There are “almost” to many irons in my fire right now. The problem is that we — my wife, Danny, and I — get started on a project and then turn that project into another project, and another, and another, and so on. Then we go ahead and buy the materials for yet another project while we can get them — supply chain you know — and now the dressing room and laundry room are full of project materials and they are two of the projects.
What is one to do?
Our house in Sebastopol is the third very old house/home renovation for Danny and me, and by far the most difficult. Age has something to do with it. Our age, and the age of the house.
In 1984 we moved to Clarksdale, just about as far away from here as one can get and still be in Mississippi. The Mississippi Delta to be exact.
There we bought a 1920s era little stucco bungalow. It was perfect for the two of us, on a nice street, in town, had a large back yard, and in pretty good condition for its age. And, it came with a great sunroom off of the living room with lots of light which was a great place to put a Christmas tree for all to see.
We didn’t have to do a lot to that house other than some cosmetic touch ups. A little paint on the walls and new kitchen counter tops was about it. And when we pulled up the old musty carpet we found beautiful parquet floors in fantastic condition.
We added a big back porch/deck to it the following year and then shortly afterward, in 1987, we moved to the eastern edge of the Delta up in the hills to a quaint little town called Carrollton.
Our house there was built in 1906 and was still owned by the builder’s family when we bought it. I suppose it would be called a Victorian farmhouse if anything. Built of heart of pine, with beaded boards for an interior, and tall windows that had never been painted shut — original finish actually — its 40 by eight-foot-long hall actually glowed with the tree lights each Christmas.
It was in rough shape when we signed the papers and took ownership and even had a possum or coon one living in a bathroom with its own entrance through a hole in the middle of the floor. That was soon remedied.
We poured our hearts and soul into the renovation of what we named Allen House after its former tenant, Carroll County Sheriff John Tom Allen. When we were done — if one ever gets done with an older home — it was beautiful. Perfect for the two of us up on top of a hill on a dead end street a stone’s throw from the town square. It was even more perfect a few years later when we welcomed our daughter into this world and carried her up the big steps to the front door.
That was our favorite house and a lot of fun times were had there, and in the rambling back yard, complete with pear and quince trees, and what we were told was certified as the largest American Chestnut tree in the state of Mississippi...until, that is, a severe wind storm blew through one night.
We moved from there to the Ross Barnett Reservoir in 1996 and took a break from renovating and bought something that just needed some paint and paper — when paper was in style — and didn’t have any holes for varmints to crawl through. In later years, however, a pesky family of raccoons, and one of squirrels as well, found their way into the second story’s attic. That’s what traps are for.
Our final renovation project, though, the on-going one, the one with all the irons in the fire, began about this time of year in 1997, 1998 maybe. My grandmother, Delia Mae Hudson, died in April of 1996 and her house, my great grandfather’s house on my grandfather’s side, sat empty for a year or so.
Then we decided to clean it up and have our family Thanksgiving there. The tradition continued each year and slowly but surely, we got some things painted and some things shored up and a new porch on the old place, but roof neglect for years on the old tin roof led to water damage and rotted wood and all kinds of problems.
My mother eventually deeded the house over to Danny and me since we were pretty much taking care of it, and lived in it, and I had come to work here and Danny to work for the Choctaw Tribal Schools in Conehatta.
That’s when the hard work began. The irons in the fire work. We’ll never finish working on the old place, because it is just that, an old place, a very old place built before the turn of the last century. We have done a lot though. The most challenging project being the master bedroom (pictured before and after) where varmints could again come and go if they pleased and a lot of plywood covered a lot of holes. Happily we got that room finished, as well as most of the rest of the place, just before my mom died in 2019 so she went home knowing what home looked like.
In the past few weeks we’ve put down some really pretty, hardwood floor look-alike in place of the no longer dependable hardwood floor, and today we’re now pretty much down to that dressing room and laundry room which are weekend projects for the coming weekends.
That said, however, we’ve got some really nice double doors leaning on the wall of the back porch, that we have had leaning on the wall of the back porch for about two years now, that will be installed where the dining room exits onto that porch.
We’ve also got a really nice, really old, office door with the kind of glass in the top half that is frosted, or textured, to make it opaque. It is already refinished and ready to hang and will be the bathroom door. It came out of an old building in downtown Newton and is currently leaning against the wall of the dressing room just behind the old bedroom door that will be the dressing room door, which is against the old living room door that will be part of the wall in the laundry room.
All of that is next to the new vanity that will go in the bathroom where the not so old pedestal sink is after the new floor is down. On top of that is the new faucet for the kitchen sink that will replace the old kitchen sink faucet that won’t cut off all the way once I figure out how to get the old kitchen sink faucet off. It is old. It is stuck.
Likewise, I’m old, and sometimes I think I’m stuck too.
So, as Paul Harvey would say when I was a small child, and not old nor stuck, and he was blaring from the radio in the same dining room in which those doors on the back porch are going, you know the rest of the story.
But, unfortunately, that ain’t even all of the rest of the story! Everything else is stored in the barn!
