Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

This is, of course, the carved, solid-wood front door that I bought at the Daughter Unit’s urging last weekend at the neighborhood estate sale. Said door was one of the items crammed into the house formerly owned by an elderly couple with hoarding issues. The estate sale managers told us that they had to fill and empty an industrial dumpster three times, just to get to the sellable stuff. Which, as it was all crammed together in a dingy, airless and dark house, did not show off at it’s very best; honestly, there were some rather nice items available, but a lot looked like several aisles worth of the Dollar Store jumbled in with random contents of the marked-down shelves at Walmart. The blanc de chine lamp was one of the random nice ones – the door was another. It’s some kind of oriental sycamore wood, with four inset panels carved with a sort of lotus and leaf design. It was completely unfinished, and never had been installed.

My daughter called our next-door neighbor as soon as I had paid for it: he has a pickup truck, and I think feels rather guilty about how his basset hounds sometimes start barking in the middle of the night. Anyway, he came at once – so did the guy who does all kinds of neighborhood handiwork. All agreed that it was a very nice door – albeit heavy enough to require two or three persons to lift and carry. Well, we had planned and budgeted to replace the front door this year, but some piece of contractor  leftover from the Habitat for Humanity retail store was what we originally had in mind. The day after we bought it, the Daughter Unit and I set to with steel wool and a bucket of polyurethane varnish; three coats to the front, two on the back, and oh, my – did it come out well. There is a thin veneer front and back, which looks very much like something called ‘lacewood’ – a kind of rippled gold and brown effect. The Daughter Unit fears that someone will break into the house someday and steal nothing but the door.

We did source a latch set from Habitat, anyway – I am almost certain that much of what we use for renovating and replacing certain elements of the house will come from there, if not the marked-down section from Home Depot or Lowe’s. A small bit of panic upon trying to assemble the latch set, when we realized that it was set for a left-hand side opening and not a right-hand one, which was what we needed. Nothing about this in the box, and instructions were there not: It also wasn’t returnable. The three of us – me, Daughter Unit and the neighborhood handyman finally figured out that we could disassemble the latch mechanism itself and convert it to what we needed.

Oh, and the existing threshold needed to go, as well as the inside door trim, but we had pretty well written that off. Of course now the danger is that this bit of renew-replacement will make everything else look tatty. I’m almost a hundred percent certain that we are due for another inside paint job…

‘Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind,’ as the philosopher Emerson observed, and as I was reminded every time that I changed assignments at the bidding of the Air Force. Having to shift all your personal household ‘things’ every three years or so meant that the acquisition of ‘things’ was kept to a dull roar. Yes, there were the usual artistic souvenirs … and in my case, books without number … but on the other hand, the 220V appliances, transformers, and potted plants usually were handed off upon scheduling of a pack-out date; extraneous clothing and other ‘stuff’ usually had a date with the base thrift store, and what couldn’t be sold or donated was dumped. I couldn’t help observing, though, that my own ‘things’ went from a couple of B-4 bags, a duffle and a suitcase, to a single van-load in the space of three years, and multiplied exponentially in the years thereafter. (Still – in spite of all the books, I was still under the weight limit on the last PCS move.)

But – in 1994, I bought a house, and moving into it constituted my very last PCS move. (Although I never have thrown away the stereo boxes. They’re still stacked in the garage.) My daughter finished her last hitch in the Marines in 2006, and came home to roost with her ‘things’ which went into the house or the garage. We added to the mutual household ‘things’ over the following years, leavened and reduced by the occasional garage sale, or natural household selection. Yes, things wore out; china and glass items hit the floor and broke, I upgraded certain household items like pots and pans, computers, major appliances … but certain things were added to the household, either by my daughter or myself; pictures and books, nice bits of china and glass. That kind of careless collecting of ‘stuff’ might soon slow to a crawl, though, owing to an experience this last weekend.

So, we have always rather enjoyed yard and estate sales. Great was our rejoicing on Friday to discover another one, not three blocks away. There was a good crowd outside, and a huge quantity of tools and boxes arranged on racks in the driveway, and cars and pickup trucks parked on both sides of the street for a block in either direction. This was a most promising development, so we hustled the dogs home and drove back in my car. There was a line to get in – as the sale manager minding the door explained with a terribly harassed expression, there was so much stuff inside the house they simply had to limit the numbers of people coming inside for reasons of safety. The owners of the house had been hoarders. I mean, they had hoarded to the point where the house had been entirely packed. The team managing the disposition of the sale had filled several industrial-sized dumpsters of junk, before they could even begin on the sellable items. There was a storage shed out in back, and apparently some storage units also filled with ‘stuff’ for which there was no room until what was in the house could be sold.

We waited for about half an hour, rather intrigued. We had heard about this kind of thing, but never actually seen it first-hand. The elderly couple whose home this had been were said by the neighbors to be absolutely wonderful, sweet people, and generally good neighbors, but the house had a definite air of neglect about it. And once we did get inside – oh, my god; the house was even more dilapidated on the inside; dusty, unkempt and as dim as a cave. There was no bannister on the upper part of the staircase, and in one room, a massive roof leak in the ceiling had eaten away the ceiling drywall, and spilled dirty insulation into the room – there was, however, a plastic wastebasket wedged between the top of a tall bookcase and the ceiling in an attempt to catch water leaking through. The house, and the back porch was crammed, every corner, nook and closet with stuff; for some unfathomable reason, mounds of luggage. Camera gear and accessories, stereo components and laser printers, most of them new and untouched. Lamps and knickknacks, box after box of sets of china, toy trains, Madame Alexander dolls, still in boxes, much of it covered in dust. Books, of course; one whole walk-in closet lined with shelves of DVDs and VHS tapes.

I came away with a pierced chine de blanc lamp, which had no shade and wiring so ancient that the plastic practically crumbled in my hands as I took it apart. It must have been in storage for years, for it was absolutely filthy. I’d always wanted one, as they sold them in all sizes in the BX in Japan, but all I could afford back then was a small one. As I waited to pay for it, my eye fell on a a Kodak EasyShare camera, just about the same make and model as the one I currently use – which barely works any more. This one was a slightly older iteration, but unused – still with the protective film over the view-screen, and even had the instruction manual with it. The camera I got for $5 dollars. The estate sale people, I judge, had gone past trying to get fair market value and were just pricing most items to sell as fast as possible to anyone willing to take them away.

We came back on Saturday, just to see if anything interesting was left; there was – enough to carry on the sale through the following day. This time my daughter suggested that we look at the tools and stuff in the garage, which we had not done on Friday. Most of the good power tools and camping gear had sold, but my daughter spotted a carved wooden door. Solid wood, un-finished and for an extremely reduced price … we had intended to replace the front door anyway. So, I bought it, while my daughter called our chivalrous next-door neighbor with a pick-up truck. It’s out in the shed right now, awaiting application of stain and varnish.

Good purchases all, and at excellent prices, but I am resolved after this that any purchases of anything other than books will be on a replacement-only bases. Something coming into the house will necessitate something going out of the house. Whatever the future holds for my estate and home, it should not involve multiple dumpsters.

Or, at least, it has sprung in this part of the world: the wisteria bloomed, the Spanish jasmine is blooming, everything but the gherkin cucumbers that I planted several weekends ago has put up little green blades, pairs of leaves, or as in the case of the potatoes – whole clusters of green and greenish-purple leaves. There are even embryonic apples on the two trees – clusters of three or four little green marble-sized things, which is gratifying. We were worried about the apple trees being suitably pollinated, but the one from Lowe’s three weeks ago and the lonely one planted last year both look to have been visited by bees, the breeze, or whatever. And the peach tree has several long green things that might eventually become peaches in the fullness of time. Over the last weekend, we took some time for retail therapy and purchased some more things for the garden; potting soil, a better grade of garden soil than the unimproved clay normally on order in this neighborhood, some bulbs and roots and corms to improve some of the unimproved corners. Hauling heavy bags and pots hither and yon, scooping up last years’ leaves … well, that proved pretty exhausting. But at least, I now have a back yard that I’m not embarrassed to invite neighbors into. And at the very least, we will have some produce and herbs out of it, although I am still in two minds about chickens.

My daughter has spotted a chicken coop at Sam’s Club, you see; quite a lavish one, as these things go. The last excursion into Sam’s we went to look at it again, and struck up a conversation with a woman who was also looking speculatively at the display coop. She turned out to be an artist, a neighbor of Victoria’s Black Swan Inn on Holbrook Road, and a friend of Howard the glass artist … so anyway, she talked up the Starving Artists Show in La Villita this weekend. She and my daughter swapped pictures of their creations on their cellphones, and we talked shows and budget shopping and scrounging, the best thrift shops around. It turns out that we are both fans of Thrifttown, and the conversation reminded me that I really ought to stop by there and get some new jeans. The one comfortable pair was pretty close to disintegrating, and well … we were going to hit Rainbow Gardens again, so why not check for any bargains to be had as long as we were going that way?

My daughter is always on the look-out for quality crystal and vintage glass, which sometimes show up in venues like Thrifttown, so we did a spin through that section – but on the way from there to the other side of the store, I spotted something oddly familiar, on a shelf with the usual assortment of battered pots and pans; green and pristine, with the glass and metal lid taped securely together. Was it … could it be? Why, yes it was – a classic Chantal enamel small stock-pot with the full-depth metal insert for cooking pasta! You can’t even get that kind or color of Chantal any more, save on Ebay for prices very close to what they would have been when new. I know this, because about fifteen years ago, I upgraded from the budget set of Revere-ware pots and pans that I had bought when I moved out of the barracks. I picked Chantal because they were nonreactive enamel, nicely styled, had a narrow metal rim around the edges of the pots and pans where the enamel would be most prone to chip, came in a pleasing number of sizes and colors, had glass lids (also edged with metal), and were of high quality but not so expensive that they were out of sight. So I upgraded and was totally happy with cobalt-blue pots and pans, which have served admirably, with hardly a chip or crack among them, although the metal rims of the most heavily-used pots are rather dinged. Alas, like picking my everyday household china from Reading China and Glass at the outlet mall in San Marcos, and thinking that they would be in business forever endeavor and I would be able to replace broken pieces and perhaps enlarge on what I had … Chantal stopped manufacturing that style, and all colors except for bright red and steel-finish. Well …(insert colorful oath here) I suppose I can always trust to luck on Ebay when I want to add another small saucepan or two, but here was a lovely pot to cook pasta in (or even to use as a canning kettle) for the not unreasonable price of $15.

Yes, of course I grabbed it. Even being green instead of cobalt blue, I’d have been kicking myself from here to Waco and back again, if I hadn’t.

That time of year again – the last week before the recorded date of ‘last frost’ in this part of Texas. I suppose that in some year or other there was a spasm of frost after March 15^th – this is Texas, after all, where if you don’t care for the weather at any particular moment, just wait for five minutes. But March 15^th is the traditional ‘ladies and gentlemen, start your garden engines’ moment. We actually started last weekend, moving out the tender plants which had been sheltered on the back porch, protected by sheets of plastic hung from three sides to make a sort of temporary if terribly cramped greenhouse. It has been pouring, drizzling, misting and oozing rain off and on for the past week, and … well, really, the rainwater is good for plants, and they might as well get all the good out of it.

So it begins – another year of attempting to have regular backyard supply of fresh vegetables, in a variety of raised beds, pots large and small, and hanging patented tomato planters. Last year saw us add three sapling fruit trees – apple, plum and peach, along the back fence, where they all graciously consented to leaf out, and to produce blooms in the last couple of days. This week, we added another apple tree – it seems that it is necessary for the purposes of cross-pollination. Blondie’s Montero awaiting a new engine, it was necessary to bring it home in my Accura – and not a problem at all. I opened the sun roof, and Blondie lowered it in, and we drove home with the apple tree’s upper branches waving proudly in the breeze. We planted it today, and I took down the last of the sheltering plastic sheets and swept out the back porch. This seems like the first sunny, mild day in weeks, so we did take a few minutes to sit down and relish it all. Tomorrow – top up the big raised bed with garden soil and plant potatoes. Last year we had a lovely crop of them; not as many as we had expected, but oh, were they delicious – and smooth, like vegetable velvet.

We also installed a number of small items which came from Mom and Dad’s place – things which had no particular value, particularly – so likely they would have been sold at a yard sale for a buck or two, or put into the trash by new owners cleaning up. A good few of them had survived the fire in 2003 which destroyed the house and garage, but left the garden relatively unscathed. There was a cast cement gargoyle, a hanging glazed ceramic bird-bath, a pair of cast-resin ducklings, a wind-chime, a glazed spatter-ware jug and some other oddments. One of them was the Moche-style face jug I made in the sixth grade, which always amused Mom enormously as it so looked like Grandpa Al. Blondie brought all these oddments back from California with her, and we scattered them about the garden in appropriate places.

The plants which did survive outside on their own did so in style; especially the one artichoke that I moved from a raised bed into a pot and thereafter ignored for the remainder of the year. I so love artichokes, and the ones in the store are usually as expensive as they are tasteless and tough. Here’s hoping for some likely blooms from it this year, and may the other two from Rainbow Gardens thrive just as well.

We might also have a respite from field rats, raiding the almost-ripe tomatoes and eating leaves off the pepper plants. We have detected a semi-feral ginger cat, lurking meaningfully in our yard, who might have set up occasional housekeeping underneath the shed. Blondie has nicknamed the cat Smeagol; if it turns out that he is a mighty hunter before the Lord, a dish of kibble now and again will so be coming his way.

“You should be very glad,” I told my daughter a couple of weeks ago, “That I used to help my brothers assemble airplane models.” I did, too – JP was quite fond of putting together detailed 1/48 and 1/72 scale model aircraft, which he bought with his allowance money. He paid great attention to detail, fitting the parts together so that only a hairline crack showed – and often filling in those with plastic putty and sanding the piece so it that the join was invisible after being painted. He was just as careful in painting the models and their visible component parts, even to painting a miniscule silver zipper down the front of the pilot’s flight suit. At a later date he went to the extent of fabricating battle damage with fine wire and bits of tin-foil. So that was my introduction to following instructions and identifying the bits and pieces involved. Eventually my brother put away childish things like Airfix models, and moved on to tinkering with real automobiles, to the horror of his first wife, whose family was wealthy and in their world, one just didn’t pop up the hood in the driveway and investigate the mysteries within.

Myself, I moved on to another form of kit-building – that of miniature furniture, and then of full-sized functional furniture. Dad’s facility with, and collection of a wide assortment of hand-tools meant that I had a fair grasp of their various uses, and a tendency to have a bash at fixing whatever might need fixing. And following Dad’s many examples – once I became a home owner, there I was, replacing light fixtures, re-wiring table lamps, applying a finish to unfinished furniture, painting the house (inside and out), putting in new faucets in the kitchen and bathrooms… Piece of cake. Just follow the instructions.

What brought on the recent round of assembly was a jaunt through the Ikea store in Round Rock two weeks ago to collect some shelving units for my daughter’s work area/office. She has a corner of the living room for her computer desk, the various office items and storage for the materials for her origami art. Much of this was previously stored in plastic tubs and a couple of plastic drawer units which had been cheap to begin with and now looked even worse. So – a pair of shelf units, with some cupboard door, drawer and basket options were in order, all of which came packed with fiendish ingenuity in an assortment of flat cartons. I do have to say the assembly instructions were quite logical, and the language hurdle was gotten over by being completely pictorial. Still – all the side and shelving panels had to be sorted out, and the various connectors identified. It wasn’t a patch for thoroughness on the last bit of office furniture I had put together; a pair of wooden filing cabinets from Amazon, which had every single panel and piece identified with a little sticker, and the hardware packed in a blister pack with everything labeled. With Ikea and the usual kind of flat-packed items it’s more often a process of having to sort everything out of a bag, and identify by measuring, counting and matching descriptions.

This weekend’s assembly was a pair of bi-fold closet doors, to sequester the den from the cats. I was able to have some furniture reupholstered; two chairs and an enormous tuffet, and the last thing I wanted after having gone to the trouble and expense was to see the cats sharpening their claws on it all … as they had shredded them before. (The den used to be closed off with a pair of louvered doors, but I repurposed them in the last remodel and used them for my bathroom and closet, and used a long pair of curtains in the opening.) So – I was off to the Home Depot website, to order a pair of wooden bi-fold doors to fit – and with generous free home delivery, instead of having to pick them up in the nearest store, too. The doors were delivered Friday, we stained and finished them on Saturday, and installed them today – again, carefully following every instruction. They fit perfectly, met in the center and matched up exactly – and now I may rest assured that the chairs and tuffet will be safe, once they are delivered on Wednesday. And that’s my weekend …