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roger rollman
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Recent Entries to this Blog "And so to bed." (with thanks to Dr. Johnson)
Posted: 02 Aug 2010
Robin Hood and garden design
Posted: 26 Jul 2010
From Here to "IT"
Posted: 03 Sep 2009
Doingdafloors
Posted: 14 Aug 2009
If I had courage
Posted: 07 Aug 2009

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roger rollman's Blog




"And so to bed." (with thanks to Dr. Johnson)

Category: gardening and old home restoration | Posted: Mon Aug 02, 2010 4:51 pm


"And so to bed." (With thanks to Dr. Johnson)


There is a sense of accomplishment in having come to the point in your efforts that you can sleep in a real bed rather than on the floor in an inflatable something-or-other. I feel a bit like a champion being able to share that I can rest upon a bed at last. It is the culmination of efforts now five years old and untold hours of work.

In my dreams and in reality, I move back and forth between the worlds of the home I live in, with its formal garden and with the hope of building a new Tuscan home and meadow garden, and the 200-year pile in eastern North Carolina, named Melrose, that I inherited. Today, in my split personality, I reflect on Melrose.

It is only this year, and specifically this summer that the efforts of my work have allowed me to erect a real bed in a bedroom that has been painted, carpeted, and fitted for human habitation. Melrose has been more a campground than actual home for years now, and in truth it will be hard to accommodate the new reality that getting up in the morning is not necessarily an exercise that begins from six inches above the floor. Oh glorious mattress! Oh maximum rest!

And maximum rest of what is called for following a day of painting, scraping, cutting and moving heavy objects from point A to point B, and in all too many instanes, back to point A. When working at Melrose, one does not go to bed. One falls onto a bed with all the grace of a goonie bird coming in for a landing.

I have reached that point in my life where, when I do something resembling lunacy as I go about polite society, I have the common sense to ask myself, "What the hell do you think you are doing?" There was a time in my youth and middle age, when the fact that something I was doing was more likely to be done by a lunetic, I would not have paid the least attention to such a fact. I would have pushed ahead. But, a saner, older and grayer head now prevails.

Recently, I had to ask myself that "what the hell...." question as I stood atop a 25-foot ladder at the lower end of an eight-foot high shutter that once served to hold winter winds at bay for a bedroom on the second floor of Melrose. The shutter, like all of Melrose's 46 shutters, is in awful condition and it is my considered opinion that all of them should come down and stay down. In a perfect world, all of the shutters would be replaced using the original hardware and the old shutters would be burned. But I do not live in that perfect world, cannot afford to replace all the shutters, and have decided to put them in one of the outbuildings for my sons to deal with after I have gone to the great restoration center in the sky. Melrose will have no shutters for the remainder of my life.

Which brings me back to my being atop that 25-foot ladder. The shutter I was determined to take down is connected to the exterior wall by two pins about four inches high. My job was to first loosen the shutter from years of accumulated paint on those pins, and then to nudge the shutter up and off of those pins. I was never a good physics student, but I quickly became aware of one of nature's laws which declares that when you are lifting something tall and heavy and you are doing so from it bottom, the chances are that- it being top heavy- will begin to topple backwards. And, should you be atop a ladder, the physics lesson will include the "you" of this story being pulled off the ladder, still clutching the shutter, and falling onto eastern North Carolina soil. It is sandy but it ain't that soft.

Such was a recent educational moment for me, except by the Grace of God I did not fall, and neither did the shutter. Somehow, before the laws of gravity kicked in, I was able to slide the shutter ever-so-slowly down between me and the ladder, and then to carry the shutter back to terre firma. But as I went through this exercise in terror, I pledged to never again repeat what I had just gone through. Sometimes, the things that don't happen to you are the best teachers.


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Robin Hood and garden design

Category: gardening and old home restoration | Posted: Mon Jul 26, 2010 4:32 pm



Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding thru the glen,
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men,
Feared by the bad, loved by the good,
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood.

Those are more of less some of the opening words of the song that opened one of my favorite television programs of the 1950s. But I will return to that thought in just a moment.

A prolonged illness has kept me from this blog for far too long, and I mean now to return and to remain, using - as luck would have it - the Robin Hood television program to ease me back.

A few days ago Public Radio ran a feature story on the blacklisting of communists, would-be communists and supposed pinkos during the halcyon days of Macathyism. In the course of that report, listeners heard once more about how artists of various hues - including lots of writers - were blacklisted, losing their livelihoods in this country. They simply could not find work in their native land.

Which brings me to "Robin Hood."

The program I so loved as a kid growing up in Baltimore was actually filmed in England and produced by a woman who apparently was a genius at creating a TV series on a shoestring budget. One of the ways she managed to do that with "Robin Hood" was to hire several of the blacklisted American writers at bargin rates to develop quality scripts.


The Public Radio story made it pretty darned clear that some, if not all of those writers were certainly of a very socialist bent, and they worked their social ideas into the story lines, which could not have been all that hard given that the series involved a man and his gang who "took from the rich and gave to the poor.' In other words, Robin Hood was the forerunner of today's IRS, except Robin never had the luxury of taking from the middle class as well as the rich, something the IRS has perfected. But that is another story.

Anyway, I listened to that very interesting Public Radio story, learning that as a child I had been unknowingly subjected to a spectrum of ideas more reflective of the script writers' ideology than anyone might have suspected, and I saw how the "socialist agenda" supposedly espoused by Robin Hood and his band of merry men has come to impact my thinking about garden design. For decades, I have been very much influenced by the formal, grand gardens of Great Britain, the kind paid for by decadent capitalist-types to adorn their ill-gotten estates from Surry to the far reaches of Scotland. I have many a book that captures the beauty and the allure of those gardens, and it has been my goal all these years to someday develop a garden along the lines of those formal masterpieces, albeit on a less grand scale since I have the beneficiary of less grand (read that as meaning less rapacious) capitalism.

About 15 years ago, I had the opportunity to do that very thing, having essentially a large open space on which I could put any kind of garden I wanted. A formal English garden was my goal; I set about creating one; and I have about finished one that pleases me and those who visit it.

But somewhere along the line my taste morphed into a wilder, less structured, more proletarian approach to garden design, and that is where I blame or credit Robin Hood. Decades of an orientation to formalism have melted away, possibly the result of pink-shaded ideas implanted without my knowledge or that of my parents as Robin wooed a fair maid and thwarted Prince John.

I have had an architect design an informal, Tuscan-country style home that I hope to build as soon as the right piece of land comes available. Since the inception of that idea for a Tuscan-style home, I have given intense thought to what stye of garden ought to accompany it. Just as I now live in a Georgian home with Georgian trimmings and a formal garden, my desire for a home of the Italian countryside has been accompanied by a desire to move at warp speed away from garden formalism and toward a large meadow garden. I envision a socialist, common-man meadow, more comfortable for rabbits and ground hogs than for exotic birds and hedge hogs.

I hope sooner rather than later to have that meadow garden, with wild flowers and the scent of hay (though, regrettably, also with deer, the occasional raccoon and perhaps even a coyote). What I owe to "Robin Hood" for that vision I cannot say with certainty, but given how impressionable kids are, placing blame on a TV program scripted by blacklisted writers cannot be easily be thrown in the compost bin.


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From Here to "IT"

Category: gardening and old home restoration | Posted: Thu Sep 03, 2009 12:59 pm

Since beginning a blog on Garden Stew, my focus has been almost exclusively on a 200-year old house, Melrose, in which we are honored to be saddled with its restoration.

Melrose, however, is not the only house in our lives. It is a house we renovate in the hope that it will be a home someday, but we also have a home more than three hours drive away. That house has been my home for nearly 13 years, and when my wife of many years died nearly four years ago, I was left with our large, Georgian home and the sizeable English/Southern garden that had been the focus of my leisure hours for almost a decade. In time, I met someone else, one thing led to another, we married, and it will come as no surprise that that changed the dynamic of my life in many ways, including raising questions about our home and garden. It must be said first and foremost that the home we have is truly wonderful and if I never leave it until I'm toes up, I will have been blessed many times over. However, when we take a dispassionate look at our home we also conclude that it is too large, its formality no longer reflects the lives we live, and it is not particularly dog or kid friendly (we have both),

Which brings me to a third house that has entered the picture. It isn't, as of now, a real house. It exists only on paper, the outgrowth of a desire to have a house that is uniquely ours, that is smaller and further out in the country, and that reflects a less formal, more laid back family. That vision of a Carolina Arcadia competes for time in the ether of my imagination with the demands of our beloved Melrose.

Warning- what follows is a digression that really does have a bearing on this blog.

I anticipate that long before Almighty God calls me to task for my many sins and transgressions, my Irish ancestors will berate me for having become an Anglophile. They probably look upon that as being a serious character defect. But there it is. I'm an unabashed Anglophile. So, here before the world I've exposed my Anglophilia like a zipper you forgot to pull up, and I just know that those Irish ancestors are yet spinning in their graves at the tarnished image of me as one of their descendents. I point out this grievous shortcoming in my character to explain that for several decades my Anglomania has shaped and colored my choice in architecture and my preference in garden styles. I live in a Georgian home, have a somewhat Georgian garden, enjoy a home furnished in the English Country style, watch Masterpiece Theater, and have been known to fake a British accent to the amusement of real Brits..

But times change, hair grays, tummies pot and we evolve. Faced with the idea of having a smaller house that we could call our own, I discovered that my evolution had gone in the direction of Tuscany and Provence. Perhaps that really isn't such a far stretch for my Anglophilia, since I understand the English flock to the Luberon and there are so many in rural Italy that it is sometimes referred to as Chiantishire.

To my knowledge, I have not so much as a drop of Italian or French blood, which shows how life has shortchanged me, so where this rather late blooming interest in Tuscan-like architecture bubbles up from is one of those mysteries best left to Wimsey.

When I think of Tuscan/Provencal design, my imagination is driven by pictures of homes in those regions. I am not thinking of what passes for Tuscan/Provencal among so many American contractors and even some architects, who cobble together a gargoyle-like style that passes for Tuscan, or Italian or rustic French. Lacking any other appellation, it goes by the name Mediterranean. While I do not want to cast unnecessary aspersions on these home styles, I want to quickly point out that they are not the direction in which we have gone over the past few months.

Speaking only for myself, I knew at some intuitive level what I wanted and I knew that as soon as I saw it, it would give me a swift kick in the keester, and I'd recognize it. It wouldn't be a "could be" or "should be" or "maybe." It would be "IT." But we had to have an architect's help getting there. I've actually come to the conclusion that working with an architect is a bit like working with a sculptor in creating a statue out of a block of marble. The sought-after figure is embedded in the marble; the sculptor's job is to chip away until the figure is freed. That's what we've been doing with our long-suffering architect. With him, we have chipped slowly, methodically away at a concept, and all the time I've known by faith and gut that the moment would come when I would see it, and it would announce itself at some visceral level as being not just it, but IT.

The other day, that moment arrived.




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Doingdafloors

Category: gardening and old home restoration | Posted: Fri Aug 14, 2009 6:07 pm

The floors at Melrose were covered with carpet when we bought the old place. Not to put too fine a point on it, the carpet was hideous and old and infested with moths. It seemed like a very good idea to rip all that mess up, and we did it, but no good deed goes unpunished. Under the carpet was the original heart pine flooring covered in paint splatters, ground-in filth, remnants of long ago bird droppings and patches of mysterious stains best left unexplored.

For the longest time we managed to ignore the floors because there were so many other projects that demanded our attention, like the roof that leaked and was causing deterioration throughout the house. But the roof has been replaced, the interior walls have been repaired, the kitchen has been totally remodeled, the upstairs bathroom (otherwise known as the bloody bathroom) is once again usable, the front porch has been rebuilt, a new heating system has been installed for half of the house, yadayadayada. Now the floors creak out for repair.

We had refinished one floor last year and the effort was really pretty massive. After that, we had intended to follow up with a room-by-room attack plan, but somehow as 2009 moved along, we always found other things to do rather than return to the backaches that were certain to accompany floor refinishing. By a stroke of luck, we learned of a floor refinishing job that had been done in another historic house in town by a fellow from up in Virginia and after we had seen the floor, I swallowed hard and said that we needed to have the same fellow do our floors. The cost, and it was bound to be high, would be offset by having all of the floors sanded and ready for the next step rather than waiting many months and very likely years to get the floors done by ourselves. I envisioned myself check out of the ol' folks nursing home so I could hobble down to Melrose for one more round of floor sanding.

So, the floors have been sanded and my wife reports that they look wonderful. I'll see them this weekend for the first time. The big issue since the floors were prepped has been what the next step should be. Stain only? Stain and wax? Stain and polyurethane? polyurethane only?

I heard some pretty scary stories about how easy it is to screw up doing polyurethane on a floor. But after reading many articles on the subject, I have come to the conclusion that the reason why many people apparently have problems putting polyurethane on floors is (1) not preparing carefully before the application, and (2) rushing the actual application process, especially the drying time.

This weekend, we will put that understanding to the test. I know that if things do not go as expected, we can always remove go back to square one with some sanding and gnashing of teeth. But I really think we can avoid that.

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If I had courage

Category: gardening and old home restoration | Posted: Fri Aug 07, 2009 8:09 pm

After having been away from GardenStew for awhile, I find myself returning, and I think the reason is that I liked sharing thoughts about Melrose, which is a mess of a place I have in Eastern North Carolina. Melrose is old, at least by US standards. It celebrates its 200th birthday, depending on who is doing the counting, either next year or in 2014. I think that after all these decades, quibbling over a couple of years is a bit of a waste of time. Melrose also was a wreck. 200 years of failure to properly care for the house had left it in pretty bad shape. The roof leaked in many places, rotted wood both exterior and interior was commonplace, the floors were in atrocious shape, the walls were covered by 40-year old wallpaper, the heating system was on its last legs (indeed, one of the systems died a joyless death and had to be sent to the ol' bone yard), there was no air conditioning on the upper floors (which in Eastern NC means it was well neigh uninhabitable in the summer) and the list of shortcomings goes on and on. I had taken to calling Melrose my little road to the poor house.

However much as happened in the last year and a half, and while the poor house remains a distinct possibility, the house is rapidly getting to the point where it will be ready for the next 100 years. It has a new metal roof, the kitchen has been totally redone, all of the floors were recently sanded and are ready for some protective surfacing, the wallpaper is gone and the walls have all been repaired and are ready for painting, the upstairs bathroom (which we fondly call the "bloody bathroom") is restored, the broad front porch has virtually been rebuilt, the upstairs is air conditioned , and generally speaking, the old girl looks pretty respectable, though it is still a good idea not to look too carefully in the nooks, not to mention the crannies.

There are two issues facing us as we move ahead in restoring Melrose- one is supernatural and the other is merely vexing.

On the supernatural front, Melrose is, not to put too fine a point on it, haunted. We have taken to calling our resident ghost, (if there is indeed only one ghost) Lucy. The temptation when she visit the house to come through the door and say in a lound voice "Lucy, I'm home" is quite hard to contain. But given that Lucy may not like being called Lucy, I don't give voice to any I Love Lucy capers.

Lucy has shown remarkable patience with me and my family, choosing apparently to signal her presence by some rather low-key signals. There was, however, a signal of a different sort which even now stands as a remainder that pissing off a protoplasmic phenomenon is rather unwise. My wife had done plaster work in the bloody bathroom and aimed the beam of a strong work light at the still drying plaster when the workday came to an end. The idea was that the heat from the lamp would speed the plaster's drying. During the night, as we slept in a downstairs room, we were awaked by lots of thumping sounds from upstairs. Lots of thumping. Not the sounds of an old house settling. Not the sounds of an owl owling. More the sounds of stomping around. If I had courage, which I do not, I would have gone to the foot of the stairs and yelled "Lucy, you got some splaining to do." Yes indeed, that is what I should have done. If I had courage. You'll notice that I did not say I would have gone up the dark stairs to make known my displeasure. Oh no! Not on your life. Not me. Instead, I would have stood there in the downstairs hallway, every light on the first floor lit to its maximum wattage, draining megawatts from the North Carolina power grid, and proclaimed my annoyance. If I had courage.

The next day, as we prepared to return home, I took the opportunity to go upstairs, to position myself in an otherwise empty room and to have a one-way chat with Lucy. I splained that we are good folks, trying to do the old house a good turn through a lot of back breaking labor. And I asked her forbearance in the event that we should piss her off again. There haven't been any repeats of the loud sounds since that night, but then we have been careful to leave the intense light off when finishing work for the day. Coincidence I suppose.




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