Don Davis gallery

Perhaps the greatest transformation took place downstairs in the Hotel Suite/Mud Room (pronounced hoh-tel sweet slash muhd roo m).

Back in January 2007, when we were still in the planning process for this renovation and working with the incredibly impractical Dumas architecture firm, we articulated a key goal:

Give a reason to go downstairs. The area is now a basement with a door to the backyard and feels like an excellent place to develop musculoskeletal maladies.

Thankfully, in January 2008, we cut our losses, stepped away from the firm’s over-priced, unbuildable schemes, sketched a more doable design ourselves and found a relatively inexpensive architect to complete the drawings.

While we waited for the renderings, we got to work. On March 16, we started doing the demolition on the walk-out basement ourselves.

In May 2008, we made the wise decision of hiring Steve Wasko as our primary builder. Structural repairs began downstairs on June 28. August was a month of tremendous progress. (Could a year have passed already?) One tree trunk lally column holding up the upstairs was replaced by two proper supports, among other improvements mandated by the structural engineer we needed to hire.

As Matt noted: “It is like getting a new house from the inside out.”

Replacement stairs were built in October 2008. Matt had the team construct them in an “L” shape, versus the straight shot we traversed in the past. With the space defined, and before Igor (whom I’d never recommend) installed the drywall over the new framing and insulation, we ordered a hospital curtain track from the easy to work with people at Brite Inc.

In January 2009, our Railco Metalcraft railings were installed. We took care of paint, stair treads and trim. By June, we were adding a radiant heating system to the floor, followed by tile. (We learned—too late—about the almost impossible to remove resin haze the pre-mixed grout leaves behind. Matt has doused the floor with various chemicals during the past weeks to try to reduce the shiny splotches.)

After a lot of searching online, we found a storage bed—and seem to have gotten the last one in the country from the very nice people at FOW in Fair Lawn.

After the bed arrived in mid-July, we did some fine-tuning, including tiling the ledge behind the bed, paint touch-ups and caulking, etc. Then came one of my favorite aspects of feathering my nest: Hanging art. At last, we could place the five paintings created, selected and given to us by Matt’s dad, Don.

The curtains Matt picked up at deep discount from a going out of business sale informed our paint color choice for that wall of the house. Then Matt’s mom, Jean, was kind enough to sew the two panels together, creating on-demand privacy.

I cannot believe what this house has been through... But for this corner of our home, at least, it may be time to declare: “Yes! We are done!”

Beer garden

We spent this evening at Starbrite Farm for Slow Food® Northern NJ’s Sustenance™ on the Farm Dinner. Or, as Matt calls it: Hippy Farm Dinner. (I wore my best tie-dye shirt. He reluctantly agreed to serve as my Arm Candy for the event.)

An al fresco fundraiser featuring “family style” dining with 98 strangers (Matt expected “88 lines about 44 women” by the Nails to describe the guest list), the threat of long speeches (totaling a relentless 63 minutes), under a tent in a muddy field (we had to regularly extricate our chair legs from the muck) during a hot, humid and buggy August night… what could go wrong?

Actually, excellent wine flowed with each of the five courses, plus dessert. Although the vegetarian option for the two meat courses looked comparatively akin to prison rations, it was all quite good. We had fun. (Luckily, Matt never noticed the underweight mustachioed hippy woman with the furry legs and dressed-so-you-cannot-miss-them hairy armpits.)

Farmer John told us about the travails of trying to grow organic vegetables. We identified. As gardeners, deer and ground hogs also thwart our efforts. Since moving to Casa de Roo in June 2000, we’ve learned that these critters welcome most plants we put into the yard as additions to their salad bar. Especially plants we ourselves consider delicious.

So a key element of our new deck is a potager. I had visions including espaliered apple trees; visions that exceeded our available “acreage.” We took delivery of our deck furniture on April 17. While the set ended up requiring more space than I envisioned when we placed the order at Max Furniture, the exterior living room is oh so comfortable.

On May 16, we hit Tractor Supply Company and found exactly what we needed: two galvanized metal feed troughs. The enormous containers fit one inside the other, like Russian nesting dolls, and we easily transported the set in my Rav4.

Our kitchen garden features a variety of tomatoes, herbs like basil and a few flowers to attract pollinators and add color. On May 17, we filled one trough and the metal planters we reclaimed up from our storage unit with organic soil. Every bag. So, off Matt went to Home Depot for more. He came home with (shudder) on-sale Miracle-Gro® potting mix. It smelled acrid, but soon off-gassed.

The organic plants look scrawny ... and have yielded delicious fruit since early in the season. The “juiced” plants became ’roid freaks, growing leaves like crazy and then collapsing. They took several rounds of staking and tying, and are productive, albeit difficult to harvest. Better living through chemistry?


We gathered our first two tomatoes on July 16 and continue harvesting these super-sweet beauties regularly. Then rain, rain and more rain fell, filling the tomatoes with water to the bursting point.

As the old saying goes: “If life gives you split tomatoes, make a cocktail.” So yesterday, I created a Bloodless Mary, dropping damaged Sweet 100s directly into a shot glass and topping it off with American-made Crop Harvest Earth Organic Cucumber Vodka. Matt made a Cucumber Crop-n-Tonic, garnished with tomato. (We had previously tried Crop’s tomato flavor, also excellent enough to drink neat.)

This morning we harvested 90 tomatoes, for a total of 731 small and large, red and yellow perfectly juicy fruits.