Holes

Probably the most common (though often unspoken) question we get about our retrovation is, “Why is it taking so long?”  Asked by us as much as anyone, frankly.  We’ve been in this house for over three years, and without qualification, it does NOT look like a house owned for three years by a couple that has a remodeling blog.  It’s embarrassing.

But, lucky for us, we have a way to publicly post our excuses.  You’re reading it right now.  I won’t say it has nothing to do with the fact that when Har Mar Superstar is playing at the Bell Museum we drop everything and go dancing.  But it also isn’t as if we’re not working on it.  We just… have a lot of holes.

The place had been owned by two bachelor brothers for more than a decade before we got it, as a far as we could determine they did nothing but gather complaints about the volume of their remote control cars, and feed mac & cheese to the squirrels and other fauna that lived inside the house with them.  (There may be some conjecture in those statements, but not as much as you would think.)  This big scary hole above is one of the scarier, but less important holes we had to deal with.  It actually ate that bicycle at one point.

There were holes that were sort of hard to ignore.  One side of the house had sort of been eaten through by the driveway, and if you heard us joking about how we had to plug up the holes so raccoons wouldn’t wander into the basement… well, I wish we were joking.  And then in the spring, the snow would melt and form a lovely natural spring.  It was beautiful, in a “nice to visit, but wouldn’t want to live there” sort of way.

So, we had to tear out some walls, call in some favors from some contractors we knew over at Nelson Construction, and do a lot of bringing of lemonade and staying out of the way as the pros replaced our holes with bigger, more appropriate holes that we then filled in with new siding, and so on. 

But that was just the really really big holes.  Getting the house to hold in heat and hold out rain was just the beginning.  Then there were the holes that held the giant gross air conditioners.

These holes teamed up with some of the fauna to create a kind of hole/slash/ant fusion art project which can be seen under construction on the left.  From a Planet Earth documentary standpoint it’s all very fascinating and beautiful.  But, you know, we’re working on it.

To keep things interesting, here are some bonus holes:

The hole in the bottom of the toilet.  That would be the toilet where if you left the door open you could high five the person pooping on the toilet in the next bathroom.  It was not a hard decision to dump this one.

The hole in the water meter.  If you were quick, you could fill up a glass before this hole filled up the bucket you put underneath.  Or, you know,  you could just drink out of the hole.  Or the bucket.

Me actually creating NEW holes, for some reason.  I don’t know why holes can’t be commodity items that you just trade in for new ones.  What’s with all this creating and destroying holes?  Where’s ACME when you need them?  These holes didn’t actually do their job, because it turns out you need a fence 97 1/2 feet high to keep deer out of a garden in Arden Hills.  See my upcoming post on posts.  -E