Live From Chillicothe (Taped Earlier)

I initially started this post from a hotel room in Chillicothe, but the internet service there wasn't working properly, and I couldn't upload the pictures or finish the post. Now, we're finally home, so we'll try this again.

We find ourselves in a Comfort Inn in Chillicothe, Ohio today. The Dread Reverend's grandfather is sick and in the hospital, he wanted to come down and see him, and Tyler and I accompanied him on the trip.

But he's spending the day at the hospital and with family, and I didn't go because I felt this was more of a private family time - not to mention, I didn't want to leave The Poo alone in the hotel room; the one time I trie to go to the vending machines, he barked his head off. So we're hanging out here.

Tyler's an excellent traveling companion, and seems to enjoy it. He adapts so easily to these things. I think it's been good for him to get out and do something, anyway - he's been very mopey and dejected-looking lately, and I think it's just boredom. The trip has perked him up - he's been alert, energetic, and curious. Traveling usually seems to go well for him. He's been on a weekend trip to Cook Forest in PA, week-long trips to Virginia Beach and Emerald Isle, NC, and I'm sure a few other brief trips I'm not remembering at the moment. I'd love to take him to Oregon, but I won't subject him to plane travel, and we can't get enough time off work in one chunk to drive there and back.

He did really good till the trip home, when he seemed pretty tired and fed up with it all. I think he'd just had enough 'adventure' and was just looking forward to being home. (For his own account of the trip, check out his MySpace page).

Yard Work Frenzy

Wow, what a day. I got up a little after 7:00 a.m. (because I had to have Tyler to the groomer's by 8:00). My plan then was to run a bunch of errands, but I got sidetracked by some rocks. (Does that mean I got side rocked?)

For many years the border or edging of the pond garden was landscaping ties. But they are old and rotting, sinking into the ground, and falling apart. I didn't take a 'before' picture this year, but I have this one from last year, which gives an idea what the landscaping ties looked like.

I had been thinking this year I wanted to pull them up and put in something nicer, but hadn't decided what yet. I knew I'd like rocks, but when I hunted for the flat rocks I edged the pond with, I remember them being hard to find, and expensive.

While driving Tyler to the groomer's I passed a mulch and self-storage place, the same one where we have our storage unit. And what to my incredulous eyes should appear but pallets of large, flat rocks.

I stopped on my way back and inquired about them, and it was great - big flat field stones, a pallet full, for $50. I said, yeah, I'm on it! I believe that to be a very good price for rocks, if you must buy them. Which I must, as I have no big property to dig them up from.

Better yet, they delivered them a few hours later!

So I started this.

So my afternoon consisted of hauling more than 40 of those rocks over to the pond area (there are still about 20 more laying in the driveway where we had them dumped; and the Dread Revered helped me by carrying a lot of them); pulling up the landscaping ties and tossing them out of the way; raking out all the dead leaves from the neglected bed; arranging the new rock wall in something like an aesthetically pleasing way; cleaning the pond pump filter; and ... I think that was about it.

For now it looks like this.

I'm pretty happy with this. No, I'm ecstatic with this. So it was a pretty good day. And now I'm so sore and tired I can barely move. But it was worth it.

Well, it wasn't knitting, but it was gratifying

All day yesterday I kept thinking I'd come home and spend the evening on the porch trying to start the shawl over. Again. I know, I'm kind of obsessed. Part of me really wanted to work on it again (I'm telling you, I was really enjoying it ... umm, except for the mistakes). But part of me was just very, very afraid ... I didn't know if I could take the disappointment of getting to Row 38 and having it all buggered up again.

But circumstances arranged themselves to protect me from the disappointment. I came home, and the weather was beautiful - sunny, high 70s, just gorgeous. And I was looking at my messy, disheveled lawn, and at all the neighbors out mowing their messy, disheveled lawns, and the yard work bug - which has been conspicuously absent during these days of early beautiful weather - finally bit.

My dad handled most of my yard work for most of the years I lived here. Not because he had to or I made him - because he wanted to. He always loved yard work, and once he was retired, just keeping his own lawn manicured didn't keep him busy enough. So he'd come over here all the time while I was at work and putter around in mine. (Well, that, and he just really liked helping me out). I really appreciated it, because living alone and working full time made it hard for me to adjust to the rigors of caring for the outside of a house, when I was a new homeowner. So very much more to do than in an apartment.

A few years ago he became too unwell to keep up with it anymore, and then I was too busy caring for him to really pay it much mind. This is the first year that I've had the time, energy (well, in theory), and nothing else distracting me, to finally take over my own yard work. But I'm behind already.

My dad always told me the most important things I could do for the life of my lawnmower was to change the oil every spring, and keep the clogged grass cleaned out from around the blades. While the lawn did get mowed last year, neither of those maintenance tasks were kept up on. So my first order of business this year was to change the oil in the mower and clean it up.

I had to go find the manual because I didn't even know what to get for lawnmower oil - if you had to get a special kind, or any lawnmower oil would work. Found that, then drove over to K-Mart and got the oil, and a few other tidbits.

Came home, changed the oil (man was that old oil cruddy - I'm sure if I hadn't taken care of it this spring, my lawnmower would have been letting me know in a few months), cleaned up the mower, and then mowed both the front and back yards.

Wow. I was tired. I'm so out of shape for this stuff.

Once I started, there were so many other things I wanted to do ... clean up the rest of the leaves from fall that are accumulated around the back yard fence ... fertilize a couple of shrubs that look to be dying ... dig up and divide that hosta by the pond ... load up all the garbage alongside the driveway into my truck so I can take it to the dumpster at work ... weed-n-feed the lawn ... and 40 or 50 other things.

But I just didn't have any more energy. Besides, I think that's a pretty good evening's work, and I think I deserved to call it a night after that. There's plenty of time for everything else. Or, well, even if there isn't, I can only do so much on one weeknight evening.

I Fought The Lace, And The Lace Won.

I threw in the shawl last night. I gave up. I was so happy that I'd fixed my mistakes in the morning, and much of the afternoon at work I looked forward to coming home, sitting on the back porch (the weather was great again, in the 70s), and working on the lace.

I did that ... and had mistakes in the first row. I spent a lot of time fixing them, and thought I'd succeeded. I had mistakes again in the next pattern row. This just went on, and finally I just gave up and said screw it, I'm just going to "fix" each row's mistakes as I discover them by either making a new stitch, or knitting stitches together, or whatever I have to do to fix the stitch count, and just go on. Maybe in a few rows, with the right stitch count, it'll straighten itself out, and I can just go on from there, albeit with a swatch of completely screwed up lace through it.

But I had given up on un-knitting back to fix these mistakes. When it's every single row, it just got to be ridiculous. At that rate I'd never get more than 2 rows done a night (and possibly have to fix one of them the next morning). No, I didn't put in a lifeline like I said I was going to. Maybe it would have been a good idea, but I know that the way things were going, it might also have just been an extreme source of frustration - continually ripping back to the same place and putting all those stitches back on the needles, only to keep screwing up again over and over would have probably been just as frustrating.

Eventually, a few rows into this new suicide lace-knitting tactic, it got so completely screwed up I knew I couldn't even fix it, and I ripped it all out. Again. I threw everything into the knitting basket, tossed the basket down in the living room, and gave up.

It's very disappointing, because I was really enjoying the process, and I loved the way it was turning out. I just can't figure out what was going so wrong. I mean, obviously I was not following the chart properly, but what's so frustrating is, I thought I was - I was being extra careful, and still screwing it up. And it was always in the same place - Row 38. That's what did me in on my first attempt. (I did check the designer's errata page, just in case - no, it's me).

Apparently the only way I could properly knit lace would be in some type of isolation chamber with absolutely no distractions. But I'm not even sure that would work - it was pretty quiet and non-distracting out on the porch last night.

It's even more disappointing because I just ordered $30 more of the Silky Lace Alpaca, to ensure I had enough to make the shawl (since I'd changed needle size from the original pattern).

I'm thinking about making a light summer cardigan. I wear this one sweater almost year-round, but it's kind of heavy for summer. I thought I'd make something out of a nice sport-weight cotton, and not try to follow a manufactured pattern (as I've never yet had one of those work out either). I thought I'd try my "Knitter's Handy Book of Sweater Patterns." You determine your own gauge, then follow a chart-like description of what to knit where, to make a simple sweater (or cardigan). Since row gauge doesn't enter into it, everything lengthwise is done by measuring. Which would work great for me, because row gauge is another place I often get myself into trouble.

I've made two vests from this book, both for my dad. The first one turned out pretty nice. The second one turned out beautiful but way too big - but that was my fault for - again - having a gauge problem. I've been wanting to knit myself a sweater for a long time, but my first two attempts were disastrous (one was ripped out, the other is laying in the back of my closet) - both because of gauge issues.

Geez, it sounds like I don't know how to knit at all. To boost my ego, I'll remind you of this - all of which fit, by the way!

Anyway, back to the discussion at hand: the sweater designs in "Handy Book of Sweater Patterns" are simple and plain, in part because that would be the only way to make a book like this, covering so many sizes and gauges, and in part because it's ideal for adding your own patterning to cutomize it for yourself. It's more of a recipe than a pattern. And one lesson I think I have learned - it takes me a far larger piece of knitting than a 6x6 swatch to get a true gauge calculation. When I knit something larger, like a sweater, my gauge always changes as I get further into it and the piece gets bigger. (it doesn't keep on changing indefinitely - at some point, far into the project, it stabilizes - but it's usually quite a ways into it, like half the back of a sweater).

So where all this is going is, my thought is that when the new lace yarn shows up, I'll just return it and exchange it for some cotton yarn. Then I'll knit an actual, very large gauge swatch - like the size of a sweater back. That way I can get a very accurate gauge, and I can experiment with different pattern stitches I might want to try in the sweater, taking the gauge of those sections as well.

If I do all that, I think I have a chance of making a sweater that I have partially designed, that I like, that fits.

Maybe. I thought I could get the lace to work, too.

Although I'll tell you something ... I'm really ticked off about the lace not working out, and I'm not sure I've given up on it yet. I may - may - try it again. I'd only be able to work on it in certain places and times, when I knew I could give it 120% of my attention, but ... I think I want to try it one more time. I hate being bested by some string and sticks.

Addendum: Okay, now I feel really stupid. I just went and did an internet search to see if I could find a knitalong for this shawl, or some posts on one of the Yahoo knitting groups, to see if anyone else was having trouble with this pattern. Au contraire, this is known to be one of the best 'beginner' patterns for lace because it's so "easy." Lovely.

Disaster ... faced and averted

I spoke too soon and too smugly about not having made any mistakes in the lace so far. (Yeah, ya'll probably saw that coming). Last night I had a minor disaster. I was two stitches short in the row I was working, in two different pattern repeats. The first time it happened, I just fluffed some fix (probably an M1 [make one], I don't remember now) and went on. But when I discovered the second mistake in the end of the same row, I didn't want to leave them both. My experience with the first attempt is that once that happens, it just goes downhill from there.

So I decided I was going to unknit this row and fix it. And that's when the real crisis ensued. I was just having a very hard time properly unknitting that row. Several times I thought I'd dropped stitches that might be yarn-overs, but wasn't sure. Several times I ended up with two loops instead of one where one stitch should be, and wasn't sure what I did.

In my defense, I was extraordinarily tired last night, and probably shouldn't have been even trying to fix it. I finally gave up, left it in it's disastrous state and went to bed, assuming that today I'd have to bite the bullet and rip it all out.

Oh, what a difference a good night's sleep and daylight can bring. This morning I tackled it again, but all the things that made no sense to me last night started making sense this morning. I realized that my previous row was a purl row on the wrong side, which means that I should be ripping back to solid stitches, no yarn-overs. So I didn't have to worry about them.

I also got smart and began really studying the stitches, not just counting. I finally began to be able to recognize stitches just by looking at them ("this is a knit 2 together, so when I unknit it, I should have two loops on the left needle instead of one"), and distinguish where problems were - to 'read the knitting' as they say, a skill that has to date eluded me with lacy stuff. I can do that in my knitting with larger yarns (even socks), but once you get into tiny stitches and the laciness of yarn-overs and such, I was getting very confused.

I unknit the entire row, then went back through comparing it with the chart, and figuring out which stitches were in fact still there, and which ones were missing. I'm no expert at it yet, but it all began to make sense, and I was able to isolate the problems.

It turned out that whole disaster occurred because I'd missed two yarnovers in the previous pattern row. That was it. Just forgot to make a couple yarnovers. That seems to be a bad habit of mine.


I 'fixed it' - so to speak. I was able to reknit the row, picking up yarn from the row below to 'create' the missing yarnovers. It's obviously not a perfect fix. The missing yarn-over should have been two rows below, then purled on the previous wrong-side row, making the large 'hole' that creates the lacy effect; picking up a horizontal bar from only one row below to replace it only fixes my stitch count as a mostly solid stitch, losing that particular lace 'hole' for that row.

But I got my stitch count back on track, everything in the right place, and I don't believe those missed yarn-over fixes will have a totally catastrophic impact on the final result (as long as I don't keep on doing it). It will show if looked for, but if I can stay more or less on track through the rest of it, I don't think they're going to be very noticeable in the greater scheme of things.

Once I got it fixed this morning, I set it aside. I'm not going back to work on it till tonight, because I think I learned my lesson ... I think I'm going to run a lifeline this time. Although I think getting tiny lace stitches back on the needle even with a lifeline could be a huge headache, I still think it would better than getting two feet into this thing and then having something disastrous happen that causes me to have to rip the whole thing out. That would just make me suicidal. (hence the term lifeline, I suppose).

So. No more cockiness with lace. (Although I was proud of myself for fixing it). Tonight, life line, then more knitting. (although probably not much - Ghost Hunters is on, and I love that show, and I've learned I really can't knit lace while watching an engaging TV show that I actually want to see, not just listen to). And I'm going to pay much more attention from here on out. Because really - I don't mind having the occasional mistake in a piece of knitting that only 'sorta' gets fixed, but when it's lace, I don't want to just keep screwing up over and over - enough of those will ruin the design, which is the point of knitting lace; if I'm going to tackle this stuff, I want to do a better job than that.

Okay, this rocks!

This is going much better since I dropped to a size 2 needle!



(Sorry for the rather crappy picture; I didn't want to take the time to go actually pin it out on a better background. Maybe when there's a little more of it done, I will get a better picture.)

So whatever the confusion with the pattern is, I'm sticking with what works for me. (Note to self - go order more yarn!).

The pattern is coming out much more clearly to me in this version, but more importantly for the short-term, it's so much easier to knit. I am up to row 28 - 2/3 of the length I got last time - and haven't had a single mistake. (knocking on wood)

I think the lack of mistakes is due to the fact that I can see what I'm doing so much better, and the whole pattern makes so much more sense now. I was even able to work on it a little bit last night while watching TV, something I never thought I'd be able to do. Granted, when it got to the interesting parts in the show, I did Put. The knitting. Down.

But anyway, I'm happy - and becoming very addicted to lace knitting.

Lace: A Steep Learning Curve

I started the triangles shawl over again on Saturday. I don't think I've ever sworn at one piece of knitting so much in my life. I had a lot of trouble with it. I had to rip it out and start it over 5 or 6 times, all right around Row 8. I just couldn't get past Row 8. At the end of the last repeat of Row 8, I kept coming up one stitch short every time. After all those re-starts, I couldn't take it any more, and I gave up and just did an M1 (created the missing stitch), and moved on.

But it was a recurring problem. I'd gotten up to Row 38, but at least every couple rows I'd be a stitch off again somewhere. I knew if I kept fabricating stitches out of thin air, it was just going to screw up the pattern.

Here's how far I had gotten - notice the past tense.

I finally gave up and had to rip this all out, too, for a couple of reasons. The first I'm still confused about. The pattern as sold at Patternworks specifically calls for this particular yarn (Silky Alpaca Lace) and a size 7 needle. This is truly lace-weight yarn, but I thought I'd heard or read that lace is often knit on needles much larger than the yarn weight would suggest, to give it that open lacy effect. So lace weight yarn on a size 7 needle didn't startle me too much. And anyway, that's what the experts said.

I didn't have a size 7 needle I could use to start this, but I did have an Addi bamboo circular in size 6. Since I generally have to drop a couple needle sizes anyway, compared to most people's gauge, I decided that would probably be safe.

This needle was not working out at all. First, I was unhappy with the look of the fabric on a needle this size. The stitches weren't just open and lacy, they were loose and sloppy. I figured it was probably just the way I knit, but regardless, I didn't like it. Second, the join on this set of circulars sucks for yarn this tiny. It's smooth enough, and wouldn't be a problem on a larger yarn, but there's a small gap between the wood needle and the metal cap, just small enough for about 2 stitches of this yarn to fall into. So when the thing began to get big enough that some of it had to slip off the needle onto the cable, I could not get the stitches back onto the needle without much fighting (and more swearing). I knew that once the shawl got really large, I was no way going to be able to fight with those joins constantly.

The last straw was that on the last row I worked, I again came up a stitch short, but this time was determined to unknit back and fix it. I managed to screw the entire row up doing that (and no, I wasn't using a lifeline - a piece of yarn or string run through the stitches of a properly completed row at intervals, so that if you have to rip back, you have a place to rip back to and still get your stitches back on the needles properly).

Anyway, once that happened, I figured the thing was pretty much a lost cause, and ripped it all out last night. I figured I was going to have to order a new needle with a better join, and some smaller stitch markers (more on those later).

But I'm horribly impatient when I want to start a new project. I really wanted to work on it last night, and began a little investigation to see if there was some way I could start it over without ordering a bunch of new stuff. I got the pattern out and read the requirements at the beginning, and something caught my attention. The written pattern calls for fingering weight yarn and size 7 needles - not lace weight yarn and size 7 needles.

Now, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding was that fingering weight yarn is basically sock yarn, or the size most sock yarns come in. If so, the sock yarn I've been using is several times thicker than this very fine lace-weight I'm using for the shawl. I mean, check this out - lace yarn on top, current sock yarn on bottom:



So if the pattern called for fingering weight and size 7s, and I'd dropped it to lace weight (on the recommendation of Patternworks) and was still trying to use even a size 6, no wonder I didn't like it.

So I got out the yarn and looked at the label, and it's recommended needle size is 2. Well, hmm. They know it's lace-weight yarn, and they know you're probably going to want to knit lace with it, and they still recommend a 2. And I'm using a 6, and not liking the fabric. Maybe I should just go try a 2. I had Addi Turbos in that size, and I knew the joins on those needles would give me no grief.

I don't know what the confusion was with the stated recommended yarn being different from what the pattern instructions said, and maybe the confusion is mine alone - maybe the designer did indeed knit the thing in Silky Lace Alpaca on size 7s. Maybe to some people Silky Lace Alpaca is fingering weight. But having discovered all of that, I felt more justified in dropping the needle size to something that worked better for me, and was closer to the recommended needle size on the yarn label.

By the way, gauge hasn't entered into this conversation because, no, I didn't do a gauge swatch. The instructions said to do the stitch and row count after the swatch had been blocked. With all the trouble I'd had getting this thing started, I wasn't about to take it off the needles and use as it as a gauge swatch. But once I had to rip it out anyway, I did take a sort of semi-blocked gauge swatch, and was getting about 8 stitches to the inch. The pattern called for 4.5. That alone told me that was something was not kosher.

So I started it over with a 2, and I'm up to Row 15 without a single problem. It's easier to knit, the stitches look much better, and the fabric is turning out much nicer.

Most gratifying of all, my stitch count has remained correct so far. I think I figured out what I was doing wrong before - the last yarn-over at the end of right side rows was right next to a stitch marker, and I was managing to either lose it or forgetting to make it every couple rows. Apparently I've stopped doing that on this second try.

The only problem is, I guess I'm going to need more yarn, having dropped the needle size so much, but I have no idea how to figure out how much. I should order it now, while I can still get it, and in the same dye lot number, but I hate to play around with $10 balls of lace weight yarn (okay, actually I'd love to play around with it - this stuff feels sinful - but, you know, money and all).

Meanwhile, I'm very happy with the way this new attempt is turning out. I'm not at all sure that I wouldn't also be happy with it on a size 3, and have debated going ahead and starting over yet again on size 3s, since I'm not very far into it. But I don't really want to. I could take a second ball of the yarn, and start a new one on size 3s, so I don't have to rip out my current work, then compare the two. That's a possibility.

So the story with those markers. I couldn't find anything to use as markers when I was working on the size 6s. My standard white plastic rings were too thick, and causing me grief working around them with this fine yarn. I looked for anything else that would work, and finally decided to try safety pins. It worked, in theory - their odd shape made them difficult to work around, but helped with one tricky thing. There are yarn-overs at the beginning and end of each pattern repeat (yarn-overs are simply a loop of yarn around the needle, that isn't a full stitch; it doesn't turn into anything like a real stitch until the next row, when you knit or purl it from the other side; until then, they are dangerous, as there's precious little except the knitter's own attention that keeps the slippery things on the needle; and if they do fall off, you can't always tell for sure, because they don't unravel like a regular stitch, they just relegate themselves back to the horizontal threads of knitting, hiding out there). At first I was having a hard time with those yarn-overs slipping around the marker rings. With safety pins they couldn't do that.

But I wasn't very happy with them by Row 38. They were just too fiddly, and this whole lace thing is fiddly enough without making it worse. I had some jewelry making components upstairs, and when I switched to the smaller needles, I discovered these metal spacer rings fit on the size 2 needles and made quite serviceable markers.

So, I'm back on track with the shawl, for now anyway. I'm discovering that I really like lace knitting, but only on smaller needles. If I have to use larger needles for this tiny, delicate yarn, I'm not going to like it at all. The pattern did say that it's easily adaptable to other yarns and needles by simply adjusting the number of pattern repeats once you get into the main body of the shawl - but it also said you'd need to adjust your yarn requirements accordingly. So I know I can make it on these size 2s, but as I said, figuring out how much more yarn I need is a process that's eluding me. I'm just not sure how to do that part.

Back to Fiber; House Update

I was so excited about the house I didn't even post that I'd finished the socks.

It was an interesting pattern. This was my first pair from Cat Bordhi's book "New Pathways For Sock Knitters". It worked out well, the socks are very comfortable. I'm looking forward to making my next pair, but first ...

... that was my first attempt at the lace shawl. I think I could benefit from smaller markers. This pattern is especially tricky because each repeat ends with a yarn-over, which means you have to worry about losing your marker sliding around that yarn-over. Or perhaps, this is better - larger markers may be harder to "knit around" but may also be harder to lose stitches around.

I had only gotten a row or two past this when I already had a mistake, so I just ripped it out, and haven't started it over yet. I started it at a bad time, though - in a rush Tuesday while waiting for it to be time to go see the farm house. I'm sure my concentration was off. I may try it again tonight, and see if I can do better (and get a little farther).

Something else very cool that I haven't gotten to post about - my friends Ray and Su got me this!!

How cool is that? A real, honest-to-God loom. Okay, it's marketed as a 'toy' but, pshaw. It's made out of wood, sturdy, and is a perfectly working loom ... I can make a variety of things on it, and I'm really looking forward to trying it out. With all the flurry of activity this week I haven't had a chance yet - warping it is going to be the trickiest bit to begin with, and I need a time when I'm awake (i.e., not exhausted as I've been a lot lately), have several hours to spend with it, in quiet, with no distractions. Maybe tomorrow.

So the house project. Well, here's the update. A friend of mine is kind of an expert on renovating old houses - he's done that type of work in the past, and lives in a renovated Victorian house. He generously offered to come out to the property with us today and do a walk-through, and check the place out - look for any serious structural problems we may have missed, advise us on just how much work the place is, and give us tips on making the heating costs bearable.

Oh yeah - gas. Because the house had free gas from a gas well, but when they sold off a large chunk of the land to the church, they transferred the mineral rights. So no more gas to the house. Which means no free gas and enormous heating bills - a definite down-side.

Anyway, Troy gave the place a thorough going-over, and his thoughts on it were that it would probably be worth fixing up, if we could get it for far less than the current asking price. But at the current price ($59K), no way. It needs many thousands of dollars worth of work, too much to be worth that price.

The good news is, the basement is sound, and the roof is mostly in good shape - he said there were maybe about 25 slate tile that need replaced, and some drip-edge repairs - but for a 120 year old slate roof, that was very minimal, and the roof is generally in very good shape.

Those were two good pieces of information, because if either the roof or the basement had serious issues, I was writing the place off.

But that leaves us in a whole new place, because while the most major issues aren't structural, they are still serious. One is that gas problem - not just the cost of heating, but the fact the the house doesn't have public gas run or hooked up (due to having had free gas all this time). So we'd have to pay to have all that done.

The second major expense is the septic upgrade. That alone can cost between $12,000 and $25,000, but we have an additional concern - since they parceled off the property so close to the house, and the septic system is now basically on the property line, we don't know that some part of the adjacent land (which doesn't go with the house) may not be used for the septic - and if so it would have to not only be upgraded, but moved. More major expense.

Then there are interior water issues, which appear to be coming from second-floor plumbing problems. Fixable, but a pain in the ass (involving taking up floors, etc.). Worse, apparently people have come in through the broken basement window and just cut out all the copper pipe in the basement, meaning much of the plumbing lines have just been cut and stolen.

Well. I haven't written the place off yet, but I will say my hope for the place is dwindling. I've decided the next step is probably going to be seeing if we can get a septic company to come out and review the situation with us, for free (I'm certainly not putting any money to any of these inspections or estimates), and finding out some info from the gas company.

Once we know how bad those two situations are, we'll reasses things, and consider making an offer - one far, far below the asking price. But hey - if we could get this place for $25,000, it may well be worth all the cost of upgrading and repair.

Because the house would be very beautiful inside - most of the original woodwork remains, and is in very good repair. Most of the wood floors remain and are in mostly good shape. The rooms are beautiful, large, and three of them have bays - like a bay window, only that is the full height of the room from floor to ceiling. The house is in good enough shape over-all to deserve fixing up and restoring, and it would be a beautiful place to live afterwards.

But meanwhile, we're going to have to continue to look at other houses.

W. O. W.

Things have been happening fast around here. You know I've been complaining for awhile about my closet of a house, which I've grown to just freaking hate. The claustrophobic clutter is driving me mad. I can't move without having to step over something, shift something, or walk around something.

For more than a year we've toyed with the idea of buying a bigger house. We looked at some last year, but got sidetracked for awhile. Then last Sunday I kind of snapped and told the Dread Reverend, "I've got to get out of here!" There ensued a flurry of looking up houses online, etc. etc. yadda yadda. Monday we spent all evening driving all over Trumbull County looking at houses we'd found online (outside only; no inside tours).

Then we found this. An 1880s farmhouse in need of much TLC, but not, miraculously, a lot of structural repair. Apparently, anyway - we haven't had any experts look at it yet, but we took our first inside tour today, and we did not see any structural issues at all. Lots of filth, a bit of very tacky subdivisioning (a family subdivided it for privacy, partitioned off the stairway and the living room, put a second kitchen upstairs - all easily removed), lots of needed cosmetic repair. But no apparent roof leaks, basement walls straight and solid, no real problems at all. I'm still in shock.

So I think we're gearing ourselves up for some serious negotiation on this place. I've been doing research on renovation loans, because (a) the price on this place is good, which means we can afford to add renovation costs onto the initial mortgage and still keep it affordable; and (b) obviously it needs a lot of work, and a renovation loan would allow us to get some of the major work out of the way quickly, by getting extra money for the fixing up rolled right into the mortgage and having it to hand immediately, instead of having to wait to save up for it.

'Nuff of that, let's get to the pictures!

And then the adorable Poo ... pouting because we couldn't take him with us tonight to see the house. Next time, Poo!

Well, there's what's going on with us. We're gearing up for this place big time, and I'm PSYCHED. Yes, it's a ton of work. No, I don't mind at all. I've always kind of wanted a house I could fix up ... in my own way, not stuck with someone else's ideas of 'nice.' And something that would actually be really nice after the work was done. I truly don't mind doing the work, in fact I'm already so psyched about all the fixing-up - even sanding and painting and stripping wallpaper! For a place like this, I don't mind. And this one will highly reward us for the effort put in, it's got such potential.

The only real down side is there isn't a lot of property with it - 3/4 of an acre, which translates into a big front yard, and a bit of a back yard. The family sold off the other 20 acres that used to go with the house to a local church who plans to build there. Of course, that's not so terrible - a church on 20 acres can't really be a bad neighbor. It's not like we'd have someone else's houses surrounding us 20' away like where I live now. And we already plan to privacy-fence most of the yard - the back and part of the sides, at least - so though it may not be a huge yard, it will be bigger than what we have now; private; and still out in the country.

But the house is three times the size of the current one, not to mention the 2+car garage with an entire second story on it as well!

Now the tricky part - the financials. Can we afford this???

What A Weekend.

Especially if you count it as beginning Friday evening. Because of some serious ridiculosity at work, I had to work till 8:00 Friday night. Consider I am usually done for the day at 3:00, and you'll see why that was extremely annoying.

But moving on ... the weather was gorgeous this weekend! Sunny, warm - in the 60s. I was so inspired, I bought flowers. I mean, if this doesn't scream spring ...

... nothing does.

I did a ton of outdoor work this weekend - it was great. Anyone who knows me or has sporadically read the blog in warmer months knows how I love my porch. Well, it had gotten trashed over the winter. It was never really cleaned up to weather the cold months, and then a few wind storms blew things into a hideous mess. I forgot to take 'before' pictures of the worst of it, but this is an 'after.'


It's a good 'after.' Prior to this cleaning, there was stuff piled all over the table and all over the floor behind the table. I did take one picture of the other side of the porch, still in the middle of the cleaning project.


Ugh. I'm glad I got this done this weekend. The other side looks mostly better now as well, although the porch swing hasn't gotten cleaned off yet. I also cleaned up a couple other areas, trimmed my rose bush, lilac and azalea, and did some other general yard clearing. I just wish I had another week of days like today. This time of year there is so much I want to do that even two days full of progress doesn't feel like enough.

Saturday night we had our first official 'porch party' of the year. There was a fire (a huge fire - it was still smoldering this afternoon when I used it to burn some yard waste), lots of rum, and way too many kinds of pop. Rum experimentation at its best. We didn't have any archery or croquet this time, but we'll get there - when the yard dries up.