Adventures in crafting

I haven't touched a sewing machine in over 20 years, but back in my young womanhood, I used to be pretty competent, if not expert at simple sewing projects. I made a duvet cover for my bed; curtains for my apartment windows, and one summer in the late '70s I made a little money fashioning a collection of hippie-ish skirts and drawstring pants for my friends.

I had a little Singer Featherlight machine - this was a small, portable machine that did only one thing - straight stitch. But it was a nice, solid, workhorse of a machine, easy for someone with a peripatetic life like mine to move around with, and I made good use of it.  I gave it to my mother when she got into quilting, and I guess it ended up being sold with the rest of the contents of her house.
 

Floored

It's finished. The great floor refinishing is done. Look at that shine!

Before - water damage and scratches, January 2012

All that remains is for the furniture to be put back in place, tomorrow morning.

Eigh's handiwork - orange glop

As awful as the damage was,

Sanded

 as disruptive as having the work done was, as much an unexpected expense it was, when it's all said and done, the floors are so beautiful I'm glad we did it.

We have what is known as a "pre-finished engineered hardwood floor." We had it put in back in 2003, over a plywood subfloor that had carpet in the living room and linoleum in the kitchen. Over the years, with elderly dogs, spilled water bowls and "accidents", and with baking sun and rain coming in from the clerestory windows, the floor had gotten pretty beat up. We considered having it refinished, but never got around to it. The final straw was our former housekeeper, Eigh, deciding to surprise us by refinishing it himself while we were traveling in Europe - without having either skill or knowledge how to do it.Or permission from us.

More of Eigh's handiwork

We had been so pleased by the firm that originally put in the floor that when the damage was done, we contacted them to help us. We discussed the options and decided to have the entire installation refinished. The price was steep, but surprisingly less than we'd thought. In any case, we couldn't live with it the way it was.

Before, January

 For anyone in southern California considering wood floor installation or refinishing, Mike Pillar & Sons is a great company. They've done a great job for us. We've spent almost a week with Francisco and Lorenzo working in our home, and they were incredibly dedicated craftsmen, trustworthy and respectful, taking care with our home and its furnishings. They really liked Jack, too!

Now - beautiful

Not only did they do a fantastic job, but our floor has a new beauty that, I think, transcends what it was before. The intricate grain of the maple veneer is more apparent now, and the color more clear and bright. Thank you, guys!

Disruptive week coming up

We've having some work done in the house next week, and I'm not sure how disruptive it will be to my posting.

I'll try to catch you up on things when I can.

The Housekeeping Chronicles - Transitions

"Les Raboteurs de Parquet,"  Gustave Caillebot, 1875, Musee d'Orsay

Before telling more about our travels, I'll report a recent transition in our domestic life.

We arrived home yesterday evening to discover than in our absence, our housekeeping couple committed what we determined was a "fire-able" offense.

Actually, to be fair, it was probably just Eigh, not Oeuf who was responsible for the act. When we left town, Eigh begged us not to suspend their services during our vacation, citing financial difficulties. So we left with a list of minor tasks, some of which were busy work, like watering potted plants.

I won't go into the gory details, but after a 15 hour international journey, we walked into an aftermath of disorder, dirt, and damage, created by Eigh's rash decision to perform an unrequested major home "repair", for which he lacked both the knowledge and craftsmanship.

This morning we called to inform him their services were no longer required. Insurance claim to follow.

He responded to the call with the usually hedging and argument and passive-aggressive guilt tripping we've come to expect from him, and since he needed to come by and pick up some tools he'd been storing here, we prepared ourselves for a drama-filled personal encounter. So we agreed to an appointed time, put put the tools on the porch, and waited to hear the doorbell

The time came and went, and we looked outside - the tools were gone and the house key was properly returned.

"Looks like he knows how to do this. He's probably done it before," commented [The Man I Love.]

Houseproud

When I was younger I used to enjoy home decorating - I loved to read magazines and loved thinking about every detail of my home's decor. In reent years, though, I've gotten a little lazy and complacent. Living in a house with an active kid and dog often makes aspiring home decorator snap back to reality fast, too.

Still, one of the things I always have though make a house a home is a beautiful area rug. As a young single woman I had an inexpensive smallish wool carpet in a Persian pattern - it was by no means a real Persian rug, but it was pretty and I liked it. I forget what happened to it - it probably endured much wear and staining before being hopelessly discarded.

We've often thought about getting a rug - but last weekend we finally found the rug we couldn't resist. There's a local seller of antique and imported rugs here in Topanga, and when we visited, we found our rug.

It's a flat-weave rug, or kilim; tightly woven wool yarns that produce a flat surface without a fluffy pile. The technique for using colors results in a very sharp, defined design, as there is no blurring of two colors of yarn - each strand is woven back into the color block instead of interweaving. Finely made kilims have actual small breaks in the fabric at color changes - you can see it when you hold it up to light.

Ours dates from the 1930s and was made in the Turkish village of Konya. Konya rugs are known for their striking geometric designs in brilliant, bold colors.

I love the colors of this one, which have taken on a softness from age. A warm terra-cotta-like red, soft gold, pale aqua and punched up with bold black. The intricacy of the design, with colors ever shifting, keeps it always catching my eye. 

I stood on it last night with bare feet, and it felt just warm. Jack likes to lie on it, too. It will be a household treasure for our family.

What's your most treasured feature of your home? Share.

Short term goals

Mrs. G and Jen on the Edge have the right idea for New Years Resolutions. Instead of setting unrealistic expectations for excellence in 2012, I'm setting some modest, achievable monthly goals.

My goal for January is - to get my whole phone thing together, for once. This means organize the contacts in my phone, figure out how to retrieve my voice mail (yes, I am that lame!) and get a Bluetooth device for the car.

Then maybe someday I can get an I-pad like Jack!

The Housekeeping Chronicles - Flotsam & Jetsam

I'm beginning to comprehend the fact that Eigh, the male half of our Housecleaning Team, does not have an aesthetic eye. He's unable to distinguish things of inherent value from things that are simply of utility value. It explains a lot about some of the things he does.

For example, the night after Ouef and Eigh had cleaned our house one week, I noticed that the bedsheet seemed to have a kind of panel sewn onto it. I wondered why I'd never noticed this feature before. Finally, after some thought, I recognized it as a patch - something that has not been an element of my life for so long I almost forgot the word for it. Someone - Eigh, no doubt - had patched our bedsheet.

The housekeeping chronicles - Need and evasion

Not Oeuf and Eigh - but still a memorable couple

 As related earlier, [The Man I Love] and I are busy people who are fortunate to have found housecleaning help that fits our budget. We are particularly fortunate, since we are both incapable of consistently keeping a clean and well-maintained house.

Now that we have settled into our relationship with Oeuf and Eigh, our housecleaners for the past year, it has been a pleasure to come home to a clean house once a week, to count on minor repairs being done, and  - heavenly - to find even our laundry clean and folded neatly for us.

Really, it is a marvel, to find two people who are so willing to do so much for us, for such minimal cost.

The housekeeping chronicles - A legendary couple

After we lost the services of Rita, our long-time housecleaner, I tried to go it on my own, but soon [The Man I Love] found a better solution to our domestic maintenance. Oeuf and Eigh are a couple, and work together to clean houses. They came highly recommended. Their price is a bit higher than Rita's was, but they promise far better service.

They are middle-aged. Oeuf is a tiny woman with short black hair and a sweet smile. She wears sweatsuits and sneakers and fancy glasses. Eigh is a big bear-like man, who favors shorts, black socks and sandals, and T-shirts printed with metallic fleur-de-lis and other rock-goth designs. They come from a European country to go unnamed in these dispatches, and their English is just shy of fluent - sometimes we have communication difficulties that have to be sounded or mimed out.

When we first interviewed them, they were delighted to hear of [The Man I Love]'s work in music. They had worked for a musician once, they said, at his home in Calabasas. "You know this...ah... this Shoooog Nite?" asked Eigh.

The first day they worked, they were in our house for seven hours. Now, it's true our house had gone uncleaned for a couple of months. [The Man I Love] and I had managed to do some triage cleaning, but I am not embarrassed to say that I have become so spoiled over the years by even Rita's lack-luster work that it took me a couple weeks of her absence for it even to occur to me to pick up a broom. But seven hours!

One thing that might have lengthened that first day was that, a half hour into the day, Eigh discovered that the sliding glass shower enclosure door needed repair - it didn't slide properly and sometimes jammed. This, of course, is something that [The Man I Love] and I have been not-dealing-with for thirteen years, and something Rita cheerfully put up with as if it were a fact of life. From the bathroom, we heard the door scraping and thudding and rumbling, and [The Man I Love] dashed into the room to tell Eigh, "Oh, don't worry, that's always been that way, you don't have to -"

By that time, Eigh had the whole door off its track and was unbolting the broken and corroded rollers. He stammered apologies in broken English, and we worried that maybe our new house cleaner was going to well-meaningly break everything in our house. He asked if there was a hardware store nearby.

By the end of the day, the door rolled along its tracks smoother than it had ever rolled before.

"Just you wait," said Eigh. "In one year, maybe two years, I finally fix everything you need fixed."

Slowly, Ouef and Eigh have begun to take over our house. And it's sometimes alarming. The built-up nasty finish on the hardwood floor? We told Eigh about it. When we came home after the second week's cleaning, the entire kitchen floor was clean. The third week, half the living room was clean. On the fourth week, I had to stay home from work and discovered to my shock and horror that Eigh was pouring un-diluted ammonia on the boards and scrubbing it with a machine. The fumes drove me from the house.

But the floor was clean. I checked their contractor records to make sure their insurance was paid up.

True to his promise, Eigh has repaired many things in the house, including a kitchen light fixture that stopped working; some loosened slate tile in our entryway; a blocked sink drain and a broken light switch.

They clean the oven each week, scour grease-blackened baking pans, and clean the refrigerator. Eigh even deep-scrubbed and oil-treated our wooden cutting board - with an admonishment to me not to use water on it ever again.

They even take Jack for a walk when they're here.

Oeuf and Eigh have a small dog who used to stay in a carrier when they worked, until we determined that Jack enjoyed the companionship. So each Monday when they arrive, Jack and the little dog chase each other around the house. Then the little dog has a snack from Jack's food dish.

Oeuf is the quiet one. If she needs to clean where you happen to be, she apologizes profusely, eyes blinking behind the fancy glasses. "I'm sorry!"

About three weeks into our relationship, Eigh started pressing the clothes left on the ironing board. Since these were mostly [The Man I Love]'s suits and slacks for work, and I am a reluctant ironer, he loved it. One week, Eigh asked for permission to take one of [The Man I Love]'s shirt home, so he could properly select the right replacement button from his collection. When he brought the shirt back, he presented it for our admiration. Indeed, the button perfectly matched.

[The Man I Love] is delighted with this kind of service, which is a testimony to how much pampering he's been denied living for 25 years with a housewife as lax as I am. I teased him that he now had his own manservant.

But to be honest, all this is making me a little nervous. Oeuf and Eigh are also doing our laundry, folding our clothes and reorganizing our dresser drawers. I'm not used to this level of intimacy from strangers.

It took a while to adjust to having other people deal with our clothing. We found that our familiar methods of dividing dirty from clean didn't translate immediately to other people. We learned this after Eigh, doing the shirts on the ironing board in the spare room, also ironed and hung up the dirty clothes piled on the floor, which were meant for the dry-cleaner. We didn't realize this until [The Man I Love] took a meticulously pressed pair of slacks off the hanger, only to realize it stank. Now we carefully segregate the dry-cleaning from the ironing into hampers.

They certainly do go above and beyond the call of duty. Back in the spring, when the local fire department did its annual inspection, we were not at home, but Oeuf and Eigh were cleaning that day. The firefighters noted we needed to clean the leaves off our flat roof.

The next week, Eigh was up on the roof, sweeping off the leaves. Once again, I hoped their insurance was paid up.

They both take great pride in their work, and want to share in their enthusiasm. They want us to know what a good job they've done. Each week when Eigh arrives, he asks how we enjoyed whatever project he completed last week, and points out the next target of his attention. He often arrives with a package, unveiling the next improvement for our lives. One morning it was a new iron - he said the old one leaked.

Last week, as I pulled out of the driveway, they were unloading the many appliances and cleaning products they bring for their workday from their car trunk. Eigh hailed me, and brandished two narrow fluorescent fixtures. "I put these in kitchen!" he said excitedly. "To fix the lighting!"

Now, this is something of a sore spot with me. When we remodeled the kitchen eight years ago, I wanted to install low-voltage lights underneath the upper cabinets, to light the counters and work surfaces. The contractor ran the wiring for it, but then presented me with his choice of light fixtures - really ugly fluorescent tube lights. I said - forget it. That wasn't what I had in mind. Just leave the wiring there and I'll regroup later on and install the kind I want.

Well, it's been eight years. I know exactly what I want - I want under-cabinet LED lights. They're compact, the light source is hidden behind the cabinet face so it doesn't glare, and they are energy efficient. But they cost a lot and you have to plan carefully which components to get, and I just simply have not gotten around to doing it or finding a contractor to work with.

I've learned that you have to be careful what you mention to Eigh. If you say, "Oh, I haven't got around to fixing the ____" or "I wish I could find a ____ that would do____" he will take it on as a project. So the only thing I can think is that at some point [The Man I Love] or I mentioned that it was a shame the lighting in the kitchen was so bad but that we wished someday we could have under-cabinet lights - and Eigh acted on it.

So I looked in horror at the two fluorescent fixtures. But I was on my way to work. "I get from IKEA. I try them," said Eigh. "You will like!"

"Um..," I said, "Okay, let's see, but don't buy anymore until we can talk!"

[The Man I Love] called me at work to report his conversation with Eigh after I left. "She will like, you will see," Eigh had promised. "Kitchen will be so bright she will have to wear sunglasses!"

As a little aside here, I have to mention that as an anthropologist, [The Man I Love] really enjoys other people, and enjoys the often unique and fascinating way people of other countries have adapted to the culture of the U.S., and particularly Los Angeles. The fact that a couple from a former Soviet-bloc country could come to L.A. and allow their work ethic and entrepreneurial spirit to flourish and succeed is wonderful, and it's great to know them and learn from them. But sometimes [The Man I Love]'s interest in the characters leads to bad decisions. Like the time we hired a charming yet crooked contractor to remodel the basement, hiring undocumented Persian workers. I mistrusted the guy from the start, but he won over [The Man I Love] with his quirky sense of humor and his assurances of success. "You're gonna love it," he promised, even while he was swapping out our older fixtures for cheap junk, installing the wrong kind of hardware, and stealing building materials we paid for.

To this day, "You're gonna love it!" is what my family says when we sense a conman's pitch.

With Oeuf and Eigh, it's different. They're not dishonest, and they're not incompetent. It's just - I don't want Eigh to install ugly fluorescent tubes under my cabinets. When I came home that night, there were were, glaring out at me with the tubes flickering starkly. I hated them.

I had to figure out how to tell him to STOP. WAIT. But I wanted to be constructive. I didn't want to dampen his enthusiasm, or hurt his feelings. And I also feel a little bit at a disadvantage. I mean - this is a the guy who launders my underwear. I don't want to get on his bad side. I asked [The Man I Love] to call him and tell him to hold off buying any more lights, we would talk with him the following week.

So I spent the weekend doing what I had avoided for the last eight years. Measure the cabinets. Research the fixtures. Go to the lighting store and look at the products. Get brochures. Price them out. All that work and time spent, just to stop Eigh from forcing his will on my kitchen.

The relationships you have with the people who do domestic work for you are tricky. We pay them for their services, yet they know our secrets. We hire them, yet we allow them to dominate us. We fear offending them. In 1934, Dorothy Parker wrote a short story called "Mrs. Hofstadter on Josephine Street." Although the story suffers from the casual racism of the period, it captures hilariously the sense of obligation and helplessness the two main characters - Parker and her husband - feel as their lives are held hostage to a garrulous and attention-craving servant who insinuates himself into their family and simply won't leave them alone.

"Can you have a glass of water!" Horace said. "Can you have a glass of water! Well, I'll tell you just what Horace is going to do. He's going out there in that kitchen, and he's going to bring you just the biggest, coolest glass of water you ever had in your life. There's going to be nothing too good for you, now Horace is here. Why, he's going to do for you just like you was Mrs. Hofstadter, out in her lovely home on Josephine Street; yes, he is."

He left, turning his head archly back over his shoulder to bestow his parting smile.

...

Horace returned with the water and spoke to us. Through his preparations for dinner he spoke to us. Through dinner, which was held at six o'clock, according to the custom obtaining in Mrs. Hofstadter on Josephine Street's lovely home, he spoke to us. We sat there. Once the Colonel asked Horace for something and so learned his lesson forever. Better go without a service than bring on rich and recommended assurances of the tender perfection of its fulfillment.

On the next cleaning day, Eigh came in the house and asked me with a sad face, "You don't like the lights?"

I chose my words carefully. I liked having better lights, I told him. But there is a kind of light I really want instead. So please, don't get more of this kind - let's wait until I can get the kind I want. I had a printout from the Internet to show him. I praised his enthusiasm and thanked him for giving us the motivation to get back on track with this project.

He seemed to take it well. I felt better. And it's true - we will get the project back on track. Finally. I really should feel grateful for that.

As I gathered up my things to get ready to go to work, I overheard [The Man I Love] talking with Oeuf and Eigh in the living room. "It's cold today," he said. "You can turn on the furnace in the basement, but it doesn't really do that great a job of heating the house. I think we need to have someone in to look at it...."

Uh oh.

The housekeeping chronicles - Self-pity and Slovenliness

Photo from the Library of Congress digital collections

This post has been updated from a post originally published at The Women's Colony in March, 2010.

In February of 2010, Rita, our housecleaner, called to tell us she won’t be working for us anymore.

Rita had been cleaning our house for ten years. When we met, she was the mother of a child at my son’s school. She was an immigrant from Eastern Europe, relatively uneducated, and had escaped a bad marriage. House-cleaning was her only means of support.

Today, Rita is married to a wonderful guy, has a college degree and her daughter is in graduate school. We were among the few clients Rita kept after she started a new, great job, but finally it was over. Her marriage, and some chronic health trouble made her decide to drop her clients. She won’t be cleaning our house anymore.

Before you denounce me as a Los Angeles elitist who employs servants, know this – I am not used to having “help”. My mother never had what we used to call in those days a “cleaning lady.” Up until she left her house, at age 82, she did all her own cleaning. [The Man I Love] and I first hired Rita ten years ago when I had a job offer that required me to travel away from home, sometimes for as much as a month’s time. My husband made a bargain with me – he would support my decision as long as I agreed to hire someone to clean the house once a week.

Truth be told, Rita wasn’t that great a housecleaner. She never tackled the cobwebs in the ceiling of our post-and-beam house. She constantly miss-filed kitchen utensils so you couldn’t find them. She often failed to empty vacuum cleaner bags for weeks, so that as she rolled the thing across our carpets picking up dust, an equal amount of dust spewed out the outtake vent. She cleared kitchen counters by gathering anything left upon them into teetering piles she left on the dining room table – we called them “Rita piles.” She refused to do windows or laundry, and one time she applied wax to our hardwood floors that deposited sticky, dirt-trapping goo that we still have to scrub off in places.

But it was awfully nice to come home on Friday evenings to clean bathrooms and a freshly made bed. Rita tolerated the three big dogs who shared our home over the ten years. And she was a good friend, a funny person, and we grew to care for her and her daughter.

But now it was over. So it was up to us. Or up to me. I was pretty sure [The Man I Love] – although he contributes in his way – was not going to take on much more of the housework than he had already been doing.

As far as my qualifications for the job go, you can ask my mom about my cleaning habits. I was nagged to clean my room until she finally gave up, and just asked me to keep the door closed. I had a few tearful tiffs with college dormmates about housekeeping. And my first New York City apartment-mate cited my inability to contribute to cleaning efforts in our break-up dispute.

In the theatre, the Propmaster or Propmistress job is similar to that of a housekeeper. They clean floors, tidy the set, organize everyone’s personal belongings. As a young woman, I toured the U.S and Canada as a Propmistress, and I remember during one after-show evening at the hotel bar, the stage manager confided to me that I was the “messiest Propmistress” he’d ever worked with.

It all goes to show that I am not a very good housekeeper.

Yet – I managed a house, a husband, a dog and a growing child for the first 8 or so years of my marriage, with only minor complaints from my co-habitants. I think [The Man I Love] and I are well-matched in our tolerance for a kind of relaxed slovenliness and casual disorder. Of course, he is an anthropologist who did his field work in a third world country…..

Rita cancelled a week on us before she broke the news. We were busy, and let time pass. And last week we spent some time away from home. By mid-March, I realized that it had been three weeks since any serious cleaning has gone on in our house. Three weeks of unvacuumed rugs, unswept floors, and the same sheets on the bed.

It was brought home to me when I walked in the door one lovely spring evening home from work, and, frankly….our house smelled dirty. I looked at my kitchen cabinets and realize there were food spills down the front of them. There were furry dust-bunnies the size of cats under our bed. In a porous house like ours, in a rural environment, dust and cobwebs and bugs accumulate, and when you share your home with a four-legged creature that sheds hair and walks in mud, you end up with quite a murky stew on your hardwood floors.

So after ten years of doing pretty much nothing beside daily dishwashing, I vowed to start a regimen of regular cleaning. It would be a timely change, since budget cuts had hit us as it did many that spring, and not paying a weekly housecleaner was a saving.

I signed up for the FlyLady email tips. I vowed to shine my sink! I knuckled down to clean our hardwood floors.

The funny thing is, I didn't really know how to keep house anymore. I had no engrained habits, no learned short-cuts, no timely tips. I didn’t know how often certain tasks were supposed to be done, and when to do them. I’d purchased scores of assorted mops, dusters, and cleaning implements for Rita over the years and never used them myself.

It was hopeless. I could barely keep up with the laundry, let alone the dog hair. By April, [The Man I Love] was going through Angie's List and newspaper want ads. So....into our lives soon came a new dynamic. Tune in later for an introduction to our new housecleaners.

To be Continued.....