Blue Skies Shining on Me!

The foundation ceremony!

This weekend, Rob and I scrambled to figure out what we could place inside the cement foundation of our house that would mean something to us.  In haste, we wrote a few of the lyrics to Willie Nelson's song, Blue Skies on a sticky note.  We danced to Blue Skies for our first dance at our wedding. It's about bright days ahead and new beginnings.  Coincidentally, my friend, Melissa, who was a bridesmaid in our wedding, was in town this weekend with her boyfriend, Matt.  Melissa filmed the 'ceremony' while Matt played blue skies on his iphone in the background ;)!

Yay, foundation!

 Blue skies smilin' at me
Nothin' but blue skies do I see
Bluebirds singin' a song
Nothin' but blue skies from now on

Never saw the sun shinin' so bright
Never saw things goin' so right
Noticing the days hurrying by
When you're in love, my how they fly by

Blue days, all of them gone
Nothin' but blue skies from now on
(Blue skies smilin' at me
Nothin' but blue skies do I see)

Never saw the sun shinin' so bright
Never saw things goin' so right
Noticing the days hurrying by
When you're in love, my how they fly

Blue days, all of them gone
Nothin' but blue skies from now on
Nothin' but blue skies from now on

A Strong Foundation

These days, a call from Rob DeChant, our contractor, is quick to divert my attention from any task at hand.  It may be time to choose exterior colors or put in our window order or write another check ;).  Today, his message was to let me know that the new foundation to our home is being poured at this moment.  Some couples, he said, like to bury something sentimental in the piers.  Tonight, Rob and I will think about what that sentimental something may be.

tree leaning on house

It's hard to believe that the foundation to the home where our children (hopefully) will take their first steps is being poured at this moment.  It was a year and a half ago when we tore down the old (and poorly built) addition to the house and updated the original structure's foundation.  It's been a year since I packed up the house and we thought we may be moving out any day and getting started on the project.  I can hardly contain my excitement.  The below photos show the staging of demolition and foundation work over the last year and a half

addition to original structure

corner porch

graffiti closet

The original structure of our house was built in 1928.  Decades later (maybe in the 70s?) the second owners added on a living room and second bedroom.  The addition did not stand the test of time.  A tree had grown into the roof, the wall under the window unit was rotting, and the floor sloped as you walked toward the back of the house.

second bedroom

When we bought the house we knew that the foundation would eventually need updating.  We also knew that it was best to update the foundation before making significant changes to the interior structure because the process of putting in new piers would level, and therefore shift the walls of, the house.  Well, we just couldn't wait to update the bathroom (I'll post on the bathroom process separately...) but we pretty much saved any other major renovations until now.
Our original plan was to renovate our home in stages, building an addition and moving into that addition and then renovating the original structure.  To save money, we decided to tear off the existing addition before we updated the foundation to the original structure.  We moved all of the furniture and other items from the living room and second bedroom into our dining room. Rob strategically stacked everything, knowing we wouldn't be able to get to it very easily for the months to come.

the addition comes down

Our back wall for 2 nights!

We sat and had a beer and marveled at the first major steps toward a new home.

Addition? What addition?

And over only one weekend with the hard work of one young man, the addition was demolished, hauled off, and the back wall was rebuilt and the siding put back up.  It was time to get bids on the foundation!

Cucarachas and Poison Ivy

Since we moved in, Rob has spent countless hours under the house.  He has wriggled into the crawl spaces repairing plumbing, sweating pipes, and caulking up holes. I realize now that I should have been more grateful each time I watched his feet disappear into the darkness.  Now that I live in a rented space, watching the walls to our home be torn down from a distance, I have more clarity.  I see that each of his ventures to the dark burrows beneath our home that temporarily preserved my sanity, had everlasting effects on Rob.

When we returned to Austin after our wedding in Washington, DC, we dove right back into our new jobs.  Our honeymoon would wait until the following summer.  Prior to the wedding, in our first week in the 'new' house, I had noticed a few creepy crawlers in the bathroom and squashed countless roaches with the bottoms of shampoo bottles.

However, as I remember it, when we got back in town, the number of 6 legged visitors rose significantly.  Each morning, they scattered when I would turn on the bathroom light.  After stepping on one with a bare foot, I learned to wear shoes inside at all times. I almost brought three roaches to school with me in my lunch bag one day.  When I opened the medicine cabinet and two fell into my makeup bag, I had had it. Rob, for good reason, was against setting off roach bombs.  We didn't want the chemicals in the house.  We had tried indoor roach motels with minimal success.

We figured they must be getting in through holes in the floor, of which there were plenty.  So, one weekend, Rob put on an old t-shirt and shorts to venture under the house for the first time.  He pushed the vines out of the way and carried a caulk gun with him as he searched for any possible points of entry.  He was determined to save me from the unwanted pests.  He spent most of a day plugging up gaps.  When he emerged, he was covered in a dusty film, complaining of all of the vines and leaves that had been in his way. He went to go rinse off.

If only we had known that Rob had been army crawling through poison ivy all day.  The shower water managed to spread the toxic oils from his head to his toes.  Anyone who knows someone who is highly allergic to poison ivy knows what happened next.  I haven't ever witnessed anything like it.  Rob is stoic.  He had to have been in extraordinary pain during those several weeks, but even as I watched him peel away and reapply the bandages that protected each patch of blisters from sticking to his clothing, he didn't complain.

During the weeks that many newlyweds may have spent honeymooning, cuddling, and you-know-what-ing, I couldn't even hug Rob, worried I would cause him excruciating pain.  I begged him to go get a cortisone shot or seek some sort of medical attention, but he would refuse, just smiling, and ask, "You seen any cockroaches lately?"   

Relieve the pressure

As we trudged through those last two weeks until our big day, we just kept thinking, If we can just push on until the wedding... Just a few more errands to run.  We had finished cleaning the house from floor to ceiling.  We'd pulled up old, smelly carpet from around the perimeter of the dining and bedrooms.  Rob had pried up nails and gone under the house to cut a stump that was protruding through the floor in the front hall. Someone who hadn't seen the house before our hours of work would have had a tough time believing we'd cleaned at all, but at least the smell of dog urine was beginning to air out.  Either that, or we were starting to get used to it.

One important purchase of new homeowners that can't wait is that of a refrigerator. We went to a discount store and found a huge fridge that was marked down due to a dent that we figured no one would ever notice anyway.

To save 50 bucks on delivery (have I mentioned yet that Rob is really good at saving 50 bucks?), we figured we could have the guy at the store help us hoist the enormous thing into the back of Rob's pick-up truck. "This is why we need a pick-up, babe," Rob would say to me on our cautious drive home.  What we hadn't figured out was how we'd get the massive purchase out of the pick-up once arriving to our new abode.

But, what are neighbors for?  Luckily for us, Mark saw us staring at the fridge, contemplating a plan of action.  He might have also noticed Rob rigging a wooden plank ramp from the bed of the truck two feet down to the ground.  "Need some help?" he offered, leaning out the window of his car.  Need he ask?  We could hardly believe our luck.  It wasn't an easy job, but our new favorite neighbor and Rob managed to get the refrigerator up the stairs of the porch to the front door.

Once there, we faced a new challenge: getting it through the too-narrow frame.  As he helped Rob to take the doors off, a sharp piece of metal cut Mark's finger open. He was bleeding quite a bit.  As I rummaged through boxes looking for a band-aid or gauze, Mark managed to help Rob to lift the refrigerator into the house.  Unable to find any bandage to offer Mark, I insisted that we could take it from here.  We thanked him and relieved our injured new friend from further neighborliness.

How the next accident happened, exactly, is tough to say.  Somehow, while putting the doors back on the fridge, one door slipped (was I supposed to be holding that?) and smashed down onto the nail of Rob's index finger. Having a high threshold for pain, Rob didn't complain much. However, the nail's purple color and fingertip's pulsating rhythm seemed to yelp out, "Holy $#¡+!"

For the next few hours, Rob took close looks at his injury, pressing it and inspecting it pensively.  "I can feel the pressure building," he said.  "It's so tender and it hurts to even type."

I did everything that I would have wanted him to do for me in a moment of pain. I held his hand.  I got him some ice. I may have even kissed that increasingly nasty looking pointer.  But Rob paid me no attention.  He was planning. He was plotting.

"You know," he began. "I saw a doctor do something on a show once."  This was never a good start to a thought of Rob's.  He paused and I leaned in, afraid to hear what he was going to say.  If Rob's past adventures playing 'doctor' were any indicator, this idea was not going to sit well with me.

Not long after Rob and I had met, he had proudly shown me the scar on his shin where he had given himself stitches with fishing line and a sewing needle. His favorite part of that story is that the needle was so dull that he had to grab it with pliers to yank it through his skin. 

Rob continued, "The doctor on the show just drilled a hole into a nail that was pulsating with blood."  I began to shake my head.  He continued.  "The blood just spurted out and relieved the pressure."

I knew the Dewalt was in the other room.  I spoke quickly.  "Rob, the wedding is in a week. Please don't do this."  Rob just smiled as he left the room.

I covered my ears and hummed at a volume that wasn't quite loud enough to drown out the sound of my fiance in the next room, drilling a hole into his own fingernail.

A minute later he ran back into the bedroom clutching his index finger with his other hand.  "It worked!" he exclaimed. "It worked!  There's no more pressure!"  Blood dripped out of the hole in the center of his nail. I sighed as he convinced me to take a closer look at his work.  He wore that hole in his nail as proudly as he wears that scar on his shin.  It grew out eventually and was much less noticeable than the alternative would have been on our wedding day.  As we said our vows, though, the remaining impact of the drill bit on his nail was proof that my life married to Rob would be anything but dull.

A breath of fresh air?

I was ready to buy a house before we were ready.  I didn't have the money nor any idea of why, exactly, the idea of owning was feeling like a such a good one. I started calling the numbers on For Sale signs more than a year before we bought. I walked through dozens of houses and had narrowed down the neighborhoods we would consider before Rob had even proposed.

By the time we saw the house on West Johanna Street our wedding was about a month away.  We were both sure this house was the one.  The large Live Oak trees canopy over the entire roof; the large front porch is so inviting.  We didn't know anyone else who would be willing to take on this sort of project, but, for some reason, the spotty foundation, the holes in the floors, the rotting walls, the ducktape on the windows didn't deter us.

Kitchen Shelving... the roach can should have told us something...

hallway door

our bedroom wallpaper

Shower

Rot in wall of second bedroom

We were so sure that this was the house for us that even the less than convenient closing date (just over two weeks before our wedding), had no impact on our decision.  We had both recently accepted new jobs, were weeks away from getting hitched, and decided to throw a home purchase in the mix.

The first thing we decided we needed to do to prepare for the move was to scrape down the popcorn ceilings (so it wouldn't get all over our craigslist furniture, of course).

We just wouldn't be able to live with the golden flecks, we reasoned.  Behind me in the above picture you can see the seams we worked hours to expose.  We spent a day exhausting ourselves, covered in flakes of who knows what.  All that work and possible lung damage and, in three years, we never repaired those ceilings. We went to bed every night looking up at the patchwork quilt of plasterboard and caulk.

¿Quieres bailar?

The first night I met Rob I asked him to move in with me.

I had been living and working in Buenos Aires for a year and had just signed a two year lease on a large apartment near China Town.  A week or so before the day I was set to move in, my friend Jessica invited me to go salsa dancing with her.  "We'll be the only Americans there!" she assured me.  Jessica knew I'd chosen my new apartment based on its location: closer to the heart of the city where I was more likely to blend in.

As I watched Jessica expertly weave her way into the dancing crowd, I hung back and sipped on my Cuba Libre.  I scanned the room.  Nope, she was wrong. I had spotted another American standing near the bar. He wore a thin, short-sleeved button down that hung loosely on his shoulders and pants that zip off at the knee: water-resistant and perfect for travel.  A backpacker.

I watched him for a moment, wondering if he spoke any Spanish as he nudged his way up to the bartender.  I returned my attention to the dancers and contemplated putting myself into the mix.

When I glanced back toward the bar the backpacker was standing in front of me shouting over the loud Cuban salsa band, "KeyAirEss Buy-Lar?"  (Spanish translation: ¿Quieres bailar?)

"I speak English," I responded, but accepted the invitation. We worked our way onto the dance floor but soon thought it better to return to the bar and talk.

Rob had been traveling through Central and South America for a year and a half. He'd been to Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Peru and a few places in between.  He'd stayed in too many hostels and volunteer camps to count and was ready to find a place to stay put for awhile. Buenos Aires was cheap and cosmopolitan.  But finding an apartment wasn't easy.  Most landlords required a two year lease and a local to vouch for your financial standing.

"I'm moving into a big place next week," I told him.  "In another week I'm headed home for the summer.  Maybe you could sublet my place for cheap... and for keeping my plants alive."  I tore a piece of the label off of his beer and wrote my email address on the back.

A little over five years later, on our first wedding anniversary, Rob gave that little piece of beer label back to me.  He had framed it with a little note: "I've loved you since the moment we met."