Jarrett House North

I’ve had a while to get accustomed to this Cape Cod and am starting to warm to it, now that I don’t trip over boxes everywhere I turn. I’m going to try to list balanced “like/dislike” lists, with the goal of starting to figure out what works for me in the house and what should be addressed with future projects.

For this week, we have:

Likes

1. Really solid original wood doors and fixtures (including door frame moldings!) throughout
2. The main floor seems to hold temperature really well. We’ve consistently kept well below the outside peak temperatures.
3. Dining room built-in. Nice corner cabinet (that unfortunately sits over the only place we’ve seen in the house where settling has occurred, with the result that there’s a crack in the plaster on the wall behind the cabinet).
4. Practical basement layout: garage to utility room to storage room/workshop.
5. The master bedroom. I love the Cape Cod slanting rooflines, which don’t pose too much of a problem with headroom thanks to a shed dormer in the rear that spans almost the entire width of the house), and the whole bedroom is spacious and feels bigger than it is thanks to the nook formed by the shed dormer where the bed resides.

Dislikes

1. Most of the outside doors, and all the ones in the basement, stick. Some are really tricky to open; the front door cannot be unlocked and opened one handed, which is a problem when you walk dogs a lot.
2. The second (bedroom) floor gets very hot and muggy on hot days. I think the uninsulated attic opening (not really a trap door, just a panel) and lack of attic fan are to blame. A couple of projects right there…
3. No fan in the upstairs bathroom, which means an opportunity for me to get very dusty installing one.
4. No easy access to the back where the garbage cans live. To get there, I have to go downstairs, through the media room and the utility room and out through the garage door. Which is heavy, and sticks. (Pattern?)
5. In general, there are far too few electrical outlets in the house. There are none in the full bathroom upstairs, for instance, and only one in the dining room.

Now that all the major appliances are in and working (we had a plumber out on Monday setting up new pipes for the washing machine and cutting a vent for the dryer), we’re turning our attention to finer points. Like printing.

In the Seattle house, we had cable running to our bedroom, and had a little network corner there. On one Ikea mini-bedside-table (really four two-by-two pieces of Ikea wood in a sort of box shape), we had:

• The cable modem, connected to:
• An old Asante ten-port Ethernet router (courtesy Glenn Fleishman’s office move and $5), connected to:
• Our SMC Barracuda 802.11B wireless router, and
• Our HP LaserJet 2100 with an Ethernet print server card
• A barely working HP DeskJet color inkjet printer (connected to the Barracuda)

With this setup, we could print to either printer wirelessly from anywhere in the house. Lisa could also jack into the router if she was working on sensitive stuff that she didn’t want to transmit wirelessly. I described the process of hooking up the SMC, and getting the printer to work, earlier.

Fast forward to the Arlington house. Here we have set up a bedroom that does not have cable as our office space. We’ve accordingly hooked up the cable modem and wireless router in the living room, where they’re more or less discreetly tucked in among the audiovisual equipment. This means we need a new solution to hook in the laser printer, since we do not want it sitting out in the living room. (We’ve all but given up on the DeskJet. We just don’t need color very often and the consumables are expensive, and tend to dry up if you don’t use them for long periods of time.)

I wanted to do an AirPort Express, but I’m not sure it would work to put the LaserJet on the network (if I have time, I’ll check this out at the Apple store). Also, at $130 it’s a little more than I wanted to spend just to get the printer back on line. So I’m looking at SMC’s 2671W EZ Connect 802.11b Wireless Ethernet Adapter. For a product with such an ungainly name, it only does one thing: get Ethernet only devices onto a wireless network. And it’s almost exactly half the price of the AirPort Express.

I should have an update in a few days about how the install worked.

(Incidentally, 802.11b is one reason that going all-out on structured wiring hasn’t made sense to me. But the fact that we still have Ethernet only devices is giving me cause to rethink that point, though buying an adapter is cheaper and easier than snaking cable up through walls that we’ve never opened. Maybe when we do a big remodel.)

The last time I left Seattle (after my summer internship), I wrote a post about things I would miss upon returning to Boston. This time I held off; everything moved too fast to pause for reflection, and I didn’t know what would show up on the “most missed” list.

Then tonight I was in the grocery store and I had a full-on Proustian moment. I was going to pick up a chicken to make one of our favorites, a fricassee with rosemary, garlic, and white wine, when I thought, “Guess I need to buy rosemary.” And just like that, it came to me in a rush: I miss my herb garden.

Obviously rosemary in particular is important to me. But I really miss that whole garden bed. Out of the six raised beds in the back, we only kept one going consistently. As I described when I dug it, I put in a full bouquet garni of herbs, and then some: a border of different thymes, of which the standard English and variegated lemon varieties did quite well; sage, which froze in the winter but bounced back and thrived after; marjoram and savory, which hung in quite well; basil and parsley, which needed seasonal replacement but some of which hung on for the next year; oregano, which may well have taken over the whole box by now. And what ended up being two rosemary bushes, one of which was three feet tall when we left. I never had to buy herbs, except cilantro and parsley (we consumed far more than we could grow). I could always walk out back and grab a handful of stuff and improvise.

This house has no established garden area. We’re going to have to work quite hard to carve one out of the back yard, which is shadowed by three overgrown maples and blanketed with weeds. So it will be a while before I get my herb-fu back.

As it turns out, I wasn’t quite ready to have our fridge would fit in our kitchen. When Lisa and I measured the fridge cubby in the kitchen, we forgot to take into account the width of the baseboard molding. So after ripping down the cabinet, and after the fridge was delivered, I had one last piece of demolition to do.

Ripping out floor trim can be tricky if it was put in before the most recent floor was laid. In our kitchen, there was a layer of linoleum and other flooring material that obscured the base of the trim. So instead of being able to get a prybar under the base of the trim, I had to work in stages—first splitting the trim in half along the line of the bottom trim nails, then removing the top half, then pulling the bottom trim nails, then levering the bottom half of the trim out.

After this last piece of demolition on the right hand side trim, the fridge fit back about three-quarters of the way into the nook. Maybe tomorrow while the remnants of Hurricane Charlie dump rain on us, I’ll remove a little trim on the left hand side so it can slide the rest of the way back.

In the meantime: we have a fridge!!!

There was one last piece of demolition to do before the fridge could fit in the kitchen. For some reason, the cabinet over the refrigerator cupboard was about two inches closer to the floor than needed for the fridge to fit. Solution? Rip that sucker down!

This turns out to be a stupid demolition to do by yourself. Most wooden kitchen wall cabinets are attached or otherwise connected to the wall by the following means:

1. screws
2. molding
3. paint

And that’s about it. So if you break the paint seal with a putty knife, pry the top molding loose, and then start removing screws, there’s a very good chance the thing is going to drop on your fool head. Or foot. Or make a big hole in the kitchen floor.

Fortunately for me, our cabinet was held in as well by d. friction. So when I removed the last screw, it still stayed wedged in place, even when I foolishly tugged on the front of the cabinet. I ended up bracing the front of the cabinet with one arm and using the prybar to lever the cabinet away from the back wall. It obligingly rotated itself around an axis formed by the topmost front contact points and the wall cavity, where I could get both hands under it and gently tug it free.

And what a wonderland of joy lay revealed! Unpainted walls, and big holes in the plaster ceiling where someone had done some quick work on the upstairs plumbing. Guess I need to learn to patch fist-sized holes (and bigger!) in plaster ceilings now. But hey, our fridge is going to fit! If it ever gets here (ETA: 12:45 to 2:45 PM today.)

Special bonus! By popular request following the original story, before, during and after pictures from the doorjamb removal.

Sitting in the Northeast, I probably shouldn’t complain about the 83° weather; after all, it’s 105 in Vegas. But right now it feels like I’ve been walking through soup for the last few hours. I note with grim irony that Georgia is actually cooler than Boston right now, though I’m sure that being in the middle of an approaching hurricane has something to do with it.

Productive afternoon anyway: unpacked my CDs, got bookshelves set up, found our china. Our refrigerator comes tomorrow and we’ll be paying a plumber approximately an arm and a leg to run new pipes in the utility room for our washing machine on Monday (we have a sink, but the house never had a washing machine so we have to have the hookups created from scratch).

One of these days I’ll have to take a vacation that doesn’t involve our move.