Green Bathrooms

I can’t seem to get these images to line up so that you will look at them and say, she really is clever – here she is making this all green and everything is lined up.  As in most things in life – it’s half-assed. The green beside green thing seems to be working, but the alignment is beyond the reach of my WordPress mind. So you’ll just have to drag your eyes back and forth between the two. If you do it fast enough it makes the images seem to be the same size.  A drink helps, too.  Go get a drink.

Welcome back.

When you place the words green and bathroom together you might conjure up composting toilets or recycled toilet paper or grey water or simply a sustainable bathroom in some purportedly sustainable house.  Here the green bathrooms are from the Coastal town – one is in the campground near our place and the other is our place. One is rough and naturey and the other is rough and naturey.  One smells like pooh and mould. The other smells like pooh and mould. When you are sitting in one you might be a little frightened by the idea that small furry things might scurry beneath your feet. Likewise with the other.  There are, however, two major differences. Everyone using our bathroom is known to us and we don’t feel the need to renovate the one on the left because it’s already perfect.

I love the campground bathroom aesthetic. The excitement of knowing that there is a lake swim in your day elevates the pedestrian and echoey concrete floors, the wood (often painted Ranger Brown) the coin showers, the humusy smell.  If the campground bathroom is of the “roughing it” variety there is the quietly unremarked heroism of negotiating the void. Always black, always lined with matter alive and dead and always with depths impenetrable.  Which brings us to the image on the right.

The man and I, with the enchantment typically felt by people embarking on a renovation (or so I am led to believe by any of a number of crappy reality shows that I like to watch), were chatting about the orientation of the transformed house and I mentioned the two windows in the old bathroom.  He insisted that there was only one and I found myself in the position of knowing more about the house than him.  For once.  There are two windows on the outside of the house that correspond the the bathroom bit, I told him, with a respectfully muted glee.  He, as he is wont to do, came back from the recon, not sheepishly, but full of the new fact that there were two windows, and immediately began to rip at the bathroom wall to reveal “The Hidden Window”.  Crikey. I love this part of changing up stuff.  A bit of effort and a huge transformation.

The tearing away of things in an old house either reveals the treasures of Sinbad or a serious structural problem. Always. In this case I am choosing the fact that a small tree was growing up between the outer and inner bathroom walls (aided by the greenhouse effect of the window) as a treasure beyond compare. Who, when revealing “The Hidden Window” discovers a rich ecosystem of growth and decay, bugs and big bugs, years and years of wild, trammelled untrammeldness?  We do. That’s who. I sort of like the dried leaves and tangled vines of this unknown plant in the newly revealed bathroom window. I might like to keep it, if only for that cabinets of curiosity feeling it musters.

My Once and Future Life

The trip to the house on the coast, to rebuild it into something glorious? Well, it was a bit depressing to me.  Not only the rockers and the happy face meth sign at the pulp mill hotel/bar/liquor store down the way, and the somewhat gloomy May weather, but also because of this: This is the wall of books that was left behind. The old woman who lived alone in this house until she died a few years ago was an avid reader.  When her family cleared out her belongings, for some reason, they chose to leave her library behind.  The problem is that I am also an avid reader.  The other problem is that since we are/were both avid readers it becomes fairly easy for my brain to fold my life into the remains of her life and quickly imagine that I too will die alone, surrounded by books.  Likewise, I hasten to imagine some future woman will one day come to pack up my mouldy offerings and herself create some cockamamie narrative about my vulnerability and loneliness.  My books would be on a nicer shelf, and would not tend towards epic love sagas from the early 1980s, but as evidence of a life lived, those things are of almost no consequence. The old lady was showing me that things outlast their persons, that life passes and if you leave behind a passel of books, some romantically inclined person is going to go all sad, imagining you sitting there with your dusty candies, throwing your beleaguered mind into bawdy literature whose purpose is either to keep company with your fading memories or enable you to ignore the day’s passing .

Jesus.

Imagining someone else’s sad life is not for the weak.

May Day

The Pet Room is no more. We made it go away with a simple flick of the wrist and a nod to the gods who look down gloomily on people who create this much trash just because they don’t like someone else’s idea of what makes a home cozy. Rip down one wall and part of a ceiling and you too will find yourself with 200 lbs of rubble.The constituent bits of said rubble were hunks of broken drywall, office ceiling tiles x 500, sundry bric-a-brac,  jim-crackery and pillbug shrouds. One day this area will become the requisite office/sometimes guest room that all contemporary homes have, because:

#1. Why work only 8 hours a day?

#2. If you don’t have a guest room, who is going to stand around drinking red wine and laughing while you cook them some food in your open-concept kitchen?

We, the family, and friends (one of whom is mostly busy being pregnant) repaired to the hidey-hole for the May Long Weekend (All Capitals, Yes?). The man and the other man did two major things while they also did other man things like drink beer and listen to loud rock.  (N.B. We don’t normally listen to loud rock.  In fact when the pregnant one and I and the wee child went walking around the neighbourhood my between the eyes crease, which registers my physical aging and cognitive disapproval, crevassed as it became distressingly apparent that this new house of ours was in White Snake country.  A rictus, which might have been mistaken for a friendly smile by the bypassing rockers, was in danger of becoming botoxed onto my face as we returned home only to be greeted by some unspeakable 4/4 drum solo shaking the house. I died a thousands deaths and then turned it off.)  Off to chastise the newly revealed rock-man, I was gobsmacked to see what shotgunning some Bud Light could do to the progress of a renovation. The men had actually taken the porch roof off and rebuilt the house roof where the porch had been attached.

AND had mucked out the creepy basement and jacked up the front of the house.  The house is now ready to receive, what is it called?… Ahhhh! Yes!  A cement foundation and structural cement wall that the previous builders forgot to put in. Turns out that when your foundation is built simply by placing the end of 2x4s in muck, the wood rots and becomes structurally unsound.  We’re just going to say no to that!

A Window From Another World

This picture resides in my iPhoto folder called The New House. It is the first picture that comes up when The New House folder springs into openness. After all my shit talk about the place, people see this image and then look at me sideways, wondering if I’m a horrific liar, deluded, or someone that they don’t know anymore (like they used to).  I am thrilled to imagine that people think that we bought a house with windows like this.  In Vancouver, if you own these sorts of windows (with french door poking in), it indicates two things:

1. There is honeyed oak flooring throughout.

2. You bought the house before 1999 or you bought after 1999 because you and/or your Dad are investment bankers with holdings on the Cayman Islands.

But wait! There is good news!

These windows might be the windows of multi-millionaires but it looks like they are going to be ours!  A friend of ours is a carpenter who is currently involved in a project that will see the demolition of this old house. This window and more like it are up for grabs!  The french doors too!  And the front door! And we get to take them all!  I can barely believe it!  The man goes in with a chainsaw and in ten minutes we have five windows that are astonishingly beautiful – all because we know the right people!  He will do this on Mother’s Day while I eat bonbons.

Can you imagine the Pet Room now?  You don’t have to. See below:

I Feel Something Creepy

This is a space with a toilet. In the basement. You trending ones out there might notice the beadboard and covered over transom window painted that milky cerulean. Me? I notice the dark shadow over the top half of the image and how the space with a toilet seems to pick up that theme and run with it. I also notice that the toilet tank lid is sitting across the toilet seat.  The space with a toilet has existed here since 1940. It’s creepy. It gets creepier when you are supplied with more information. There is another room behind this space. The other room was probably somebody’s bedroom.  My God, I beseech. That other room has a bare bulb, a small window tucked up under the ceiling and a packed earth floor. It is stained an unspeakable colour and right next door, of course, is this space with a toilet. If this were the first thing I saw every morning I might be slightly to moderately scared – all of the time. Even if I went upstairs to luncheon with my family, there would be at the back of my mind the knowledge that I will have to return to this at the end of the day. At night.  This space with a toilet and the creepy room will have to be radically altered.

The first step will be a smudging.

The second step? Your guess is as good as mine.

Delicious

The Sold As Is Where Is house? The one that took me back to some half recalled pleasant memory from someone else’s childhood? Let us being to unveil it.

This is the Pet Room (or so it was designated on some report that we saw somewhere).

The Pet Room

We really like what the pet did with the place. What type of pet might have chosen this – of all the rooms in the house? Some clues as to its genus might be found in a look about.  The gaping holes in the ceiling indicate a need for constant moisture, wood panelling as camouflage, the muckling up of the fallen insulation and twigs indicate perhaps a mother to be. Our best guess is a garter snake.  Please god let her and her many and lovely children be gone from the pet room.

Tidy Town Time

We looked at five houses in this small coastal town, by appointment, with real estate agent. Ostensibly, this means that the people showing their places or living in the places being shown had some previous knowledge of our imminent arrival.  The first place was an insane fire trap, the tenant living there stockpiled bags of garbage in her laundry room. Many bags of garbage. Twenty at least.  The second place was more depressing as there was evidence of a baby. In the living room was a flat screen television, a Canucks blanket pinned to the wall and a chair in the corner. Echoey. Where were the bright colours, moving objects and tactile stations? The third place was owned by mould spores, no matter whose name was on the mortgage. The fourth place… my god…the owner was there talking the place up to me.  The real estate agent suggested we check out the basement.  I pretended that I was a textbook claustrophobic and forced the man to descend into the dank cavity. I stayed on the main floor with our small child, hosted by the owner and his friend who had stopped by to watch daytime comedy on a  large flat screen.  Now, I watch television.  I would even consider myself somewhat blessed to have witnessed the renaissance of the medium – The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Deadwood, The Wire – the usual suspects.  But I draw the line at daytime TV. Daytime TV means you are not happy with your life.  Daytime TV means that your imagination has dried up. Daytime TV.

I could feel myself sinking.

I am strongly affected by places.  I’m an artist for god’s sake. Aesthetics mean something to me.  I walk into peoples’ homes and start casing the joint for ways to improve it – bring in more light, create cozy nooks. Yadda yadda. The other sisters’ of my man mentioned casually in passing that they were thinking of renovating their kitchen one day in the near future.  In ten minutes I had drawn up a sketch for them that not only changed the kitchen but the whole layout of their house, including the ripping out of the stairs from their basement.  I mean, who wants something like that thrust into your hand after an off-the-cuff comment.  Luckily, I have other attributes that allow them to love me. Jumping jacks.  I quasi-hate myself for doing this, but I cannot stop.

All of this is to say that while I am gritting my teeth in this fourth house, I am both repulsed by this place and admiring of the people who live there.  Whose mental health is to be called into question here?  They live 24-7 surrounding themselves with crappy crap and seemed somewhat chipper, and here I am  descending into a funk after being in the house for only five minutes. Surely, the answer is obvious.  I just want to say, “Hey! Are you depressed? I know I suddenly am. Let’s make your life better by vacuuming up the dog fur and getting rid of this 6 foot wide television in your 8 foot wide living room – the proportions do nothing for the space.”

The next house we saw warned “Sold As Is Where Is”.  I quipped, “aren’t most houses sold under these general parameters?” The real estate agent wouldn’t catch my eye. What could be so awful about that it came with a discreet warning?  There were no dog fur smears, tobacco smoke or large screen televisions.  It felt like a fresh breeze from some long past summer wind at some imagined lake somewhere with lemonade and ice cream.

“Let’s buy it,” we whispered to each other in the car later.

And, so it transpired.

Our dream had come true.

We’re Artists for God’s Sake!!

We had been looking around at real estate for some time – making plans with friends to buy large acreage somewhere and turn all hillbilly, grow our own food, have beautiful gardens, take short focus images that would instantly romanticize any situation (including gout.) Turns out that getting a bunch of people, or even four people, to agree on much of anything leads to night sweats and teeth grinding. So we hemmed and hawed and dreamt of a beautiful rural life and ground our teeth down to worrying nubs.

Then we went to visit the man’s sister and brother-in-law. It was an innocent enough talk, how to survive retirement with a strong roof on the house and food in the cupboard.  They, like us, are self-employed artists. They, unlike us, have a beautiful home whose value has trebled, perhaps even quadrupled in the recent Big City Gold Rush on land and homes here in the lower parts of British Columbia. While people chatted and laughed and looked at heat pumps I went deep inside. It looked like this:

Holy Shit! What were we thinking?? We should have had jobs with pensions for the last twenty years!  An artist?!! What the hell was I thinking?  And here I was in my mid forties without a house –  without a heat pump.  I became post-apocalyptic, trying to imagine how much oatmeal one would need to survive my retirement years.  The amount was boggling.  Could I afford 2500 lbs of oatmeal? Probably not. Where would I cook it? I would be living on the streets, after all.

Then we came home.

To our rental apartment in the Big City.

The man and I sat down to discuss things retirement. I, wondering if I could be a grand old lady in an airy atrium with cut flowers surrounding me as my milky blue eyes stared off into the middle distance of pleasant recall or, was it going to be dusty chews in a mouldy basement?  It looks like the dusty chews are edging out the cut flowers at this point. This called for rapid breathing  Action, I mean action.

We had come to the conclusion that we were not the intended audience for our Big City real estate maneuvers.  A 700 sq.ft. home on a standard city lot in the less desirable east side would set you back about 1.5 million. We thought that it might be a bad move to sign up for something like that. However, we did not want to leave the Big City, because we were actually able to make a somewhat decent living as artists with contracts, commissions, etc… Besides which, we’ve lived here in this community for twenty years and actually love it.  So we made a decision to purchase investment property in a place where we could afford it.  You never go wrong investing in land someone somewhere said. Although my fatalistic mind can come up with all sorts of reasons why that might not be true, we put a pin into a map of the Lower Mainland and let out a string that represented a four hour radius around our Big City – okay – Vancouver. There I said it. Please don’t come to axe murder us.  The string ended up deep in the waters of the Georgia Strait, the United States of America, on the other side of the Fraser Valley, at the top of a mountain or two and on the coast of our large province. Ahh! My spidey brain began to grasp the situation – not many places that one can actually urban sprawl to in this type of geography. Of the circumnavigation only two places had towns with houses. Canadian houses.

The Fraser Valley and beyond had a bible-belt whiff that best be avoided by the likes of us. So we decided on the coast.  We scouted various towns online, got in touch with a real estate agent in one of the larger towns, and within one week of arriving home from the talk with the family, had gone to said town, looked at numerous houses and put an offer in on one that was sold “As Is Where Is.”  What the hell was that supposed to mean?

I am sure that we will soon find out.