Bob Desrosiers, 1944-2015

No work on the house again this week. Instead, we both flew back to New Hampshire to say goodbye to my father, Bob.

1962

He was a funny, humble, affable guy. He was a fixture in the neighborhood, spending summers sitting on his deck, looking out on the lake, and waving to neighbors driving by. About 70 people turned out to pay their respects at the memorial on Friday night.

Here is his obituary, for those who never had the opportunity to meet him:

Robert R. Desrosiers

June 3, 1944 ~ October 13, 2015

Robert Rene Desrosiers, 71, passed away at his home in Derry, NH, on Tuesday, October 13, 2015, surrounded by loving family.

Bob was born on June 3, 1944 in Lowell, MA, to Albert Desrosiers and Florence (Lemire) Desrosiers. He loved playing the guitar, spending time on his boat, and cooking for his family. He was also a proud veteran of the Navy.

He leaves his devoted wife, Toni Desrosiers of Derry, NH; his daughter Christine Desrosiers and her partner Adrienne Johnstone of San Francisco, CA; his daughter, Angela (Northcutt) O'Brien, her husband Michael and sons Jacob, Patrick, and Sean of Swansea, MA; his son Anthony Northcutt of Fayetteville, AL, and his son Jacob Hernandez of Casper, WY; his son, Terry Northcutt and his fiance Marty Ray of Jacksonville, NC, and his son Todd Etress of Charleston, SC; his older brother, George Desrosiers of Lowell, MA; and his loving dog, Meili.

A gift from a secret admirer

Last week we got a surprise in the mail -- this beautifully painted portrait of Pickles!

The card with the cute owl didn't say who sent it, but we suspect it's one of Pickles' admirers in the great Commonwealth of Virginia.

We love it very much, and put it up immediately in a place of honor in the kitchen:

It's basically the first thing you see when you walk in. Just as it should be!

Thank you so much, Secret Admirer! Please come visit again soon!

Speed Bag

No mural this week after all. We got the front & back yards tidied, AJ fixed her bike, & I got the present AJ gave me for my birthday set up:

Of course I had to try it out for a while, using these great mitts she also gave me:

Both the mitts and the speed bag are vintage, to go with the overall aesthetic of the garage/workshop/DuserHaus. Of course, at this point, vintage can refer to things that are much younger than we are, but they do look great down there with all the 60+ year old stuff from the "rooms" under the kitchen.

After all that, I was pooped. So, no mural. Next week, I'm going out of town for work, so maybe no mural then, either. But it's next on my list!

Bedroom done!

It took a few evenings & one whole day, but the bedroom is now done!

The pink trim has been eradicated:

I did two of the walls in the same blue-gray as my work room, and two the same ivory color of the new rooms:

When the construction guys jacked up the back of the house to repair it, they caused a shift in the bedroom wall that loosened & tore some old wallpaper that people have been painting over for decades: 

When we saw that, we immediately peeled some of the paper back, to make sure the wall wasn't cracked. It wasn't, but we exposed a couple large bare patches of old plaster that we've just been living with all this time. As a quick cosmetic fix, I tried to cut away as much paper as I could to get to the places where it was still stuck to the wall, while not making the holes too much larger, and then painted over the holes. It worked pretty well:

It doesn't catch the eye when you're in the room, so all's well that ends well. We can do a real fix later, when we have the ceilings redone.

Pickles, meanwhile, couldn't understand why I would want to do all this activity in the evenings instead of doing normal couch time with her:

In the end, she went ahead & compensated herself well. I cleared out some dead plants from the garden bed on Saturday afternoon, & she spent Sunday morning in the sun, on the soft, warm soil:

The garden has a ways to go before I can replant after the Mouse-pocalypse -- I have to build a contraption -- but the bedroom is now totally done & checked off the list. I didn't get to work on the mural because I have a school assignment to finish, but I'm still satisfied with the progress this week. Next week: a return to the mural, along with some overdue yard cleanup!

Mouse Onslaught. Again. Still.

The mice laugh in the face of my attempts to block them from getting into the house. Ultimately, what it will take to stop them from coming in entirely is taking the vinyl siding off of the house, and plugging up every tiny gap along the foundation -- a project that is at least a few years away. New kitchen cabinets/counters would help but that's not happening immediately either. For now, we will just have to keep doing what we're doing: keep the kitchen spotless to not give them a reason to hang around, and keep the kitchen door closed at night to keep them from exploring the rest of the house.

I suspect the reason it's so much worse this year than in years past is because they seem to be taking up residence in the concrete block wall on the north side of the yard. Judging from Pickles' behavior, they've been nesting in the back part of the wall for a few months. Over the past week or so, they seem to have moved closer to the houses. When Pickles goes out, she stops at the bottom of the stairs to power-suction-sniff all the tiny cracks in the mortar at the base of the wall and bark (which sets off the dogs in the house next door -- sorry, neighbors!). She somehow scratched her lip doing this:

(the pink dewdrop shape right under her nose)

That wall is in a slow state of collapse -- plenty of nice little holes for mice to live in. We're supposed to get some very heavy rain this winter, so we've been talking to the neighbors about replacing the wall before that starts. I feel bad for whoever takes the wall down and sets a thousand mice loose.

In other news, I have started the bamboo leaves on the mural, but it's hard to see the progress in the photo. If it's dry this weekend, I'll get some more work done & post a photo then.

I also have felt inspired to finally tackle the last remaining pink trim in the house:

It's in the bedroom, which has the most doors (ugh) and the most big furniture to move (ugh), so I've been putting it off for the past three years. I'm excited to be tackling it, & finally being rid of the hideous color!

Second Annual Labor Day Paint Fest

No one got on the roof this weekend. AJ got her annual back-to-school cold, and it seemed like the shingles needing replacing were in a tricky spot, so we decided to skip it entirely & call a professional. I also didn't continue on with the black paper strips on the shoji wall. I got sidetracked by the discovery of the mouse highway on-ramp in the garage:

They have been burrowing up through the insulation behind this new sheetrock in the garage, straight into AJ's office and the kitchen. I had to move a bunch of stuff to get in there to block that off, so I took the opportunity to paint that sheetrock, as well as the new firewall in the garage:

As beautiful as the construction project has turned out, at its core, it was about bringing a number of things up to modern building code standards, including adding a firewall between the garage & living space. It's not glamorous, but I'm really happy that out of about a dozen things we were told to get done "very soon" by the guy who inspected the house for us when we bought it, we have just two left (replace the mud sill at the back of the garage, and cap the foundation in the garage). From multiple gas leaks around an old and improperly installed water heater, to the light fixture in the kitchen secretly sparking in its junction box in the ceiling, to the imminent collapse of the whole back quarter of the house (which would have landed on the neighbors downhill), it's not an exaggeration to say that this house was a hazard. It's an appalling comment on the local real estate market that you can spend such an astronomical sum for a house and still have serious problems like this, but it is what it is. At the end of the day, we plan to be here for many decades, so it's satisfying to know we've already gotten through so many items on the Serious Things To-Do List, and that our home is safe and sound for the long haul.

Anyway, it was really warm this weekend, so I decided to keep painting, and get the foundation layer of the bamboo mural up on the walls under AJ's office. Here is the space before:

And here it is after:

(Yes, it's supposed to look mottled like that.) I finished off the ceiling the same light gray as the trim on the rest of the house, as well.

Two days of painting and no one has gotten food poisoning or fleas, unlike last year's Labor Day Paint Fest (click here and here to refresh your memory), so I think we can call this year a success!

Garage almost finished...still

Got lots done in the garage this week, but also came up with more ideas of things to do. I think I should just go ahead and accept that the garage will never actually be totally done, but at least it's fully usable & more or less tidy at this point.

I just about finished using The Stuff I Saved on the other half of the wall in the DuserHaus:

Here's the full wall:

I also cut down some more of the wood left over from construction into quarter-inch-thick strips and added them to the outside of the DuserHaus, to mimic a Japanese shoji screen:

The edges of the paper are still exposed along the vertical lines in the picture. I don't think I want to use more wood to finish them off like an actual shoji would have, because it seems like it's going to be too square-ish, so I'm trying out some narrow black paper strips:

You can see in those pictures that there is one panel on the wall that is a map -- that allowed me to tie in to the maps inside the DuserHaus, while cleanly dealing with the one gap between the studs that was too wide for my roll of rice paper.

Over Labor Day weekend, I may go back to the black paper strips. Or, if we're feeling ambitious, we may actually attempt to replace a couple shingles on the (flat part) of the roof...