Sleepwalker

I descend from a long line of sleep walkers, well, okay, one that I know of, my Dad.  The most famous Dad sleepwalking story is the night he woke up outside in the rain on his back in a ditch in his underwear.  Apparently he had sleepwalked out of the house and fell in the ditch that he was digging for the new septic leach field.  After that night, we got a deadbolt and my Mother started locking him in the house when he went to bed.  For him, the sleepwalking peaked in his twenties and by the time he was 30 it had stopped.

My first memory of sleep walking was when I was a kid.  I walked out of my room into the kitchen and was trying to warn my family about the witch who had hijacked the dishwasher.  It was a very hard dream to communicate and I remember my Mother laughing, which made me SO MAD.  Although in retrospect, what else could she have done...

The times I remember sleep walking are usually the times someone wakes me up or I wake myself up.  In high school my room was in the basement and there were no windows so it was very dark.  I woke up one night to find myself out of bed, holding my alarm clock and trying to use it as a flashlight to find the door.  It wasn't very successful, but thankfully prevented me from getting too far...

When T and I were renting a house, before children, I remember getting out of bed and running to the window, grabbing at the mini-blinds and yelling at him to come help me save the kittens that were being strangled in the cords.  Needless to say, he didn't help me, but did wake me up and convince me to go back to bed.  I still remember the urgency of that dream and wonder why he couldn't just get up and help, or pretend to help or just tell me he saved them all so I could go back to sleep without being so disoriented...

The worse thing I ever did was when Jack was born.  He was an infant.  I was dreaming that the house was on fire and I got up, scooped up the sleeping infant and started running down the stairs.  When I got to the bottom I was horrified that I had actually picked up a sleeping baby...a baby that took forever to go to sleep...and now was waking up which meant another hour of nursing...  I have to wonder, what if I didn't wake up and put him in the car and started driving in my sleep...  Luckily, I always wake up before I get too far.  I have never left the house.

For me, the sleepwalking has gotten worse as I get older.  Since moving to this house, I sleep walk a lot.  Thankfully my husband is a light sleeper.  I joke that he sleeps with one eye open, checking on me.  Once I went down stairs and was rummaging in my purse for a ticket (that didn't exist) and he followed me and made me go back to bed.  A lot of times I just talk, or yell, not usually at him, but he is the only one there so he takes it personally...

There is also the wall in the bedroom next to my bed.  I have spent a lot of time sleep walking to the wall.  It is where the secret codes are written (a la A Beautiful Mind), where the conspiracy theories take root, where the garage door code that prevents the destruction of the world resides.  I spend too much time asleep touching this wall, trying to break the codes and patterns, trying to save the world.  Clearly, so far I have been successful!

I also have to be careful of what I watch before bed.  I can not watch any science fiction (the wall loves when I watch science fiction) or crime or police dramas.  Lost was the worst and my husband finally forbid it before bed.  Downton Abbey seems safe enough.  One night we were playing Pandemic which is a board game about saving the world from viral outbreaks (right up my alley, sure!) and I was dreaming that my two friends had figured out my strategy and were going to hide the codes behind the picture on the wall.  I had to stop this!  So I jumped out of bed and proceeded to take the picture off the wall.  Then I started to wake up, and disoriented wandered off into the bathroom to pretend that none of that had happened.

Upon coming back to bed I asked my husband.  "Are you awake".  Him:  "yup".  Me: "did you notice me take a picture off the wall?"  Him:  "yup"  Me:  "Why didn't you SAY something?"  Him: "well, you were being really careful..."  Me (thinking):  "How did you know I wasn't going to crash it over your head??"  Because really, I wouldn't put it past me.  I have no idea why sometimes he intervenes and sometimes he stays silent.  He usually waits a certain amount of time and then will get up to follow me to see what I am up to...   He doesn't understand that I am usually just trying to SAVE THE WORLD.

Last night in the middle of the night, I shook him awake, and demanded he return my glass.  He groaned and told me to stop it, but I knew he had that glass and I wanted it.  I jumped out of bed, yelling at him that I WOULD FIND IT and stumbled into the bathroom where I tried to mesh dreamland with reality.  Sheepishly, I went back to bed.  Him:  "you really have to stop this."  Me:  "you need to stop taking my stuff."  This morning he barely remembered the exchange.  When I asked him why he hasn't been so vigilant of late, he said "the difference is that now I just find you annoying..."

Touche!

power of a dinner party...

Never doubt the power of a dinner party...or a deadline in general, but especially a dinner party.  Once the date is looming it seems it is time to start checking off the to-do list...  To up the bar a bit, I recommend

1. inviting people who have never been to your house before, especially those that live in nice, (a.k.a. finished houses)
2. inviting a lot of people, adults only if possible and make it formal...

You might just see miraculous things happening...like the hallway that has been down to framing and insulation for the past THREE years, suddenly being covered in wall board...hmmm, not exactly on the party to-do list, but who would stand in the way of progress?

When you live amidst the chaos of constant renovation, there never is a good time to host a party.  Waiting for a room to be finished can sometimes take years, so it is better to just do it and make the best of it.

There are some tricks, however that I strongly recommend:

#1 - candlelight makes everything nicer (and darker)

#2 - greens and centerpieces distract the eye from the eyesores



#3 - lots of alcohol...



Just imagine what could happen around here if we hosted parties more often...

Can you spot the difference in these two photos?

I think the photos might just say it all...

September, 2010
November, 2013

Green eyed monster

I have been debating whether or not to write this post.  I am a little worried that when you hear about our latest upgrade that you will be filled with envy.  But, I would rather that you hear it from me.  Once the word gets out on the street I can't be responsible.  "What?!" you are thinking, the suspense must be killing you...  A fabulous vacation?  Trip to Disney?  Countertops?  New living room furniture?  A real driveway? Alas, no.  The price tag may be the same, but come on, this is so much better...

[drum roll here]

Yup.  A brand spanking new electrical panel.  Two in fact.

When we moved in we got this little gem.  The trouble is the main breaker would trip.  Randomly, without warning, we would be plunged into darkness.  We thought at first maybe moisture was getting into the panel when it rained, but it didn't seem to be weather dependent.  We would walk down to the basement and flip the main breaker and all would be fine...until the next time it happened.

The husband spent many hours labeling what wires go to what switches...

The problem is one of two things...a faulty main switch or something too awful to mention.  Now regular folks in a regular house might just replace the main and be done with it, but as you should have figured out by now, we are not regular folks living in a regular house.  The existing panel is old and has some corrosion.  It was recommended to replace the entire panel.

The corroded beast

Okay so replace the electrical panel, not too terrible, right.  Well, the wires to the panel come through the bulkhead.  And then if you look at the wires themselves, well they travel quite a distance, through the tulip tree, the scotch pine and then out to the pole on the street.

Electrical Wires where they attach to the house

Wires through trees out to street

So we decided to replace the panel and also move the service to the other side of the house which is closer to the pole near the street...which means adding a second panel, then tying the two together and dealing with the north side of the house (i.e. strip siding, cover in Tyvek and re-side in fiber cement) to attach the new electrical panel.  Eventually the wires will go underground which should help prevent them coming down in a storm.

Stripping the east side...

Progress on the siding...


Someone is excited about the siding being finished!


The new meter arrived early last week...along with the town electrical crew...


The connected new service, wires travel a much shorter distance to the front of the house...


You will notice that I don't seem to have photos of the new electrical panels...  Nope, don't even think you are getting down in the cellar to see them...  Friends do not let friends ogle their electrical panels.  In fact, no matter how much you beg, I am not letting you down in the cellar.  Friends should just stay out of cellars (at least mine)!

The finishing touches....

It's true, November has been balmy enough to continue painting...  T has been busy putting the finishing touches on the front of the house.  He had to replace the crown molding above the bay window.  He tried to restore it, but one piece was too far gone and rotten.  We couldn't match it (without spending beaucoup money on custom trim) so we replaced all of it with as close as we could find.

Before Crown Molding....

Putting on the first piece of crown molding...

The North Side...

It is not enough that we have been scrambling to get the front of the house painted before it gets too cold...  We are also trying to get the north side re-sided.  We spent a day taking down a cinder block chimney, and a lot more time stripping off the siding, sealing gaps, putting up tyvec and picking up the siding.

We are using fiber cement siding, which looks like wood, but is termite and water resistant and non-combustible.  It is made of cement, sand and cellulose fiber.  It does require painting, but because it does not expand and contract in hot and cold weather, like wood does, the paint lasts longer than on wood siding.

We got the siding from MAKI because they had the best price.  The downside is that is comes primed in gray, so until we paint it, it looks from the photos pretty similar to the original clapboard.

Here are some progress photos...

Taking off the old siding...

More of the old siding 

Cutting the new siding to fit

It pays to have friends that are contractors...well it costs too, but the work goes that much faster!!

The Tyvec is done, the siding about 3/4...until next weekend...

More on the front...

We scored big at Rocky's Hardware Store in West Boylston.  The store is closing and everything is at least 30% off, including paint.  Yes they carry Benjamin Moore!  We bought northampton putty HC-89 exterior paint with white trim for the front of the house.  I have such a hard time picking paint...there is a disconnect between my mind and my eye.  This color is close to the color of the siding primer.  I thought about keeping the house white as it was originally, but there is so much detailed trim work that just doesn't stand out when everything is the same color.  We are keeping the door hunter green, the trim white and the body this color.  Now all that is left to decide is the decorative bracket color...

This color is part of the Historical Color collection. A collection of 174 time-honored hues comprises our most popular palette. Steeped in tradition, the refined, elegant colors of the Historical Collection deliver timeless color that can be used in traditional as well as contemporary spaces. Inspired by the documented colors found in 18th- and 19th-century architecture, these classic, inviting tones continue to serve us well today. http://www.benjaminmoore.com/en-us/paint-color/northamptonputty#ce_s=HC-89

More pictures when it is painted!