Monday, February 26, 2007
My quirky new home
When you first enter the house, it seems normal enough. Nice hardwood floors everywhere, nice smooth ceiling (I HATE that popcorn shit that some houses have up there) and a decent sized kitchen. However as you make your way around the house, you start to notice a certain obsession with hooks that the previous residents had…
- Behind the front door
- Behind the bathroom door
- Next to the shower
- In the kitchen
- Behind one bedroom door
- In the other bedroom (don’t you think my sweety has made excellent use of that one?)
- In the entryway as you walk through the front door
But at least hooks are fairly useful. They may be everywhere, but we don’t mind them. What’s bizarre is when you walk into the living room and notice the transition from wood-floor house to cave.
You can’t really see it, but the rest of the house is very normal looking. The strip of wood you see at the bottom is the dividing line between hardwood floor and that funky concrete floor. This had to have been part of the outside patio at some point. I mean, look at it! Does that weird floor surface belong indoors?? But wait, we’ve got our very own stripper pole now, so that makes it all worth it, right?
Here’s another view:
That couch came with the house. If you look carefully you can see that it’s covering an even weirder recessed area, like steps down to some other part of the yard. There are even cement blocks holding up the rear corners of the couch:
Probably the most annoying part of the whole house is the pile of rocks in the corner:
It’s not just a pile of rocks, there are three metal rods sticking straight up from the cement. WTF? They couldn’t clip them shorter, or even bend them down so as not to provide some kind of weird Mortal Kombat surface for killing people? These rocks aren’t removeable either. Well some of them are, but the rocks along the edges of this… structure… are cemented into place like a campfire ring. It makes this space completely useless.
Which is unacceptable. We have a LOT of crap to stuff into this house. We got rid of a lot of stuff, but we still need every available crevice. That means no wasted corners. We have a space-saving computer desk that would fit perfectly in this corner. But all those rocks and metal rods and shit made it impossible to put any kind of furniture there. It was quite infuriating. However, being the higher-thinking primates that we are, we found a way. Behold the fruits of our ingenuity:
My sweety found a piece of leftover granite slab we had from the remodeling of our ex-house. I took a hammer and banged on the metal rods until they were bent to one side. I adjusted the rocks as best as I could to form a flat, somewhat stable surface. The weight of the granite helped the stability a lot. Cement blocks are all the rage in this house, so of course I had to use one to hold up one corner. Note the clever use of floppy disks to achieve the perfect height.
Very frankensteinish and reminiscent of poor college student days when I used milk crates for shelving. But dammit we were proud of this accomplishment! The whole room is fairly dim all the time anyway so you can’t really see it well. Bit by bit we are beating this place into submission making this place into our cozy new home.
(17) Comments • Permalink
Categories: • Home Improvement