The spring rains have brought with them multitudes of ants, sporadic flooding, and the near onset of depression in many of us. But at the same time...LOOK! Gorgeous yellow iris are popping up all around the round house, along with a myriad of crazy native plants and animals. We drive slowly down the street now as we watch for baby deer who have joined the sizable herds that roam the neighborhood. The other day we had to stop on the road for a fox that was simply ambling down the way toward our car. He paid us no mind as he walked right on through. A bobcat strolled past Greg one afternoon as he was using the chop saw, and hung around long enough for Greg to pop his head inside to alert me so that I could enjoy watching him too. It's a magical place, I tell ya!
Between all the storms we’ve kept ourselves busy working on the round house.
In our last installment I included this picture of 55 boxes of cork flooring waiting for installation. We were so anxious to see that project finished, but before we could get started Greg had to level the concrete floors throughout the main living space.
Another week later and the concrete was set. Greg and Mitch, our son, worked their tails off to get all the cork flooring installed throughout the house.
We love the look of it so much, and the added cushioning and room insulation is night-and-day noticeable on our tender feet.
All interior doors have now been painted, and most of them are now hung. Lighting is now installed and working.
And then there’s the kitchen...
I finally put the hammer down on our Ikea kitchen purchase in late February, back when life was normal. (Remember what “normal” used to be like? Swoon!!) I’d chosen a design style for the kitchen that included three drawers per lower cabinet, and no upper cabinets at all – save a few open shelves, because the designer had advised that the uniformity would help to make the room look larger.
Yeah, fine. Sounds good.
Word to the wise: when you buy Ikea cabinets, you slap down your credit card for the purchase, wait a few hours for their warehouse folks to pick all the disparate items and chuck them onto rolling carts, and then YOU schlep those heavily loaded carts onto the freight elevator, roll them down the way to your waiting trailer, and then you work together as a couple to load each heavy melamine-ladened box onto the trailer, all the while snarking and growling at one another and complaining about the lack of any assistance from the store that just took thousands of your hard-earned dollars. It took four separate trips up and down the elevator to assemble all four cart loads onto our trailer, but we got it done.
On the day of our kitchen purchase, our Ikea store was out of nine drawer fronts, along with a few other elements. But that was no big deal. We’ll just pick them up in another week or so, no problem! We had plenty of other things to work on at the house, so there wasn’t a real rush. We happily drove our trailer load of 100+ boxes of cabinets and 55 boxes of cork flooring down to the house with visions of cushy cork and soft-closing drawers dancing in my head.
Back to reality: In our order of operations the flooring had to be put down first, so the Ikea boxes remained on the trailer inside the garage for a few weeks while the flooring was leveled, then laid, and then…this stupid pandemic set in. And as soon as the coronavirus hit, Ikea swatted out their lights, locked their doors, and walked away from their buildings – world wide. I mean lights OUT. No ordering online, no customer service email/chat/live, all stores closed with no projected opening date that I am aware of. So our kitchen has remained in limbo, with drawers with no fronts, and a few open areas where cabinets really ought to be…GAH! Just the other day - May 22nd – Ikea finally rose from the dead to wave a flag. My hopes soared when I learned that our KC store had become a “Click and Collect” location. My Shopping Cart was quickly filled, checked and double checked and I hit “PURCHASE” with such pent up enthusiasm that I nearly burst. But alas – this was the response from Ikea:
We have received our maximum order capacity for the day, for this location. Please try again tomorrow.
I tried again multiple times that day because hey, it’s a worldwide company. When does THEIR “tomorrow” begin?? And I tried multiple times the next day, and the next – but to no avail. Same response. So our kitchen looks like this, and we have no idea when we can expect it to be complete. The actual cabinet color is deceptive, as there is a protective plastic coating over all cabinet fronts that hasn't been removed yet. The color we chose is "Bodarp," which is described by Ikea as grey-green. I can't picture grey-green, but I like Bodarp!
And…one more thing about Ikea before we leave this subject. Anyone who has tackled the assembly of an Ikea product knows how maddening it can be to decipher their pictorial instructions. I mean, can they not use ONE English word to help guide the process? (Oh wait – I see the word *Click* periodically, so I know that they CAN use words, or certainly onomatopoeia, if desired.) Hey Ikea, here’s an idea: How about use of an arrow to point to the critical issue at hand, or a big “X” PLUS an arrow to emphasize what not to do? Is all of this just too difficult to do? Because, for the life of me we could not decipher what in the world they were trying to convey through this:
Is this a new at-home version of a coronavirus test kit? Are we to use this part to fling our heads back haughtily like your picture, for some important reason? WHAT are you trying to say, Ikea? In any case, this gave us a much-needed laugh as we plugged away that day, and maybe THAT was the intent of the image in the first place. Clever!
Though our focus has been on the round house itself, I’ve kept you in the dark regarding the OTHER big project looming on the horizon – our garage. Our garage is a large metal building that measures 24’ x 36’, with two (undersized for the scale of the building, and ugly) garage doors, and ample space to park two cars or two boats, or with modification to the garage door, a large RV plus a boat or car. In addition, it has a nice sized work shop cordoned off in the back, a huge alcove for storage shelving, pull-down stairs for more storage above the vehicles, plumbing and electricity. And it looks horrible.
We were excited to simply replace the rotted wood trim around the doors and paint the thing in the same colors of the round house – dark grey with white trim. *POOF!*. Instant AAHHHHHHH. But no – nothing works that easily for us! We knew a quite bit about the sad maintenance history of this round house and property, but a closer look at the garage revealed that it had succumbed to more than we had originally recognized, and the building would require quite a bit of attention before we could simply slap on a coat of paint.
Below is an aerial photo of our round house, dated 2015, along with a photo of how things look today. In the top photo the large white circle is the round house, and next to it is a “mini-me” structure - a smaller version of the same. Like the house, the small round building was constructed of pre-fabricated curved fiberglass walls and roofing sections, and was built on a round concrete slab. (A moment of silence, please, for the loss of this sweet little structure. I was veklempt for months when I first learned of its loss.) Adjacent to the “mini-me” round house is the garage. In the second photo you see only a round patio in that spot.
One fateful day a few years ago, the then-owner of the round house decided to rake up his fall leaves and burn them on the property. This is commonly done down here, and if it’s a calm day and the fire is monitored, the task is normally completed without incident. But if instead the fire is set and then the task manager goes inside to watch TV and take a nap, incidents may occur – as happened on that ill-fated afternoon. The flames were carried by the breeze, took hold of that cute mini-me round building and burned it completely to the ground, and in so doing they also licked at the adjacent garage structure, seriously damaging the six roofing trusses on the front/left quarter of the building.
Sadly, all that remains of the mini-me structure today is that round patio slab foundation, now a patio. And the affected garage trusses look like triangles of charcoal. To add insult to injury, the owners apparently contracted “Larry, Darryl, and his other brother, Darryl” to repair the damage sustained by the garage. Net result: the front quarter section of our garage roof is visibly drooping and will require intervention before any cosmetic work can begin.
As usual, Greg concocted a means to address the weakened garage trusses that involved a “Danger Rating” of at least 9. His idea involved a car jack, found in the back of the garage, a small chunk of 4” x 4”, with a 10’ tall beefy board set on top.
While I held the tall board steady, Greg slowly pumped up the car jack until the tall timber met the underside of the affected roofing truss. Then a couple more pumps of the jack raised the truss to the proper spot. Greg’s hillbilly solution was not particularly dangerous I suppose, but the next aspect of the operation was a spine chiller. Greg then propped his tall ladder against the affected truss, and proceeded to “sister” an 8’ 2” x 4” to the badly burned timber using construction adhesive and lots of screws. The work forced him to lean and push against the very part of the roofing structure that he was trying to mend, which forced me to wince and worry below, as I mentally calculated how to mitigate his fall when it inevitably occurred. He attached exactly one long board to one truss before we mutually concurred on the folly of this process. There has got to be a better way. Stay tuned on that one.
Meanwhile we decided to replace some of the metal panels on the face of the garage. We noticed that the garage front had been pieced together with random short metal sheets, like a puzzle. We presumed that the pieces were scavenged after the fire by “Larry, Darryl and his other brother Darryl.” Instead we learned that those jigsaw puzzle-pieced sheets pre-dated the fire, AND we discovered perfectly good long metal sheets just sitting up there in the garage! They’re smoke-smudged, but are otherwise perfectly fine.
Our neighbors surely think that we’ve made the garage even WORSE at this point. But as we all know, paint is the great equalizer, and I cannot WAIT for this building to get a new coat!
Thanks for your support and for remaining interested in our crazy journey in rehabbing this place. It's been a fun ride, and we are nearing the end.