A Few of My Favorite Days

They say a house is just a place to live, but a home is a place to love (do they say that? If they don't, they should.)

We didn't live in our Cape May house, but we certainly did love the time that we spent there. Even the time that we worked there (which was pretty much of the time that we spent there).

Here are just a few of my favorite days (and/or nights, and/or weeks):

1. The night we realized that the pipe from the upstairs bathroom came straight down the house and emptied in the crawlspace. And had been emptying there for weeks. My husband didn't just "crawl" out of the "space" when he realized that, he scurried backwards like a spider...one that was scurrying away from a bigger, poop-covered spider. You can see the whole story in yesterday's post.

2. The day our pool contractor drove into the fire hydrant next to our driveway and broke not just the hydrant itself, but the water main underneath it. We had owned the house for two weeks and had not yet met any of the neighbors. We could see them all, of course, as they walked outside and watched the water rise with worry (it ended up about halfway up their car tires). Although it would have been convenient to meet them all at once at this impromptu block party, I didn't think that that was the time. So the hub and I fell to the floor, and painted baseboards until the water receded. I darted above the windowsill just once, to take this photo.

3. The day we wanted to plug in a radio to play music while we painted the third floor bedrooms, only to discover that there wasn't a single.solitary.outlet anywhere on the floor. (This, despite the fact that the old owners had multiple lamps in the room as if there were outlets there).

4. The very next day, when I called the home inspector and screamed at him for not mentioning the lack of outlets (there was only one outlet on the whole second floor as well). Highlight of my call: "Even an IDIOT can count to ZERO." (Note: I didn't even call him about the sewage line that opened up underneath the house. I didn't think I could top my earlier line, and I wanted to go out on a high note with him).

5. The day we came downstairs and found Mike's 4'8", 86 year old grandmother standing ON THE KITCHEN COUNTER wiping down the inside of the cabinets. "Does your daughter know you're up there?" I asked as I walked through. "She doesn't need to know," said Grandma. We needed the help, so I continued on my way. I'm not sure how she ever got down again...but I know she wasn't on the countertop when we stopped by the house last weekend.

6. The day/week/month we realized that our friend Birdman had no home renovation skills whatsoever. He couldn't pull out old carpet tacks. He couldn't paint baseboards (unless, by painting, you mean slapping a full gallon of paint onto a two foot section of baseboards so that it all slid off and onto the newly painted floor. He did that pretty well). He couldn't scrape wallpaper (although he determined that in less time than I think it actually took to get the wallpaper scraper out of the toolbox).

7. The day we realized that Birdman was invaluable for providing comic relief as we did all the crappy jobs like pulling out old carpet tacks and painting baseboards and scraping wallpaper. And, subsequently, the relief we felt when we realized that he was somehow able to pick up lunch without hurting himself or anyone else. Everyone has a gift, Birdman, and we are just the kind of people who will exploit yours.

8. The day my dad and my brother drove to Cape May with their farm truck, pulled out all of the horrible old carpeting, and TOOK IT HOME WITH THEM to burn. I am still grateful, and I hope it isn't still smoldering!

9. All the days that friends and family came to help us...like Karen, who painted, and my brother's girlfriend Heather who helped me lay a path around the pool made of broken slate (I am convinced that that was the day that my brother decided he would marry her). My friend Mary Jane, who painted the shutters on the shed, and who bought the rockers for the front porch...and who passed away five years ago from breast cancer. The 140 hours that Mike's mother and grandmother spent scraping wallpaper from the bathroom (full disclosure to the new owners: we just painted over the wallpaper in the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom). Eating dinner in the living room...with Mike's Dad (who could never get enough of Tony's batter dipped fries), Mr. Mark, me and the hub. Speaking of Tony's, we made a sign one weekend that said "Thanks Tony: Corporate Sponsor of this Renovation." We ate a lot of Philly cheesesteaks (fried onions, provolone cheese, and hot peppers, please) in those 18 weeks.

10. The day we finally finished everything and had time to just lay in the pool sipping mai tai's. Oh wait...that never happened.

The Worst House in Town

Cape May, New Jersey is a pretty competitive town.

Like, if your town suggests it has more Victorian houses then they do, Cape May will accept your smack down invite and throw back with all sorts of b.s. about the number of "restored" homes that they have, and how they are the true "queen of the seaside resorts". Or "cooler by a mile". Or just "better than you". (Two of these were actual advertising campaigns for Cape May. A free coupon to the Fudge Kitchen for anyone who guesses correctly.)

So don't try to beat those Cape Mayites. You won't win.

Which is why I always love to hear the one-up-manship between two historic homeowners, when they bump into each other at Swain's Hardware Store.

"What you buying today, Ed?"

"Some drywall patch for my ceiling. The roof is leaking again. I've spent $4000 in the last three months patching it, and still the water drips down it like the fountain in the mall."

"You're lucky. When I bought my house, the whole third floor was covered with mold from decades of leaking. Apparently the old owners wanted an indoor swimming pool."

"Ha! At least your house had a roof. Our roof collapsed twenty minutes after we went to settlement. Opened up the whole third floor. Killed our dog, too."

And on it goes.

I don't like to enter into these contests, as it seems to me like there are no real winners.

But I have a doozy of a story, if I wanted to throw my hat in the ring.

I mentioned that the house was in some sad shape when we bought it. The front of the house looks better than I remember it..but the back is pretty accurate:

It was a little unliveable, with mold everywhere (it's the beach, folks...it happens) and mustard-colored carpet in the whole house, including the bathroom (I'm not sure what color it was when it was installed in 1970. I think it was orange, because we found some orange patches underneath the mouse-infested sofa).

I thought that there had been a fire in the kitchen, because the floor was very dark and missing in a section in front of the refrigerator. In fact, I later figured out, the linoleum had simply melted after 40 years underneath a southern exposure window (this is about week 10...you can still see the dark area in the back there in front of the mustard-colored fridge):

That's a lot of deferred maintenance.

The funnest part of our acquisition is that we planned to rent the house. For gobs of money. It was 2000, you know, and we took advantage of banks that were giving money willey nilley to all sorts of bad credit risks like the hub and me. Renting the house to tourists was the *only* way we could pay for our mortgage.

We said we'd open for business on July 1. We started taking rentals.

And then, as I said earlier, we worked our butts off for 18 weeks straight. We scraped wallpaper. We chloroxed walls (not good for a manicure, or for your skin, or for mold). We called plumbers, electricians, and pool people (we planned to install a pool, thinking it would help with the rentals).

Later, I'll write about some of the fun times we had working on the house. Like the time that we flooded two blocks of Washington Street.

But let's stick with the mother of all stories first.

It was week 17. The house was looking pretty good. Almost liveable. Our contractor friend Mr. Mark was down for the weekend, taking care of loose ends. And going to Atlantic City, which is where he was on Saturday night when the hub decided to install the home theater system in the living room.

"You want these wires to run around the room, or should I run them underneath the house?" the hub asked, clearly hoping it would be the former.

I hate wires, and said to run them under the house.

A few minutes later, he was back in the house. Looking a little sick.

He said that there was a pipe under the house that appeared to go nowhere. And that it looked wet in front of it.

Did I mention we were in the midst of a 17 week drought? It hadn't rained once since we bought the house.

But that wasn't everything.

There was, he said, little white things.

"Like toilet paper," he whispered. He was as white as a roll of Charmin as he said it.

I'm not always the calm one, but this time I was. "It can't be leaking from the bathroom," I said, very matter-of-fact. "We would have known by now."

So we devised a plan where the hub would crawl back under the house, with a flashlight (it was getting dark already), and I would flush both of the toilets in the house and see if anything happened. (How I got the "good job", I still don't know. I usually don't).

We were both in place. I decided to flush the toilet upstairs first, since the pipe seemed to be in the middle of the house. I pushed the knob down. I heard the water swish through the pipes the way water swishes through old pipes.

I heard my husband scream. Seriously. Two stories beneath me.

I came running downstairs. He was back in the house by now, covered with...water.

"I expected a trickle," he said. "A small leak somewhere."

But no, the pipe opened up straight into the crawlspace and the whole force of the flush came flushing out on him.

We both were sick to our stomachs. "If you have to puke," I said, "use the bathroom on the first floor."

We waited until our contractor friend came home from Atlantic City. It was almost 2 in the morning.

He listened to our story. Then he almost laughed.

"That's no big deal. We'll just run out to the hardware store tomorrow and get some plastic thingamobobs, and about 400 feet of doodlywhacks, and one or two hokeymans."

Obviously, he didn't say that. The truth is, I stopped listening after the "no big deal" part.

It was a bigger deal than he said (a trend among contractors that we would see again and again during the ten years we've owned the house). But it was fixed before the first renters came.

I didn't ask them, but I think they would have been less than pleased to have a festering pool of poop underneath their vacation home.

And that, boys and girls, is the story of the Worst.House.inCape.May.

Note: The only reason that there wasn't more "stuff" in the crawlspace is because the toilet spent much of the 17-week renovation right here: inside the bathtub. Thank *God* the plumber kept canceling on us!

No Business Like Snow Business

Well, it's another week that there isn't a whole lot of traveling going on for this historic traveler.

But dang, this winter is nothing if not *historic*.

According to the weathermen, the snowiest year on record for Baltimore was 1994-1995, with 62" of the white stuff falling. In this winter season, we've seen 79" of snow already. And we've got another couple of inches, which is supposed to keep falling.

As the hub would say, as he sat around in his pajamas two weeks ago for only the second snow day he has had since 1981, "We're number one! We're number one!"

I'd be happy to lose this contest.

So, as I *travel* outside for another milk, bread and toilet paper run (which is weird, because I don't even eat bread), I thought I'd share some Baltimore images with you.

Centuries old stalactite formation in Luray Caverns, er, the icicle that grew on my neighbors porch in two short days:

Half a million people visit Luray Caverns in Virginia each year. Perhaps tourism is Parkville's future?










Our side yard--it's under there somewhere:

Lesson learned: if you have a white car, and you get over 4 feet of snow in four days, it is helpful to hit your remote lock thingy and follow the sound of the horn. (Because this is what they looked like *after* we dug out!!)








A street full of people pitching in and shoveling. In just a few days, these same friendly neighbors will slash your tires and throw a flaming bottle of hooch through your driver's side window if you dare to park in the space that they have shoveled out:

Note: the guy on the right is headed to his garage to get a lawn chair so that he can "save" his space. New Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said on February 18 that Baltimore police would begin enforcing the law that makes it illegal to hold your space with lawn chairs, bar stools, ironing boards, etc. But, like most laws in Baltimore, few people pay any attention to it.


Happy travels, snow angels!!! May your flights all be rescheduled quickly!

I'm a Baby Seller

This weekend, I started packing up some of my things from our Victorian house in Cape May.

I know--even before I write this blog--that this post won't technically be about historic travel, unless you include traveling down memory lane. Which I am. Because it's all that I can think about.

We bought our vacation house in 2001. It was pretty run down at the time. Like, so run down that when we told the hub's parents to take a look at the house (along with their contractor friend Mr. Mark), they not only looked at it, they made a list of three other properties that were for sale that we should buy instead.

Seriously.

"Run away from that house," their contractor friend said.

Have I mentioned we're not much for taking advice?

We bought the house (obviously), and started what would become a routine for the next 18 weeks.

On Friday afternoon, we'd meet at my sister-in-law's house, leave my car there, and drive the 142.1 miles to Cape May. Many times, we'd start working when we got in, even if we were tired. And we were tired. And we got more tired.

We patched, and painted, and called every contractor in the phone book (and quite a few that were not listed anywhere officially, their phone numbers whispered surreptiously in the dark corners of Swain's Hardware like deeply held secrets). After working for 47 hours straight, we'd hop (and by hop, I mean drag our battered bodies across the lawn) in the car on Sunday night and drive home.

Creatures of routine, we always stopped at the halfway mark (76.3 miles), a nice WaWa with a clean bathroom. The WaWa (I just love saying that) was still in New Jersey, which meant we could live large and sit in the car like ex-Presidents while someone else pumped our gas.

We liked sitting in the car, because--when we went into the WaWa to use the bathroom--it took us 5 minutes to get out of our vehicle and try to stand mostly upright to walk into the store (and by walk, I mean drag ourselves through the parking lot).

By the end of 18 weekends, we no longer did a bathroom break. I would have rather peed on the car seat than tried to move my screaming muscles if I didn't have to.

That was nine years ago, although I still remember it like it was just last year. A lot has happened since then, but the biggest thing happened on February 3.

That day, we got an offer on the house that we couldn't refuse. We tried to refuse it. But the interested party just took that as negotiating. Eventually, we signed a contract.

And then the crying began.

Cue the violins.

As my husband says, there are a lot worse things that could happen to us. We know that in a world full of earthquakes and soaring cancer rates and unfortunate civilian deaths that this is on the low scale of tragedies.

But we are sad. Very, very sad.

Getting the house ready for the new people (we hate them, incidentally, and call them the people who stole our house), packing up our things...I'm tearing up just thinking about it.

So, as therapy (or something), I thought I'd tell you a little bit about our renovation experiences. Because we may not own the house, but no one can buy our memories.

I'll start with an after picture:

Check back for the befores, along with a funny story about the time we realized that sewage was slowly filling up our crawlspace.

Ahh, memories.....

Turn the Lights Out When You Leave

Last night, the lights went out on the ten-week long Nights of Lights in St. Augustine. If you missed it this year, make your reservations for 2010-2011. It's a pretty magical place...enlightening, as the poets and the artists say!

Thank goodness for that warm Florida weather, and the beautiful buildings that still shine day or night, or today would be a dark dark day indeed!

Letter from Richmond

As you may or may not know, HTG works in the agricultural sector of our country's economic engine. (How appropriate for a history lover to work with what is TRULY the world's oldest profession, right?)

As part of my duties, I recently found myself in Richmond, Virginia, stopping there for an excuse to drink Virginia's finest fermented grapes an agribusiness meeting and reception.

And by agribusinesses, I mean that we were celebrating all of the wineries big and small farms that make up the largest part of Virginia's economy and workforce. Seriously, whether you like wine or not, it's pretty likely that you like to eat. And Virginia's farmers have an economic impact of over $55billion, providing over 357.000 jobs within the Commonwealth.

Some of those jobs belong to friendly sommeliers.
Virginia has lots of agriculture, and lots of history. It has lots of history that involves agriculture. Thomas Jefferson--statesman, politician, architect--was most proud of his agricultural pursuits ("I am become the most industrious and ardent farmer" he wrote to Madame de Tesse.) If you've visited Monticello, you know that he spent more time on his garden than he did on his finances.

Anyway, thinking of TJ and all his fellow patriots, I made an impassioned "Give me Chardonnay or give me death!" speech right before the reception ended (Patrick Henry? A Virginian, of course).

If you prefer wine to death as well, you can learn more about local wineries at http://www.virginiawines.org/.

Although I didn't get to visit any vineyards on my trip, I did see this very cool sunset out of my hotel window. (Special kudos go to the housekeeping staff at the Convention Center Marriott for the exceptionally clean windows that allowed me to get this shot. See 'em at http://bit.ly/4J5nJ)

It's a modern Marriott, fairly standard with the nice smelling soap perched on a washrag next to the bathub. At least I thought it was modern, until I noticed this little throwback in the 10th floor hallway:

Was it a direct line to the historic society in town? A closed circuit phone that rings in Monticello when you pick it up? It was an internal phone only (although with no visible list of available extensions, I 'm not sure who exactly I was going to call on it). But I thought it was cute, a little pinch of history in a pretty historic state.

I hope to be back in Virignia soon. And I hope to stay a little bit longer than one night.

After all, it's only about three hours to the south of the HTG Homestead. I don't mind making that drive, assuming that there will be a nice glass of grape juice plus waiting for me on my arrival.

Here Kitty, Kitty: Cat Got Your...Foot?

There's a new survey out about cats and dogs and the people who like them (or don't like them). You can read all about it at http://bit.ly/6nJi3l, but here's the gist: 74% of people like dogs a lot, while just under half of the people feel the same way about cats.

As if cat people would fill out some stupid survey.

I like both of them...although I prefer them to be outside, where God intended all animals to be. I grew up on a farm, after all, with more animals than you can imagine (that includes one or two of the hired men, but that is an entirely different story).

But even with that tough-girl-farming background I had an ick moment at the Villa Zorayda in St. Augustine recently (http://www.villazorayda.com/), as I found myself alone in a room with their famous "Sacred Cat Rug" (well, I was mostly alone...but we'll get to that later).

The Sacred Cat Rug is 2400 years old. That's not a typo. And that's old, even for someone who looks for old things and places as a matter of course.

You know if you're looking at something man-made that old, you're probably talking ancient Egypt. Yup. According to the Villa Zorayda's literature, the rug was "taken from a pyramid in Egypt." I'm assuming that means "stolen by the light of a gas lamp by some guy in a pith hat".

Like most items stolen from pyramids, this one has a curse. The Zorayda doesn't say what the curse promises will happen, but it only applies to people who walk on the rug. And since the rug is now hanging on a wall in the Villa, behind protective plexiglass, it doesn't seem too likely that will happen, so I guess it doesn't matter what horrible fortunes the curse portends (if you don't know what portends means, insert the word "pretends").

Here's the ick part: not only does the rug have a bold and graphic cat motif, but it's made of cat hair, too.

Those little minxes just give and give and give, don't they?

Whoever "took" the rug from the pyramid, "took" a little something else too: a mummy (presumably 2400 years old as well). While they took the whole thing (wrapped up in the rug), they only kept the foot of the mummy. It wasn't any ancient fetish, but rather because the foot was somehow embedded with gems--a big ruby in one of the toes, and another milky looking rock in the ankle. I'm not sure how the gems were embedded...and honestly, I don't want to know. What happened in ancient Egypt stays in ancient Egypt, I say, especially if it has to do with embalming and pulling someone's brain out through their nose (that's everything I remember about mummies from school).

Anyway. The foot was in the room, too.

I'm not sure that the foot is cursed, but I know that I cursed when I saw it.