Home Improvement

When we bought our house 19 years ago, the one feature that Deb wasn't crazy about was the kitchen. The location of the house was great, it had great "bone structure" (although the wall and floor coverings were badly in need of updating), and it fit our family well. The galley kitchen was passable as long as there was only one cook. And for a long time there was only one cook.

So we've lived with this non-ideal kitchen for all these years, making several cosmetic updates. When dinner guests come over, the arrangement of the house naturally causes all the incoming guests to congregate in the kitchen, which makes for extreme congestion, just when the meal comes out of the oven.

We now have two cooks. Abigail, now that she has acquired the language and has become more comfortable in our family, has gravitated to the kitchen as one of the places she likes to be. She likes to cook. She loves "cook's privilege" (the cook gets to lick out the bowl). So we finally decided that the kitchen was in need of a more extreme makeover. After a few months of planning, we're moving ahead with the project. The kitchen is going to grow.

Along with the kitchen, the adjoining half bath is moving, and we're adding a room onto the back of the house, a sort-of homeschool room or sitting room that adjoins the kitchen and shares open space with the kitchen. In the picture below, the wall area between the two red lines will be removed and extended out about 19 feet into the back yard.


The permits are in place, the plans are drawn up, and excavation begins on Monday, September 27. We'll post pictures as this progresses.

Tales from the Front Pew, Chapter 11

Abigail has a new friend.

LeiAnna, who is nine years old, was adopted a month ago by close friends of ours. LeiAnna is busy adapting to a completely new culture, language, and family, and they are going through what we went through about a year and a half ago. Lots of adjustments and you never know what is going to happen.

One of those adjustments is sitting through church services. Orphanage children generally do not sit through church services, so this is a new adjustment for them. One of the big things is just keeping the child from being too distracting to others while a stranger stands in front and speaks for a half hour or more in a language that she doesn't understand.

This past Sunday evening, Abigail was delighted when LeiAnna was seated right next to her. They became friends almost instantly when LeiAnna came home from China and they are always excited to see each other.

The two girls held hands through much of the church service. During the prayer, I was distracted by Abigail's hand hitting my leg. Abigail is an inquisitive child, with lots of questions, so she taps me regularly with a question. But this was not her usual soft tap. It was a full backhand slap. I was about to ask her what was wrong when I saw LeiAnna grab Abigail's hand and wind up for another swing at my leg. I quickly grabbed Abigail's hand, which seemed to satisfy LeiAnna. LeiAnna was holding Abigail's other hand as well as her dad's hand, who was seated next to her. Apparently, in LeiAnna's household, they hold hands during prayer, so LeiAnna thought everyone held hands during prayer. Seeing that Abigail and I were not holding hands, she sought to rectify the situation.

We have been observing the adjustments that have been happening in that family for the last month with interest, not because we enjoy seeing them go through difficult adjustments but because we have been there and can sympathize with them, and also because it confirms for us that what we went through over a year ago was actually sort of normal when adopting an older child. We really weren't such a nutty family as we appeared to be.

So getting slugged during prayer in church was not all that abnormal after all.

Project Completion

It's done. Finished. Completed. Culminated. Ended. Mopped Up. Finalized. Wrapped Up.

After about eight months of work, the house we have been rehabbing in downtown Grand Rapids is complete. The last thing to be done was a re-build of the chimney (I hired that job out). Our work included painting entire exterior and most of the interior, gutting and redoing two bathrooms, refinishing hardwood floors, rebuilding the concrete steps on the front porch, replacing most of the wiring and most of the plumbing, installing four new windows and several doors, new heating system, new water heaters, tearing off six layers of shingles and putting a new roof on (hired out), and a list of other tasks that would probably fill a good sized book.

About halfway through the project, I started to maintain a list of tasks to be done. As the project progressed, that list grew as we thought of more tasks. There came a time when the list started to get smaller. About two months ago, the list could be printed on a single page. At that point, it seemed we were "almost done". We also discovered that "almost done" can last a long time. It seems that the list doesn't seem to get any shorter, the details on the list just get smaller. For example, list items like "install tub surround", and "rebuild kitchen cabinets" gave way to "trim the bedroom door so it actually closes", and "caulk the bathtub", which gave way to "trim the strings on the blinds" and "replace dining room window lock". And then we kept finding new things that needed to be done. Many of them were little things, but new things nonetheless. Loose outlet plates, missing shoe moulding, slow running hot water (those plumbing details will drive ya nuts!), coat hangers, and a zillion other things all cospired to extend the time from our original September estimate to February.

Part of the problem was that the labor pool shrank dramatically. First, Josh started college, and then David ended up having enough homework to where he was often unavailable. And Abigail was usually able to con Grandma into taking her to Grandma's house on the days when we worked. And then she wondered why she wasn't making any money.

So it came down to Deb and I, with occasional help from David. It was the two of us that would don the old paint-spattered clothing after supper on a Tuesday night, throw a few supplies in the car, and drive downtown to spend a couple more hours working at the Joe (as we called the property). On Saturdays, I would go early and Deb and David would join me later on in the day. We would get home in time for our traditional Saturday home-made pizza meal.

These sorts of projects tend to take on a life of their own. Part of that life is to prevent many other tasks from happening. Our vegetable garden this past summer was a mass of weeds because many spare moments were spent with paintbrush or hammer in hand. Perhaps the hardest hit was the barn, which became sort of a dumping ground for anything that needed to be stored indoors, as well as many "deal-with-it-later" items. Now that it's later, I'm having to deal with it. I have spent the last couple of weeks sorting through the piles of stuff on the table and the floor. I've started remodeling the interior of the barn at the same time, so the mess is still there. But it's a good kind of mess now, a mess that means progress.

One of the effects of finishing a big project like this is that David's income has suddenly dropped to zero. He is now having to look for a job. It was very convenient for him (and us) to be working for me, as we could be very flexible. We took time off in the summer to spend on family vacations. There were several evenings where we just didn't feel like working, so we stayed home. There was always plenty to do, but we could ignore it if we felt like it, or if the calendar had other activities listed. (This was another reason for our February instead of September completion date.)

That was nice, but it's not gonna happen again real soon. It's time for a real McJob.

As a reminder of our neglect of many things at home, on the day we officially declared the project done, our microwave oven died. Time to catch up on the home front...

The Finished Product

The boys spent many hours refinishing the floors in this picture and the next picture

Joyful Noise

A year ago, Abigail could not speak the language. Life for her at that time was a blur, in fact she remembers very little of the month after we returned from China. A year later (yesterday evening), she was singing a solo in front of a large church. She loved it. She wants to do it again.

God is good.

Pictures and a video clip below...


Abigail is the one with the pink shirt and big smile (circled):

In the following video clip, Abigail is the first to sing...

The Strong-Willed Child

It is said that some children are strong-willed. We have one of those. If there were a way to measure the strength of a child's will, Abigail would be way at the top of the scale. Some children have strong wills, her will is made of high strength steel. While this can result in some tensions within the family, particularly with other strong-willed family members, it can also result in some rather humorous situations.

She has been learning the concept of obedience, and of one's role in the family--particularly, children being obedient to their parents. Some of this she has been learning the hard way, through the consequences that occur from disobedience. Those are some hard lessons, but she is making progress. To put it in simpler language for her, Dad and Mom are the "boss", and the boss is to be obeyed.

Knowing now what she is like, it really came as no surprise to us when she announced at dinnertime yesterday, "I wanna be the BOSS." She just blurted it out to the whole family. She has never been accused of being subtle, so this was right in line with her character. She wants to be in charge, and will let everyone know about it. I think she knew that she wasn't going to get far with this little request, since we all burst out laughing, but I think that she was only half joking.

This resulted in an animated discussion of what being the "boss" was like. This was backed up a little later when the topic on our Advent calendar was Jesus the Servant King. The "boss" serves his family. The "boss" is the one who gets up earlier than everyone else to clear the snow off the driveway. The "boss" takes responsibility to provide for those that he is responsible for, putting his own desires aside.

I told her that she could be the boss. I would go to Chinese class once a week, and practice the piano for a half hour a day, and sleep in until 9:30, and wash the dishes, and work on math problems. She could then pay the bills and go to work and make sure there's food on the table every day and keep the cars on the road and heat in the house.

She was not dissuaded.

She still wants to be the "boss".

It Is Finished

At long last, the bathroom is finished. Below is a progression of pictures which shows the destruction phase, then the construction phase, a process which took several months.

The original bathroom. If you stood far enough away, it didn't look too bad.

The beginning of demolition. Tile shards, drywall dust, sawdust, and just plain dust made for a very dirty job. That's why I had my kids do it.

The claw-foot bathtub exposed. Because of the slant of the floor, it would not drain properly.

Destruction nearly complete. All the fixtures gone, and the plaster about to be removed. Josh and David had the job of hauling the tub down the narrow stairway. I told them that they built a lot of character that day. David told me that they learned a lot of new language that day also.

New plumbing stack installed. Since the house settled several inches and the old stack didn't, the difference pushed the toilet out of the floor. So I either had to raise the house or lower the plumbing. I chose to lower the plumbing by simply replacing all of it.

Additional plumbing for the tub installed.

Time to level the floor. Sleepers cut at an angle and new plywood made for good bathtub drainage again.

New level floor installed. Because of the severity of the slant across the bathroom, the floor had to be rebuilt in two levels, so the tub is actually two inches higher than the rest of the bathroom.

Tub set in place. Too bad the room is seven inches wider than the tub.

New drywall and new window in place. Also, the seven inches behind the tub was filled with a linen cabinet.

Some of the painting is done. Heating vent installed, medicine cabinet installed, and the final flooring is installed.

The finished product. The only thing missing from this picture is the showerhead.

The End of an Era

It's tough to see happen, but the boys have moved on from things that were interesting a few years ago. Particularly since they had so much fun building and then using these "go-machines". But, in the end, practicality won out. I needed the space in my barn, so the go-machines had to go. I took some last pictures, just for old time's sake...

The low-racer, made from a Craftsman lawn tractor

The infamous propeller-kart. This one was a blast.

The propeller-kart, rear view

On the trailer, before hauling to the recycling center. This was 1200 pounds of metal. Our place seems to accumulate this stuff.

The Missing Day

Last year, we didn't have a November 5. We went right from November 4 to November 6. So this year I'll sit and bask in the November five-iness for a while to make up for last year.

We left last year on November 4 and arrived in Beijing on November 6, heading into an adventure that we had no idea how it would turn out. It was, and continues to be, quite an adventure. A few days from our missing November 5, on November 10, we stepped off the train after an 11-hour overnight train trip in Xi'an in central China. Later that day, we met our daughter for the first time. She has been with us ever since, and we have not been the same since. Abigail certainly added a whole new dynamic to our family. We thank God for our newest family member and the progress she has made. In just one short year, she has learned to speak English, she has learned how to live in a family, she is making strides academically, and she is growing physically.

What a difference a year makes.

The Little Foxes

Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, our vineyards that are in bloom.

Song of Solomon 2:15

This verse really didn't seem to mean much to me until today when, for the first time since we have lived in this house (18 years), we spotted a fox in the back yard. We watched him for perhaps five minutes and shot several pictures from the kitchen window until something spooked the fox and he dashed off into the trees behind our place.

Its reason for being there was specifically the row of grapes along the garden, our vineyard, and he was eagerly eating the grapes that Abigail had thrown down a couple days ago, when she was trimming the plants. After a bumper crop, we had a lot of grapes left over, so the fox was grabbing the easy stuff, the grapes lying on the ground.

I would imagine they could do considerable damage to a good crop, given half the chance...

Facebook Panic

Tim Friend is unemployed.


There's a whole story behind this. Most of the story was caused by the appearance of these four words on Facebook this past Friday.

I check Facebook occasionally. Sometimes, it is the only way to find out what my college kid is up to. I rarely post anything. The signal to noise ratio on Facebook is quite low and adding to the inane posts will only increase the noise level.

Such things as:

So-and-so is bored.

or:

So-and-so is tired.

appear frequently, so I thought that:

Tim Friend is unemployed.

would be just another four words in the endless digital chatter.

I was wrong.

On a whim, just before I shut down my computer for the last time at work, just before I turned in my ID badge, I logged into Facebook and typed two words (my name was already filled out). I then handed my computer to my boss and walked out the door for the last time.

I had David with me. The secretary from the Tech Center where he is taking his auto mechanics class called me to tell me he missed the bus, so I picked him up and had him help me clean out my office. I learned that his bus had left an hour early because of homecoming at the high school and had left him behind.

When I walked in the door at home, my dear wife went for the jugular. It took a little effort to pry her hands from around my neck and when I finally could breathe again, she went for the verbal jugular.

"What do you mean, you lost your job?!" she screeched.

"You know what's going on," I told her, "I start my other job on Monday. Unemployment is only for the weekend. You've known about this for two weeks."

As she started to calm down, the story came out.

When she arrived home from picking up Abigail from her class, David's car was not in its usual spot in the driveway. Deb's immediate thought was, "road kill" and Panic 1 started. David has had his driver's license for about a month and his car (which we affectionately call 'the bomb'--see The Car Crisis) for a week. So Deb thought he was splattered on the road somewhere.

She checked the answering machine, which was flashing 9 messages. When she finally got to the last one, it was me, telling her that I had David. The panic started to abate as turned on the computer to check email. She doesn't have a Facebook account, so she could only see the emailed responses to the above four words. "We're so sorry." "We'll be praying for you." "We're sorry you lost your job." These sorts of messages greeted her and started Panic 2.

We have great friends and family, by the way. They've showed lots of concern for what turns out to have been a false alarm.

While Deb was still reading the email, the phone rang. "Did Tim lose his job?" asked my mom. They are currently travelling and had received a phone call saying I had lost my job.

"I don't know," said Deb, "but I'm going to wring his neck."

So, just to set the record straight, I no longer work at Gentex as of this past Friday, but I start at a former employer, X-Rite, on Monday. So the statement "Tim Friend is unemployed" is true, but only temporarily.

And if you want to be in on the fun, just be my friend on Facebook. You may not hear from me that often, but when you do, it may make waves.