Something like 40% of all divorces are the result of a major moving, building or renovation project, and we discovered there's a good reason for that. There's nothing like the combo of total exhaustion, filth, physical chaos, and a seemingly endless string of tiny little collaborative decisions to get two people really up each other's noses. So we took a nice, long break.
In the meantime I finished my show (you can see what the New York Times thought about it HERE and what Eva Yaa Asentewaa thought about it HERE), we fixed up my old apartment, and started planning for (insert bad James Bond music) PHASE TWO.
My apartment sold in November, which was good, because without the money from that sale we would not have been able to afford (bad James Bond music) PHASE TWO.
Katherine is going to post cogently about the Phase Two plans, so I'll just say the basic idea is this: live on parlor floor while renovating garden floor. Move down to garden floor and live there while renovating parlor floor.
Here's the catch though - the garden floor was full of the accumulation of about fifteen years' worth of crap in boxes. Each box needed to be gone through, the two or three treasures we couldn't be parted from extracted, and the rest disposed of. That last is actually a non-trivial task in New York City if you, like us, prefer not to put perfectly usable stuff you don't want in the garbage but would rather find it a new home. (Which is why we have not let our mothers empty their garages into our apartment, despite their desperate desire to do so.)
Here's the other catch - the basement, where the boxes of treasured crap that had been painstakingly separated from the non-treasured crap needed to be stored, was an unholy disaster area.
The ceiling was falling down, raining showers of crumbled sheetrock and resting sheets of metal against live electrical conduit and plumbing pipes. And there was an inexplicable inch of very fine dirt on the pitted and uneven concrete floor. That needed to be addressed before our boxes of crap could be stored down there so we could start destroying the rooms the boxes were in.Which is mostly what I did in December.
The ceiling is just going to get shored up, because taking it down is just too ginormous a job and, given the risk of electrocution and/or flooding, should be done by someone who knows what the hell they're doing, ie, not us.
I did clean the floor though, and bag up all the dirt and debris:
That was a pretty disgustingly filthy job, and big thanks go out to my old and dear friend Lynne Kuemmel, who was visiting from LA and volunteered (despite my warnings) to help. Lynne, you rock and I love you, and I hope you don't develop lung cancer from whatever the hell we were breathing yesterday, but if you do, I promise to come empty your bedpan and bring you peanut butter sandwiches.
So this is our basement now, with swept floor and neatly organized boxes full of treasured crap,and this is me, post-sweeping-and-dirt-bagging, and ready for a nap.
