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viviti

Part II

The House Today (2003)

The Country Wasn't Like I Remembered,
But Then Again, I was Only A Year Old
When We Moved Away To Houston


"I'll Take You Home

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The Last Fairwell"

Rebuilds And Add Ons

The twelve by sixteen foot room that we added to the back of the house and the eight foot wide thirty two foot long covered porch across the back of the house are finished. The room is filled with light with a double window on the north side, another window on the west side and the double French doors opening onto the new back porch. One corner of the rom is for me the computer and my main research books and the rest for our family room. Of course the room isn't huge, but it's fine for Nellie and I. When we have a family gathering the men tend to collect in here and the ladies in the living room. That works pretty well as it seperates the baby and cooking talk from the football and old cars talk.

Nellie and I completely gutted the old main bathroom to where I could stand on the bare ground between the un-sheetrocked walls, look up at the bare rafters and out the non-existant back wall onto the back porch. It was worth it though. Now there is a new sub floor and one piece vinyl floor. There is a white ceramic tile wall half way up behind the pedestal wash basin, commode and Nellie's claw foot bathtub. She bought the tub about six years ago, had it refinished about 3 years ago and now, finally she soaks in it every night

I made a mistake when I bought the windows for the new room and bought white frame, divided light, double pane windows. All I heard for months afterward was how tacky the house looked with 2 different styles of windows. A lot of the old wood siding was beginning to rot or split. The twenty year old siding (From a former addition) was even worse shape then the 42 year old siding. So when we sided the new room and back wall we installed Hardie Plank. A 50 year guarantee and reduced insurance rates almost as good as a brick house is hard to pass up. If you didn't know, Hardie Plank is a siding product made of cement and wood fibers and won't burn, rot or split. Anyway we decided we would be money ahead if we went ahead and replaced the rest of the old siding and insulated the walls at the same time. At the same time, while the siding was off, we replaced the rest of the windows with the more efficient double pane windows. For the past few months the electric has been about fifty dollars less then the same period last year even with all the over 100 degree days we have been having. Now I can see that if we live long enough the improvements will pay for themselves, but I'll never admit to Nellie that it doesn't look tacky anymore.

Another thing that looked tacky was the concrete block the house sits on. If you remember, the house sits on a slight hillside. The southeastern corner sit on two blocks while the opposite northwest corner sits on five blocks. That's a lot of blocks showing so we covered the foundation with white lattice work and it looks 100% better. If you don't believe it get on the web page listed at the bottom of the column, go to page II, then to the “LIFE NOW, IN PINE ISLAND page and see a picture of the house in Humble, one just after the move and a current one. While you are there go to page VI and then to “REMEMBERING 1945” page to see a picture of Nellie and one of Corky fifty years ago.

Nellie and I put up a chain link fence around the back yard. We have to make the place safe for our adopted boy, Doodlebug. Isn't that the most unnatural name you ever heard for a dachshund. We already have the panels of wood picket fence to enclose the front yard when I get off of house arrest next week. I had a cataract operation two weeks ago and you aren't supposed to pick anything up or bend over for three weeks afterward. It don't make a lot of sense except that when you strain or bend over it increases the blood pressure in your head and of course in the eyes. Anyway we don't want the new lens to pop out.

I built a nice chicken house with the old siding we took off the house and fenced in a nice yard for them. The chicken house even has a couple of in the back for light. They were old ones that were removed when we redid the house. Of course I tell the neighbors the windows are for the new window air conditioners I am going to install so the hens will be comfortable. We went over to the Fields Store area and bought six young laying hens and daughter Becky gave us 14 chickens about three months old so we are feeding twenty chickens and getting about three eggs a day. I figure that makes our eggs cost about $5.00 a dozen.

The Back Of The House After Remodeling


Remodeling After 43 Years

For all of the readers who have been waiting with baited breath for the next exciting chapter about moving a whole house to the country, it's here. Once again we are living in the house that we had moved from Humble to Pine Island.

I know it sounds like a big brag, but it's really true. The house looks like it just growed up here. It gets pretty cold on this bald hill side and it didn't have any insulation in the walls of the old section. Well, it was a choice of tearing the sheet rock off the walls or the siding off the outside to put insulation in. In case you don't remember, when I added the room back on the rear of the house, I fouled up. When I bought the windows for the new room I picked out white aluminum double pane window since they would be on the north side and make it warmer. Big mistake, how was I supposed to know that a house would look tacky with two different type windows and everyone who passed by would laugh at my mistake. Besides, the back part was covered with Hardie Plank (A cement type board with almost the same fire rating as brick) and the front and most of the sides were covered with old wood siding that was getting pretty raunchy looking. So, we decided to replace the rest of the old wood siding with Hardie Plank and we could insulate the rest of the walls at the same time. Now all of you men know that a man cannot live comfortably in a house where the wife thinks the windows look tacky so we replaced the old aluminum colored one with the new white aluminum double pane ones.

Now, don't get the wrong idea, all the things I am talking about took place over a couple of years. Then I was told that it didn't look like a country house without a white picket fence. I thought a country place was supposed to have a barbed wire fence. I was quickly outvoted and now we have a white picket fence with a rose arbor over the gate.

Now it's warm inside and the house definitely doesn't look tacky with all the windows matching. Now it's painted a pale yellow with white window and door trim and gingerbread across the front porch. Oh yes, the porch. We tore off the old three foot wide front steps and built a new 6 feet wide set with extra large treads and fancy banisters on each side. If we only had a second story and bigger house it would look like something from “Gone With The Wind”.

Then of course we would find a few shingle tabs in the yard after a good wind and a couple of small water spots appeared on the ceiling. Did you know that a tin roof only costs half again as much as a composition shingle roof.. Of course the kicker is that a shingle roof may last ten years and a metal one should last about 50 years. Besides, a metal roof makes a house look more country. Oh yes, lest I forget we did get a reduction in our house insurance premium for the new siding and roof. Besides, now we don't have to worry about fireworks landing on the roof and we won't find shingle tabs in the yard anymore. Another plus is that if you put the metal roof over the old shingle roof you don't get the sound of rain unless you walk out on the porch. What may become a much bigger plus is the fact that our electric bill was between 25 and 40 dollars a month cheaper this past summer after the new roof was installed.

Almost forgot, we have about a dozen hens and a couple of rosters. We averaged about 8 eggs a day during the summer, but that has dropped to a couple a day since could weather blew in. Of course Nellie is allergic to eggs and she won't let me have but 5 or 6 a week because some idiot invented cholesterol and it's not good for old people. Disregarding the fact that I am still only 21 years old on the inside, the outside will be 74 in March and she thinks we should go by the outside age for medical purposes.

We also have put either white picket or chain link fence around about an acre of the place planted a dozen trees, put in a small garden and over a hundred feet of flower beds.

Just think, if we were still in Humble, I would be sitting in the recliner watching cable most of the day. That reminds me, I still have to start on the new beds on each side of the rose arbor.

The Chickens Are Gone

Well the chickens are finally gone and the chicken yard fence is torn down.. We gave part of them, including Henny Penny, to the neighbor behind us and the rest to our daughter in Houston. Henny Penny was the first hen we bought and Nellie's favorite. That way she is close enough that Nellie can visit. Having chickens and fresh eggs every day seemed so “country” and such a good idea when we moved this old house to Pine Island and it only cost about $15.00 a month to feed the chickens. They did pretty good and we would average getting about 6 or 8 eggs per day. What a way to save money and have fresh eggs every day. Besides that, having chickens and a little vegetable garden made me feel that much closer to Great grandpa Milam who first purchased and started farming this land way back in 1897

Then Nellie's allergy to eggs got worse and she started getting sickish after the second bite of egg. Then as Doctor Granny, she decreed that with my hypertension and the stents holding a couple of arteries open, I shouldn't eat eggs more then twice a week. Besides that, we quickly learned that you have to walk out to the chicken yard and feed them every day. As the postal service says, “Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow, nor gloom of night shall deter the chicken feeder on his or her appointed rounds.” or something like that. It finally got to where Nellie and I tried to out wait each other to see who would finally get up and go feed the chickens. Of course that didn't work very long because the chicken couldn't see how to eat and we couldn't see inside the nests after dark. Just think how exciting it would be if you reached into a dark nest box to get a handful of eggs and grabbed a handful of chicken snake.

Don't even start about those fancy chicken feeders that will hold 10 or 20 pounds at a time. To begin with, every chicken thinks that only one type of grain in the feed tastes special so they have to scratch around in it with their feet looking for that special treat. That means half of the feed ends up on the ground and is only considered eatable when the feeder is empty and they are approaching starvation. Second, every sparrow within 5 miles is hollering to his friends, “Free Lunch over at Poverty Acres.” Third, and even more important is the fact that you need to gather the eggs every day so you will know which ones are the freshest.

Now we figure the real cost for eggs. We actually use about 6 eggs a week or 2 dozen a month which means we give 15 dozen eggs a month, more or less, to the kids families and a couple of Lodge Brothers. Of course we can't charge our kids or the Brothers for eggs when we have 4 or 5 cartons and a big coffee can full in the refrigerator and today's collection on the table, that we desperately need to get rid of. OK, figure 2 dozen eggs a month divided into $15.00 for feed means our costs for eggs is $7.50 per dozen.

Of course, you have to realize that price doesn't include the capitol expenditures required to build the chicken house and the fence. Well, maybe I should only count the cost of the fencing since it ended up in the dumpster. The chicken house with the nests, roosts and feed room removed makes a great equipment shed for the little Massy Ferguson tractor and the Craftsman riding mower. It's also a good place to store the rakes, hoes and other yard and garden equipment. Especially since it's right next to the garden.

Adding about half of the old chicken yard to our little vegetable garden will add some tomatoes and squash and other stuff to the vegetables we have to give away this summer because we can't eat them all. Another plus for the extra gardening area is that it should be very fertile.

I guess I am just a romantic because I still miss hearing the rooster crowing in the mornings and the old hens singing every time they laid an egg.

Living With Freeways

Freeways, yuck. The only thing Freeways are good for is allow big city dwellers to get from one big city to another big city. For us country people who live in small rural communities like Pine Island or small towns like Hempstead and Waller, freeways are the pits. Freeways were originally built to allow traffic to move in a rapid manner. Does it work, un uh. Like today, I had an appointment with a doctor at the Kelsey Seybold Clinic on Holcomb Blvd. this morning. The clinic is about 55 miles from here. That means at 55 miles per hour with freeway all the way to South Main St. it should have taken 1 hour to get there. Let's see, from 8:15 am to 10:00 am it took an hour and 45 minutes.

You can't blame traffic either. That was one of the fastest times we have in a long time. I couldn't hardly believe it when we got on the West Loop, traffic was moving 60 and 70 miles an hour most of the time between Hwy. 290 and South Main St. Of course I was only going 55 mph if there are any law officers reading this column. Last week I had an appointment at the Medical Towers on South Main St. (which is a mile or so closer ) and it took over 2 hours. A truck stalled in a middle lane of the West Loop and an accident had been cleared on Hwy. 290 near 43rd. St.. Of course everyone had to slow down to gawk at a wrecker and a damaged car sitting on the shoulder.

When we lived in The Humble area way back before I retired, my office was at the Eastex Freeway and the North Loop. When the Eastex Freeway first opened it took me 15 minutes from home door to office door. When I retired from the city in the early 80's, my best time was 45 minutes.

Freeways are also the killers of small towns and the things that make small town living desirable. Wait a minute, there is another small town killer that we call Wally World (Wal Mart). Take Hempstead for instance, we have a very small Wally World store that is basically designed and stocked for the convenience of the college students at Prairie View University. If we really want to do some serious shopping at Wally World, we have to drive to Brenham and shop at the Super Wally World. Do Wal Mart stores really kill small towns like Hempstead? There is only 1 clothing store still open, no drug stores left, no jewelry stores and 1 tiny plant nursery. Actually there is only 1 drug store left in the whole of Waller County.

As usual I have digressed, we were talking about freeways. Since the freeway opened, bypassing Hempstead and Waller, the Sonic drive inns in both towns has closed and opened new ones beside the freeway. McDonalds in Hempstead has opened a new one next to the new Exxon Truck Stop beside the freeway. In Waller, built beside the Freeway since it opened, is a new Jack In The Box, Domino's Pizza, Arby's Roast Beef , A Donut Shop, Popeye's Fried Chicken, County Line Bar-B-Que, an Exxon station, a Love's Truck Stop and a Shell Station. Waller has lost about 3 antique stores and Hempstead a couple since the freeway opened. The Dairy Queen and a couple of cafes in Waller have closed down. Another problem, at least to me, is the new subdivisions that are popping up like mushrooms between Brenham and the west belt around Houston. It takes 3 or 4 weeks to get the light company or phone company to send a crew out to install anything new in Pine Island because they are so busy trying to keep up with construction the new subdivisions. It took us 3 weeks to have the electric meter removed and the wires disconnected from a small building we wanted to move (that will be another story). We have been waiting a couple of months now for the light company to remove the unused electric pole from our yard.

Even worse is the fact that the people moving to these new subdivisions are destroying the thing they are moving out here for. Almost every new family in the area means another car on the freeway. Build a 200 home subdivision and you add 150 cars on the freeway. 10 subdivision and we have added 1,500 cars to the freeway. With 2 or 3 car lengths between each one, that translates into a line of cars over 20 miles long.

Instead of getting away from the big city with it's inherent problems, people are bringing it with then. I remember moving to Glen Lee subdivision near Humble to get away from the City of Houston. Everyone had 2 or 3 or even 6 lots and we had room to stretch. We were surrounded by shell streets and cow pastures. Now they have built about 50 Habitat For Humanity Houses on most of those empty lots and apartment projects are beginning to fill the cow pastures. Humble was a sleepy little town with all kinds of mom and pop stores on 1st Street and a Robbins Chevrolet dealership that would fit inside the show room of the current dealership.

Sometime it's hard to believe that progress is really progress???

Adventures With Imitation Wood

Here awhile back, Miss. Dixie wrote a column for this paper where she mentioned buying furniture made of “imitation wood”. That's what I usually call particleboard. It's really a big hunk of sawdust and glue that has been covered with a wood grain printed piece of plastic on any surface that will show.

Nellie and I drove down to the Lowe's store in Tomball the other day, looking for a small entertainment center. My old TV stand, made of “imitation wood” of course, had just about given up the ghost. The casters on the front corners slowly pushed the bottom shelf up till the front edge of the stand sagged about an inch and a half and was resting on the floor. Just about every morning Nellie would get up and look to see if the TV was laying on the floor. It did that about a year ago and being a number one repairman, I had pushed the shelf back down and drove 3 screws through the sides of the stand into the shelf on each side. Ha, I said, that'll last for years. Well if you know “imitation wood”, you know it doesn't pay much attention to screws or nails and the front of the stand was touching the floor again in less then a year.

Any way, we couldn't find an entertainment center that would fit our requirements at Lowe's. Just about every thing was 5 or 6 feet wide and would have held 2 TVs like ours and a couple of small ones on each side. We had already looked at Ikia and didn't find one there. Nellie remembered seeing one at a Target that she liked pretty good so we drove down Hwy. 249 to Jones Rd. and shopped the new Target store there. They had one that would work. It was only 5 ft. tall and about 2 and a half ft. wide. Of course it was made of “imitation wood”, but the price was about one third the price of real wood so what the heck. As Dixie once said it was in a little bitty card board box about 3 ft. by 2 ft. by 6 or 7 inches. As soon as I started pulling the box off the shelf, I discovered my mistake. That son of a gun weighed at least a hundred or so pounds and Nellie with her bad back and I with my bad everything couldn't have got it on top of the shopping cart in a week.

I caught a young feller that worked there and ask if someone could get the box to the check out and to the van for us. He was gone a few minutes and came back with a flat dolly. He quickly discovered he wasn't going to load it by him self and ask one of the lady workers to help. They got it off the shelf and quickly dropped it on the flat dolly pinching the boy's finger. He got another boy to help him wrestle it in the van.

The new helper was very macho and told the first boy to back off. He squatted down like they teach workers to lift with their legs and kind of wrapped his arms around the box. After 3 attempts to straighten up he turned to the first boy and said, OK, you can help if you want to.

When we got back to Hempstead, Nellie and I wrestled it out of the van and got it on the 2 wheel hand truck. With both of us pulling on the handle, we finally got it up the 5 steps and on the back porch where I wheeled it into the den, office, back room. I finally got it laying on the floor and the sides ripped open, exposing all 20 pieces and 2 bags of screws and small parts. The only problem was that the “imitation wood” side on the top of the stack was broken and unusable. It appeared that when the box was dropped on the flat dolly, it broke the “board”.

The next morning, we taped the box lid, got it on the hand truck, back down the steps and finally loaded back in the van. Target was very nice, even apologetic and sent a couple of young men out to get the old one and put a new one it in the van. Back to Pine Island and in the house. Four hours latter and we had a very attractive entertainment center, on the surface at least. Now, I'll be watching to see if it starts to lean in one direction or the other.

Almost forgot, that first night when the box was laying in the middle of the floor, I grabbed the remote, turned off the TV, then turned around in the recliner and turned off the lamp. I got up in the dark and took 1 step before I tripped over the box and fell on my face. Now you know why I hate “imitation wood”.

The Big Kitchen Makeover

For all of the readers who have been holding their breath while waiting for the next exciting chapter about Nellie and I moving to the country, house and all, it's here. It's been a pretty good while now since the last update and a lot has changed since then.

The main thing is the kitchen. Nellie wanted some new tile on her drain board because pieces of the old ones were beginning to peel off here and there. We had laid a mosaic tile pattern years ago, with 5 smaller pieces in each 4 inch square, on the drain board and back splash, for about a foot up. A couple of years ago we bought enough new tile to cover the drain board and all of the wall surface between the lower and upper cabinets. The old drain board under the tile was made out of plain boards laid across the top of the base cabinets, so it really needed to be replaced with solid sheets of waterproof plywood before setting the tile. Then I didn't want the tile to be stuck directly to the wood so I also bought enough cement board to cover the plywood. This past summer I ran out of excuses about planning how I was going to go about building the new base cabinets and she twisted my arm a little tighter.

I had already decided to rebuild the base cabinets because they had been built, added to and rebuilt over the past 40 years. Nellie had complained for years that she lost a large amount of storage space in the base cabinets in the two corners of the room because she couldn't reach back into the space without a long stick and insisted that I put lazy susans in both corners.

To prepare for the big project we had to have a temporary kitchen, so we put the electric skillet, toaster, crock pot, the silverware rack and a couple of plastic dishpans on the dinning table in the dinning room to serve as a temporary kitchen until the remodel was finished. All of the pots and pans, cleaning supplies and just plain old kitchen junk ended up under the table. There wasn't enough room for the microwave so we put it on a small table on the back porch.

Nellie did seem a little upset when I grinned each morning as she went out on the back porch in her gown to warm her coffee cream. It made me think of going outside the log cabin in the olden days to cook over the campfire. With a place for cooking taken care of I started tearing out the old base cabinets and plumbing.

The next thing was the damaged sheetrock. When we removed the tiles off the back splash, some of it pulled the paper covering off of the sheetrock here and there. We tore out all of the sheetrock from the floor to four feet up and replaced it with sheets of water resistant green sheetrock. First though, we moved a couple of wall plugs in the backspace area to make them more convenient for small appliances. About that time Nellie came up with the idea that the refrigerator which had been sticking out into the traffic pattern needed to be recessed into what had been the dishwasher space plus a little piece of cabinet.

By now, a couple of weeks had passed (Don't forget, I turned 75 years old at the end of March and have slowed down a little) and I decided there was no way I was going to build the cabinets so we went to Brenham and bought some unfinished oak units including two corner cabinets with lazy susans.

I know this is beginning to sound weird but the vinyl flooring was looking pretty sorry and had a couple of small puckers left over from moving the house when the motion popped up some of the floor leveling compound under the vinyl. So we bought enough Pergo snap lock flooring to replace the old floor.

The Colors Are Not That Bright
Effect Caused By Flash Camera

Nellie had been cooking on the dining table almost two months when I installed the last drawer pull and we had a new kitchen. We had replaced the floor, the lower cabinets, half of the sheetrock, the tile drain board and backsplash, the sink, all the plumbing and relocated the refrigerator, the dishwasher and a couple of wall plugs. Oh yes, all of the outlets are ground fault protected.

And, in my spare time I've rebuilt the back steps at the high end of the back porch. Remember the house is on the side of a hill. It's two 8 inch blocks and a 4 inch base block high on the east side and five 8 inch blocks and a 4 inch base block high on the west side) Now instead of seven steps straight down to the ground level, it's down three steps to a small platform, then a ninety degree left turn and on down three steps to the ground. Now if one of us trips on the way down you can't fall over three steps at the most instead of seven. In my other spare time I also put in a couple of new flower beds and some concrete patio block walkways.


One Of The New Flower Beds

I expect that in the pretty near future, Lowes and Home Depot will have special reserved shopping carts and drinks on the house for us when they see us coming.
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