The Adventure of Stove Island

Stove Island looked like this for three weeks. The advantage was that you didn't have to open the cupboard doors below to reach the pots and pans--you just put your hand right into the cavity to pick them up. The disadvantage was that there was no cooking surface in the house on which to put a pot.

I was beginning to think my Stove Island was like Pitcairn and would be isolated and uncharted forever. And then Sebastian the Tile Man sailed into port--on a Saturday, no less--and put Stove Island on the map.

He had been at Fort Chapman once before--on April 22 as scheduled--to demo the original tile on Stove Island. We had to do it because the old cook top--a 1952 Thermador--was a 48" monster that had seen better days, and I couldn't find a reasonable replacement to fill its enormous dimensions. Cook tops these days run to about 36" when they are on the large size.

So, I picked out a white GE cook top with grey burners--similar to one I had in my old home in Winter Park, Florida--and arranged with a local company to re-do Stove Island to the new dimensions in a tile that was complementary to the other tile in the kitchen. I was going to have them install a nice piece of granite on the Island, but then they smiled and said I could just pop over to San Leandro to pick it out, and all of a sudden the tile that I saw before me in the shop looked better and better.

After the demo, I had the plumber add a gas line so we would be ready for the re-install date of April 27.

And then, somewhere between Italy where the tiles were made, and Mt. View, California, where they were to be picked up by Sebastian the Tile Man, the "Durango" tiles were mislaid. Honestly, I was beginning to think the tile company was jiving me, and had the great Sebastian far too busy working on other, much more lucrative projects to stop for a day to work on Fort Chapman's tiny Stove Island.

Finally, one day last week, the tiles turned up in Reno (divorcing themselves from Italy, perhaps?) and once they headed down Donner Pass, the tile company called to say Sebastian would be here on Saturday. Ten days late is better than nothing.

On Saturday it wasn't long before I heard the happy sound of Hola Senorita! And oh! What a joy it was to see Sebastian using my pretty front lawn as his workshop! Ordinarily I would have smacked him for strewing wood chips and grout on the green; but, at this point I wasn't about to find his divots anything but delightful.

Sebastian at work using the front lawn as his job site. And oh well for that.

Once he got cooking, which was something I had been unable to do for several weeks, the work proceeded apace.

The Stove Island repaving project begins.

The one thing that worried me the most was that he had to remove the stove from its packing case in the garage--so he could measure it to create the Island template. And I worried, as it sat in the driveway under the spreading arms of the cedrus deodara that it would end up with scratches and nicks and pine sap all over its lovely face. I checked on it regularly. Alone as it was, and vulnerable, sitting on the asphalt.

There lies a thousand dollars of my old Dad's dough, I would say to myself as I checked on the pretty, lonely cook top.

Sebastian had to run an extension cord into the garage to power his tile saw, and in the course of that he noticed--how could he not?--the gargantuan pile of furniture my sister and I had stored in there for our upcoming garage sale. After three or four hours he asked me about a couple of chairs he saw in there, and how much would we be asking for them?

I thought about it and called my sister. I had disliked those faux Victorian chairs for decades. Not comfortable. Not, in my opinion, very pretty. Oh, and my college boyfriend Bill had sat in them one summer evening, waiting for me to appear and accidentally pulled one of the arms off when he rose to greet me. (They needed to be re-glued.) (And he was 6' 4".)

I had this idea. I had nine tiles that needed to be replaced in the grey bathroom shower ... My sister agonized a while then called back and approved the trade. The bathroom shower was repaired while Stove Island was drying before its re-grout. And we traded Sebastian's extra work for the old, red, chairs. Deal! I was happy and so was Sebastian.

My sister always worries that we've missed our big chance on the Antiques Roadshow, and there is something to that. But my feeling is that "things" only have a theoretical value, unless you are willing to make finding their actual value your full-time work. And unused "things" have almost no value at all. Sitting in our garage is not what a chair was made to do. Sebastian had a family who wanted to sit on them--much more sensible. And we got our shower repaired.

So, later Saturday afternoon, we wrapped the day up with a happy ending. The "Durango" tiles (a Colorado name they've adopted in Italy?) looked ab-fab and so did the cook top when it had recovered from its brief stay in the driveway.

Sebastian, in a flurry of sealing the tile.

The darn thing still has to be properly installed and connected to the gas line by the plumber. And it needs a little piece of moulding around the bottom of the tiles. (Why not? Every project so far has been missing that one final thing.) So, I still can't boil water anywhere in the house, except in the microwave.

But we moved several steps forward. Got Stove Island well on its way to joining the League of Nations. Got the shower-that-has-been-bugging-my-sister-for-three-decades on its way to having a new mixer and faucet.

And I got to say Adios! to a couple of things that were taking up space in the garage. And a very nice young man took Mom's old red chairs home to his family.

The Adventure of Stove Island turned out to be an excellent adventure indeed.

I warned Sebastian, as he drove away, not to let his daughter's boyfriend sit in the chairs, until he gets them properly re-glued.

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Home Remodeling: Ms. Blandings and her Dream House

Cary Grant and Myrna Loy with the plans for their home in Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House. Hilarity ensues.

Don't know if you've ever seen the 1948 classic Mr. Blandings Builds his Dream House, but the movie has been on my mind of late as I stepped over workmen, appliances, cable cords and paint buckets in my new/old home. Sans the hilarity, my experience has been very similar to the Blandings': suffering through the daily grind of dealing with a phalanx of workmen who are constantly underfoot and are chronically installing everything upside down and backwards.

I was so out of my head from entertaining these dunderheads, I cleared them out late yesterday and indulged in some retail therapy, something I'm pretty much against these days as it generally serves to add stuff to my already too-large collection of same. But it turned out to be a relief--wandering in and out of stores, tears streaming down my cheeks, clerks saying soothing things to me as I bought junk I didn't need and blubbered into my linen handkerchief.

Now that my equanimity has returned--or the meds clicked in, whatever--I thought I would list the best and the worst of the people I've dealt with during my move and retrofit/remodel this past week.

From a neighbor I received a recommendation for Fred Murray of Murray Electric Co. who is an independent contractor. What a terrific worker this guy is! From changing a light fixture to installing the Miele to putting a baby spot on my Dad's flagpole for night flag flying, he turned out to be the best of those I met during this experience. He works quickly, knows what he is doing, installs things and makes sure they work properly. Best of all--besides all those other things--he is neat and tidy and always cleans up any and every mess he makes. Actually, he makes things look better than they looked before he made the mess. His wife has trained him well: she should contract him out for housecleaning services on his off days.

He works out of San Mateo, California. You should Google him.

Alas, Home Depot, with whom I worked on a remodeling project ten years ago to much success, is not the company it used to be. Every single thing I worked on with them followed Murphy's Law--and those were on HD's good days. My clerk was a very nice lady who was misinformed about practically everything--or, and I hate to think this--misinformed me in order to help her make the sale.

My HD delivery guy was Freddie Krueger, only with a lower IQ.

Returning and/or exchanging at HD had a certain quality that can only be said to have originated somewhere back in the SSR days of Roumania.

As soon as possible I'm divesting the family of Dad's stock in HD. As Warren Buffet says--bad product+bad service=bad investment.

Movers: I think they should all be sent to Guantanamo.

Comcast? This company, alas, has very limited technical ability. They know how to plug-in your cable if you are already wired. Anything else that is way beyond their bandwidth, intellectually, technically and otherwise.

I could tell you the long story about trying to "port" over the telephone number my family has had since 1950 to Comcast and how, with the help of Comcast, it turned into a Dali-esque experience.

I could tell how I had visits from three different Comcast's technicians in four days, the last one of which went something like this: "Excuse me, ma'am? Would you mind if I move this big chest here from the living room into the kitchen where you can stumble over it all day while I drill fourteen holes in your wall and leave sawdust everywhere and by the way they don't give us a vacuum so I can't clean up my mess and I won't move the thing back as we are really not supposed to move furniture. That's okay isn't it? Oh, and that number we ported? You can call out on it, but calls can't come in. Okay, we've closed the ticket. Goodbye."

For now, only my cell phone is working.

On the appliances side: GE, as always, makes terrific appliances. But someone ought to tell them not to contract out their deliveries to Chucky.

Miele makes a wonderful oven. But somebody ought to tell them to make a trim kit for retro fitters such as I.

But, looking on the brighter side, my experience was not nearly as trying as, say, the one Cary Grant and Myrna Loy suffered through in Mr. Blandings. But some of it did seem strangely familiar. Especially the exchange between Mrs. Blandings--Myna Loy--and her painters. It goes like this:

Loy:I want it to be a soft green, not as blue-green as a robin's egg, but not as yellow-green as daffodil buds. Now, the only sample I could get is a little too yellow, but don't let whoever does it go to the other extreme and get it too blue. It should just be a sort of grayish-yellow-green. Now, the dining room. I'd like yellow. Not just yellow; a very gay yellow. Something bright and sunshine-y. I tell you, Mr. PeDelford, if you'll send one of your men to the grocer for a pound of their best butter, and match that exactly, you can't go wrong! Now, this is the paper we're going to use in the hall. It's flowered, but I don't want the ceiling to match any of the colors of the flowers. There's some little dots in the background, and it's these dots I want you to match. Not the little greenish dot near the hollyhock leaf, but the little bluish dot between the rosebud and the delphinium blossom. Is that clear? Now the kitchen is to be white. Not a cold, antiseptic hospital white. A little warmer, but still, not to suggest any other color but white. Now for the powder room - in here - I want you to match this thread, and don't lose it. It's the only spool I have and I had an awful time finding it! As you can see, it's practically an apple red. Somewhere between a healthy winesap and an unripened Jonathan. Oh, excuse me... (she has to walk away to deal with another crisis.)
Mr. PeDelford: You got that Charlie?
Charlie the Painter: Red, green, blue, yellow, white.
Mr. PeDelford: Check.

Still, going through a house remodeling with Cary Grant would have had its consolations.

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