the hospital. While he was dying, Nate was pulling out shards of old newspapers that had been stuffed into the gaps and painted over. The gaps widened. When Ref died, we inherited the challenge to find a solution to a bigger problem than we'd imagined.

Arnold came up with the idea of new wood over old fractures. Rotten beams have been replaced, and new boxes built for the porch fans. Where the boards themselves are broken, we'll putty or spackle or whatever.

And the big gaps? Cover them with quarter-inch-thick lath, then caulk and paint everything a nice sky blue, which will keep out wasps and birdies. I think it's going to be a brilliant solution.

Another crayon in the box

Roy knows how unsure I've felt about the soffit color -- it's Behr's "Desert Lily," which looks great in the green baths and on the upstairs drywall, but I've been iffy about it against bold yellow, and especially on the "frame" of the pineapple railings on the loft.

At best, I thought it might almost read white and fade away in a best-supporting-actor way. So this morning we whipped up a can of courage and painted the soffit facing the front door in it. And it read . . . like nothing at all. Not white. Not yellow. No soul. No nada.

I immediately did the stations of the cross: Sherwin-Williams, Benjamin Moore and Behr, fabric samples in hand. I put some Cuban music on the CD, to remind me of the sound I wanted to see -- between the ceiling and the walls, literally and figuratively.

A few hours later, I walked back into the house with a chip (OK, 15 or 20, but I really liked one in particular) and sought Roy's advice.

"Ah, mango!," he said right off. He loved it. So did Arnold, who called it perfect. I call it Dusky Dreamsicle. Sherwin-Williams calls it Mandarin. You'll find it or its mood somewhere in the picture above, which is a plant outside St. Peter's up the street.

We're going to see how a test patch looks in place. It's by no means exact, but click here to get another taste of the flavor.

Just a touch of color

Remember the blue-gray primer in the den and bedroom?

Well, the guys were busy Saturday, and there's one coat of the final color on those walls today.

It's a little different from blue-gray.

Here comes the sun

I'm pretty closely attuned to the sun, and I think I can tell it's coming back.

This morning in our apartment's galley, the shadows from the old Victorian ornaments were just clear enough, just bright enough, that my third eye saw Old Sol reviving from his winter swoon.

Of course part of the "clear and bright" was a stiff, chilly breeze from the sea. Winter's here, but not for long. Heat is on the way.

Primer time

That's Santos in the den, priming the walls in a dark blue-gray.

Don't worry; we're not going battleship. It's just that Roy is most comfortable laying down dark blue or gray (I guess he compromised) under deep red.

And note another of the plays of light: The room beyond him is the same color he's painting.

All of this comes as a result of one of the great debates among the prospective bidders on the paint contract. Some said the underlying primer color for deep red should be black. Another said tint it deep red. Roy has had great success with deep blue, and came back from the paint store with this.

It actually looks terrific on the walls by itself.

But all that aside, consider: They're priming!

The other colors are about to go on -- and as the second picture shows, they're priming outdoors.

Darren started turning our picket fence into a white picket fence today, and Roy thinks they'll be seriously "painting the face," as Arnold describes it, by early next week.

Magellanic clouding

There was a loud tourist in the pool next door, impossible not to hear through the fence, who was expounding on the mysteries of geography to his girlfriend. "We're way south of New York here," he said sagely. "And really close to the equator."

She said something timid about the equator being a bit farther south.

"Oh, that's stupid," he said.

"Doesn't it go through South America?," she said.

"That's stupid," he said.

"Ecuador," I said loud enough for both of them to hear.

"Ecuador?," he said back.

"It means 'equator' in Spanish."

"But that's not in South America."

"OK," I said.

"Where should we go for dinner?," he said, but it occurred to me that he'd never find his way there.

■ ■ ■

On a much more pleasant tourism note, Maryl, Johnny, Muggs and Gary were here this week, staying just up the street on DuPont.

We ate at Alice's and Opera, and it was wonderful to see them.

Happy birthday, dear Arnold!

Arnold was off checking on doors -- they'll be here next week -- when I got to the house Friday morning, which was perfect.

I squirreled my package away and hung the birthday sign across his bench on the porch.

Mr. B and I were tempted to play his great little game ("What do you notice about the porch?"; it's usually something like newly fluted column edges, or the block soffits, or the new junction with the fence), but resisted and let him see it on his own.

It took him a minute, but then came the big laugh, the wide smile and the handshake.

I had a tray of cupcakes and candles ready, but the timing didn't work out for the group sing of "Happy Birthday": He was on his way a little early to celebrate his 70th with Mike and Lindy in St. Pete.

So much for the stain

With a few long strokes of the brush, Darren hit a milestone on Thursday: Apart from a few touches and trims, the ceiling stain is done, giving his and Roy's aching necks a break.

A thousand miles away, Robert is having some pains of his own, and I can understand them totally.

"Is it too yellow?," he asked this morning, looking at yesterday's picture from the top of the stairs.

It's definitely yellow, I told him -- but the effective shade depends a lot on the surroundings, the light levels and about a billion other variables of perception.

Here, for example, there's a rosy glow near the ceiling. The color is much clearer down low. Add art, draperies, furniture. . . .

But all that said, I'll be much happier when the clear poly glaze evens out the reflectivity and the whole thing can mellow a bit.

Not on the same level, of course, but there's the story about Lady Spencer, Diana's mother, who was asked about the brightness of some newly regilded furniture. "Give it a few hundred years," she's reported to have said. "It'll calm down."

Swinging smooth

Arnold got the side gate on our little yard up yesterday, and today we had several more public hangings of the only variety I'll tolerate: the 6-foot gates on either side of the house.

As I watched him set the pieces into place, I understood all the strings and levels, the checks on straightness and plumb. Not only does it look great from the street; it also works like a dream.

I know he makes it look easy, but when things are right, it's certainly easier: Set a well-made gate between well-made posts, and you've won half the battle already. The gate unlatches, swings, swings back and closes with the flick of a finger.

In the second picture, Mr. B has finished up what otherwise would have been an ugly sheet of plywood that the control boxes for our pool equipment will hang on.

Dennis the electrician suggested 2-bys and pickets instead of plywood -- better look, better durability -- and Arnold executed it with finesse.

Go for the glow

In some ways, this was not a good day.

The cooktop was delivered -- not quite. The delivery truck came to the to the apartment, not the house. It's rescheduled for Friday.

The electricians -- Matt, Dennis and Steve -- arrived to pull lines to the kitchen island, and needed all the schematics for the oven and the cooktop. Instantly.

Roy got wheels for the scaffold Arnold brought over, but the wheels didn't fit.

And so on.

But that's the glass-half-empty side. You'll see pictures of the glass half full tomorrow, and meanwhile here's the afternoon sun coming into the stairwell, seen from the top.

It's bright, it's glowing and it's beautiful, which means not such a bad day after all.

How to stretch a porch

I don't want to get too maudlin here, but I did a lot of reflection around New Year's, and one of the blessings I went back to count was Arnold: Losing Ref was horrible, but his loss brought the amazing gain of getting to know Dollie, Shawn and their dear, brilliant uncle.

He doesn't assume; he analyzes, measures, experiments, corrects and then acts with great resolve. Having considered all the possibilities, he almost invariably comes up with the most elegant, simplest and most practical solution.

My case in point here is our front porch, which now has at least a foot more usable space than it did when Marvin, our home's previous owner, was sitting there and said hello to us as we first walked up the street all those years ago.

The side columns, you see, are indented from the sides of the slab on which the porch sits. After taking a good, hard look at them, Arnold invented new corners -- both to give us more space and to tie the railing better to the edges of the house itself.

That meant smaller, lightly proportioned, corner posts. It brought us one extra spindle on each side of the porch. And the way he and Brantley constructed the corner units, it resulted in incredible stability.

I know that every time I sit on this porch, I'll think of Ref's questions about how the decking ought to go down, Shawn's commitment to Ref's promises -- and Arnold's master-craftsman solutions to the questions that arose.

Mr. B and I were screwing a railing in yesterday, and before he did the final fastening he asked me whether I thought it was evenly spaced on the board underneath. I moved my fingers along the board, and only later did it dawn on me that that's what I'd seen Arnold doing all those times, testing by touch, seeing by feeling.

Thank you, Arnold, for teaching me so much, so freely.

Flexi-granite

Our granite guy, Germán (say hair-MAHN), is back from his Christmas visit to Colombia, and stopped by Tuesday to make lath templates of our kitchen and bathroom counters.

When the kitchen L he's carrying here wouldn't fit into the back of his pickup, he bowed it into place so it wouldn't blow away on his long drive up to Miami, and we both laughed about how much easier granite would be to deal with if it behaved that way.

He's actually going to bring this "piece" in two sections, joining at the sink, which is just about even with his shirt. A seam there will be far less visible than the alternative, which would be along the square on the right.

He'll be back next week with the finished products, and we'll be ready for him. Dennis the electrician is coming back in the next couple days to put in whatever undercounter lines remain, the cooktop is being delivered tomorrow and I've got all the sinks and faucets Germán will need out of storage and in the back of my car.

Stairs at night

It's 80 degrees at 10 o'clock. Climb and find a breeze.

Shoutin' out Shawn

Happy birthday, you handsome devil.

Handled, quickly

The cabinet guys came down from Miami today to switch out some damaged doors, install some missing trim and attach our cabinet handles.

Unfortunately, it wasn't Tim and Alonzo, the pair who did our terrific installation.

Oh, these guys were OK, but I got the impression they were double-parked.

In front of a fire hydrant. Next to a burning orphanage.

Deep blue

Hank finally finished the black grout in the blue bathroom, and besides picking up his equipment won't be back until the kitchen backsplash is ready to go in.

He had the intense lights out for good visibility while he cleaned up, and they drove the glass accent tiles crazy.

I thought of Mike Sherman's comment on the green bathrooms -- "The colors of the sea" -- and then thought of the sea at night, or very deep.

A story in this week's Solares Hill tells of an undersea sinkhole yet to be explored. It's 33 miles southeast of here, starts 1,880 feet below the sea surface, is 1,312 feet across. A Navy research sub was able to go only 400 feet down into it, though the hole yawns at least a quarter-mile deeper, to a range even beyond sonar.

Makes you wonder what that would look like under intense lights.

In the stretch

Santos, the third guy on the painting crew, is a terrific worker, but both Darren and I had to keep him from overreaching on Saturday.

He's eager to get as much of the ceiling sanded as he can from the ladder, but we don't want him to risk a fall so we pulled him down a rung or two.

Speed is great, but not at the cost of safety.

Roy is dreading putting a scaffold up, but resigned to it -- and we're ready for him. Arnold broke down his big, heavy radial saw Friday, and it was the first time in months we'd seen the dining room without that table set.

And speaking of cleaning things up: I dropped a six-pack off with the Rude Tourist around noon, told him there's no reason today shouldn't be better than yesterday and wished him a good stay in Key West.

I was moved by one of my mom's maxims: Be kind to kind people, and even kinder to unkind people.

Tenderness

With limits:

Without: