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A red door for you for Valentine's Day. It's the vintage hollow-core, peeling version of my heart. Happy Valentine's Day!

OK, it's not for you. It's for Laurie, who is looking at 40s/50s-style doors, and I'm posting it along with some images of the exterior of the front of the house where it resides. These were taken before we moved in, and I've already -- as you may recall -- ripped out the christmas tree and mums and porch light. We're working on the rest. Alas, the house is still baby-ass beige and will be for a while.



For more on modern doors, check out Laurie's post and David Erwin (of Erwin House fame)'s response, in which he reveals he is starting a modern door repro business. Wow. So I guess my heart's name is "The Grover." I always suspected it.

army of the upright deploys to kitchen

Virginia Woolf, in her under-read and excellent essay "On Being Ill" (1925), muses on the aesthetics of illness. She writes of how, as one lies prone and feverish, one becomes aware of the incessant passage of time as clouds grow and morph across the sky, and roses bud and bloom and endlessly unfurl their petals. When one is ill, the little things become fantastical and profound.

"Meanwhile," she says, "with the heroism of the ant or the bee, however indifferent the sky or disdainful the flowers, the army of the upright marches to battle."

I look at the pictures I snapped from my bed a couple of days ago and am glad, I have to say, that I've rejoined the army of the upright. As much as I like staring at knobs, I'm really DONE with being sick and its profound, useless, dreamy musing.

Plus, we've got ants, Virginia, heroic or not, I can't tell.

They're coming in from a tiny hole in the monstrous caulking, applied with a kitchen spatula under the bizarre kitchen window sill. Looks like this weekend I'll be removing said monster caulk and continuing the job I've been fearing: painting the kitchen.

Our kitchen window doesn't open. The wood vent on the bottom of the window (still visible in the exterior picture above), was boarded over. Now we have an ugly window frame around a simple, ugly window and a board. The next step is to figure out how to de-uglify the whole thing with a new window. But first, we have to get rid of the ants and the caulk.

Now I'm ready to go back to bed and ponder clouds.

in which i suffer for my art

Last night, I made the mistake of going out to a play and drinks afterward with a big group of people I didn't know well. The evening was really fun, and I mainlined cough drops and kleenex so I wouldn't hack up a lung in the theater. Unfortunately, I talked for most of the night and drank a Negroni and ate a slice of pizza and, well, when I woke up at 4 am, my throat was on fire and my head was exploding. I've almost lost my voice and my chest feels heavy and constricted. In short, I'm getting worse.

I'm not doing too well today. We went to a small antique fair near our house, walking in the drizzle, and afterward I crawled back into bed and haven't left since. I'm at that "sick of being sick" point, but I've pushed too hard, and the only remodeling that's going to happen this weekend is me editing the clutter out of these photos, taken from my bed.

Please enjoy the birdseye view of such delights as my "Still Life with Masochism and Drug Paraphernalia," two views of my kitsch faux-stained glass lamps, the bakelite knob on one of our dressers, several extremely unflattering shots of me, the lock on my grandmother's cedar chest, my curtains, the corner of the molding above the closet, and introducing Boris, my semi-removable chest implant and all around man Friday. Mr. Reluctant appears as a rock-n-roll groupie and is responsible for washing the sheets and making the bed (all while I lay dying in it). Now that's impressive.

fortification fridays - Manly Chicken Soup

Yes, it's another chicken soup recipe. I'm on a chicken soup kick. I'm deathly ill (ok, it's just a bad cold) and the only thing that sounds good is chicken soup. Too ill to cook, really, but if I could clone myself and make that person healthy, I'd make me my recipe for Manly Chicken Soup, a seriously intense version of chicken soup with roasted meat and vegetables.

Have a great weekend, intrepid remodelers, and stay well.

Manly Chicken Soup

Kitchen needs: Working range and oven (you could use a slow cooker after roasting the meat and veggies, but it has to be a huge one)
Serves: A houseful of sick people

This soup will kill the plague. It is a pain to make but emerges glossy and dark gold, redolent with meaty goodness. This is not your wan, pale, low-fat, girly girl chicken soup. This is manly chicken soup. Make a huge pot and give it away to sick people across the land. All measurements are approximate and the soup changes each time you make it. Feel free to use some or all of these root vegetables or use chicken thighs/wings/carcasses. I usually just buy what’s cheapest.

Meat:
One big “supersaver” pack of chicken legs and a couple of bone-in breasts.
A beef soup bone or two.

Root vegetables:
Four parsnips
Two small turnips
Four carrots and/or one large rutabaga
Two leeks
An onion, halved and stuck with two whole cloves

Herbs and spices:
A handful of parsley
Two bay leaves
Some dill
Pepper corns

First, brown the meat and vegetables in the oven. Preheat oven to 450 degrees. I use two pans: one for the chicken legs and one for the breasts/soup bone/vegetables. The oven smokes a bit, so turn on your fan.

Add the chicken legs to one roasting pan. In the second roasting pan, add the onion halves, the soup bone and the chicken breasts. Set aside half of the other root vegetables for adding later in the soup. The other half should be cut into very large chunks and added to the second roasting pan.

Add a bit of vegetable oil to both pans and toss ingredients, to minimize sticking. Roast until significant browning occurs. Watch the vegetables carefully and turn them after about 5 minutes, since they will brown much more quickly in the fat than the meat, and remove them when they are browned. The chicken legs should be turned after 10-15 minutes.

When large-chunk vegetables are brown, add them to a very large soup pot with the herbs and spices, and fill about 1/2 full with water.

Add the chicken legs and beef bone to the pot when browned and start cooking soup on a medium-low burner. It doesn’t matter if they are fully cooked, since you’ll be cooking them in the stock. You just want some nice browning action. Scrape the drippings from the pan with a wooden spoon and add them, too. Add more water, if necessary, to fill the pot about 2/3 full.

As for the breasts, roast them until done (see above image). Alternatively, throw them in the pot with the other stuff and poach them in the stock. Basically, you are using the breasts for soup meat, so you don’t want to overcook them. When completely cooked, cool breasts, then shred flesh and set aside in a covered bowl for adding to the soup when serving. Moisten with a little broth if they get dry. Throw the denuded breast bones in stock pot.

If you’d like to set aside more chicken, remove a few of the chicken legs from the broth after about 30 minutes, and add the meat to your meat bowl and throw the bones back in the stock pot.

Half-cover the pot and simmer soup for about three hours, more if you like. Do not, for the love of God, bring soup to a boil. There is NO NEED for a cloudy stock, and boiling will always make a cloudy stock. Keep heat on low the entire time and skim foam and fat that floats to the top.

About an hour before the soup is done, make noodles or matzoh balls according to your favorite recipe. I add cayenne, chopped parsley and celery leaves to my matzoh balls for a kick and color.

The rest of the vegetables should be cut into pretty bite-sized pieces and added to the soup with salt and pepper to taste about 30 minutes prior to serving. Save some celery leaves and parsley to garnish soup bowls, if you like.

Delicious roasted chicken breast image courtesy of the manly men at Meathenge.

chairman of the board

Me: I got a message from Scholar Craft. He says my chairs are 20-30 years old.

Mr. R: Oh?

Me: Yes, and they cost $32 new apiece.

Mr. R: heh heh heh

Mr. R: And they’re a value even at $32.

Me: Oh, you managed to get that out the second time without laughing?

Mr. R: I hope you’re not planning to buy more of those chairs…

Me: I am. I’m planning to furnish the whole house with them.

Mr. R: …because four is enough.

Me: They’re very comfortable.

Mr. R: Yeah, if you’re in elementary school.

Mr. R: [thinks] If you want to get something good from elementary school, get those big triangular pillows, thanks.

Mr. R: Do you even know what I’m talking about?

Me: All I know is that I’m going to dig into our living room floor and make a library pit…Do YOU even know what I’m talking about?

now we're cookin'

Our gas stove is installed! The guys were blazing fast. There was already a stub under the house, so pulling the gas line through the kitchen floor was no big deal. They did a great job with the line, and cleaned up after themselves.

There's just one problem: they had to drill the hole in the floor a few inches away from the wall, since there was a floor joist there. So my stove isn't flush against the wall. Any ideas about closing off the gap? We're planning to remove the cupboards over the stove and install a stainless steel backsplash and a chimney vent, so I wonder if it is possible to somehow integrate a little shelf into that. Actually, now that I'm typing, it sounds like an impossible idea, but it doesn't hurt to ask.

In any case, I'm thrilled to finally have a functional stove, especially one that's gas-fired and brand new. Now, if I could just shake the ick that has invaded my lungs and ears and head, I'd be a happy little remodeler. I'm not at the stage Mr. Reluctant was (yet?) when he told me all he wanted was to die, but I spent most of the afternoon and evening in bed yesterday, and I'm seriously considering returning there now.

knobs!

The guys are here putting in the gas line and I'm trying not to have a heart attack, so I will make myself useful by providing for the blogosphere a pictorial history of the sad story of knobs in our house.

I almost cry when I see the photos other housebloggers post of their old hinges, knobs, and hardware. Restored doorknobs, solid brass and handsome and fitted to nice doorplates on solid wood doors, in particular, make me green with envy. Somewhere in the tawdry history of my house, most of what little ornamentation there was originally had been stripped -- the doors were robbed of almost all of their original knobs. Several of the doors themselves were replaced by hollow core substitutes. So we are left with situations like our front door:

That's the cheapest, shiniest bath door knob available. On our front door.

These are what at first glance seem cool old 50s-style handles on our built-ins. But no. They are cheap silverized reproductions that are peeling and rusting. To add insult to injury, the ones in the back room are cheap brass-ized reproductions.
Oh, you like the mixed brass and silver look? I'm sure you'd love our former kitchen knobs, then. Most were silver (cheap, peeling, various finishes), but the one row of drawers that was painted beige had cheap, peeling brass knobs. Classy. One of the first things we did was replace them with probably cheaper Ikea powder-coated nickel knobs (six for two bucks) that match and will last at least until we can get new cabinets. (I'm kind of making fun of myself and beginning food photography with the picture of knobs in my vintage aqua candy bowl.)

Also, note that the once-beige drawers are now the same color white -- thank you Sherwin Williams' color matching service, Kilz, and mastering a fear of painting laminate cabinet facings.

And why, pray tell, is this wall heater knob on our window sill? Because it doesn't fit the wall heater, of course! The previous owners replaced the original knob with something that doesn't fit, and instead of returning to the store to get the proper knob, they just left it on the window sill when not in use.

And last but not least, the shower knob. On my clothes washer hot water feed.
It's a Moen, so you know it's top quality...er, yeah. And thanks for patching the hole, too, guys. When the washer broke the first time I used it, being a lifer renter, I had no idea that the this contraption was even part of the plumbing, since the cold water line had a regular knob. It was like "stump the chump" for dummies.

And for extra credit, the top photo is the finials for our bedroom overhead lights -- my replacement is on the left.