Tag: #Home

  • Planning Home Projects

    General Update – The car got fixed, you know, from yesterday. It was the engine thermostat that needed to be replaced. Cost over $1,200 to get it fixed. But the car is back, and all is well in the Universe.

    The other thing that happened yesterday was that the air conditioner that we ordered arrived a day early. See, this winter, we got rid of the a/c unit that was in the kid’s room – it was over six years old, and had seen better days. The plan here is to move the unit in the livingroom (6,000 btu) into the kids room, and replace it with a larger and more powerful (8,000 btu) unit. 6k btu might be overkill in the kid’s room, but it just wasn’t cutting it in the livingroom. (Also, the end of March is a great time to buy an a/c as they are all on sale, to move out last year’s inventory for the new in prep for Summer.) BUT, before all of this installing can happen in both rooms, we need to repaint the windows and trim, so everything will be matching, and the apartment looks a little more unified.

    I say all of this because, as I was hauling the unbelievable heavy a/c unit up three flights of stairs, I was excited for all of the home improvement projects we have. You know of the a/c and window project. Then there is redoing our “mudroom” area by the front door, and replacing the livingroom ceiling fan. There is the touchup painting in our bedroom, and hopefully coming up with a better closet situation. The biggest project of them all is working on the kid’s room. It reflects the interests of an eight-year-old, and not the aspirations of a soon to be teenager. Not sure how to accomplish that, nor what budget for it will be, but I know that it’s important to the kid, so it’s important to me.

    I say all of this because what it really means is that we are coming out of Winter. We can open the windows again, and let the breeze blow through. There is a wonderful peace and tranquility that comes from this time of year. It is fleeting though. Soon, it will be too hot and steamy in the City, and the windows will close up and the a/c’s will roar on. If it’s a good year, we’ll have a comfortable Spring until early June. If it’s a bad year, we’ll be locking up in May.

  • DIY Home Remolding Videos

    I used to watch HGTV for all the remolding shows. I will stress the word “used to” because after a few weeks, I noticed that all the shows were the same in their structure, and they didn’t show you how to improve anything in your home. Such as every HGTV show had the same reality tv plot wherein half way through the show, the hosts discovered some huge “whatever” that would cost way more money to fix, and then they had to call the client and get their reaction, and decide what to do next. But no matter what the issue was, it all worked out, and Joanna put a huge “LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE” sign up on the wall. Oh, and they only thing I learned about fixing my home was to hire a good contractor.

    All of this has now lead me to watching YouTube videos. At first, I was looking for clips that would help me patch a hole in the wall, or install trim, or build a built-in. But, the Algorithm caught on to me, and started pushing all these renovation videos on me. Like, “we bought a school building in the country and turned into our dream house” type videos. Or “I bought a row house in Boston, and am fixing it up with my girlfriend and our dog.”

    I won’t lie, late at night, these videos suck me in. Not so much the people, or their story, or how they did it all (though I wish they would go into more of those details), but I get sucked into their home renovation ideas, and I try to figure out if that would work in my apartment. See, I have a mudroom area, and a place for a built-in buffet/bookshelf but I can’t figure out how to make it work…

    As I have watched more and more of these renovation videos, I have started to notice, especially the ones that are a long series, that they all kind’a do the same thing. They all have a time-lapse video of their demo, or a time-lapse of the contractors doing something, with a jangly guitar underscoring it. Or, they do this confessional thing where the “admit” that they might have bit off more than they can chew, and the whole project might fail.

    But it never does.

    They always figure out a solution, or they pay more money to the contractor who figures out a solution. Yeah, it’s all rather cliché.

    Or to put it another way…

    Once, you know, I’d like to see someone just throw in the towel; They can’t do it, it’s just too expensive, or they settle. Sure, that wouldn’t be a very interesting video, but it sure would be a cautionary tale for all of those middle-aged guys out there, that have no experience at home improvement, but think they can do it because they watched a video at 1am.

  • Moving Stuff Around

    After Thanksgiving, like the day after, is when we put up our Christmas decorations. And to be honest, we never had a good place to put our tree. The curse of a small NYC apartment: There is a never a good place for anything.

    But this year, the wife came up with a good idea, which was to move our lounge-sofa away from our windows, and place the tree there. The tree looked nice in that location, and with all the other decoration we put up, it looked very festive, but cluttered – a Christmas explosion.

    Anyway, I mentioned before that we take everything down after New Year’s, but with the holiday on a Monday, and everyone back to life on Tuesday, we didn’t get around to cleaning up until this weekend. It took all day Saturday, but we got it done. Life had returned to normal, but we decided not to move the sofa back. We were tired, and ready to relax.

    And something amazing happened.

    The new placement of the sofa has changed the whole mood and flow of our apartment. You could logically assume that we were just reacting to something being “new” and in time it will wear off. But I have to admit, for the past two days our home has felt different, more home like, peaceful, calmer even.

    Is it possible that the placement of the sofa was holding us back? Does anyone remember Feng Shui? That was a pop-culture thing, right? Was that real or something made up to sell sofas?

    The funny thing is that I remember being a kid and my parents would do something like this very randomly, like every few years; that they would get a bug in their ear and just start rearranging the furniture in the home, and then talk about how much better everything felt.

    So, I have discovered another way that I am slowly becoming my parents. Not that I mind.

    No… Maybe the better way to think about this is that I am coming to a better understanding of who my parents were.

  • The Thanksgiving Blog

    When it comes to prepping for Thanksgiving, we have our own family tradition, which is me running around like a madman on the final days leading up to the meal, trying to get the last of everything. The first year I did this, in 2006, it was snowing as I ran around Harlem on Thanksgiving Day, looking for a place that would sell cooking twine. (I found it at a dollar store.) This week has been no different, and it’s kept my mind off other things, which is good.

    This morning I had to head out to Whole Foods on Lenox and 125th. It is only a 15-minute walk from our apartment, and today I felt like I should take my time and not rush. I have been scurrying all week, and that hasn’t been making me feel better so I thought, taking it easy, and looking around might be worth a shot.

    And I did. I walked along 126th, and went by the stage door for the Apollo Theater, and wonder what crazy shit has happened at that spot. That took me to the Alhambra Ballroom, which was a venue that Dizzy, Monk, Coltrane all played at one point. When I was on the northwest corner of Lenox and 125th, I thought about how Lou Reed sang about buying drugs on this corner. Now, it has a Whole Food and a CVS. A lot can change in 50 years.

    Heading home, I walked along 123rd to look at the brownstones, and I thought about the family gatherings that were underway, or about to begin. With the exception of three, me and the wife have spent every Thanksgiving in Harlem. It really is a wonderful neighborhood, this little corner of Manhattan which we have made our home, and started a family in. Nothing feels like home, and it was good to remind myself of that.

    This will most likely be it from me for this week. I don’t plan on putting a blog up tomorrow, and it really depends on how I feel on Friday, but odds are I won’t. So, as we all celebrate tomorrow, I hope that you all have a good and Happy Thanksgiving!

  • A Home in the Country

    We are going to get out of the City for a long weekend, and I think it is long overdue. I could be wrong on this, but I don’t believe we have slept outside of our apartment since June 2020. A good friend of ours has a little house upstate. It’s in a small subdivision of a neighborhood, and has all the feelings and trappings of suburban bliss, from about 1970. The family friend is out of town, and has offered the house to us. We jumped on the opportunity.

    When we stay at this house, or when we Airbnb/VRBO a house that is in a neighborhood, I play this game in my mind of wondering what my life would be like in the suburbs? I have lived in New York City now for fifteen years, and I am thoroughly City-ized. And by that, I mean, I can live in a very tiny space, and have people on top of me all the time. Having lots of space is now very foreign. Could I function with so much room?

    It reminds me of a story. We have some friends who used to live in NYC. They owned a small one-bedroom apartment, and when their kid was born, they knew they had to move. Very fortunate for them, their tiny apartment sold very well, which allowed them to move out to the country and buy a house. When we went to visit them after their move, their modest house was sparsely filled with furniture, and pictures on the wall. “We have more house than stuff,” they told us, “but we don’t want to buy stuff just to fill it up.” Their house is still scantly decorated.

    I think we would also have a home with nothing in it, a little Scandinavian Style. (You know I have an IKEA fascination, right?) I’m not excited about owning a house, but the older I get, I find myself wanting a yard. Well, a back yard actually. Not so much for me, but for the kid. A backyard and an imagination is a pretty awesome thing to have as a kid.