@Robin4,
Are you Rob or are you Robin? I'm thinking out loud now. 😉
I did read your post about your house recently and all I could think of was my mom and dad's 100-year-old house in Hermosa Park, Chicago, just minutes from Logan Square and Wicker Park (find the movie and you'll appreciate the beauty of urban Chicago). My mom and dad stripped layers and layers and layers of oil paint off stair banisters and crown mouldings. They refinished floors, repaired horsehair plaster walls, rewired the house for safety. They restored the brick by retucking and remortaring as needed. They did it all themselves, by hand. My dad on a ladder, my mom holding on, me with the camera shooting photos for posterity.
I remember living in houses where we had to use the bathroom as dad was going to shut off the water to replace toilets and bathrooms, sinks. My mom wanted a pot filler but it wasn't true to the period so she agreed to pass on it.
My father built every single kitchen cabinet by hand, out of maple, and with soldering and welding tools created the handles.
Ceramic tile, in the black-and-white octagonal pattern was laid on bathroom floors and subway tile on bathroom walls. He did it himself with my mom.
I'd go home to visit, meet my brother there, and we knew it was a working vacation. I remember helping my mother till clay soil to amend it with compost and sand and anything that would allow water to drain.
I lost my father on May 24, 2010. I was with him, in that house, when he said his last goodbye.
I stayed with my mother for a week and found original drawings. I went into his workshop and brought his chisels home.
They sit in my garage, on display, along with his chair with wheels, his crazy toolbelt/apron, and that big ol' clock that was always four minutes slow.
My father taught me how to cope and mitre corners. He taught me how to change o-rings under toilets. He taught me how to sand and finish portrait floors so that I always worked with the grain. He taught me that finishing by hand was necessary as machines didn't handle the curves and grooves of the craftsmanship of years gone by.
I built a modern house which I finished six weeks after my father died.
I laid my own hardwood floors, mounted my own cabinets, set my own tile, and mitred all the corners for the trim around the doors and baseboard.
I brought my father's ashes home with me and planted a memorial garden with a modern pond and a plethora of hostas and coral bells, bleeding hearts and astilbes.
My father built grandfather clocks and so the coral bells. Bleeding hearts reseed easily as our hearts continue to bleed for him. The astilbes are Sister Theresa in honor of his mother, Theresa. Forget-me-nots float on the pond above the goldfish, which remind me of the first goldfish he bought me when I was seven.
I finally found a rose named Margarita, my mother's name, and she grows cascading over the fence which encloses his garden to make it my private nook.
I built that fence myself, using all the techniques he taught me. Measure twice. Cut once. Clean corners. Sink the nails.
One day my mother will be gone and I'll have to do something with that fabulous house in Chicago, and I know that when that day comes, I will be saying goodbye to him yet one more time.
