Working through walls

I think this will turn out to be the last chance Arnold had to reach through one wall to work on another -- the top of the triangular air-conditioning soffit leading to the den door.

None of this soffit, nor the one stretching over the door itself, was in the original plans. But when the AC guys told us the architect's duct plans simply wouldn't work, Ref and I put our heads together and this is how we solved the problem.

As mechanical solutions go, it lets us put great volumes of air into the den and bedroom, too.

I'm not crazy about the duct over the door -- Arnold took a long look at it today and said it reminded him of a birdhouse or doghouse -- but at least it ought to provide a good blast of air where it's needed in the vault of the dining room.

It came, it sawed, we conquered

First thing Friday, Arnold pulled me over to the chop saw, handed me a piece of scrap wood and told me to cut it.

Whoo-ee. He'd bought a new blade -- not an expensive one, just good, a kind he said he'd had on his saw at home for the last decade -- and it made fast, smooth work of the wood.

Its precision was a great match for Arnold's. In this picture you can see the level of one board over the door on the wall outside the little guest bedroom. Take a look at where it intersects the front wall in the distance: perfect alignment with the course of boards on that wall. You might think that's the easiest thing in the world to make happen. Sure. Just try it.

At any rate, by the close of business Friday, that wall was done -- finito, terminado. And it was beautiful. Franklin, who came back after taking his wife to a medical appointment, studied the detail of the casings, the structure, with great admiration. Dollie dropped by, looked all around and whistled.

Earlier in the day, a woman and two guys passing by stuck their heads inside the door and asked if they could look around. I gladly walked 'em through. Maybe because I'd been carrying lumber around, they seemed to assume that I was one of the builders.

Finally upstairs, bowled over, the woman asked whether we were building it for a client or for sale. I told her it was my house. "Oh, you lucky man," she blurted, with wide eyes.

Tell me about it, I said with a huge smile.

Mix and match

The most beautiful bougainvillea hedge I ever saw was at Mrs. Goodwin's Silver Sands Lodge, near Malindi on the Indian Ocean. My second favorite is just up the street on Petronia.

Whoever planted the hedge couldn't decide among orange, magenta and purple -- and in the immortal spirit of Phyllis Diller, "When you can't decide which color to wear, wear 'em all!"

'That's it, baby!'

And with those words, Mr. B fitted in the top piece of the wall over the front door.

Arnold had wondered how we were going to get that high, but a scaffold here and a 20-foot ladder there did the trick.

All the way up, Arnold would chop the side angles (54 degrees) to the needed length -- and the piece would snap in with a few taps of the mallet.

It was getting Brantley giddy after a while. Pop, went a board, and he'd shake his head and smile, or laugh, and give me a big sideways look.

"He's just showing off," I told Mr. B. And we all thought of Ref.

- ■ -

Late bulletin: Shawn called Thursday night to say reinforcements were on the way. Kurt -- who was here earlier with the Macon crew -- and Frank are coming down to help make sure the ceilings are done before Thanksgiving.

That's the best news we've had in months.

High-smileage transport

Captain Outrageous (yes, it's his legal name now -- just check his driver's license) is a local artist who paints "things that look like they need painting." What I've noticed most are cars, bikes, scooters and heaven knows what else around town.

They always make me smile. Here's the trunk of his car, and if you'd like to see more, you can check out this link. See if they don't make you smile, too.

Window coverings?

Not really. It's just the easiest way for Franklin to hang the drywall upstairs: hang it now, trim it later.

He has a dandy little tool -- sort of an in-line drill -- that makes neat work of it. And he's dipped into his stock of self-tapping screws to whiz through the slew of hurricane clips upstairs as he attaches the panels to studs.

Arnold is waiting for the drywall before casing the windows, by the way. Then we'll finally be able to get exact measurements for the real window coverings.

Lord love plumbago

Plumbago ought to translate as "serene joy."

House painters

One of the joys of living in the Historic District is stumbling across art-minded tourists and locals.

They set up shop on the sidewalk -- in this case, on Caroline Street; I came across them coming back from voting at Old City Hall -- and do their best to render the structures in front of them. Some are quite good.

Steve, our landlord, has a half-dozen watercolors of his house -- our rental -- the historic Kerr House. They're hanging in the laundry shed.

That may sound awful, but I think it's a spectacular way to share the art with nonchalance: Everyone who lives in the building gets a chance to see his own home through another set of loving eyes.

Tongue and . . . groovy!

Holy Moses, hello gorgeous, kiss yo mama, hip hooooo-RAY!

That's the den door on the left, with the living room wall and ceiling beautifully paneled in pine.

Happy?

Um, yes, you could say that.

Spinning on the color wheel

I know it's just paint, but I still took a hefty armful of stuff into Home Depot today: four kinds of tile (green, blue and two accents), a couple of fabric cuttings, a chunk of granite and a section of cherry cabinet.

Overkill maybe, but in the hour or so I spent at the paint counter, it was gratifying to hear oohs and ahs about this going with that going with something else.

As happened at the tile store last month, a woman asked if I'd redo her house. I politely declined, because my plate is quite full enough, thank you very much.

In the end, I went home with five quarts of tinted paint, a quart of primer and a brush -- then primed in the morning and painted in the afternoon. The red is problematic because it's on white primer -- but I ended up doing two coats, which helps in judging it.

And here are the winners. If you want to see paint colors without my flashes twisting 'em, you can click into the Behr website.

In the main space on the first floor: Mellow Yellow, the top patch in the first picture, over Zinnia Gold, the bottom patch. The consensus: It's bolder, richer, less "faded," more oomph.

In the den and our bedroom: Daredevil. An intense and wonderful red, which will only get better over tinted primer.

In the master bath: Innuendo, a suprise winner in a pale orchid. It picks up so much of the iridescence of the accent tile that it's scary, though hard to see in a photo. (The greenboard -- waterproof drywall -- behind it doesn't do it any color favors either.)

And finally in the no-brainer category for the guest rooms and guest room baths: Desert Lily, a pale and wonderful yellow. The swatch I painted today was behind a scaffold in the kitchen, so I didn't get a good picture of it. But you don't even have to trust me on this one; it's a force of nature, especially with the tile.

And if you really want to see any of them in better values than I can produce here, you'll just have to come visit.

Turn a moonlit sky to stone

. . . And you've found our countertop.

Another week, another party

When I opened the door for my shower this morning (so the mirror wouldn't fog up), the banner from the Atlanta Parrot Head Club was waving at me from the guest house behind us.

It's party time in Margaritaville, and Duval was closed from Southard to Eaton, with a big stage set up in the street at Fleming this morning. From the afternoon on, the corner was ringing with steel pan rhythms -- and rumors that Jimmy Buffett himself was going to show.

Tens of thousands of Parrot Heads are in town, and you just have to smile when you see them -- roving in jovial gaggles, pretty mild-mannered but certainly happy to have a drink in Paradise and listen to music and catch up with friends.

And of course they make me miss the Carsonettes -- the crew at my dentist's office in Chattanooga, who are Buffett fans supreme. I'll hoist a mojito and wish that they, like so many other absent friends, were here.

New perspectives

Arnold is having great fun with my reactions to the new walls -- every new "coverup" changes a room's character so radically, along with its light sources, that I'm pretty constantly agog.

Today, for example, with the wallboard up in the little guest room's bath, the light from the south front dormer was really obvious in the stairwell.

And here, in the den, looking toward the living room -- well, you finally get a sense of the room's scale and the ceiling's height.

The den is a whole lot airier than I'd expected, and I like it a lot.

About that rain . . .

As usual when stuff happens around here, Rob O'Neal of the Citizen got a terrific picture of yesterday's storm aftermath along lower Duval.

They ran it -- big -- on Page One.

As you can see, tourists were devastated, and their party plans dashed, by the torrent.

Knots and all

Arnold's at the chop saw, wood's on the left wall and part of the ceiling, and the soffit is dry-walled.

It was a moment between the storms Thursday, after I volunteered to learn the details of the saw man's job, and Arnold was generous enough to share several decades' tips. (Do you know which side of a pencil mark to cut? Hint: Give it an extra sixteenth.)

I'd like to help when Arnold and Shawn take on the details of our ceilings later this month, and what few talents I have, I offer. Still....

The wood we're putting up is so beautiful -- all those variations in color and texture. Arnold had apologized for imperfections, but within limits (of course; I don't want gaping holes), I tried to let him know how much we love the variations that nature brings to wood.

Winning slate

I went out to Island City Tile yesterday to look into less expensive alternatives to a solid granite backsplash in the kitchen -- penny saved, and all that -- and they almost mugged me to say they wondered when I was going to ask about that.

Eighteen inches of granite on top of a granite counter is a bit much, they thought -- soo cold -- but had held their tongues.

I found some South American slate that adds interesting texture as well as wicked colors that pick up the peacock green granite and the cherry cabinets. Diamond-setting it will be an eccentric contrast to the rectilinear march of the cabinets. Seal it, and it's waterproof.

(Disclaimer: Color values are for general reference only. If you want to see the real thing, come with me to the stone yard in Miami.)

Paging Mr. Noah

Yesterday and today made me happy we're building a big wooden structure.

Judging by the pool at our rental, I guess we've gotten 2 (or close to 3) inches of rain. About 2 p.m. today, when I was out at Home Depot checking out cedar closet wood and paint colors, the sky looked about a half hour past sunset, and soon every street was full.

Arnold seemed impressed that Truman Avenue was hubcap deep, while our little stretch of street was merely damp a block away. I'm not sure he quite appreciates that we're on a little block of rock, and water (a) seeks its lowest level here as elsewhere; and (b) takes a while to run off.

I told him that our neighbor Barbara said she had a well in her backyard that was 17 feet deep, which tells you a lot about our elevation and drainage.

Meanwhile, lots of porch roof runoff had turned a wheelbarrow into a rainbarrel, though we still found some roof leaks that Dan Ace has to deal with. I told Arnold that Dan is an honorable man, and even though his account is settled, he'll make it right.

Told 'ya

The wall I said you wouldn't be able to see through is there on your left, in the living room. And Brantley is making sure you can't see the second-floor joists by putting in the ceiling.

This is moving ahead faster than I might have thought -- and chewing through more wood than anybody might have figured.

But it looks so good.

Enough

So much for "April is the cruellest month."

April saw our house grow like a tulip, found me working next to a wild, wonderful man. Not cruel at all.

But October . . . .

We lost our builder, and then heaven save me the dog. Yes, it's Key West, and Kirkwood lived here, and P.S., Your Cat is Dead. Still.

It's painful to see walls grow skin and cover up Ref's work -- though the structure is always there. "Structure." He said it often, and with reverence: Something built to stand.

His work is done. Ours is not. And it's a relief to tear a page off the calendar, crumple it, sharpen a pencil for the fresh sheet.

Shantih.

Wallbanger

This is Franklin, who I suspect has been doing drywall since shortly after gypsum deposits formed in the Permian Age.

He's working on the bathroom wall in the master bedroom, and to give you an idea of scale, the drywall sheets are 8 feet tall.

Scale started shifting radically this morning, as the walls started closing up. The upper photo -- from the living room -- won't be possible tomorrow. My see-through-walls superpower is waning, as is the light through walls that suddenly become solid.

So now I have to see more clearly through time, which is why I was happy to get Marc's quote on granite, and then high-tail it out Flagler to see Stacey at Southernmost Kitchen & Bath. We'll need sinks and faucets on hand for the granite man, and I ordered them today.

Dusky magic

Busy, busy, busy

This pile of sheet rock was in the yard bright and early Monday, soon to be followed by a few stacks of 16-foot pine planks -- all emblematic of the home stretch on the house.

Which brought me to my prime errand: finding an alternate source for the kitchen and bathroom counters.

Last week, when I ordered cabinets and learned that the granite would take an extra four or six weeks beyond the cabinet installation, I consulted my mental calendar and sank into my chair. We'd really like to get a certificate of occupancy before New Year's -- and besides, our building permits expire Jan 7.

So today my second stop was Island City Tile, where Marc said his turnaround on granite is . . . about a week. He gave me a map to the stone yard in Miami and promised a quote by tomorrow.

Then it was off to Marathon. Nathaniel had an appointment beyond the Seven-Mile Bridge, and hitched a ride while I went up to scope out the Keys' only patio furniture dealer. (There was one here on the rock early in the year, but his storefront is padlocked, and he appears to have skipped town with our deposit. C'est la vie criminale.)

Actually, it was a nice drive on a lovely day. Nate and I got back late in the afternoon -- just in time for Bob, a tile installer, to take a quick look at the house and promise to return Thursday so he can work up a full bid on the bathrooms.

Things are getting a little hectic.

Monday morning traffic

Hangin' loose

These beads along middle Duval were among tens of thousands of the hung over Sunday.

Astonishingly, though, the curbs were almost spotless, and there was none of the typical morning-after beer reek. The city's sweepers and washers had done yeoman work.

Barbara, who owns Mermaid House on our street and braved the parade from a stool at the 801, said she'd never seen so many naked people. She liked it.

Joe, the checker at Fausto's, also approved: "At least you know they aren't carrying knives, guns or bombs."

Rain / Shine

It stopped raining in time for Saturday's parade, so
I headed out, got halfway down Eaton, took
one good look at the crowd and headed back home.

It's crazy out there

The paper said people were calling Friday's Madness March the biggest in years.

The throng starts at the cemetary gates, stops for drinks at guesthouses along the path downtown, then adds its own kind of marinated spice to the Duval scene.

I walked down to the house, just to make sure it was still buttoned up, and the 801 queens were showering beads and confetti on a heck of a street dance. Back at Fleming and Simonton, I watched the parade with our neighbor Bill, who was bemoaning the undressing habits of unattractive people.

I joined the crowd. On Duval again, I ran into Arnold, landlord Steve and his houseguests and several tens of thousands of very happy zombies.

(Saturday's tea dance -- indeed much of anything outdoors -- got some serious afternoon rain. I stayed in with a good book.)

Ready to rock

If you look carefully at the picture (or click it to enlarge it), you'll see insulation above, ahead -- just about anywhere you glance.

Our building inspector, Ron, saw the same thing Friday morning when he signed off on the insulation.

After he left, Arnold and I high-fived and planned for paneling and sheet rock next week.

But the island was ready to rock, too. Since Fantasy Fest was starting to kick into high gear, with Duval Street closed and other streets at gridlock, the guys (like the rest of the island) started the weekend a little early.

- ■ -

The food festival was in full swing, and compared to past years there were lots of women wearing paint and little else in daylight. Across from the AIDS Help booth, a guy clutching a Bible was talking about sin and damnation, and a conservatively dressed Cuban woman walking by near me called to him, good-naturedly, "You need to have a drink and calm down."

"Oh, I don't drink!," he called back, horrified.

The woman laughed and kept walking. "Poor guy," she said to me.

What he really needs is to get laid, I said to her.

She laughed again. "I'm sure he doesn't do that either, but just like the drink it would do him a world of good."

- ■ -

As I came even with St. Paul's, I heard some organ music over the din -- the lunchtime concert. So I wandered in and took a seat along with a few dozen others.

The organist was finishing up something gentle -- I think by Durufle -- and the congregation sighed and rustled between pieces. Then he launched into the grand Toccata and Fugue in D minor, played with excruciatingly strict cadence. I closed my eyes and saw the mathematical march of notes across the page.

Method amid the madness.

Getting it done

Here's Arnold taking care of the upstairs guest room ceiling.

Just as he was TCB, Brentley was finishing up downstairs, and Nathaniel was hitting spots he could reach on the stepstool.

There were interruptions -- like Franklin coming by to talk about drywall, greenboard and the like -- but Arnold had called for an inspection Friday, and he kept the whip cracking to get it all done.

Good night, girl

Mitch's suspicion was correct, and Lena never woke up from the anesthetic.

- ■ -

I'm indebted to Kathy Rohsenberger for these pictures, which she sent me in early spring.

She'd taken some wonderful photos of our farm, including spectacular aerials, when she and Carl visited awhile ago, and was kind enough to send them along with many kind words.

In these, you see Lena in her full come-pet-me kowtow. It's obvious Kathy took them with deep affection -- something Lena returned as naturally as an echo.

Quite a reach

When I was watching the guys insulating the walls yesterday, I glanced up at the ceilings, over at the ladders, and thought, I'll bet they're going to need the scaffolds.

Of course, when I got there this morning, there were the scaffolds, and Mr. B was up on one of them, stapling the batts into the den ceiling. He's got a new electric stapler -- the old mechanical ones swing like a hammer, but you just squeeze a trigger on the new one -- and he loves it.

If you look closely, by the way, you'll see that the ceiling insulation is rated R-30; it's about eight inches thick. The stuff on the walls is R-19 -- six inches or so.