High Holy Mass of Contradictions

Went to Metro Archives over lunch to meet with a woman named Debie Cox. Karsten was put in touch with her by someone at a party when he mentioned that we’d had little success in tracking down info about our house. After Debie found out which house was ours, she apparently got intrigued. Normally, she says, she doesn’t do research for homeowners — she’ll just tell people how to do the research themselves. But she got intrigued and dug up tons of good background info about the house.

Long story short, it looks like our house was probably built around 1849. It was probably built by a fellow named Pritchard, and he probably lived there for a few years before selling it in 1855 to someone named Collette for the whopping price of $2000. It probably is the oldest house in the Germantown neighborhood, but it is almost certainly not the oldest brick house in Nashville, as we’ve been told. It is, of course, one of the oldest houses in Nashville, period.

So anyway, we saw lots of maps and deeds and whatnot, and Karsten’s going back to make copies of it all for our own files and to pass on to the next homeowner whenever we finally decide to sell it (which won’t be for a long time, I don’t think).

This stuff fascinates me. I’m glad we found our way into a mystery house; it’s been a fun adventure.

Originally published at Sticky, Sweet, & A Little Overdressed. You can comment here or there.

Gardens Gone Wild!

Originally uploaded by Kate O’

Our garden has gone almost all summer without maintenance (darn my
pesky thyroid), and it really shows. We haven’t been too concerned
about it, figuring my health us more important than a perfectly
manicured front yard, and anyway perfectly manicured was never our
style, so it’s been sort of a Darwinian exercise in garden tough love.
But next Saturday our house will be on the neighborhood homes tour, so
it was high time to give the garden a quick cleanup.

Karsten’s up on an extension ladder cleaning the top windows (he won’t
let me take a picture of him, though), so I tried to muster the
stamina to do the yard work myself, but I only got as far as weeding
(LOTS of weeding, actually), pruning, and trimming the established
plants, and loosely digging around to position the new plants.
Tomorrow, if my energy is right for it, I may do some mulching. But
just at this moment, I think the rest of the planting is up to
Karsten, and all I have any energy left for is, well, posting this
here picture. Enjoy.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

We’re well preserved!

Originally uploaded by Kate O’
(Thanks to Busy Mom for the subject line. )

Not sure why this didn’t post to my blog when I posted it to flickr. That whole “post to flickr and your blog at the same time” function is kind of sketchy, I find.

The moment we’d been waiting for finally arrived, and our house won a preservation award from Nashville’s Historical Commission. We genuinely didn’t think we’d win, sitting at the ceremony watching all the other winners be presented, with projects far bigger than ours. But when they called out our names, we sure weren’t going to turn the plaque down!

Karsten is thinking of wearing it on a chain around his neck. He says he’s busted up enough concrete around here to have earned it, and I quite agree. But in all likelihood, it will be as it is intended: mounted at eye level next to our front entrance. In this picture, I am holding it approximately where it will end up.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

Detail of front walkway at gate,
originally uploaded by Kate O’.

One of the interesting things about getting deep into any major project, like renovating a house and yard, is that new metaphors sometimes emerge throughout the process. For me, one of the best new metaphors to come out of the work we’ve been doing in the front yard is the idea of replacing the paved sidewalk around the house with a fieldstone walkway: the paved sidewalk, not only visually incongruent with such an old and charming house, encourages brisk walking, whereas the fieldstone walkway with all its inconsistencies in level and varied surfaces nearly forces the walker to slow down and look around at the garden and the house.

It’s not uncommon for Karsten or me to make references now to the “fieldstone” effect in our lives, of something having a welcoming slowing-down effect. I really love that about this house, and I’m also happy that Karsten and I can both appreciate what that does for our quality of life.

See? As much work and expense as this house has been, it’s actually rewarding us in unexpected and deeply meaningful ways. I wouldn’t trade a moment or a penny of what we’ve invested in it.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

Sorry, one more “compare and contrast” picture pairing that I’m enjoying:

Aside from the fact that the trees are all lush and green in the first picture and all winter-blah in the second, I guess it’s no secret which one makes me happier, is it?

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

I just uploaded a picture to Flickr that I took of the front of the house during the brief snowfall we had on New Year’s Day. While I was tagging it, I went back looking through old pictures of the front of the house and was absorbing just how much work has gone into it. I made a comment on the picture with this string of pictures, but wanted to share it here too:

And the current pic is this:

I’m so tickled. I love this house. I consider myself incredibly lucky to live here.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

I thought about writing a year-end update yesterday, but the truth is, not all that much of note happened. And that’s a pretty good thing, as it turns out, because I was also thinking yesterday about how I’m feeling more balanced and centered than I have in — gosh, what? — maybe 8 or 9 years.

In the meantime, the highlights were clear:

• Karsten and I celebrated our 10th anniversary of being together and being crazy in love by going to Paris, world capital of romance. And it was romantic. The trip wasn’t 100% perfect all the time, but it was wonderful on balance. As for being together 10 years: wow. Our ties to each other just keep getting stronger, and having that is the best thing life can offer in any year.
• I started working at Magazines.com in January of 2007, and it’s been a really good move for me. I worked a lot (so much so that I seem to have lost my ability to update blogs), but I’m really OK with it. In fact, by far most of my efforts and energy in ‘07 were directed towards helping make something really special happen there. And it looks like that will be the case in 2008, too, and again, I’m OK with that. (Although if that’s still the case in 2009, I will have to re-evaluate my effectiveness. I want to be able to find better balance around then.)
• We got the front porch, doorway, and fence built, and the front of the house is transformed. I find so much pleasure in those last few yards of my drive home, coming up over the top of the hill in front of us, looking at such a charming house and being perfectly content to live there. I’ve never had that feeling about a place where I’ve lived before, and I don’t take it for granted that I’m this lucky. (And who knows — we might even be able to begin the major addition and renovation in 2008.)
• Karsten and I got close to another song placement, and although it didn’t ultimately come together, we ended up having much-needed clarifying conversations about our level of commitment to our songwriting (both still very committed) and how to refine our writing process under our current highly-unavailable circumstances (maybe more on that later). That clarity should help us over this next year, too, as we both continue to be heavily distracted by other areas of work (me with my job, him with renovation and visual art) — we should still be able to make progress, as long as we continue to want to. And so far, we still want to.

There were other events, of course: stressful conflicts at work, pests in and around the house, disappointments, disagreements, and so on. But they don’t stand out in hindsight, and that tells me exactly what my resolution for 2008 needs to be:

I resolve to find as much happiness in the current space of every moment as I possibly can, remembering that, in the end, it’s the happy moments I’ll want to carry with me.

May 2008 be the happiest of new years for all of you, as well.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

At some point today, the furnace stopped coming on periodically to blow heat, even though the house was noticeably cooling off. After a few hours, we tried switching the setting on the thermostat from “Auto” to “Fan,” and air did start coming through the vents, but only cool air, even though the temperature on the thermostat was set high.

We tried setting the heat extra high in case some kind of temperature gauge in the system may have been off-kilter; we tried flipping the switch in the circuit panel off and on. Nothing is making any difference.

Any home-repair-knowledgeable people out there have thoughts on what might be happening?

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

Latest view of the porch,
originally uploaded by Kate O’.

Not much has changed in the past week or so except for the new copper downspout to the right of the porch, but it’s hard to see in this picture. I’m looking forward to the handrails, the spindles, the rest of the trim detailing, and the caps for the posts, but above all I can’t wait for the new doorway and door! That should be happening in the next few weeks or so.

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

Not much has changed in the past week or so except for the new copper downspout to the right of the porch, but it's hard to see in this picture. I'm looking forward to the handrails, the spindles, the rest of the trim detailing, and the caps for the posts, but above all I can't wait for the new doorway and door! That should be happening in the next few weeks or so.

I keep forgetting to mention that the guy who’s painting the tippy-top of the front porch (which I’m thrilled Karsten isn’t going to do himself) is the son of the guy who wrote (co-wrote?) “Lucille.”

Now, come on. How Nashvegas is that?

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Originally published at The Bee Hive. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at The Bee Hive. Please leave any comments there.

View from my outdoor office,
originally uploaded by Kate O’.

This is what I’m looking at as I work right now.

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Would you be more inclined to translate "little disaster" as "kleine Katastophe" or "Katastrophchen," since our intent is to use it as an affectionate term (as in "Unsere kleine Katastrophe" oder "Unser Katastrophchen")? Or is there a better translation altogether? I wouldn't want to miss out on getting the best humor value out of it.

I've been chastised by multiple people in multiple circles within the past week for not posting enough. I think about it a lot, but I never seem to make the time. Part of it is I feel like I'm scrambling to keep up with my work responsibilities, and part of it, if I'm honest, is a increased feeling of restriction on my posting since I started this job. Not that anyone has given me reason to think I need to do that... well, other than letting me know that people at work know about this journal/blog. But whatever. I know I have options. I could always use friends-only posts, but at this point a good deal of my friends and readers are outside of LiveJournal and I don't want to ignore them. I could adopt a different persona, set up a different blog, and talk freely about whatever I want, but I've always enjoyed being myself online. I could talk about things in a veiled way, but there are always those who know what's being described and who's who and all that. I could just throw caution to the wind and write whatever I want, but I'm not sure I'm up for that.

But I think the latter is closest to what I'm going to have to do. We'll see how it goes.

In the meantime, by way of update:

• I've been at the "new" job almost 3 months now and it's very cool but very demanding.


• I haven't really had time to think about songwriting since I started here, but I'm still holding out hope that that'll change.


• The staircase and front porch have been gone for several weeks now but we still don't have a new staircase yet, which looks really funny.


• My mom got elected to office at the local level last week. She's now a politician. That's weird.


• I was part of an amazing gathering of women bloggers over the weekend, and was very humbled to have been invited.

And by way of apologizing for my lack of recent activity, I give you a picture of a robin.



There. Isn't that better?

Good news – we got our loan to do our front porch / entryway work! Yay! What’s especially cool about this is that when we went into the banks to start the application process, we told them what we thought the value of our house was but we aimed pretty high, knowing that the appraiser would most likely be coming in to say “yep, it’s worth that much” or not. Somehow the numbers got mixed up, though, and the mortgage guy gave an even higher figure to the appraiser, who came back saying it wasn’t worth quite that much, but placed it almost exactly at the figure we originally gave. So in just about two years’ time, our house has increased in value by over 60% of what we bought it for. Not too shabby! Some of that is directly attributable to the appreciation of home values in our neighborhood overall, of course, but the new windows and some of the other work we’ve done were factors in the increased value, as well, so that feels good.

Anyway, this means that our front porch and entryway work can begin in the next few weeks, and the bulk of it should be done by late spring. The only part that will probably have to wait is painting, which will likely happen in the fall. And for the next little while, we’ll have to use our back door only, which will be weird. But I think it’s going to look great. I can’t wait.

( Wanna see what we're doing? )


Anyway, so Karsten will be outside today preparing the front porch for demolition (he's removing the old bricks that were laid over the concrete so we can save them for patching up bricks on the house).

In the meantime, there’s a lot of movement in our neighborhood: our next-door neighbors just moved to the Waverly-Belmont area a few weeks ago; we’ve learned that some friends of ours in the Werthan Lofts are moving to Shanghai for three years, but when they come back they’ll be moving into a new development a few blocks down and over from us; and some other friends in Werthan are selling their loft and buying a single-family home on the other side of our block.

As for us, we plan to be here for a while. Despite how much work this place is, nowhere else has ever felt quite so much like home.

2007 should be a year for advances in our songwriting business and on the house renovation front. That's a lot to ask for, perhaps, but I think it's reasonable.

( The down-in-the-dirt details, and the rest of the resolutions )

And right now, I resolve to stop editing this entry and get on with other things. Happy New Year, everybody!

Karsten got our lights up, and I think they look great, especially with the new windows. We saw John H & Lynn headed for home while we were setting out on an evening walk, and they kindly complimented our windows, too.

We saw a few other houses in the neighborhood with lights up already, so in honor of Sista Smiff and her holiday light fetish, I took some pictures.

Here's what cost me the scratch in my arm yesterday. It was worth it.

This is what's going on chez nous. It's crazy, man, crazy.

Now that, by default, I'm once again a songwriter by day and night, I decided to improve my work environment. The office/studio/catroom, though fairly large, serves a lot of purposes in one space and needed some organizing.

So I've spent much of the past few days cleaning up the office a bit. I had managed to let quite a bit of filing pile up, so I took care of that and then attacked a few bigger problems, like the magazine shelf. I recycled all our old issues of Entertainment Weekly. I realized that, of all the magazines we keep around for reference, there's never been any reason to go back and look at an old issue of EW -- or, well, actually, that's not true. There was a reason once, but I couldn't find the item I was looking for. Either way, they're useless as reference tools. So they're gone, as are a bunch of home furnishing and clothing catalogs. No money to spend, no point thinking about it.

Donated a huge pile of clothing I was planning to sell on eBay but concluded would not be worth my while as none of it was new with tags (but I kept the items that are NWT); managed to clear off several surfaces; got the Logitech USB notebook speakers working with the PowerBook (we bought them when I was doing the Indy gig and could never get sound to come out of them, but I figured out there was a system preference that needed to be set); and just generally made the place look better and be nicer to work in.

And even got some writing done first thing this morning, so my efforts are paying off.