There's a Hole in the Roof

Some HUGE quadruped--I could hear it sniffing! I could hear its fur!--thumped and shuffled in the attic above my head, rattling my ceiling. Mice teethe and scramble in the bedroom walls all winter, but mice this was not. I phoned the handymen saying, "I think there's a hole in my roof." Before they got there I checked the Internet and learned that if there's a raccoon there's almost always a nest with little ones crying and squeaking, and getting them out requires professional pest controllers trapping them and releasing them 10 miles away. I didn't hear any crying, but because I'm so often 100 percent wrong when I self-diagnose house problems I figured 1) there was 100 percent chance there was no hole in my roof and 2) that there were baby raccoons I didn't hear. It's so great to be me.

The handymen came with their ladder, checked the roof, and found Something Not Human had pulled off a patch of hardware cloth--not "cloth" at all, but flexible metal--at a juncture between roof levels. There was indeed a hole in my roof. I was ecstatic to be right. Pete and Tim stuffed the hole with more hardware cloth and screwed down more on top. "If it's a squirrel or raccoon," said Pete, "it's usually out and about during the day." Haven't heard anything but mice ever since.

People's Dream Houses

The local paper printed a recent survey from Yahoo Real Estate about what U.S. home buyers want, even in these days "when one in three Americans knows someone who has experienced a foreclosure" (the way one in three Americans "knows someone who had crabs"). The least wanted features today are: gated communities, urban locations, and castle-style homes (!). The most wanted home features are:

• Green/energy-efficient 50 percent
• Building custom home 38 percent
• Water views 38 percent
• Mountain views 32 percent
• Suburban home 31 percent
• Near the beach 27 percent
• Cottage in the woods 20 percent

I was pleased to see "cottage in the woods" made the list and that one-fifth of all folks wish they could live like me.

The Rain Barrel Solution

Well water is so darn hard it grays my skin and hair. Recent rains also made the water stinky. I thought, get a softener, a purifier. After spending the evening with Culligan et al., turns out that water gets softened by pumping it through salt, or, the "salt-free" alternative, potassium.

Laundry and dishwater here drain off the limestone cliff twenty foot down into The Secret Pond, right now chock-full of Spring Peepers, and I'll be dad-blamed if I'll salt and shrivel them and everything around them. Besides, there's no room for two tanks and 40-lb. bags of salt, and needless to say there ain't several thousand dollars.

I could get a counter-top water distiller if I had a countertop and lots of wattage to keep the thing steaming -- and if I wanted an all-year, 24-hour Turkish bathhouse in place of a kitchen.

Bottled water is a choice, but not for showers or laundry. Reverse osmosis is slow, and 4 or 5 gallons of water are wasted for every osmosis gallon you get.

Then I remembered my granddad in Park Falls, WI, in the early 1960s, had a rain barrel. I lined two 5-gallon paint buckets with trash bags and now after it's rained I have soft water, the old-fashioned way, to sponge off with or to stick my head into post-shampoo. Yeah, it's cold. But it's natural, cheap, and I aint no sissy.

A Lesson in Warmth

The Divine cabin is well-built; it’s just that it’s 70 years old, with two tacked-on rooms built in 1969 and 1991 – and the doors are a bit warped, and the windows old, loose or off, or single-pane (no storm window). Spring, summer, and fall here are glorious, but I’ve always dreaded winter.

Until David came last week to winterize the place. Oh, I’d always done the plastic-over-windows stuff, but I still spent last winter straddling the electric heater just to keep warm – wearing hat, legwarmers and fingerless gloves. I’d stand there like that to do my reading, telling myself, You wanna live out here – you have to be tough.

Well, this prince among men caulked up the window frame that let winter winds whistle over my bed. And he did bunch of other stuff, like help me plastic the windows, and fixed my old furnace’s thermostat. There's a level inside filled with mercury called the heat anticipator. The level wasn’t level. Just a tap fixed it and corrected the whole system. Won’t be using so much propane.

I’d been shutting off rooms to keep warmth in some and cold in others, and David pointed out that because there’s only one air-return – located in the living room –I should open the interior doors to keep warmth circulating.

Then he weatherstripped the doors, some warped to the tune of half-inches and inches – “hellacious,” in David’s assessment. I could feel the difference right away.

He had to go shopping with his sister, so he left me the caulking gun to do some other, smaller jobs. Thank you, David, for your knowledge, advice, common sense, and skill – you should see how flawlessly he caulked! Thank you for the warm house!

Hired Help

I heard that Debbie is decent and honest and "a cleanin' fool," so I phoned. My house, at any level I'd have to stretch to, has not been well or fully cleaned for over a year. She has no car so I picked her up in the city.

She was great. She scrubbed the kitchen ceiling and fan, the walls, cabinets inside and out and tops, back of the stove and beneath the sink. She took down the kitchen wall clock and re-set it -- it had been an hour off since late March. Also dusted walls, mopped floors, vacuumed, etc. Total of eight hours. All the while drinkin' coffee and Pepsi. Meanwhile I mowed the lawn, pulled weeds, cut back some creeping poison ivy, and cleaned out the garage.

I woke up this morning and thought, Glory be, my kitchen was clean, finally clean enough to suit me. We had even folded up the living-room daybed -- a job I couldn't do alone. In the bed position it only reminded me how much of 2007 I had spent laid up with three torn muscles that are now so scarred up there's places I can't stretch to.

Debbie has long Missouri roots and grew up near the Black River. For a long time she was a housekeeper for the elderly, she said, until government funding for that was cut. She was also caretaker for her grandmother, who died last year at 91. I worried that she might secretly hate cleaning and me for asking and paying her to do it. Oh no. "Cleaning is my livelihood," she said, and she offered to come back and clean for a day whenever I wanted, monthly or every other month. An irresistible thought.

I am over 50 and Debbie is the first hired housekeeper I have ever had, probably the first my squeaky-clean family has ever had in the three generations I know about. Thought long and hard before finally deciding there was no shame in hiring help.

Toothpicks and Tarpaper

Not far from here some farmer sold an acre along the highway to a real-estate developer. The developer shaved all the trees off, and in record time, using toothpicks and tarpaper, erected another of those "dream houses," aka "McMansions." It has columns out front and a little treeless yard. It has never had an occupant, not in four years.

Nearby, within sight, are three acres of pasture in -- get this -- a floodplain. There a developer built yet another dream house, dressing it up with curtains and porch lights. Every summer for four years now, the hopeful real-estate agent opens up one door of the three-car garage and parks a car in it, and puts a kids' trampoline in the back yard. But you never see any kids, because there aren't any parents dumb enough to buy a dream-house in a floodplain.

On a ridge just above it, visible only in winter when the trees are transparent, is a huge rustic barnlike "dream house" with a wraparound porch and dramatic rows of Anderson windows. The buyers wanted to run a bed-and-breakfast in the nice oak-and-hickory Missouri woods. Anyone could have told them that city folk on weekends don't want to bed-and-breakfast in the woods. They want to be able to walk up the street to have a latte and buy antiques. This dream-house was advertised for sale in the paper, for $550,000. It's still for sale, for $450,000.

Now, you and I know that most people can't pay $450,000 for a house, or even $300,000. Even $200,000 is a little steep for most families. And the economists are wondering how it happened that "the bottom fell out of the housing market."

On Cleaning a Country House

Every Saturday we kids worked with Mom until her place was hospital-clean. In fact I didn't see a truly dirty house until I was in my teens. But no way I can keep clean this half-log-cabin half-concrete-garage. It was built in 1930. The door and window sashes aren't true anymore. Nothing can be sealed. Fuss and scrambling occur in a certain closet, so I open it only to throw in a turquoise-colored cube that poisons mice. Mud, leaves, gravel, all get tracked in. Creatures get in: wasps, crickets, ants, wormy things with a thousand legs, sleek little skinks -- one who settled in the house finally needed a name, so I called him Harrison, and grew fond of him. I have a great stone fireplace but spiders live in the cracks and declivities, build webs from ceiling to lamps, have spider babies, and cast little papery silver capsules onto the mantel and floor. And dust/pollen, from the trees, that sifts in and covers every flat surface with its gauze.

Did I mention tar? Scuffmarks from boots? Motor oil? Faucets caked with hardened lime?

They say the way to clean is to prioritize. So, first, I try to evacuate the place. I warn my unwelcome guests with, "You have fifteen seconds to get out of my sight," and hope they listen. I sweep daily, vacuum up their webs and lairs about every fortnight, and mop the floors and clean the bathroom each month (unless company is coming), and in truly ambitious moments I will dust (although it's like the myth of Sisyphus), and pour baking soda and vinegar down the drains, and dribble corrosive on the calcifications around the faucets and then scrape them clean. But I have accepted there will never be even half a moment when this house will be Martha Stewart spotless and under control. There's too much of life here; no matter how I try I can't stamp it out. And I like it. That's why I live in a country house.