Last week I received notice that I had to clear all the plants and furniture off our decks so that they could be repainted. While I appreciated the action, it was kind of a pain in the butt to find a temporary place for everything.
When I was 10 my family moved across the highway from our originally pink Levitt colonial to an authentic Victorian house with six bedrooms. Oh the place needed work, which is exactly why my mother wanted it, and she was up to the challenge-- stripping wall paper, knocking plaster off covered up fireplaces, painting, laying flooring, building closets, re-upholstering furniture, you name it, in the three short years that we lived there, that house was vastly improved.
To a child, perhaps it was the porches that were the most different from our tract home. Where once we had poured concrete and brick, now we had wide gracious outdoor spaces with white trim and painted gray floor boards. One of the things I remember most was the side porch. Three feet above street-level, it ran the length of the front room and the dining room, but with no stairs the only way to get out there was through a door in the dining room. I liked to pretend that it was the deck of a ship and I was the captain, and in the summer I spent afternoons out there in the shade reading and drinking ice tea with lemonade.
When the painting was done here, I was a bit dismayed to find that they had whitewashed the formerly stained floor planks. That just seemed like a bad idea, so off I went to my local home improvement store where I purchased a gallon of porch gray. After patching and repainting the Adirondack chairs white, today I turned my attention to the floors, and now I have my own gracious space.
Ice tea and lemonade at the ready-- I'll need them tomorrow.
