Low and Gray Again Today

I moved in here before we were actually the owners of this place.  We were worried it might not pass the bank inspection prior to closing; it had stood vacant for quite some time, and we thought we needed to make it a little more presentable.

The floors throughout, except for the living room, that is to say the two bedrooms, hallway, tiny galley kitchen, and dining area, which was apparently an add-on, were old asphalt tile, missing and broken in places.  The living room floor was a bare concrete slab, but etched, as if in some attempt to impersonate tile.  Not much I could do with that for the time being.  I patched and repaired the old tiles as best I could, and tried fixing a square of plywood up in the attic crawl space to cover a small patch of termite damage.  I bent several #10 nails trying to drive them into the Dade Pine rafters.  I think I spent two or three nights here– a bed had been left in the back bedroom– and it was pretty eerie. I heard noises, and a couple of times woke thinking someone was in the house.  Another manifestation of old houses.  There’s always a spirit or two lingering about until you establish yourself.  This one wasn’t in the least malevolent, just observing, I felt, and by the third night, he was gone.

The day the inspector was supposed to come I swept the place out and started planning renovations.  The living room, bedrooms, kitchen, and dining area took up about 900 square feet, at best.  Attached to the north side of the living room was a one-car garage, and next to that a flat-roofed addition, another add-on, a rectangular space of twenty by thirty feet.  The ocean view from the living room was provided by a large plate-glass window, with a double-hung casement on either side.  In the west wall was a fireplace with some kind of cover fixed over the opening, and in the north wall was a large, built-in bookcase. On the other side of the kitchen were the two bedrooms, connected by a hallway, with the bath in the middle.  The front bedroom stood out from the main house, with casement windows taking up virtually all of the east and south walls, giving great ocean views.

Evidence of some afterthought, however, was the dining area at the back. Entry to that could only be made through the kitchen.  There was a window into the back bedroom from the dining area, and also the living room.  You couldn’t get there from the living room, you had to go through the kitchen, very inconvenient.  So, I concocted a plan.  I needed to take out the living room and bedroom windows that looked into the dining area, knock out the wall below both, frame them out, and either hang doors, or leave them as open pass-throughs, in order to provide more flow from room to room.  I wanted to lay a wood floor over the etched living room concrete, and put down Saltillo tile throughout the rest.  No carpet, this was going to be a beach house.  Track in sand, sweep it up, drip wherever.  The bookcase wall in the living room presented another, slightly larger challenge.  Because space was so limited we had talked about utilizing the garage as more living space.  It was really too small for even one car, if you wanted to get in and out.  Taking out the bookcase would create a space large enough to hang double doors. That would entail about twice as much work again as I would have clearing out and framing the two windows, though, but it could be done.

When the inspector came, she barely looked at the place, and signed off.  We closed and I continued living here alone until I could get it really livable.  One at a time, I took on the aforementioned projects, starting with the strange living room/dining room window. Once the window was removed, itself a monumental project, I hacked through the concrete block below and sculpted the proper size space, then framed the whole she-bang, being careful to match the existing half-round moulding that existed throughout the house.  Same with the bedroom window, but there I hung a single French door.  Meemaw moved in sometime along here, and the work continued.  We laid the wood floor in the living room.  Beautiful.  All this while both of us were working full-time.  Ah, relative youth.  Couldn’t do it now. I took out the living room bookcase and knocked through the block below, framed it and hung double French doors.  This all was happening in the spring and summer of our first year here, and it was a joy to work with the windows open, to look up and see the ocean just a couple of hundred feet away.  If there were decent waves, I put the work aside and paddled out.  It was a marvelous time.

I built a pressure-treated wood walkway all around the house, and a deck off the back, working around a beautiful Florida Bay which grew close to the back door.  Then we started on the tile.  Saltillo, if you don’t know, is a Mexican terracotta tile, a foot square.  We ran it, grouted it, and sealed it in the two bedrooms, hallway, former garage, and add-on space.  The dining room slab floor, I discovered, dropped more than eight inches from kitchen to back wall and had to be filled and leveled before tiling.  We did.  Let’s see, what else?  Oh, yeah, we built a drywall enclosure for washer and dryer in the old garage; dry-walled, built closets and installed a toilet and shower in the add-on, and then I built the big deck and steps down the back dune into the hammock, and an outdoor shower and enclosure on the back wall.    Somewhere along there I took down the single garage door and hung double doors, which made way for a single giant Moroccan kind of thing not long ago.  I can’t really remember how long this all took, but I know I didn’t get to the beach deck until 2002, so it was all done between ’96 and then.

All this was something of a disruption to the lives of the indigenous animal population, especially with the introduction of two cats, who will have their own posting soon.  The abundant anole lizard population was initially devastated, but then both cats grew tired of such easy pickings, and they’ve come back strong.  The snakes were amazingly curious at first.  I found a rat snake in the new shower; a pygmy rattler made it into the dining room as I was leveling the floor; and after testing the new outdoor shower, I returned from putting away the tools, and found a gorgeous black snake helping himself to the pool of water.  A balance has been established. And while we still frequently see critters, especially the ubiquitous anole, and a family of indigo snakes, for the most part, they stay outside.

And oh yeah, that first year I built a 8×12 foot outdoor storage shed, which I just rebuilt from the ground up last year, and if all this ain’t crazy enough for you, we bought an old house in St. Petersburg in 2003, and renovated it from top to bottom, too!

I think we’re pretty much done now.  There’s just the ongoing battle to keep the jungle from growing into the house.  Wouldn’t have it any other way.