A recent purchase of a 1950's vintage General Electric clock radio at a local tag sale earned Beaver the chance to visit a mini-white house on the river that she'd always admired. Beaver was curious whether the handsome thing worked or not, and the owner of the house invited her inside to try.
The clock, she explained, was used by her Uncle to play music to his cows. The house had taken her twenty years to renovate, "and look", she said, gesturing upstairs, "it isn't even finished yet".
This is the reply of most Sandisfieldians when Beaver says she is renovating a house up the hill. "Take it room by room," they say. "Go slowly." "Triple any estimate." "Start with the most important thing." Underlining everything is the insistence to keep a sense of humor in the face of leaking roofs, hornet invasions, mice, even termites. A sturdy suggestion to do the best you can, and to laugh when the going gets expensive.
Humor is essential when applying joint tape, especially to the cracking corners of a molded kitchen ceiling. Spray bottle of bleach in hand, Beaver mounts her ladder, and with a single spritz she is dowsed with a gentle rain of Clorox right in her eyes. She toils, nearly upside down, scrubbing the spotted ceiling, rubbing her furry head against the omnipresent bleach. It's certainly cheaper than highlights.
Joint tape. Joint compound. Messy, messy, messy. It oozes and goozes and drips on the floor, it cracks at will and disobeys her spatula. And yet she persists. Dreams of a white kitchen call her to move on.
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