I Kept the Roses

I watched a Hallmark movie this week called Time for Him to Come Home. 4th in a series of “Time for someone to come home”. It’s based on a song Blake Shelton and his mom wrote and a book his mom wrote. It’s a nice feel good movie, as all Hallmark ones are. It has a bit of a mystery. It has the very handsome Tyler Haynes with the kind eyes. Kind eyes being the key to being handsome. And it has an adorable Canadian singer named Tenille Townes. She’s singing the title song with the line “Mama called and said it’s time for me to come home.” Bringing tears to the eyes of all of us who wish our mom was still around to call us and say the same. 

Then I found this song of hers. For all of us who know what it’s like to have a broken heart. And what to do with all the things remaining when the one we love is gone. I’ve found people do it differently. Some never change a thing. Some toss everything out the first month. Some, like me, keep a lot, but “give up that bar on the East side of town”, or in my case a tiny house on a tiny ranch because the memories are too painful and the dream has died. A lot of us give up friends, or more accurately they give us up. But I think everyone keeps something. And it’s often surprising what we choose to keep. 

The song is about a love that didn’t work out, but the sentiment of what to save is sometimes the same. 

🎶I tore all the pictures from all of their frames

And all of your T-shirts, I gave them away

I gave up those friends we both hung around

And I gave up that bar on the east side of town

I quit driving by to see if you're home

And I took your dead number right out of my phone

I came to my senses and I gave up drinking alone

But I kept the roses 

Right by my bed

And they should make me lonely 

But I'm smiling instead

'Cause you weren't the one, babe

But you were the closest

I let the rest of us go 

But I kept the roses🎶

I Kept the Roses

What is the longest project you have ever worked on?

This was one of the questions on a StoryWorth book project my daughter and son-in-law gave me. I’ve shared some of the stories here and this is the latest question.

I did two long projects. One was the garage conversion at the first house I bought in Colorado. I did the floors, the painting, and some of the insulation. And demo on a lot of shelves. I also assisted as the carpenter’s helper on removing windows, framing walls, and hanging doors. And I handled the whole permit and inspection side of things. The first time I’d ever gotten building permits and had inspections.

But I did the most work on the other big project, the one I did at our tiny cabin in central Texas. It’s the project I’m most proud of. After Rickie died I moved forward with adding a bedroom and bathroom with laundry area, a project we’d hoped we might be able to do when he retired.

The original cabin had 464 sq ft. After the addition the total cabin area was 809 sq ft. I had the same company that did the original cabin shell do the addition shell. Because of the way the chimney was positioned the addition was connected to the original cabin by a hallway with small outside decks on each side.

The ceiling in the addition was 12’ tall at the peak. The carpenter tried to talk me into letting him add a drop ceiling because he thought it would be easier for me to finish. I had told him I was going to try and install the tongue and groove planks myself. Rickie and I (mostly me) balked at doing that in the original cabin and only did the walls ourselves. We hired someone for the gable ends and the high 13’ peaked ceiling in that original cabin room. The carpenter told me that there wasn’t a doubt in his mind that I could do that ceiling but if I decided I needed help to call him and he’d come help me. It’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me!

The carpenter had been an accountant in Mexico and we talked a lot while he was there about life and about what I wanted to do myself. He was very kind to me and told me how to make frames to do the metal skirting I planned to put on the addition. His son was also a carpenter and helped with the shell project. They were only there a week building the shell and they stayed in town. One night I cooked some soup and cornbread for us and we shared a meal.

They did the addition shell, including metal roof, and the small back deck and stairs. I did the front deck myself. The biggest part of the project was the tongue and groove planks for the walls and ceilings. I had to cut lots of angles for the gables. It took me some thinking to figure out how I would do the ceiling. We had a tall stepladder that would just allow me to get to the top. I had bought a cordless nail gun and hung it from a belt on the ladder. I’d cut each piece, alternating lengths, climb the ladder and install it, then back down and do the same. Moving across one side and then the other.

I had to rip boards at the top of the walls and the ceiling peak. I was not comfortable using the table saw we had. So I cut them with a cordless jigsaw. I also had to cut some of the back part of the “tongues” off when I used different planks. We had enough left over from the original cabin to do one wall but when I changed to the new planks they didn’t fit tight. So I had to cut the back part off to force them to fit. And I had to do this on others that didn’t mesh together well as I got to planks bought at different times.

I framed out a drop ceiling and installed planks on it over where the bathtub would go because I knew I would have a hard time finishing the ceiling once the tub was in. I couldn’t do the whole ceiling until I finished the walls. And I couldn’t do them until the plumber and electrician did their work. After the tub was installed I framed up an end wall as the space for the tub was about 8” longer than the tub.

I improvised a lot as I went along. Sometimes I’d have to tear something down I’d just finished. Like the first framing for the drop ceiling over the tub when I realized I didn’t support it correctly on the side walls. I used coffee can tops and other odd things I had on hand as patterns for some of my cutouts.

I unloaded and cut and installed the plywood subfloor. The 4x8’ sheets are heavy and hard to handle but I managed to get it done. I stained the ceiling planks before I put them up and painted the walls and trim after they were up.

I bought, loaded, hauled, and unloaded most of the supplies myself. I’d transfer things to the Kawasaki Mule, which was lower than the pickup truck. Then drive to the side of the front porch and unload them there. The tub was very heavy and challenging. At some point I went into town and just had the lumber yard there deliver the last of the planks I needed. I moved the planks around so many times during the process. I had the compound mitre saw set up on the front porch for most of the project. Sometimes I had it inside when there was room.

After I had finished the planks on the walls and ceilings, I did the trim work, including window sills and trim. Then I installed the vinyl plank floors (LVP). I didn’t do any electrical, HVAC, plumbing, or the tile work around the tub. I installed the hardware for a sliding barn door for the bathroom. Then I built a barn door for it out of leftover corrugated metal and the pine planks. My neighbor Scott ripped the two side pieces for me on that so I’d have a smooth even finish. And he helped me lift the door into place. I had to make some adjustments on it as we discovered when hanging it but it all worked out. I made a door handle from a piece of a tooled leather belt Rickie had.

John and Zac came out one weekend and they helped me put the framing together for the metal skirting. I finished the frames and installed most of the corrugated metal panels. Caleb and Cameron were out hunting one week and they did some of the metal skirting on the front. I knew I needed venting for the crawl space so just left spaces that I filled with vents and trimmed them out.

A lot of the project was just figuring out how to do things as I went along. 

I had room for a washer and dryer at one end of the bathroom. I installed some shelves over that area. After the addition was finished I put some roofing shingles under the skirting to keep skunks from digging and spread granite gravel all around the cabin to cover this and for xeriscaping. I had a door to the small new back deck and I painted it pink.

There was the original back screen porch this new deck connected to. I’d removed enough screen to make room for a screen door to go from that new deck to the old porch. I put a 4x4 post in and put a screen door so you could access the old porch and new deck.

The whole project took about 8 months. I learned a lot about myself and what I was capable of doing. It got me through that first year after Rickie died and life as we knew it came to an end. It gave me confidence that I could handle anything thrown at me. And confidence to tackle projects I’d never done before. To never let the fact you didn’t know how to do something stop you. That was always Rickie’s motto, a variation on “just do it!”