FINALLY BACK AFTER THREE YEARS
I thought I'd posted some things to this old blog since my return, but the Blogger Gods kept them from going forward. Hopefully this one (and many more) will go through.
Because I'm back from Exile.
Laid off from Steve Marshall's glass shop in 2019, I went back to CooperLand and redesigned their window Stripping shop, then helped build the Glazing and Painting shops, then proceeded to train the Strippers (oh my!) and Glazers and Painters (well, some). We did all this so we could restore all 438 original wood sashes from Connecticut Hall, the oldest building on the Yale Campus (or so they tole us).
I was so successful at this that they let me go again. I wasn't laid off, just set down. So, after six years in Connecticut, I realized that I was once again ready to go back into the Old House Repair and Restoration biz on my own.
But, but, BUT!!
It was October, and as any fool knows (I am qualified in foolishness, trust me), one does not go out on one's own in bizniz in New England in late fall. It's a Spring endeavour. Thus a call to my good bud Chuck in Little Rock Arkansas, who always has a house to restore.
So I loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly....no, I took the dwawgs, tools, kitchen equipment, clothes and tools in a trailer to Oak Street, where I spent the next year restoring a 1930s rabbit warren.
And WHY did I stay more than six months? Well, we had this little interruption in March 2020 that shut the country down. You might remember it.
I lived in the house, got paid weekly, and only had to go to the lumber yard, hardware store, paint store, and liquor store. I'm sure I must have eaten, I don't remember. Certainly not at any restaurants.
My neighbors looked after the Farm and it was relatively safe. I even returned for three months the next fall to refinance the house, though it was like giving a starving dwawg a rubber bone (3.6% going from 5.7% and from a thirty to twenty year mortgage, a GREAT choice), then returned to finish Oak Street. But The COVID thing was still keeping me from returning so I took on the restoration of my favorite of Chuck's properties, Hill House on 19th St., across the street from the Guv's House. I'd lived there for five years after my divorce, so it was like coming home.
But finally, in May 2022, I loaded up the trailer and moved back to The Land of Steady Habits. The Farm was overgrown, the mice had filled my dressers with toilet paper and mouse leavings (eeeeeewwwww), and I had a helluva cleanup job. I was with a new dwawg, two orignial dwawgs, and had laid the ground for my window restoration business before leaving, so I arrived with a full dance card of restorations to do.
Of course the property suffered. I took care of everyone else and not myself, as usual. Then things evened out in Fall, and we had the mildest winter in memory. It snowed three times, and only one measured over two inches. Each snowfall melted within two days.
The next (previous in Blogland) post will explain why.
So now, one year after returning, I am a LOT older, my body is failing, and I have winnowed the dwawg pack to two, Speckle the Giant Boxer and her new love, Rissa the tiny Bernese Mountain Dwawg. Rissa has learned to guard and bark from her big sis and they stand guard between naps while I try to tame the briars, bittersweet, and poison ivy, cut down dying trees, and hack back and poison the always evil vulgaris, the Worst Weed in the world. I've built my three shops into Window Restoration Machines and am presently traveling WAAAY too many miles to do window restorations. Other work is also coming my way, and before long, I'll have my Lifers (clients that will always call for services) and Newbies (future Lifers).
My left shoulder and right knee are blown, my right wrist hurts like hell, and I sleep unevenly.
But I'm HOME.
And it feels so good.
Let's POST!
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