Home Improvements
My grandson is going on a school music expedition to Chicago. He plays saxophone in the high school band. He taught himself to play guitar with the computer. He plays jazz. He is sixteen. The trip to Chicago costs several hundred dollars. Not easy to come by for an extra in a family of six with a stay-at-home mother.
So - my kitchen is getting a new floor. My daughter and her brother (Number five son)are the installers. My daughter has never seen a job she doesn't think she can do as well as anybody. The musician going to Chicago belongs to her..
Presently the kitchen floor is parquet. It absorbs light which I didn't notice when the kitchen had a window. When the addition was built just off the kitchen, the window and door openings became its access. There's lots of light in the addition but the kitchen lost some. I didn't expect that.
I didn't need the addition but I always imagined the house would be better served with direct access to the basement and it would have to be enclosed. . Number Three Son's affairs ran afoul of a plunging real estate market in 1991. He built the the extension.
The porch at the front door was built when he decided earlier in life that going to university would be a good idea after all. He changed his mind in the second year, when he encountered a Professor whose English was difficult to comprehend. He was teaching a higher math course. Martin weighed substantial debt on one hand and a substantial negative on the other and decided to remove himself from that equation,
I continue to enjoy my porch. He built it well. He was twenty-two. The roof had been raised a few years earlier by Number Two Son when he was starting post-secondary education at Seneca College. It covered the patio at the front door. Before that, when it was hot and humid, we used to huddle under the patio umbrella in the rain, our heads and the playing cards sheltered and raincoats draped around our shoulders. Rain and laughter, when the drips ran down our necks, were the perfect antidote.
In early summer, Adam of the same mother mentioned above, is going to Virginia to participate in a special hockey tournament. Mum, Dad and Sister are going too. I will have another window installed in the addition I think. That should add more light to the kitchen. It's probably better than putting in a skylight. I'm leary about cutting a hole in the roof. Rain is best kept outside the house and the pesky racoons are not the only ones on the look-out for a space to get their claws into.
The house is forty-five years old. When it was still two months from completion, I was in the last weeks of a pregnancy. We were renting a house in the city. The landlord gave us notice on the 1st day of the month the child was due - he was selling the house. He was a specialist of something.
We had three other children and no place to go. We were not long in Canada. There was no extended family. When we finally moved into our new house, I vowed my family would never again be in that situation.
We have not.
The baby girl who arrived at the same time as the house is now grandmother of Cheyenne and Abigail. Cheyenne is four and came to visit last week. She has been here before but only with the whole clan. She scowls and visibly braces against the unfailing attention due to the second youngest of them all. Last week, she looked about her in bemusement and asked “Where is everybody?”
How could she know ..... they are all still here - in the porch, in the addition ,on the deck in the back yard, the tree that shades it, the view of the town from its topmost branches and the laughter and tears that echo still in this place we made our own.
So - my kitchen is getting a new floor. My daughter and her brother (Number five son)are the installers. My daughter has never seen a job she doesn't think she can do as well as anybody. The musician going to Chicago belongs to her..
Presently the kitchen floor is parquet. It absorbs light which I didn't notice when the kitchen had a window. When the addition was built just off the kitchen, the window and door openings became its access. There's lots of light in the addition but the kitchen lost some. I didn't expect that.
I didn't need the addition but I always imagined the house would be better served with direct access to the basement and it would have to be enclosed. . Number Three Son's affairs ran afoul of a plunging real estate market in 1991. He built the the extension.
The porch at the front door was built when he decided earlier in life that going to university would be a good idea after all. He changed his mind in the second year, when he encountered a Professor whose English was difficult to comprehend. He was teaching a higher math course. Martin weighed substantial debt on one hand and a substantial negative on the other and decided to remove himself from that equation,
I continue to enjoy my porch. He built it well. He was twenty-two. The roof had been raised a few years earlier by Number Two Son when he was starting post-secondary education at Seneca College. It covered the patio at the front door. Before that, when it was hot and humid, we used to huddle under the patio umbrella in the rain, our heads and the playing cards sheltered and raincoats draped around our shoulders. Rain and laughter, when the drips ran down our necks, were the perfect antidote.
In early summer, Adam of the same mother mentioned above, is going to Virginia to participate in a special hockey tournament. Mum, Dad and Sister are going too. I will have another window installed in the addition I think. That should add more light to the kitchen. It's probably better than putting in a skylight. I'm leary about cutting a hole in the roof. Rain is best kept outside the house and the pesky racoons are not the only ones on the look-out for a space to get their claws into.
The house is forty-five years old. When it was still two months from completion, I was in the last weeks of a pregnancy. We were renting a house in the city. The landlord gave us notice on the 1st day of the month the child was due - he was selling the house. He was a specialist of something.
We had three other children and no place to go. We were not long in Canada. There was no extended family. When we finally moved into our new house, I vowed my family would never again be in that situation.
We have not.The baby girl who arrived at the same time as the house is now grandmother of Cheyenne and Abigail. Cheyenne is four and came to visit last week. She has been here before but only with the whole clan. She scowls and visibly braces against the unfailing attention due to the second youngest of them all. Last week, she looked about her in bemusement and asked “Where is everybody?”
How could she know ..... they are all still here - in the porch, in the addition ,on the deck in the back yard, the tree that shades it, the view of the town from its topmost branches and the laughter and tears that echo still in this place we made our own.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment