On Saturday, July 26, Tessa taped a sheet of printer paper to the fridge. At the top it said SEPT 13. Under that were six lines, and under those, in smaller letters, "NOT: cabinets, stairs."
The wedding is at a barn outside Lowell, not at our house, but the house was going to get company anyway. My sister Erin is staying with us the week of the wedding, and both sets of parents will be in and out. Counting from that Saturday, we had six weekends through Labor Day, and we agreed the last weekend before the wedding and the wedding week itself would stay empty, on purpose.
The list
Here's what made the fridge, with where things stand today and what each one cost:
- Front stoop railing, scraped, wire-brushed, primed and painted black. Done July 26 and 27. $52.
- Porch light and new house numbers. Done August 2. $127.
- Tub recaulk around the pink 1952 tile. Done August 3. $24.
- Garage cleanout and workbench. Done August 9 and 10. $140 for a bulk pickup fee, wall hooks and a shelf. The bench has its own line in the house sheet.
- Office into a guest room. Done August 16 and 17. $201 for a queen air bed with a built-in pump, a set of sheets and blackout curtains.
- Plaster patches and living room touch-up paint. Plaster this weekend, paint over Labor Day. $96, already bought.
Everything for the last one is sitting in the basement, so I can give a real total: $640.
Notes from the first four weekends
The porch light was a straight swap, breaker off and the Klein tester confirming the wires were dead before I touched anything. The one surprise was cosmetic. The new fixture's base is smaller than the old one, and decades of weather left a clean white outline on the aluminum siding where the old one sat. A melamine sponge helped some. It's the kind of thing only I notice, which is what I keep telling myself.
For the tub, my dad's advice was to fill it with water before caulking, so the joint is at its widest while the caulk cures, and to leave the water in overnight. Getting the old caulk out took an hour. The new bead took ten minutes. That ratio seems to hold for most things in this house.
The guest room was mostly moving furniture. The office is 10 by 11, so the desk went against one wall, the air bed fits along the other with about two feet to spare, and the blackout curtains are there because the streetlight shines straight in that window. Erin is not a morning person.
The two we cut
Painting the kitchen cabinets was on my first draft. They're 1994 oak, and they'd look a lot better painted. But doing it right is three weekends at least, with the kitchen torn apart in the meantime, and a bad finish would be hard to miss with our parents standing around the counter. Tessa crossed it off with one line: "Not the month before the wedding."
Pulling the stair carpet was the other one. After the upstairs bedroom in May, I'm fairly sure there's oak under there too. I also know what pulling carpet looks like: hundreds of staples, tack strip and whatever condition the treads are really in. A half-finished staircase is worse than a carpeted one, and I couldn't promise to finish it in a weekend.
What the fridge list did for us
Most weekends at the Cape start with me walking around the house picking something, which works fine until it doesn't. This time, the date at the top of the paper made the choices easy. Each project had to be something a guest would see or use, it had to fit in a weekend, and it couldn't open up a bigger problem. The cabinets and the stairs failed that last test.
The porch light had to be ordered, and it took nine days to show up, so it moved to the second weekend instead of the first. That was the planner part of my brain earning its keep: anything with lead time goes on the calendar first, and everything else fits around it.
This Saturday is plaster, which Gary describes as "fine, until it isn't." Erin arrives the Thursday before the wedding. The air bed has been inflated, tested and deflated twice, and I've got a stack of cheap towels set aside for the guest room that Tessa insists are not the good ones.
