Year #2!

Fernando found and sent me this photo last month:

The photograph, entitled "Invisible House in Staten Island," is by filmmaker Lynn Sachs and can be found on her website here.
Yes, that is our house.
Happy 2nd Re-Birthday House! I'm glad you no longer look like a giant bush with roof.

One Year.

Dear House,
Happy Re-Birthday! We bought you one year ago today and have been trying our best to get you back to your former glory. Whenever I see photos of you shrouded in your vines I'm amazed at how different you look today. I'm sorry that you haven't been painted yet or that you're not completely finished on the inside. I promise we'll paint you as soon as we can. Believe me, you look (and smell) a thousand times better today than on this day last year when we first walked through you after the closing.
Thank you for providing a happy place for us to live and for being in such close proximity to a lot of nice people. Thank you for not being haunted. Thank you for not being infested with any creepy living things either.
We love you House and hope to spend many more happy years living inside of you.
Love Always,
Heather & Fernando

I'm gonna chow down my vegetables.

We've been taking advantage of the nice weather by doing a little yard clean up. Winston (the neighborhood gardener) has been an enormous help. He managed to clear all of the remaining ivy that was heaped up in a corner of the yard since last summer as well as all of the bamboo and sapling refuse that we pulled out on our clearing spree. We're going to mulch our leaves in one of the corners of the yard to use in the future. The soil in the yard is already really rich with nutrients from years of neglect and piles of leaves left to mulch on their own.

Today, Winston is going to clear a bed in the yard for my future vegetable garden! I don't know how much I'll get planted this year but I'm trying to get an early start.
Dried up bamboo roots and rhizomes:

I'm keeping some bamboo to use as stakes in the garden:

Not much has gone on on the inside of the house. We're not lazy - just preoccupied at the moment with work and other projects. I finally finished a little baby blanket I've been working on for my friend's son (due any day now!)

A couple of months ago Fernando decided to lose his wedding ring. He was pretty bummed about it. I decided to make him a new one:

It's unfinished (not plated with rhodium) white gold and much more brutal. He says he likes it. :)

Yesterday, we worked on clearing out our remaining storage unit. For lunch, we hit up Montalbano's in Rosebank for a 120 hero and decided to eat down by the Alice Austen House.

Smoke on the water:

Hopefully, I'll have photos of the finished garden bed tomorrow.

cue quincy jones

I can't tell you how much I wish I had an after shot for you here. This was pretty much the state of the front section of our backyard for the last two months.

We did hire a "clean-up" guy last week. He came the following day and removed a lot of metal. We really had a lot of metal. Someone had been hoarding it in the basement. Most importantly, he removed the stinky old stove that none of us could lift out to the curb. He even had a red pick-up truck ala Sanford and Son!

Alas, he too must have been scared away by the swarms of mosquitoes and the never-ending clean-up job. He never showed up again.

Fortunately, our amazing neighborhood gardener, Winston has saved us from our festering junk heap! Winston does work for our neighbor who has an almost identical house to us. I say almost identical because their house was not renovated in the 30's and because compared to ours, it looks like heaven. Manicured lawns and perfectly trimmed hedges with fresh exterior paint and I can only imagine inside! Ahh.
Winston does a lot of the houses in the neighborhood - he will come around when he thinks something needs trimmed and just work. He's a little hard to find - we begged our neighbor to send him over to us next time he saw him. Eventually, I would like to do the gardening myself. I love garden work. For now, I'm extremely overwhelmed with all of the weeds, vines, hedges that tower above me and did I mention the bamboo?! If you look to the left of the top photo in this post (above the pile of dried ivy) you'll see we have a bamboo forest taking over our yard. It extends way beyond the lattice and into the middle of the yard. If anyone needs bamboo for a project, let me know - you are more than welcome to take as much as you need.
We hired Winston to remove the roots of the ivy around the house since we are already getting re-sprouts here and there. He performed nothing short of a miracle yesterday in rounding up all of the garbage in the yard and sorting it into bags and bundling vines and wood. Now we can actually set it all out on the curb on garbage day. Not all at once, but at least it's very manageable now. We can see the stone patio now and even found a strange thing resembling a headstone sticking out of the ground! I highly doubt it's a headstone but I can't imagine what it could be. I'll need to shoot some pics and ask for opinions.

I do however have some recent photos highlighting the new lighting in our kitchen and dining room. Check them out:

No, nothing looks finished yet. But we're hoping that one day soon it will be!

she's mighty mighty

Why are contractors so unreliable? I don't just mean general contractors but plumbers, electricians, etc. I can't tell you how many people have cancelled on us, just not shown up or just not followed up with estimates after coming out!(???) How do they stay in business? And why bother coming at all if you're not going to send an estimate? Waste of time.

phew.

Anyway, we are now vine free. The only success we've had in hiring anyone came in the form of roofers. They showed up (I know AMAZING!) and have so far cleared off all of the remaining vines that we could not reach. Even the chimneys are visible!
They're not starting any of the actual roofing stuff until Friday. Nevertheless, the house already looks better and we've been getting many compliments on the progress. As a matter of fact, I hear we're the "talk of the neighborhood." Now we only have to live up to everyone else's expectations. ;)

everything looks perfect from far away...

If you can't tell by now my posts aren't exactly being posted in order. Well, they are but I've been writing at the end of the day and adding photos later... so the posts haven't been getting published right away. I'm keeping the dates the same though - so we have a record of our progress by date.

We have a roofer coming next week (hopefully) to start the roof, gutters, point the chimneys and take down the remaining vines. Yesterday, we had a landscaper tame the hedges in the front and on the side - this I haven't had a chance to see yet but I'm very excited to hear that we can walk freely down the side of the house now! And he indentified all of the poison ivy and removed it. He was actually immune to the ivy and was able to touch it. I'm beginning to think I may be immune to it as well - I picked up a lot of those vines and I didn't have the slightest reaction.

Some highlights from phase two of the vine removal last week here:

Fernando did the chopping, I did the clean-up and Chris was the muscle again.

And here's another shot from last week taken by the roofer:

I hear there's some view from up there... makes me wish I wasn't so scared of heights!

shut up!

Back when we were trying to close (another story for another day) all we had were photos to obsess over. What colors we were going to pick for inside and how we could spice up the outside. Now we are so far away from choosing paint colors... you need smooth walls with no holes in them for paint right? F. decided to clean up a photo of the house taken in the winter. I immediately decided that we needed shutters. Don't you agree?


When we had pulled off enough vines to see the front windows, my mother noticed hardware on the sides of the windows. I knew that visually it needed shutters but we didn't actually know that it had had shutters at one time! Then, Sunday night poking around the basement near the original storm windows stacked up in a pile, we had an amazing find - 8 of the original shutters! I know we are no where near putting the shutters back up but it's a nice feeling knowing I don't have to have them made and that we can just take them to our refinisher to get painted. I know there's enough to do all of the large windows on the front so eventually we'll have to have the two smaller 3rd floor window shutters made. But I don't care. I'm happy we have the original shutters.

you're gonna need an ocean of calamine lotion...

What you can't tell from the previously posted photo of the outside of the house (taken in cold, cold winter) is that our house is COMPLETELY covered in ivy. Well, it's not just ivy, it's all kinds of grow-y, climb-y type stuff and probably a few trees. Someone has already commented that we even have poison ivy.

When I say completely covered you need to envision this: the house looks like a giant, unruly section of hedge. Add that to all of the surrounding foliage left to grow as it will on a fairly large lot and you have a nice recipe for mosquitoes. We have swarms of skitters - everywhere. My arms and legs and even one hip (?!) are full of swollen bumps and lumps.

Sunday was an amazing day. Our friend Chris (aka Tarzan) came over to swing from the vines and we actually were able to uncover a lot of the house. Chris even jumped out of one of the windows onto the roof of the glass vestibule. All this during a downpour of torrential rain.

Need proof?



Yes, there are windows under there.



That's Chris using amazing feats of strength to yank down thick, twisty, long vines in clumps! Clumps! The man is strong.

I haven't been slacking either - you see that lattice? It was full of twisted growth, in and out of every square opening. I felt like I was unraveling a wool sweater, pulling on the vines to get them off. I still have three sections to complete.

So now we have some windows that actually let in LIGHT. The former owners seemed to really hate light. Every window has blinds (very dirty blinds) and every room is dimly lit. There was a 15 watt bulb in the foyer fixture! One of the chandeliers has ten bulbs and only one was working.
And back to Chris - he didn't stop with the vines. The rain had stopped and the mosquitoes were out in full force again, so Chris moved to the inside and almost completely removed the wallpaper in an entire bedroom. We have really good friends.