People who take photos of your house

Titus House Scottsdale, originally uploaded by jhaskellus.

Finding a photo of your house on Flickr, that you did not take...is both nice and a little scary.
Has this happened to anyone else out there?

though you never hear from us...

I am exhausted.

But, exhausted in that way after a performance, where you are like a monkey in the jungle swinging through trees... in that I also feel amped up.

We helped the local historical society by putting our house on their tour.

It is an incredible experience to have so many strangers peek around your things, have a glimpse into your life.

I was fortunate enough to have some dear friends come over and help out by talking to people and pointing out the neat things about the house we live in.

But I am so freaky tired, and the Squink never got a nap because it is hard to put a kid down when there are lots of folks in the house... so we are winding down, mindless in front of the television set, not even sure of what we are watching.

Tags: community

also posted over in the personal blog, because we rarely post here (uhmm, never), since folks started walking in randomly.

"Is this a museum?"

So, while we try to figure out where we need to start on small projects and how we can ignore the big projects until we are less... uhm, I dunno, less overwhelmed by what all needs / can / should be done... we have to come up with a means to let people know that when they open our front door that they may just catch our little boy running naked and screaming "no poopy"... The one time we forgot to lock the door behind us.

Today, we had some visitors do that, though they were regaled by me in a sickly wonder and forced to shush because Squink was asleep right near the front door.

Hi to those visitors! I am sorry, my head was so stuffy I can only remember that one of you has a mother that has a business that involves the word clutter. Thank you for not taking pictures after we asked you to stop, the house is a bit messy and we don't really want folks we don't know to keep that in their record.

I guess we will be getting a sign (or two or three) that reads "This is a personal residence."

UPDATE TO ADD: PS: We don't mind giving tours of the house with just a little bit of heads up... (Chris can't remember his password for blogger right now)

Tags: strangers

How on earth does one get motivation

to fix/build/mend/repair their homes... when they have lost it?

Help? I have builders block!

I had all these dreams of moving in and working on it.
And that lasted for about 8 months.

Then all sort of subtleties that influenced a massively brutal stop to anything getting done.

These include:

• Captain Kaos disappeared leaving us with a ton of exposed interior brick some expensive wood cut too short... and a [insert expletive here] mess in the work area.
• My husband and I had some pretty interesting differences of opinion on what style needs to be used when working on the house. Which I strongly believe are not all that different but enough that it caused for a few heated discussions.
• We had that massive storm that kicked out some windows in the attic.
• We had pipes burst in the line to the house creating a muddy creek like lake/pool way too close to the house.

In the end I love this house, my husband loves this house.

We, or maybe it is I, have a major case of ennui about it, that is why I don't write about it. Because I am sure that no one (and least of all me) wants to read/write about how I have no passion to make this house glorious other than in the painless recesses of my brain (and I thought to myself, "because it is too freaking exhausting to think about right now).


Tag:Ennui

Titus House in lights

It still looks fabulous from the outside... inside is slowly coming around.

Golly gee, shucks, shelterrific!

OK, so... Since the heat is abating (slowly I will add) and I am starting to get itching to make more progress on the house and therefore houseblog. When I started up writing the previous post and looked at how many folks may have stopped by and become completely disappointed by the sheer lack of updating!

So, imagine my surprise when I saw that there was this place that had sent over quite a few folks and when I went to see what the link was, I found this.

For one, she mentioned progress... and I still don't see it, but wow, thanks, we sure appreciate that you think our house is adorable (we sure do)! But the site is fabulous... and I sure don't feel worthy but am just delighted for it... so thank you Angela M.!!!! We feel like we won a prize just because of your mention!!!

Tags: mention

Ghosts in the attic or the attic window (front)

the attic window (front), originally uploaded by Blair Necessities.

I am so sorry for not having posted anything... I went on a summer hiatus when kaptain kaos disappeared and left me with stairs I hate, they tilt forwards and taking a baby down them is a nightmare... yeah, not much nice to say... but aside from horrendous heat, nothing much has happened on the house, it is too damn hot to even think about it. However, I am now forced to... A month or so back we had a ferocious storm, which we, in our typical befuddledness, are slooooooowly adressing the damage it cause to house and home... we had a nightmare leak where the addition is, of course not a stitch of water in any of the storms since...
we had five trees down, three we could save... no power for a day and I was sick sick sick through the whole freaking ordeal to boot.
Wait, there is more to the damage report...
the basement - full of water... and this is a desert so there is not any of those drain thingies you see in basements in other parts of the US so I had a mini flood... which was related partly to condensation and partly to one filthy sump pump (think one inch of sludge in the bottom).. plus a clogged tubing to the outside... thankfully that has been taken care of and I just have to mop the rampant condensation that drips off of the central air unit...
But wait, there is more..

the attic - yeah... see the picture, there used to be a four paned window there, but it got knocked out in one of the storms. We got an estimate yesterday on fixing it and the one in the back with lost a frame and we are looking at a $2000 bill... [insert expletive here].

I am not sure what we should do, that is a lot of money for two windows... we are looking for carpenters the seek out other bids but they are often turning us down when they hear the request of attic window on an old house.

It is so bad, I am thinking of taking a carpentry course or 100...

In spite of this headache, I do love the house.

Oh and on the positive side of old house hell, or maybe not... there is a rock band interested in taking a picture of them on our front porch for their new album... though we have granted permission, we have not heard back from them.