The Rage Diaries

Reduce, Reuse, Recyle ... your TV armoire

The Miami Herald recently ran an article on how flat-panel TVs are making ye olde TV armoire obsolete ("TV Armoires Get Reinvented," June 29, 2008). While the people in the article were doing things like turning their TV armoires into office storage or display cases, I asked myself, "How have shelter mags covered this?"

Martha Stewart would turn it into a craft armoire -- or perhaps an area to store baby things. Sure, she also flogs the home-office idea, but come on -- everyone's doing that.

Cottage Living suggests turning an armoire into bathroom storage galore, or into a kitchen storage space. I'm sort of smitten with the latter -- a lot of the older houses in Alameda have kitchens when there's little storage but plenty of odd-sized nooks and crannies for a standalone piece like the one here.

Personally, I'm disappointed not to be able to find the one conversion I was sure someone had done: turning one of these monsters into a bar. Think about it! You could nestle a wine rack in the bottom drawer, put the glassware in another shelf, then tuck your ice bucket and liquors into the shelves that rest where the 37" Triniton used to go. Then, you're bringing over your special man friend (or lady friend, whichever) and you're like, "Can I mix you drink?" and don't you look smooth?

Please, someone, repurpose your TV armoire and show me what you did.

Animal + vegetable != miracle

My tomatoes are doing beautifully. I have four plants -- two brandywine, one green zebra and one yellow plum -- across two raised beds, and they are now so hearty and vigorous, I've had to stake them to the skeleton of a vandalized "Yes on H" sign someone stuck in our yard.

(Side digression: Alameda's about to vote on Measure H, which would tax homeowners to make up a massive school budget shortfall. People who dig the prop have been putting signs in their yard. However, we can home last Friday and found that someone had stuck a "Yes on H" sign in our yard with a big, black "NO" spray-painted across it. Anyway, I huffily recycled the sign but kept the the metal frame for it. Thank you, vandals, for saving me the cost of a tomato cage.)

Because I had some room left over in the raised beds, I figured I'd do some co-planting. I have some French breakfast radishes coming up in one bed. But alas, in the other ... I have a pile of dirt and a suspicious hollow. There are no green onions coming up, because Zito has apparently been peeing on them. I've scooped out the dirt and have a screen over the bed now to prevent our idiot cat from jumping back in there, but still ... if it's not one thing in the garden, it's another. (At left: the pissy culprit lolls in "his" chair, which is parked in our garage instead of at the dump where it ought to be. He has no reason to look as irritated as he does.)

I can only imagine my headache if I really committed to urban homesteading, like these people:

Really, I didn't think we were doing anything that remarkable

Last year, I took pity on a swooning Black Mission fig tree that Home Depot was about to consign to the compost pile. I brought it home, tried not to think of it as the Charlie Brown fruit tree, trimmed and espaliered it, and got three figs for my trouble.

For Christmas, my wonderful husband gave me a dwarf Meyer lemon tree. For Valentine's Day, I wheedled a concession from him and planted a companion Bearss lime tree. I figure in three to four years, these little guys will be actual bushes and I'll have the makings for lemon pie and mojitos right outside my living room. (Speaking of which: we have clerestory windows flanking our fireplace, and I put a tree under each window; I'm hoping that eventually, the fragrance from the blooms wafts inside. Gardening is a perennial act of optimistic imagination.) And this weekend, I'll be stalking my local nurseries for the Fuyu persimmon tree that will anchor my front yard's landscaping. I like the foliage in the fall, and I love the fruit.

It never occurred to me that growing productive fruit trees in my yard was anything other than normal. You have land. You can grow plants on it. Why not grow something both beautiful and useful?

Today's NYT article "Backyards, Beware: An Orchard Wants Your Spot" treats the idea of growing your own fruit in your yard as a Gen-X revival prompted by local-eating concerns. It also alludes, in the vaguest of terms, to the apparent class-conscious shift away from grow-your-own produce in the 1950s. This is the part I find fascinating -- did adults and kids notice a difference in tastes between what they bought versus what they had grown? Did they feel pressured to forsake their strawberry patches? Or were they mostly relieved to escape the gardening chores?

The very act of growing optimism

The first time I visited California, it was January, I had just weathered a few massive snowstorms in D.C., and I was absolutely gobsmacked by all the fresh, green winter growth. You mean I don't have to live someplace where it's gray and frozen for ninety straight days? I moved out west a few months later.

The promise of new plants in the first few months of the year is one of the things that keep me here. And now that I have a yard of my very own, I get dorkily excited over all the plants popping up mere footsteps from my front door. My broccoli plants are thriving, I have poppies sprouting in one of my raised beds, the garlic is sending up bold new spears, and the thirty "Ice Wings" narcissus bulbs I planted this fall are beginning to poke up on either side of our (relatively) new tiled walkway.

Although I'm grumbling over the fact that my Chinodoxa gigantea alba has not yet made an appearance, that's a comparatively tiny complaint to have. I live someplace where I can plant something and watch it thrive in January or February. I feel really lucky.

And, after reading "The Gardens that Care Forgot" in today's Slate, I am humbled. Constance Casey interviews a few people who are rebuilding  the flooded gardens of New Orleans. We should all have these gardeners' resilience, patience and optimism -- especially in the face of such adverse soil and water conditions. (To help restore New Orleans' gardens, go here.)

Between this and Cottage Living's surprisingly good -- and sustained -- coverage of post-Katrina renovation in New Orleans, you get an inkling of just how enormous the scope for rebuilding is. (CL's work includes: "A New Orleans Homecoming,"  which followed up the Sep 05 feature, "Creole Cottage,"  "Katrina Cottage," "Restoring Pride One Katrina Cottage at a Time" and "2007 New Orleans Idea Home.") 

Although many write off lifestyle reporting as soft news, I think the best lifestyle reporting can provide an entree into understanding why the "bigger" issues end up mattering.

I promise, I don't make my guests work ...

So I read "The Three-Martini Renovation" (WSJ, Sep 28, 07) with a mixture of awe and horror. Awe at the idea that people can -- and do -- rope gangs of friends into providing free labor around the house. And horror at imagining how that might play with me around.

The answer? Badly. I am the type of person who measures three times before cutting once; who breaks out the stud finder, two levels, a pencil and a measuring tape just to hang a mirror in the hall; who insists that the workspaces have everything laid out in a specific, tidy way because "that is my Switzerland, goddamn it! It is there for peace and order and its borders are inviolable!" I am not quite the Anal-Retentive Carpenter, but I get where he's coming from.

So assuming I could get over the shame of inviting my friends over to do manual labor for me, I'd have to then get over my innate suspicion that they'd screw up. And really, it's already a miracle that my friends forgive me my beady-eyed distrust and unreasonable perfectionism. I don't want to push it.

However, I just love working on other people's houses. I know, I know ... the contradictions kill me too.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: My September challenge to you

I had delayed posting this because I was hoping to provide visual aids for this post, but getting me, a digital camera and this weblog in one place at one time is apparently well outside my skillset.

So here is the deal: we have three 32-gallon trash cans half-filled with the little, gravelly detritus left from pulverizing our old walk. This stuff didn't get hauled away because, at the time, said trash cans were filled with bigger pieces. Now they are filled with what appears to be a bunch of Fritos made out of cement.

My challenge to all you inventive readers: find ways for me to reduce, reuse and recycle these concrete chips. Otherwise, I'll be tossing a handful in the trash can each week for the next ten years. I would really rather not call Blue Sky Hauling again.

Please share suggestions below. Or tell me what you'll be reusing, reducing and/or recycling this month!

Give it away, give it away, give it away now

Last weekend, we participated in the annual block sale. We sold nearly everything we intended to -- about 300 books (not all were originally ours), our old end tables and table lamps, unused underbed storage containers, my old plastic action figures (bon voyage, Critical Maas!) all our VHS tapes. We also sold a few things we hadn't originally planned on -- namely, the kitchen table I refinished last year and half our kitchen chairs. (They had been brought out to display other stuff, and when someone made an offer, we shrugged, "Why not?")

For 24 glorious hours, the garage was empty. And I could not stop grinning every time I went down there. There is something very freeing about unloading material items you no longer want or need.

I can't recapture that combination of relief and elation exactly -- for one, our garage is now filled with our contractors' tools and some of the materials for the porch-in-progress. But I got close when reading  "Give It Away." (Baltimore City Paper, Aug 29, 07)

Jackasshammer II

Summertime is sequel time, so what better time to pick up a jackhammer again?

Let's hear it for Home Depot's customer service!

Who would have thought I would be typing those words? But seriously, I just had a great customer service experience and I figured it was only fair to write about it, considering what I've written  in the past.

Backstory: you all know we need many pairs of keys to open the doors in our house, as each one has been fitted with different hardware from different manufacturers. As of last week, we added another set to the mix when we replaced a side door and its attendant hardware. Needing six sets of keys to open four doors is ridiculous, even for us, so we decided that our seventh-anniversary present would be new door hardware for the doors in our house. Once the knobs were united under one manufacturer, we could bring in a locksmith to unite them under one lock.

Nothing says "celebrating seven years of marriage" like changing the locks!

So I bopped online, price-shopped and found the hardware at Home Depot last Friday. I placed the order,  foolishly assumed that I'd be receiving a confirmation e-mail, and thus didn't write down my order confirmation number. I didn't get the e-mail. And by today, I was wondering, "Did the order actually go through? Am I being punished for not writing down my order number? How ever will I resolve this?"

By picking up the phone and calling, that's how. Home Depot has a customer service line specifically for online orders and within five minutes I had confirmed that yes, I had placed an order and -- o, frabjous day! -- it was in transit.

This doesn't mean I'm forgiving the breakdown in the confirmation e-mail -- but it's nice to know that there's a robust and responsive customer service operation in place. So kudos to Home Despot for getting this one right.

Book 'em

I have a garage full of books at the moment, thanks to the confluence of two events in my life: a friend of Phil's reducing his book collection and us preparing for our annual block sale in two weeks. I am a winnower of books: if I don't remember reading it or -- worse -- if I read it and found it unsatisfying, it goes out the door.

Now I face the necessary, subsequent re-organization of the shelves. This year, I'm vapor-locked on the task: we have one bookcase in a state of profound disrepair, and it happens to be in the room that I'm hankering to empty, renovate and fit with considerably less dilapidated shelves. So I'm debating whether to go to all the bother of reshelving now if I'm only clearing out the room later. It is nerve-wracking when one's love of classification clashes with one's love of optimizing one's time.

Although I'm not sure when I'll get around to optimizing the match-up between shelf space and subject, I do know something: I will not be organizing my books by color. This Flickr pool puts me in mind of the Anne Fadiman anecdote about the decorator who organized a clients' books by color, subsequently met an untimely death, and was judged  by unrepentant bibliofiends as having reaped what he sowed.

(Those people would probably point a paper-cut-riddled finger at me too with my insistence on chucking mediocre volumes. They would be more akin to the folks featured in the LAT's Aug 11, 05, "When You're Buried in Books.")

Yet this arranging-books-by-color thing is apparently gaining currency. A few years ago, it was an art installation at Adobe Books in San Francisco. Last year, the idea found its way into paintings, and then into the Q&A column at Apartment Therapy. And now, the idea's moved out of the urban, artsy or modernist circles and into the mainstream with RealSimple's bookshelf makeover.

There's no denying that many books are beautiful objects, so organizing them to optimize their visual value does make sense. But that desire seems at odds with my hankerings to organize books by subject, or by personal chronology, or by how much I love them. And since I don't spend as much time looking at books as I do in them, I'll be passing up the rainbow approach for an as-yet-undecided schema.

How do you organize your books? What factors drive your organizing, or lack thereof?