They Knew What They Were Getting Into, But Still...

My parents have apparently been having a lot of trouble getting carpet installed in their basement back at The Estate At Louisville. They have my sympathies, but they can't say that The Wife and I didn't warn them that people in Tennessee struggle.

Lengthy Visit

My folks came to visit over the last week. We had a great time. This was as good and enjoyable a visit from them as I could possibly have wished for. Everyone got along great; everyone had fun; everyone enjoyed everyone else's company. The time together was far too short. We didn't even have to do that much. It was sufficient to spend time together, to enjoy being together, and to eat and drink and be merry.

I took particular pleasure in seeing The Wife and my mother get along well; they both enjoy looking at open houses and new house models, so they seemed to do quite a bit of that. They also share a fondness for stamping and making cards. My father and I (more him than me) fixed some of the broken sprinklers out on the lawns, and that may well improve the appearance of the RMID. While he's much more capable than I at such things, it is enjoyable working with him and learning how he does things.

It's also exciting to hear about the improvements and plans that my parents have for The Estate At Louisville. My father's retirement business is going swimmingly well and it looks like they'll be able to fund a lot of those improvements very well in a fairly short amount of time. I'm very pleased that they're enjoying their retirement and that things are falling in place for them out in Tennessee (and out here). My father may have found a new client in the High Desert so hopefully we'll be seeing more of them soon!

Saturday night, we had some friends over; they brought their baby and we locked the dogs in the back yard. My folks had brought a premium tri-tip down on their drive from Northern California; I put it in my special marinate for a day and we grilled it up and served it with roasted rosemary potatoes, sunflowered haricots verts, and sweet corn on the cob. My mother made chocolate creampuffs and we managed to knock back a couple bottles of wine. A very good time was had by all.

For Mother's Day I made up a championship-quality quiche and we had a peach strudel. Then we looked at more houses for sale. After a while, it got to be late enough in the day that my folks had to get driving back up to Sacramento to catch their flight home (they had originally flown out to go to a wedding in the wine country) and so we bid them farewell.

But not before thanking them for the wonderful anniversary present (a new dryer) and finding the one thing they'd left behind -- what may be the last bottle of a particular kind of German wine my father likes very, very much and which he won't figure out he left behind here until he gets home tomorrow night. Rather than drink it myself, I'll pack it up and mail it to him tomorrow.

House Hunting (Again)

Like another couple pictured to the right, The Wife and I are house hunting. Our budget is somewhat more modest than Dave and Vicky, but we're hopeful we can find what we're looking for anyway.

So, this weekend's primary activity was house hunting with The Wife. She found a floor plan online that she fell in love with. To me, falling in love with a floor plan seen on the internet is not comprehensible, but that's what happened. So we drove around to the address where the developments were going to see the floor plan in real life. The developer indicated that the floor plan would be available in three locations.

At the first location, there was a retaining wall surrounding a dirt field. Not even a sales office.

The next location was twenty-one miles away. We drove there and found nothing but older developments. We tried looking for the marginally-employed people holding signs to guide home buyers to the developments, but there were none to be found.

The third location was an alfalfa field north of the aircraft assembly plant, inhabited by sagebrush and Joshua trees.

So we found another tract being built by the same developer, and went into a sales office there. It was a madhouse. There were people waiting in line to buy houses. We were collared by a real estate agent before we even walked in the door. After some difficulty, we got directions to the site where a model of the house could be found -- about a mile from where we had been earlier that day.

But we didn't just tour that house. Oh, no. That house was nice but we had to see the other five models also. I got a kick out of the one with the foyer with a mosaic floor in the turret, with a big heavy oak door facing the entryway. (Someone knocking on the door could say, "Open in the name of the King!")

Virtually all of the houses were way too big for The Wife and I. It's just us and our critters, and we're not real big on the whole formal room thing anyway -- we rarely use our formal dining room now and never use the formal living room. Both of these are dens for the animals, who could care less about the extra space. We also don't need four bedrooms -- ideally, we'd have two but will probably have to put up with three.

We looked again today, at two open houses and one built by a developer that hasn't been sold yet. Two houses that we saw were suitable for us. Both had the "great room" design, rather than having divided spaces. I favor this idea because the fact of the matter is that most of the time people are in the casual rooms or the kitchen anyway, even when you have guests over. Formal dinners and cocktail parties are not really part of our lives, so we'd rather have a house set up for relaxed everyday life and causal entertainment.

The good news is that, by California standards, these kinds of houses -- 3+2 with great room and adjoining kitchen -- are on the "affordable" end of the spectrum. The bad news is that there just aren't very many of them out there. Developers seem to think that people want to buy the biggest houses they can, with the greatest number of rooms possible. Formal dining rooms, eat-in kitchens, formal living rooms, parlors, libraries, offices, and even conservatories in which Colonel Mustard might use the revolver.

Master bedrooms have grown to "master suites" in a lot of these houses. Instead of a larger room with an adjoining bathroom, now there are cavernous complexes of rooms, with arched entryways to dual walk-in cabinets. This is just the master suite, remember. Several of the houses we saw (for me, they all start to blend in together after I've seen three models) had separate seating areas within the master suites.

No, not for us. Less is more. Great rooms are great. We don't need, or want, master suites with separate seating areas long enough to install bowling lanes. This isn't a room at the Plaza, it's where we intend to live every day. And we don't spend a whole lot of time (awake) in the master bedroom anyway. Back when we lived in the Estate at Louisville, we made a point of using the smallest available bedroom for our sleeping purposes.

So it's proving to be something of a challenge to find the right house. The one model The Wife found was, indeed, very much what we're both looking for. We intend to buy the house and stay put for some time, so it pays to look around and take our time. It also pays to think about the neighborhood the house is in -- to me, that is probably more important than the house having the perfect layout. Methinks The Wife's priorities are a bit different, but that's what all the shopping about, so that we can both get what we're looking for. There's no reason we shouldn't have both.

Recipe for hanging a dartboard

Figure 1 (above): Completed dartboard. Figure 2 (to right): Stupid little fucking hacksaw (with soda can for scale comparison).

I left work early today so I could meet the electrician. Over the course of the early afternoon, the following things happened:

• The electrician came and solved the electrical problem in ten minutes. Actually, it only took him three, but he stuck around long enough to "check for other problems" as a sop to my ego.
• The garage doors did not work. I had to dismount the brackets, bend them back into shape, and remount them before they would.
• The blade-pan almost did not reinstall on the lawn mower.
• The lawn mower repair company did not answer its phone all afternoon.
• Both The Wife and later, my parents, gave me lengthy speeches about why I need to hire a lawn care service. The Wife seemed quite emotional about this and I could not explain to her until after she had vented her emotions that I had been instructed to try and get the lawn mower professional repaired.

So you can imagine that I was feeling more than a little bit emasculated at this point. My solution was to try and hang the dartboard that The Wife and I bought at Target last week. I will relate my experiences hanging the dartboard in handy recipe form so you can easily re-create my experience this evening for yourself.

You will need:

1. One dartboard
2. One brass bracket for dartboard
3. Three brass screws
4. Three rubber stoppers
5. Four 1/2" finishing nails
6. One sleeve of 1" brads
7. Ten 1 1/4" finishing nails
8. 1x2 pressure-treated, unfinished pine moulding
9. One patient and well-meaning but ill-timed and unfortunately curious wife
10. Cordless drill
11. Corded drill
12. Philips head screwdriver bit for drills
13. Philips head screwdriver
14. Electric screwdriver
15. Rubber mallet
16. Claw hammer
17. 3/8" drill bit
18. Measuring tape (at least 8')
19. Breaker bar
20. Circular saw with rotating-angle plane
21. Level
22. Electric brad gun
23. Dremel tool with nail removing head (unattached)
24. Fingernail on right index finger
25. Stupid little fucking hacksaw (see figure 2, above right)
26. Handle for stupid little fucking hacksaw (see figure 2, above right)
27. 2 cement cinder blocks
28. 2 pieces extra 4x4 stud
    

Preparation: deny yourself food for at least five hours, or such time as is necessary that blood sugar levels are low enough to induce irritability and impatience before beginning. Allow yourself adequate time -- two and a quarter hours -- to complete task.

Phase I: Uninstall ugly shelving located opposite wall where dartboard is intended to go. Give up on using regular philips-head screwdriver upon realization that previous owner used 3" deck screws to mount ugly shelving; switch to electric screwdriver and muse idly about carpal tunnel syndrome. Discard shelving upon removal.

Phase II: Remove dartboard from container, separate brackets and other hardware. Note lack of instructions regarding what to do with extra nails and rubber stoppers. Verify height for bracket (68" from floor) with instructions and official rules of darts. Install bracket on moulding with rubber stoppers as buffers. Find center of dartboard by taking four diameters of board with a straight edge and noting point where all four intersect. Install mounting screw on dartboard at center thus located. Play two rounds of darts and note that dartboard works fine.

Phase III: Show off handiwork to wife, expecting compliments for a job well done. Instead, endure questions regarding angle and purpose of rubber stoppers. Try and make wife happy by removing bracket to re-install hoping for better fit without use of stoppers. Endure wife's observation that bracket is not mounted perfectly level. Note that moulding will no longer hold bracket thanks to holes previously drilled. Respond to wife's questions about "all those lines on back" of dartboard.

Phase IV: Reinstall brackets and center-mount screw, hang dartboard. Watch dartboard twist and turn like Wheel of Fortune on wall. Use profanity.

Phase V: Grow frustrated. Use breaker bar, claw hammer, and rubber mallet to remove molding from wall. Re-measure height for bracket, verifying level of pilot holes using level. Drill new pilot holes, install bracket. Note loss of power in cordless drill. Switch to corded drill. Note corded drill having enough power to twist segments of concrete storm drain; strip threads on screws with overtorque until they look like rivets in under one second.

Phase VI: Grow bitter. Use rubber mallet to knock the shit out of screws, pressing them flat into wall. Hang dartboard. Note stationary and steady mount of dartboard with smug satisfaction. Hold molding next to dartboard, take measurements for top and bottom of board.

Phase VII: Build makeshift sawhorse from cinder blocks and 4x4 studs. Set circular saw to 45 degree angle for intended attractive bevel cut; wallow in hubris of using powerful circular saw on wimpy 1x2 molding. Make first cut on moulding, noting blade seizure just before completion. Remove circular saw, become unable to restart circular saw. Enjoy visit from wife, who has been wondering what all the noise is about. Endure questions about why a circular saw is being used instead of a smaller, less powerful piece of equipment; explain that it is the only saw you own. Be reminded by wife that there is a hacksaw. Grow very angry and afraid of own acid tongue while rummaging through toolbox looking for stupid little fucking hacksaw. Dismiss wife with curt unfriendly words and rationalize that what you just did was better than completely venting all frustruations and contribute to an expensive, inconvenient divorce from someone you really do love. Vow to eat upon completion of task.

Phase VIII: Find and assemble stupid little fucking hacksaw. Use hacksaw to complete cuts on moulding, giving up on idea of attractive 45 degree bevel cuts. Note presence of unnecessarily long wire nails in moulding. Unsuccessfully use claw hammer to remove nails. Install nail remover on Dremel tool using right index fingernail; tear nail while screwing nail remover head on Dremel tool. Experience pain; cut nails off moulding.

Phase IX: Use brad gun to adhere moulding to wall. Note that 1" brads do not provide adequate penetration for 1x2 moulding. Search for and use 1 1/4" finishing nails instead with claw hammer to mount moulding on wall.

Phase X: Measure 8' on perpendicular line from dartboard on floor for official throwing distance. Mark spot with duct tape. Note dizzying array of tools and supplies surrounding installed dartboard as if a tornado had hit Home Depot. Find food before you pass out from blood sugar depletion. Figure out how to apologize to wife for acting like a shit all evening.

Final product should look like figure 1, at top left. Keep cat away from dartboard while in use (optional).