Board meetings

We worker bees had a palaver yesterday when the front of the old section of the south wall was sided (the part under the "tails" on the old eaves), and counted up our remaining cedar planks, and tried to figure a place for a natural break, to switch to HardiPlank. . . . And decided to go for it: Do the whole darn wall in cedar, and make the historic commission very happy indeed.

Of course I checked to make sure Ref didn't outvote the majority -- and he didn't. (As I've said more than once to subcontractors, I may be the owner, but Ref's the boss.) When I went out to visit today, he'd just finished 40 laps of the hospital halls.

So, between rain showers, the guys kept going. You can see in the second picture that there are a relatively few square feet left to go, and the guys are likely to pick the materials up tomorrow or Monday at a lumberyard on Big Pine where Juan used to work.

If you look carefully in the second picture, you can also see how the wood aligns with the HardiPlank at the corner, line for line. Both are on 6-inch laps, and I don't think you'd ever guess that they're slightly different thicknesses.

Tin at last

Finally -- though it's going to take a few days, given the complexity of the roof.

Dennis (the neighbor who runs the guest house up the blook, not Dennis the electrician or Dennis the architect) thinks the roof was part of the islandwide effort that took the wind out of Chris, expected soon to be downgraded to a mere tropical depression, and expected to pass over Cuba, not us.

Dennis says my storm-supplies run also helped, as did his own efforts: topping off his propane, and stocking up on beer.

But the roofer wasn't our only welcome guest on Thursay: The HVAC guys, Kenny and George, showed up to run their refrigerant lines while the floor is still torn up. They'll be back next week to work on ducts and such. That's Kenny in the picture, pushing copper pipe under the house.

Ref, meanwhile, keeps getting better. This morning, he almost looked and sounded like his old self, and the doc gave him a glowing report. He seemed a little wearier this afternoon -- but after all, he'd been doing laps of the hospital halls all day.

Back to the subject of guests. We did have one unwelcome one, in an odd Key West way. There is no delicate way to say this, so:

Even though we have a porta-potty onsite (and it gets a workout from the late bar crowd on weekends), someone got into the house overnight, went out on the roof and went, out on the roof. Since we need no overnight visitors, I called the cops. Two guys in blue pedaled up on bilkes and inspected the, um, evidence. After some predictable humor, they promised to increase night patrols.

Getting ready

This flyer, at the venerable Green Parrot Bar (official motto: "No Snivelling!") comes to mind as Chris forms up out near Hispaniola, expected to grow into a Cat 1 overnight.

It came to mind, too, as I heard a guy with Michigan plates bellowing on Elizabeth Street: "Just board it up! Board it up now!"

A tad premature, even though half the computer models show the storm making a direct hit on us this weekend, and the Miami stations are doing breathless updates every 30 minutes.

But, hey, I'm an ex-Boy Scout, so I hied to Albertson's for six gallons of water, canned food with a great shelf life (e.g., soups I wouldn't mind eating cold), those handy little snack packs of fruit in room-temp Jell-O, granola bars, and the like. I felt like a culinary Noah as my supplies marched, two by two, down the conveyor.

Listen to the wind, and you can hear a little Thurber there:

The Get-Ready Man was a lank unkempt elderly gentleman with wild eyes and a deep voice who used to go about shouting at people through a megaphone to prepare for the end of the world. "GET READY! GET READ-Y!" he would bellow. "THE WORLLLLD IS COMING TO AN END!"

When it does, at least I'll have Jell-O.

Moving right along

That's Steve, tacking up a furring strip at the corner between the dining room and the den -- and yes, that's the new cedar planking under the windows.

The guys have been busy, framing those windows in, matching the lines of the cedar to those of the HardiPlank, taking it one fast step at a time.

The texture of the cedar is great, just rough enough to match both the HardiPlank and the old pine. Slap some primer and paint on it, and you won't know the difference.

Ref, meanwhile, keeps on mending.

I went out to the hospital to say hey and get marching orders, and then took Brantley out because Ref needed some paperwork from his truck to make sure payroll goes through for Friday, and I think Brantley is the only other person on the planet who could dig anything out of Ref's truck.

"You've ridden in it," Mr. B said, laughing, "but you've never had to find anything in it." He just shook his head, because it's serious archaeology.

I had an Etta James disc playing, and both of us were bopping along with her on the ride out and back. "That woman can sing," Brantley said. I'm getting him a copy of the CD as soon as I get my regular computer down here.

'Light! More light!'

In the plant organ which we ordinarily call the leaf a true Proteus is concealed, who can hide and reveal himself in all sorts of configurations. From top to bottom a plant is all leaf, united so inseparably with the future bud that one cannot be imagined without the other.

-- Goethe

And the band plays on

Even with the maestro on the sidelines, the virtuosos know their parts and play them well.

Here Juan's checking the level of the control line for the lower siding on the south face of the house.

The second floor siding? It's done -- allll the way around!

TLC for Ref

I'm trying to engage the private-duty nurse at left for Ref -- just to pay him back for the scare: When I got to the house this morning, Brantley said Ref had called, from the hospital, and had undergone some gut surgery over the weekend.

I didn't get out to Stock Island quite as fast as the night I rocketed Robert to the E.R. for a kidney stone, but I didn't lose any time either -- aside from a stop for a card and a nice exotic orchid.

The first good news came from Dorothy, a big, handsome woman at the reception desk: "Oh, he's up and around, and he's doing fine," she grinned. Ref has a lot of friends.

Ref was indeed in a chair, and grousing mildly that they were making him walk as much as possible. He says they expect him to be out in a few days and to mend nicely. That's a relief not because he's my contractor -- when I got back to the house to give a full report to the crew, they were doing exactly what needed doing, and there's plenty on their plate till Ref gets well -- but because he's my friend.

Hmm

Peak experience

Nate, Steve and Juan were really cookin' on Monday -- wretched in the heat sense, but terrific in terms of progress.

They'd worked on the south front dormer in the morning, and by midafternoon they were fixing up the unfortunate things the mainland carpenter, Ken, had done on the north counterpart.

"That sill just about fell out when I touched it," Brantley said the other day. Oops. But looking up today, he had a huge smile when he said, "That's really a pretty roof. You're gonna have the prettiest house on the street."

I walked around to the back and scoped out the other side of the second floor. The proportions look different with the siding up -- but I still think Mr. B is right.

Adios, Iguana

I turned the corner at Green Street today and -- there it wasn't.

I fell in love with the Iguana the first time we went there -- a little lunch-counter sort of place across the street from Captain Tony's, with an old-style wood front that swung up to make a canopy over the sidewalk. There were a few high tables there and only 8 or 10 more jammed into the tiny inside. Behind a slim front part, there was an open-air section built around a tree, and then a wee kitchen in back. The floors were uneven, and there were terrariums behind the cash register with dusty faux iguanas.

If it started raining while you were eating, you did your best to scootch into the perimeter of what would only pretentiously be called the atrium.

It seemed less to have been built than to have happened, a great Key West relic. And once you'd snared a table, you never, ever, felt any pressure to leave. Stay, savor, read the paper, ogle the street traffic and groove to the live music from Tony's.

Of course, groove on the food, too. I loved the patty melt with curly fries, and I mean loved; Robert's favorite was the grilled fresh tuna sandwich -- the best on the island, he said. Even more delectable was the owner, little Ino, with all the passion and flash of her homeland, Spain.

Then after Wilma, we noticed 2-by-4's across the front, and when I ran into Ino at Publix early this year, I asked her what was going on. "Oh, the hurricane," she said. "It did so much damage, and the landlord doesn't know what he wants to do."

I know what I want to do. I want to cry.

New leaves

And now in age, I bud again.
After so many deaths, I live and write;
I once again smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my only light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempest fell all night.

-- George Herbert

Don't ask, just nail

Juan and Gregory were up on the scaffold, measuring what we needed and nailing up the planks that Brantley and I, down at the sawhorses, were measuring and cutting.

Juan knew exactly what he wanted: "33 and 5/16," he called out at one point -- and by damn, we gave it to him, not an easy thing with HardiPlank.

During a heat break (Juan's order is red Gatorade; Greg's another "anything wet" kinda guy), Ref and Nathaniel drove up.

"Don't ask where, but look what I found," Ref said with a big grin, pointing at a load of cedar planks in the back of the truck, some up to 16 feet long. Given the demand for materials around here, the odds were about as great as stumbling across another of Mel Fisher's ingots.

"Just unload 'em, and get 'em in there where nobody's gonna see 'em." The wood smelled marvelous as the guys carried it in, and Ref was working on adrenaline. "Now I can sleep tonight; now my stomach can stop rumbling." And now he could resume work on the front of the house. "I think that's why I haven't finished the windows yet -- I wasn't happy with the salvaged pine we had to work with. It wasn't gonna go far enough. And this cedar is perfect for us."

Later in the day, he heard Juan shouting down an order for a long-point measurement of 30 and 11/16. "Sixteenths? Sixteenths?? Just say 5/8, man! This ain't no cabinet shop yet."

Not yet; but when it is, we seem to have found someone who can deal with it.

On your mark . . .

If you heard a popping sound this morning, it was probably the starting gun for our dash to get the place sided and "dried in."

Ref's ad bore fruit, and first thing today Steve and Juan had shown up to finish building the pump jack and start siding.

Meanwhile, Ref and I were on our way to HARC -- the Historic Architecture Review Commission -- to talk with Diane, the staff honcho (or is that honcha?).

Those blue lines in the picture are chalk marks on the porch planks, finally squared up after all these years. But we wanted to let HARC know we probably wouldn't end up with enough usable salvaged planks, and couldn't find wood 1x6's anywhere, to cover all the old structure on the south face. (HARC guidelines allow HardiPlank on the new construction, but call for wood on everything historic.)

Diane told us to do our best -- and, by the way, gave us a green light for our exterior colors. (Even paints have to be approved in the historic district.) She knows the house we're using as our template -- even though it's a big, fancy thing, and we're just a cottage -- and loves the combination. All I have to do is submit chips or a photo for official approval. Pity I can't just tell her to look here.

Momentary tiger

More adventures in afternoon light.

Tempus fugit at 3 p.m.

Captive audience

Rev. McKinzie, a retired music teacher and preacher, plays at Fleming and Duval most mornings. "I try to go for 2, 2½ hours," he said. Even if the tourist tide has yet to rise, he's there, in jacket and tie. Any donations go to the Key West Bible Classes program.

"Sure, I know him," Brantley said with a big smile. "He has that two-story frame house next to Hemingway's house. He's fun to talk to -- and man, he can play any instrument there is."

Ref on roof, redux

"Is this the same roof I was working on before?," Ref was asking. "I think it got steeper."

You can barely see him up there, grappling with the other end of the post to anchor it for a scaffold. Mr. B's s up fairly high steadying it, and below him, out of the frame, is Nathaniel, wrestling with the lower bracket.

They're getting ready to shoot the planks on the south side of the house, which at this hour of the day is the hot side, believe me. The sun is merciless.

We've had a few slow days, mostly because carpenter Ken was heading back to resume work on the project but had an unfortunate accident -- Ref caught him scamming. It's a complicated story, but Ref sums it up pretty well: "I told him I was born at night, but it wasn't last night, and he might as well turn around and go home."

So Ref's put an ad in the paper, seeking carpenters and helpers, looking for labor that's skilled and honest.

Loose ends

. . . but not for long, woo-hoo!

I bit the bullet today and ordered all our "smart" switches -- and though the price smarts a bit, it's amazing technology for the price.

They're by Insteon, and basically they'll do everything but walk the dog. Want to turn all the outside lights on at once? One button from any room. Dim the den for TV while the art stays lighted? Light a path to the kitchen? Turn everything upstairs off? With a combination of wall-mounted keypads and tableside remotes, bingo.

You can also monitor and adjust from elsewhere -- as in Tennessee elsewhere -- via the net. Factor in alarm system, climate controls, watering schedules . . . .

The fanciest systems that do all this go for true megabucks. This is a brilliant alternative.

Or half-dimmed, depending on your mood.

A good third act

The light was intense this afternoon, and as I passed the Walgreen's, on Duval, I had to get a picture of the restored façade.

Krakow has its wildly decorated Rynek Glowny, and we have. . . . Aw, hell, they have T-shirt vendors in their Cloth Hall, too (that's what the finials remind me of), though better cafes on their square.

I know, the marquee can seem intrusive, especially from this angle. But it's exactly the same size as the Strand's old now-playing marquee when the Carbonells owned it. (A few weeks back, at the barber shop, a sweet old guy told me he was watching a movie when water poured in the doors and down the aisles as a hurricane roared through; I think it was Donna, but I wasn't going to screw up a good story by asking for details.)

Given Duval Street rents and the woes of non-chain non-plexes, the outcome could have been worse.

And considering that the entire canopy had been torn off some years ago -- and that the theater innards had been torn out to make a Ripley's "museum" -- I think the new life is a good third act. At least when you drop money in Walgreen's, you leave with something besides a headful of cobwebs.

And at night. . . . Well! Ro-co-CO!

Lester sends a smile

Ran into her on Duval and as usual it was hugs and kisses, with extra points for matching Crocs. She says hi, and sends love.

I mentioned Joe's buying Mangoes, and Lester said she'd run into him at the grocery and congratulated him, but in his big, quiet way he just smiled. "This is an amazing place," she said. "Five years ago, he was cooking in the kitchen at Caroline's."

Lateral light

The Artist House next door cut down their big ficus tree a few weeks ago -- invasive roots, incredibly messy; I'd have cut it, too -- and since then the late-day light on our little sitting area almost comes in horizontally. I love the hot spots it creates on the potted arecas.

Religious experiences

No sounds of saws, hammers or nail guns as I sat awhile at the house this morning. Just the seaplane buzzing in from the Tortugas, a high breeze rustling fronds, the bell at St. Peter's and the hellos from the well-dressed church ladies strolling home after services.

So I ambled to the car, and decided to see if North Roosevelt had washed away or anything during the night. No -- and the car somehow wanted to turn into Kim's Kubans, so who was I to resist.

A Cuban sandwich (or Cuban mix, or just "a Cuban" -- the names vary as much as the proportions do) is a workaday paean to the pig. It's an amalgam of ham, roast pork, a smidge of thin-sliced spicy sausage, shredded lettuce, sliced onion, tomato, mayo, pickles (extra, please!), generic yellow cheese and mustard in a sliced length of crusty, flat Cuban bread, all pressed between heated plates just long enough to smoosh but not so long as to wilt the lettuce.

Buy one, feed two. ¡Milagrosa!

Today's was great, as Kim's always are, but it would be unfair to compare it to the first one of theirs I had.

That was another Sunday, in March. Robert was here, and we'd just become "official" residents. We'd gotten sandwiches for the beach but, being spring break and all, the tables and parking spaces at Smathers were full up, so we parked in the sand on the bridle path, opened the sunroof and windows and feasted in the car.

Clear sunshine, big palms swaying in the wind, gulls swooping, galleon clouds out over the reef, sunburned kids playing Frisbee and volleyball in the sand, fine Latin jazz on the CD and that sandwich.

¡Pura vida!

For Whom the Bull Rolls

There was Mac talking with L.E. -- oh, wait a minute. They were just Mac and L.E. wannabes.

Actually, they were among the few hundred PapaWannabes and a few thousand hangers-on in town for Hemingway Days, full of literary stuff, a rolling of the bulls (on wheels; they tried running live veal on Duval for the HemTennial in '99, but this ain't Pamplona), and a bash Saturday night at Sloppy Joe's to anoint the best lookalike.

It's also a massive boost to the rum trade.

Of course Hemingway was 29 when he got here, slim and with a Citizen Kane moustache; the snowbeard contestants often confuse square-jawed with portly, stuck in Old Man and Sea mode, but no matter. A party's a party.

One perennial Have-Not, though he really would like To Have, is Tom Grizzard of Leesburg (he's in the pink shirt above). He makes it into a brass-knobbed bash, renting a big guest house on Southard, hiring a band, silk-screening T-shirts, printing up fans for his fans. . . . But thus is fame fleeting. This handout was in the gutter across from Fausto's (truth be told, a place almost all of us have been one time or another).

High mileage

It's been almost six months since I wore shoes, and my trusty blue Crocs, worn smooth as a Scrub Club come-on, now lose traction even on dry pavement.

The new ones -- with hot pink topsoles -- make me smile -- the flip-flop equivalent of big, honking air horns on a VW bug.

Plank by plank by plank

I don't know if it was heat, homesickness or the high cost of living in Key West, but by the time I got to the house Ken had told the guys he was heading back to Arcadia for a bit.

Still, Gregory was back (on the weekend break from his day job), and it was great to see him again as the planks kept going on, slowly but surely.

You get a sense of the result best on the long wall(s) of the den and bedroom. Ref says the secret is to shoot a control line at eye level -- that's where any deviation will most be noticed -- and use control blocks to assure even spacing. When little adjustments are needed (and they will be, since houses aren't perfect) you cheat here and there near the top. (Don't mind the smudges, by the way; that's just a little mud.)

Also here and there on Saturday, people dropped by -- a woman from the mission project down the street, sprucing up the St. Peter's thrift shop and asking about building permits; Bud, a business partner of Realtor Ken, who made some great HVAC suggestions; and Irving.

Irving's from Montreal, but came down to Boca Raton a few months back to help a friend with his hurricane shutter business, and has been putting in manic hours since. So this weekend his daughter and his staff Shanghaied him, confiscated his cell phone and bundled him and his wife off to a guesthouse on our street for their maiden visit to Key West, no work allowed.

He asked lots of polite questions about the house, and said lots of nice things -- but then, the hearbreak of workaholism: He asked whether it was OK to take some pictures of how our windows were framed in, so his workers could get an idea of the sort of construction they needed to anchor serious hurricane shutters.

I was flattered, and of course agreed. Then I told him to go play.

Life on a 2-by-4

Apropos of my small-world post, I stumbled on this Space Station's Eye view of our little island while I was web-surfing -- and dang, isn't it pretty from way up there?

That highly-canalled part off to the right is Stock Island, connected to Key West by the euphonious Cow Key Bridge. (Cow, stock, livestock: Get the historical thread?) The long arm rising to the top of the picture is Fleming Key; the smaller one to the right of Fleming is Dredger's; both are Navy. You can see the straight-line dredge cuts.

The offshore dot at 10 o'clock used to be naval, a key descriptively called Tank, but developers applied a ton of lipstick, changed its name to Sunset and made it a very high-class hook for arrivistes.

But our little patch of rock -- just 2 miles by 4 -- is its own quirky mix, live-and-let-living with every stripe of any rainbow ever imagined, rich, poor, in between and who cares.

How did I get here, and what took me so long?

Making haste slowly

That's Ken and Nathaniel -- aka Dogman and Bowleg -- outside the big guest room dormer. Brantley and I were inside cutting the siding, window trim and frieze boards (don't ask) that they were nailing up.

Mr. B was in a mentoring mood. First I was marking the HardiPlank from the pattern -- actually working the pencil. The detail work with the electric scissors was far safer in his capable hands. But then he turned me loose with the miter saw a few times, and I initialed the back of the first board I cut, for the benefit of future architectural anthropologists.

The heat was getting to all of us by late afternoon, and Ref blew the whistle when we all started making little mistakes at once. "We'll finish this tomorrow," he said. "It's better to stop now and do it right when we're fresh."

I told him that the Romans had the right phrase for what we needed to do: Festina lente -- Make haste slowly.

On the up and up

It was raining when I got to the house, and Ken was the only soul around. "The guys showed up at 8, but that's just when it started coming down again," he said.

So, another day gone -- until lunch, when the sun finally broke through and the sauna switched on.

Of course Brantley and Nathaniel hurried back, and by 2 or so they were almost done with the top of the second floor rear.

We toasted progress with rounds of Gatorade -- and I'm well aware of the standing orders: Mr. B., red; Ken, red; Nathaniel, grape or blue. (Among the electricians, Steve's grape, blue or berry; Denny, odd duck, opts for iced tea.)

Ref? "Anything wet." Except rainwater.

Welcome to Venice

My camera was high and dry while I was canoeing through errands yesterday, but the Citizen's ace photog, Rob O'Neal, came through as usual in this morning's Page One shot.

Between storms

The star charts say it's Alphekka -- Arabic, because our terms of reference for the heavens were born among those astronomers.

We all see the same stars. Can't we all see the same Earth?

Wrong day to roof

. . . To put it mildly.

The tail end of the system that spawned Tropical Storm Beryl up the Atlantic Coast drenched Key West. Those are streams of water, not mere drips, coming off the front porch. "Great time to build a house," Nathaniel said in passing, dry humor on a wet day. Steve, under the floor stringing conduit again, had made the literary transition from "The Metamorphosis" to "A River Runs Through It."

Roofing was out. But one pre-roof errand wasn't. Denny reminded us that we needed weatherproof vents (how appropriate) for the bathroom fans, and we needed to get them in place before the wizards of tin start their magic.

Easy, I said. I'll drive out to Stock Island to pick 'em up. So as the rain tapered off, I started for the apartment and the car. A minute into the walk, the skies opened so wide that turning back was pointless. "Soaked to the skin" was more than a figure of speech, so I kept on truckin'. Fortunately, it was a warm shower, and also fortunately the Boy Scout in me had packed a baggie in a cargo pocket just in case the camera ever needed some weatherproofing.

After I toweled dry and changed, the real adventure began. Stormwater at White and Eaton was over hubcap level. U-turn. On parts of Flagler, it was only up to the rim. Slow ahead. MacMillan on Stock Island was only rim-deep. Slow ahead -- until the return trip, when it was up by 6 inches or so. U-Turn. And so on. Key West does have some rapid-drainage issues.

By the time I hydroplaned back to the house, the pool had filled up to the bottom of the steps, but it was only drizzling, and Ref was cracking the whip to get the rear of the second floor sided. Something about making hay while the sun was shining somewhere.