Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

As in – stuff happens. I’ve not been posting so much, as Blondie AKA the Daughter Unit and I are coming down the home stretch – maybe, hopefully, eventually – on a huge autobiographical project for a Watercress client. This client, to put it kindly, has had an interesting life, with lots of interesting friends, and is situated economically far up enough on the scale of things to be able to get exactly what he wants, and to pay the full freight for it. This is a project which … well, it took up about half a year, just getting to the point of writing up the contract, then lay fallow for another year, during which I about wrote it off entirely, and then in October of 2014, we had a signed contract and a check … and a possible deadline of April of this year, which we have blown pretty much past. The professional ghostwriter for this magnum opus has been working on it for more than six years, so I have no reason to feel especially burdened.

Almost the last bit we have to do is to carefully review the hard-copy printed version, and track down and ruthlessly slaughter any remaining misspellings, punctuation omissions, and spacing issues. Yes – I am training up Blondie/Daughter Unit in the detailed ways of the Tiny Publishing Bidness, and pinning her foot to the floor, metaphorically speaking, in learning the Ten Commandments of Watercress, better known as the Chicago Manual of Style. So – that’s been the main project this week, that and finishing off the last of the Armoire project. Yes, the armoire which we scavenged from the curb slightly ahead of the professional junker who had his eye on it, is all but done – all but the lower skirting on the right and left sides. The final item waiting the armoire’s final transformation into a media cabinet was that we needed to build the shelving unit to hold the TV, and a collection of DVD’s, which would fit into the armoire like a hand sliding into a well-fitting glove, and of course I am not well-paid sufficiently as a writer to be able to whistle one of those up from a bespoke cabinet-maker.

Off to Home Depot/Lowe’s, once the payment for another project was accomplished, armed with a set of measurements and an idea in mind for a set of shelves to fit a single row of DVD cases – with two smaller half-width sliding shelf units, which would shift from side to side, thus eliminating the need to stack them two-deep … which is a major pain, and makes it extremely difficult to locate certain movies, which I ABSOLUTELY KNOW that I have, but which I cannot locate under the current system. The nice and faintly harried young salesman at Home Depot obligingly cut the sheet of cabinet-grade plywood into the shapes needed for the main cabinet, but the smaller scraps had to wait upon the courtesy of our near neighbor, the amateur wood-worker, who has a whole garage full of tools, and a monumental half-finished chest made of native cedar planks that he is constructing as a wedding present for a nephew, which will be the woodworker’s marvel of the world once that he gets finished with it. (Yes, for every artistic masterpiece in the world, there is an artist … and another one who tells him that he is DONE!) Anyway, the neighborhood woodworker obligingly ripped the plywood scraps into a number of 5 ½” wide lengths, from which we constructed the two half-width moving segments. We assembled and stained them to match the armoire, discovering in the process that we absolutely suck at applying glue – as there are too many patches where the excess glue soaked in to make a really professional-appearing final product once the stain was applied. It fits quite neatly into the armoire – but on continuing consideration, we think that we will remove the rollers underneath, before we go any farther. They make it too tippy, too unstable, even with the shelf unit inserted.

The kitchen as it stands now – a black hole of clutter

But still … what we have is useful, and doesn’t look all that bad, considering. Which brings us up to the eventual kitchen renovation; since we had a fairly easy time building the shelf-unit, what with everything cut to exact size … how hard would it be, to hire the neighborhood Handy Guy (who helped us install the Marvelous Carved Front Door) to build the cabinet frames for base and wall shelf units? The kitchen is such an odd and small size, and our requirements – for instance, for the wall units to go all the way up to the ceiling – unlikely to be met by prefab cabinets. It was simple enough, making a plain box of a certain dimension from a sheet of cabinet-grade plywood. Looking around, it seems that door and drawer units in custom sizes, plus tambour door kits, plate racks, and pull-out pantry shelves are readily available for much less than the cost of a complete cabinet unit. We’d also have to do this in segments over time – wall cabinets, kitchen floor and base cabinets in two sections, countertop, tile backsplash and sink … and this way, when we were done, all of it would match. It would about double the storage space in the kitchen, once completed. So – that’s the plan; now to see what Handy Guy says.

Ok, so the armoire is all but finished – all but the skirting boards around the bottom sides. We even went toddling off to a favorite antique store (Back Alley Antiques, on Thousand Oaks, just short of Blanco) in search of a key …my daughter had taken off the lock/latch to clean it up, and I had the idea to take it Back Alley Antiques – which has has lovely and original items, and usually rather reasonably priced, although I will only be able to indulge myself there if and when my books start selling like Fifty Shades of Grey (hah!). I did a talk there a couple of years ago for members of a book club who all appreciated antiques. Anyway, we took the lock/latch with us, and explained the situation to the manager – who immediately brought out a large box of skeleton keys, said that we were very clever to have thought of bringing the latch – and let us sort through the box to find one which fit! It took us about five minutes to find several that did, another five minutes to make certain that one was the best. I am still not quite sure how I got the idea that an antique store might have a box of odd keys laying around – maybe from when I worked at Talbot’s, and we had a box of odd and ornamental buttons that had come off things?

Now comes the fun part – aside from reconstructing and recreating the skirting boards – that of building a small set of removable shelves to fit into the armoire. There is no possible way to acquire something commercially available to fit, and no way that I can currently afford something custom-built … so, off to a local Home Depot with some measurements, and the services of a husky youth who was qualified to rip pieces of the required dimensions of cabinet-grade plywood from a single $34 sheet of same on the lovely mechanical saw available on request … yes, you can get pieces cut to exact dimensions at Lowe’s and Home Depot, as long as you don’t get too … well, demanding about it all. This is a useful thing to know, I think, since I have only a circular saw, and a small hobby jigsaw, able to easily handle soft wood of about a 1/4th inch. The husky youth was obliged by company rules and a scrupulous conscience to cut nothing smaller than 6 inches, so we brought home all the scraps, and my cunning plan is to appeal to our neighbor, the woodworker with a garage full of woodworking tools, to rip the rest of it into 5 ½ inch lengths … from which I will construct a series of shelves: one fixed shelf, sized to fit DVDs, and two half-width shelves which shall slide back and forth, allowing the DVD library to be easily searched … and the flat-screen TV to sit on the top of the shelving unit.

And when it becomes necessary for the armoire to be an armoire again – why, the unit can be easily moved out. Details to follow…I am building this bit by bit. Not a carpenter, you know – I’m just an English major!

We ditched cable TV a little more than two years ago, partly out of exasperation with the pap, piddle and trivia on offer at that time, and suppressed fury every month, regarding the manner in which the cost of internet and a slightly more than basic cable kept insidiously climbing upwards, month by month. 150+ channels and nothing much on any of them that we wanted to watch; we time-shifted and skipped through the commercial breaks for years before we cut the cable entirely. (The charge for internet access, alas, has been climbing insidiously upwards since that blessed day: once about $40 a month, now it is close to doubling that, and I am considering giving Time Warner’s main competitor a look-in.)

We invested in a Roku box, and subscriptions to Hulu, and Acorn on line – my daughter already had Amazon Prime, and so … really, we have been spoiled for choice in the last two years, watching or re-watching series which we missed in part or entirely when they originally aired: Northern Exposure, for one example, and Babylon 5 for another, and the original Poldark series. (Of finally watching all of Upstairs, Downstairs, I have written in previous posts). Original Poldark – I missed it entirely on original airing, although I do have the novels. My daughter despises the character of Elizabeth, by the way; silly, mewling indecisive female, always making the wrong choices and blaming everyone else for them.

Otherwise, we have been pigging out when it comes to British imports. Quite early on, we had discovered certain shortcomings in our local PBS channel which aired those particular imports; lacks which also seem to have been shared by the PBS channel favored by my parents – in that they seemed only to have a certain number of episodes of shows available to air, long, long after having complete seasons available on VHS/DVD in catalogues. As God is my witness, I swear that a single season of shows like Are You Being Served? and Keeping Up Appearances aired in constant rotation, over and over and over again. This was an improvement over San Antonio’s PBS station – they seemed to have only six episodes of Vicar of Dibley and aired them incessantly, apparently assuming that the audience would have forgotten everything about plot, characters and gags in the space of a month and a half. That  is why I declined to ever support them;  that and they wouldn’t hire me in any capacity for which I applied upon first retiring from the military after twenty years of professionally committing acts of radio and video production.

Bitter – moi? Come to think of it, yes. Couldn’t even scrounge a temp job,  rounding up donations for their once-yearly charitable auction.

Anyway – between the Roku box and the various subscriptions – we do not miss cable TV at all. Anything current that we want to watch – well, it will turn up eventually. We can wait. And doing without incessant commercials is fantastic. Last fall, we had a business trip down to Brownsville, where we stayed in a nice hotel and watched … I can’t remember what it was that we watched, but the barrage of commercials interrupting the story every ten minutes or so was quite horrible. Yes, I know that selling advertising time is the name of the game, and it pays the freight – but it also drives discriminating viewers away after a certain portion of the program hour is taken up by them: the law of diminishing returns and all that.

The inside, with shelves and hanging rods reinstallad

We are limited in the time that we work on the armoire, currently parked on the back porch, by all the other things that I have to work on – for a retired person and a relatively unemployed person – our days are actually quite full. And also – by the heat and humidity, which certainly does slow down the drying time of wood glue and shellac. We began by disassembling the armoire and stripping out the various interior shelves and brass hardware, in order to facilitate re-gluing, which gave our limited number of clamps into play. We re-glued, nailed and put in new and slightly longer screws along all the angles, and cut small squares of pine to reinforce the bottom corners so that we could put in castors – to make it easier to move the thing. The skirting around the bottom will hide the rollers, once that is reinstalled.

The front skirting, repaired, reattached and varnished.

This morning we got the last castor attached, and the front skirting reattached – this had been broken in two, and had to be re-glued, with a shim across the back. The arched top piece got a bit of light sanding, and then we decided to start with the shellac, which our neighbor the woodworker recommended if we wanted to keep it authentic. (His first suggestion was to slap on a coat of polyurethane and be done with it; he also said that option would basically destroy any antique value.) The sides and the doors are lightly scratched in various places; most of these scratches are in the original finish, and I did have to steel-wool the place where the front skirting had to be joined together – but we were amazed at the improvement that the first coat of shellac made. Many of the scratches and scuff-marks are immediately less visible. We intend to finish the sides and doors with as many thin coats as are required to restore the original appearance, then move it inside and re-attached the doors. I still need to repair and fabricate the side skirting panels, and to repair the top of one of the doors with epoxy putty, but after a week and a half of work on it, we are pretty pleased with how it looks.

The door veneer and detail, after first coat of shellac.

The armoire as found, remnants of duct tape adhering to front

This week is designated in our neighborhood for the once a year bulk trash pick-up by the city – that would be everything to big or too heavy to fit into the trash can. Basically, clapped-out appliances, wood-rotted fencing, disintegrating furniture … everything but broken concrete is fair game. Most usually, the piles begin appearing late in the week before; we say jokingly, to give amateur junkers and professional trash pickers a fair go before the city comes in with a number of huge trucks equipped with massive scoopers on the end of a hydraulic arm to scoop up what is left.

Close-up of veneer and wooden handle

The professional junkers usually go for metal debris, everyone else goes for … well, everything else which can be made use of. I know for a fact there are crafters who scrounge weathered fence pickets to make birdhouses and other country craft items. My daughter and I freely admit to collecting perfectly good terra cotta pots, garden ornaments, a huge chiminea, a metal bracket to hang garden flags from,  a wooden chaise lounge,  plant stands and sometimes plants themselves, but this last Sunday we spotted a real prize, and inveigled a neighborhood friend with a pickup truck to help us. We beat one of the pros to it by about five minutes, and boy, did he look annoyed when he came around the corner and saw us loading it up.

The items in question is one of those tall old-fashioned armoire wardrobes, built for use in the days before houses came with built-in closets – I’d guess this one is from the 1920s, with a veneer inlay on the doors, an arched top, and rounded column-shaped corners with some ornamental carvings on them, and very nice carved wooden doors. There is a small broken part of the molding at the top of one of the doors, damage and cracks to the corners and and the base that it stands on is broken entirely away. There were some broken pieces of wood with it, which could be part of the base, but maybe not, as they do not seem to fit.

Detail of carving on corners

There are some small brass fittings – latches, a lock, and hinges coming loose on one door, and a narrow mirror fixed inside one door. The corners are loose, so it doesn’t stand foursquare at all, but that is something that can be fixed with wood-glue and longer screws. It’s otherwise a solid and well-made piece, not a scrap of MDF anywhere in it (although the side panels are plywood) and well within our capabilities to repair, given some advice by our neighbor who does quality wood-working. In one of my books about repairing furniture , the authors made a point of observing that something from the Forties or even earlier was almost always a solidly built piece of furniture, and well worth the time and effort spent on repairing and restoring, whereas something bought in a furniture store today – unless it was absolutely tippy-top-of-the-line and heinously expensive – is most likely a flimsy piece of trash; thin veneer over MDF. We also recalled the guy on the Antiques Road show, who bought a heavy wooden sideboard from some kids who were going to put it on the Guy Fawkes bonfire, and it turned out to be an incredibly valuable and very rare Jacobean sideboard.

Interior with single shelf

What will we do with it? Probably use it as an entertainment center; with a removable set of shelves for the television and all, until I can afford to build my antique-filled summer vacation house in the Hill Country.