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:

Aglow

This is Darren taping off some trim Friday afternoon, but I hope you'll excuse the lack of focus.

The object is the light, not the detail, so I turned off the flash, which resulted in the blurs.

The light you see burning in the stairwell is just the afternoon sun coming in through the southern front dormer and reflecting down. The yellow is our wall color, washed on wood.

And the bigger glow is my happiness with it all.

A nice thing not to block

So, the picket fence is in, and some of the railing on the porch -- doesn't it look great? -- and by this afternoon, the fence across the left addition, screening the AC and pool equipment, was up, too.

I got a great deal of satisfaction out of being part of the picket-making process: cutting a little, but mostly feeding boards to the cut man and taking off the finished pieces. "A lean, mean sawing machine," I said to Mr. B as we mass-produced slats.

(The highest praise I've heard in a long time came from Arnold today. He said, "I was going to tell you what to do with the factory edges when you were cutting yesterday, but then I looked over and saw you were doing it right already, so I just moved on.")

I stepped back to admire everybody else's job when . . . well, I won't go into gory details, but a huge man emerged from a huge van that had parked in front of our space after I'd asked him not to block our loading access. He was loud, vulgar and menacing. Apparently Darren, Nate, Arnold and Brantley thought so, too -- even Zachary from down the street -- because they spilled into the street to provide moral and muscular support.

The mildest thing the guy said was that he hadn't seen any "no parking" signs. . . .

Well, I can take a hint. And apparently so can he. The van was gone by the time I got back from Strunk's with the big, shiny signs -- Arnold had apparently mentioned something about towing -- and after I got the signs up we all decided to invite him to park there anyway once the workday was done, in a spirit of fellowship.

Then he came out onto his porch and shouted a few more things, and we rethought our plan. Arnold flipped out his cell and told Brantley to hitch up the work trailer, and put it in the best possible place.

The tang of the sea

Hank is almost done with grouting, and it's been a slog. Some surfaces needed extra prep. The black grout was a type he wasn't used to. And then the green grout varied in shade from bag to bag.

We ended up mixing sanded and unsanded versions to even the whole project out, and I think it worked pretty well.

Mike, Arnold's son, made me feel good about it all during his visit last weekend. He looked at the green tiles and said, "The colors of the sea."

That's what I was going for -- the blue-green glow of Keys waters, with the sparkle of sun on the spray.

Putting up a picket line

The first of these pictures is from Tuesday, and the rest from Wednesday as the day progressed.

Arthur, the neighborhood guy who goes about with a walking stick, probably put it best: "Man, when I looked here yesterday, there were just holes in the ground."

Harvesting the grain

These shots should give you a good idea of what we're trying to achieve -- not necessarily in terms of the actual tint, which is distorted a bit by the camera (and the flash), but in the grain that emerges with the wash of paint and wipe of rag.

The wood wall in the den -- which will be sitting in an intensely Chinese Red room -- actually looks a little like the side of a barn without the louver doors that will give it some sophistication, the flat-screen that will break up the central panel, etc., etc.

"Right now, I almost expect bluegrass music out of it," Roy said Wednesday morning.

Not quite. But I'm going to hold off topcoating it with polyurethane until the side walls go in, in case it needs to get a little darker to match its surroundings.

I felt no doubts at all when he started on the little guest room after lunch. The yellow brings out every tiger stripe in the wood -- knots and all -- and reminds me that every board in that wall was a piece of a living tree.

At the end of the afternoon, it was like cloud-watching: We were all standing there studying it, picking out our favorite boards.

Comin' atchoo

New Year's Eve, I was in bed early with a tall, gorgeous glass of orange juice. My nose was scratchy, so I popped some pills, upped my fluids . . . and woke up cloggy but feeling pretty good Monday.

Late in the day, things went south and then southernmost, so I was at the house only briefly Tuesday.

Roy wanted me to come over and look at his paint tests, and then see the start of the wash on the wood wall in the den.

I looked but kept my distance -- as I did with Arnold, Mr. B and Nate staking out the yard, and with Hank and Ray grouting the upstairs bath.

I saw, smiled, sneezed and went home to bed.

(Bob)cats and dogs

By the time I got to the house to see what a difference a year made, Arnold and Mr. B were already attacking our postage-stamp yard with a Bobcat, shovels and rakes.

They'd hauled off a big load of boulders from just under the surface (looked like a sandstone and coral mix) and were grading the leftovers down to a nice, gentle slope to the street. Arnold wants to get the picket fence started ASAP, and the holiday meant he got a few free days with the Bobcat.

As he was pulling a mound of dirt back with the blade, Brantley said, yet again, "You just gotta stop showing off like that." Both of them laughed.

They'd spent New Year's Eve at St. James, with Mr. B in the choir and Arnold in the pews, and then danced the year in at the Elks.

Arnold's dog, Candy, watched the goings-on with me from the porch -- and I told you she stayed close once she got to know you. As we held the porch down while the guys broke for lunch, I rediscovered what a great ice-breaker a dog is. One after another, passers-by paused to admire her cuteness.

But Key West has always been a great dog town. Just Saturday, dachshund owners had their annual just-for-the-heck-of-it parade down Duval. By the time I caught up with them, the pack stretched from Angela to Southard all the way to Fleming.

There must have been a hundred tails wagging, and more smiles on humans than you could count.

Trumpets

"Time has no divisions to mark its passage; there is never a thunderstorm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols. . . . "

-- Thomas Mann

- - -

Well, that's what I posted before I went to bed. Waking up, I learn the trumpet was playing taps: the list of U.S. military deaths in Iraq has now rolled past the 3,000 mark.

Heaven help us all.

Sic transit gloria swanson

This was the scene on Duval this afternoon -- and thank you very much, but I won't be around at midnight to see Sushi ride the big red pump down.

Gives a certain vibrancy to the phrase "drag and drop." Still, been there, done that, been stepped on and jostled enough, thank you very much again.

And that was when people still had standards and the shoe was spangled.

Nor will I be on Lower Duval, watching the giant conch shell drop at Sloppy Joe's. Too . . . sloppy, in every awful sense.

I am tempted, briefly, to watch the Wench Drop at the Schooner Wharf. It's fairly close to the apartment, and though it sounds horribly non-PC, it's -- horribly non-PC, but at least consensual.

Evalena Worthington, who owns the wharf bar, dresses up as her own vision of pirate wenchitude and has herself lowered about 80 feet down the mast of the Schooner Liberty, at anchor off the bar. Then cannons go off, doves are released and -- with the drag queen and the conch also dropped elsewhere on the Rock -- our little island has again done all in its power to stave off the forces of normalcy.

I plan to stave them off at home. Asleep.

But happy 2007, however you ring it in. Just don't wring yourself out.

Moon dance

It's 78, and the sea breeze is caressing the palms. Dance to the moon, says the breeze. They sway.

Porch life

I spent a few hours on the porch Saturday morning -- a great place to sit and watch the world go by, giving directions to passing tourists, saying hey to neighbors, enduring the beeps from scooter renters discovering their horn buttons.

I can't imagine how many happy hours I've spent there already, on an old slatted folding chair that I'm going to hang onto once the project is finished. That chair is even better acquainted with the porch than I am. Besides, its faded wood already matches the decking.

Roy had said he might drop by Saturday to work on the stairwell ceiling without others around, but he didn't show up. Neither did Hank, who'd said he might grout. Nor did Kenny, who said he was going to hook up the AC. (But who ever expects Kenny when he says he'll be there?)

What I didn't expect -- and what a pleasant surprise! -- was Arnold coming around the corner just as I was locking up. With him were his son and daughter-in-law, visiting for New Year's: a wonderful couple, who were either quite taken with the house or so charming that they never let me suspect otherwise.

They really seemed to like the wrapped beams in the den and bedroom. I like 'em, too -- and finished just as they are, though Roy and I had flirted with making them just a few shades darker, so they'd match the old collar ties in the big ceiling.

At any rate, once I get a kitchen, all of the Shermans have to come back for dinner.

Awwwwwww

We have a new worker on the project. Major tasks include dancing with paws in the air, volunteer- ing for ear scratches and consuming the occasional treat.

Meet Candy, Arnold's pup. He brought her down when he came back from Christmas, and she's a cutie.

There's miniature poodle in there somewhere, and she's a little shy.

But take the time to earn a little trust, and she's perpetually at your ankles -- waiting to do her job as the subject for yet another ear scratch, of course.

When spindly is a good thing

Our front porch has been railing-free for almost a year now, first just a slab and then just a slab covered in deck planks, but it has a surprise waiting on the back deck.

Arnold has begun making sections to be primed and then set into place -- plus a top rail, of course -- and they're looking good.

Like the fence, they're indicators that we're on the home stretch.

I almost stumbled into them Friday morning; I was focusing upward, because Darren was finishing up the ceiling in the kitchen and living room. Hank was finishing up the tile in the upstairs bath, and was getting ready to grout. Roy was up on a scaffold in the den, staining the planks and then the collar ties.

Now just the staircase ceiling and the big half of the gable vault are left. "I'll finish them sometime next year," Roy said with a big smile.