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TODAY I’M SENDING YOU ELSEWHERE, to an adventures-in-renovating blog called A Brooklyn Limestone in Progress, which I much admire for its creativity, enthusiasm, graphic design, and general professionalism.
As part of an extended guest-blogging series, I’ve contributed a post about my cottage fix-ups that begins:
WHAT’S THE BIGGEST COLOR CLICHÉ IN THE BEACH COTTAGE BOOK? That’s right: blue and white. Sorry, but that’s what I wanted for my first house at the beach, a fixer-upper in Springs, N.Y. (a hamlet five miles north of East Hampton waaaaaay out at the end of Long Island) that I bought in May 2009.
As a longtime city person and Brooklyn resident, I’d never done the beachy blue-and-white thing…
Go here to read the whole thing and see more pictures of my excessive use of Benjamin Moore’s Sailors’ Sea Blue. And check out the rest of Mrs. Limestone’s groovy blog while you’re at it.
Ummm…not terribly, I’m afraid.
I try. I finally started a compost pile about a month ago. The delay was in deciding where it should go. I finally put it way in the far corner of my lot, 200′ from my back door. So it’s inconvenient, but it will get me out in the woods every day, where I can say hi to the deer that don’t come right up to the house to say hi to me.
I would never dream of mixing newspaper with cardboard when I go to the town dump. They have separate containers for each, with stern posted warnings not to even think about throwing plastic bags in any of them, but to put those in the Non-Recyclable Materials dumpster. We separate glass, metal, and plastic here in East Hampton, whereas New York City is happy just to get it all in one bag.
I got the last remnants of the previous owner’s oil-based paints and boat engine fluids and pesticides to the dump on toxic-waste disposal day last month.
I remember to carry a cloth shopping bag most of the time. Even so, I amass far too many plastic bags under the kitchen sink. Plastic bags are a scourge, along with unwanted catalogues. At my last address, I managed to staunch the flow of catalogues eventually, but that was a) time-consuming (they want your customer # for each retailer), b) took ages to take effect, c) never fully worked anyway, and d) resumed in force when companies caught wind of my new address. I haven’t ordered from Neiman Marcus in 10 years, but somehow I’m back in their good graces. I get several catalogues a week from them, along with Pottery Barn, Restoration Hardware, Victoria’s Secret, etc., and I don’t think I can be bothered to go through it all again.
I hand-painted, painstakingly, a rattan sofa, which took three days, but I just couldn’t see using a dozen cans of spray paint, knowing that much of it would be released into the empty spaces between the sticks of rattan, and thereupon into the atmosphere (and my lungs).
Still, and I’ve been researching this question for months, there doesn’t seem to be any way to get a handle on thirty years of rampant wisteria growth without Round Up, and even then, only time will tell if my finicky ministrations with a sponge brush to the cut ends of the vines have made much difference.
And although I use compact flourescent bulbs outside, I haven’t found any as warm as incandescent bulbs for indoor use. Soft, warm light is very important to me. I’m exquisitely sensitive to glarey, harsh, cold lighting. It depresses the hell out of me. I’ve tried numerous CF bulbs but found none I’m happy with.
In general, moving house increases one’s carbon footprint to Sasquatch proportions. All those packing materials. All the stuff that’s left behind or thrown away. The mountains of garbage I found in this house and basement and had to discard. The old appliances that went into landfills somewhere. The quantity of cleaning supplies you go through (I rarely spring for the very expensive ‘green’ ones).
Green guilt: it’s even worse than garden guilt (for not deadheading the rhododendrons, not washing out the clay pots before putting them away for winter, etc.)
Do you have green guilt, too? About what? Please tell me I’m not the only one.
I’M UPSTATE THIS WEEKEND and made it my business to check out the architectural salvage warehouse operated by the Historic Albany Foundation.
My plan is to replace the screens on my porch with glass to create a year-round sun room, much like my friends Fran and Bob did at their house in Columbia County, N.Y., below.
Bob got the windows at the Historic Albany Foundation — actually they’re mostly French doors — and in just one day, with the help of a carpenter, transformed their screened porch to a glassed-in conservatory.
Arriving late on a rainy Friday, with just half an hour to go before closing, I didn’t have time to root through thousands of square feet of panel doors, multi-paned windows, moldings, sinks and tubs, hardware, mantels, lighting fixtures, etc., but I didn’t see enough of any one kind of window to make the matched set of seven I need.
Still, it’s a great place to know about, and everything is amazingly cheap (old panel doors in good condition for $40, for example).
Albany is not an unpleasant city in which to spend some time. It has a good art museum, a few streets lined with 19th century row houses that rival Brooklyn Heights for beauty, and on Lark, several of the kind of cozy, locally-owned coffee shops that East Hampton ought to have but doesn’t.
Photos by Zoë Greenberg
I HAVE A FRIEND in Brooklyn who is a complete coffee snob. (You know who you are.) She grinds her own beans each morning – I say life’s too short for that – and disdains Starbucks. It’s not just that she says their coffee tastes ‘burnt.’ It’s too corporate, too military-industrial complex for her. So she buys her French roast at old-school mom and pop stores like Caputo’s and D’Amico’s, and when it’s a sit-down situation, there are any number of quirky, individualistic places to go.
But that’s in Brooklyn. Since leaving the Big Town for the Hamptons, three hours due east, I’ve gained a whole new appreciation for Starbucks. When you’re on the road a lot, as I have been, coffee, wi-fi, and a bathroom all in one place (wi-fi in the bathroom!) are major draws. And when you know you can get a Greek yogurt with honey, and vanilla powder to sprinkle in that coffee, and a comfy chair and somebody’s leftover copy of the New York Times, well, that’s utter heaven.
The first time I ceased to take Starbucks for granted was in London a few years ago. I had just emerged from the Underground (subway) on my way to the public baths (swimming pool) on Ironmonger Row, with no clue where I was. I was standing at the edge of a busy roundabout (traffic circle), badly in need of a place to sit down and consult my map. Also, since I was staying with an English friend who started each day with a bracing cup of tea, I was badly in need of some good strong coffee. As the traffic hurtled by, and I stood there dazedly looking in all the wrong directions, my eye caught sight of the familiar green logo, shining like a beacon. Never was I so glad to overpay for a cup of coffee.
More recently, I’ve become a regular at the Starbucks location off Exit 70 of the Long Island Expressway. It’s exactly an hour from my new home to points west, just when I’m in need of a pit stop.
And, charmless and ’80s-ish though the universal Starbucks decor is, and annoying as the middle-of-the-road music they’re constantly pushing may be (at least they keep it low), in my otherwise sophisticated village of East Hampton, there’s – believe it or not – no other comfortable coffee shop for women of a certain age to congregate after the gym. So Starbucks it was the other morning for me and my friend Roz, especially as she’d heard they were giving a free cup of coffee in exchange for taste-testing their new Via brand of instant. (Full disclosure, per the FTC’s new guidelines for bloggers: Starbucks is NOT giving me any free coffee to write this laudatory post.)
We were chatting over our decaf, getting to know each other, when I mentioned (too loudly) the name of another new local acquaintance, prompting a third woman, who was wearing big dangly earrings, to glance up and join the conversation (I later found out she’s a well-known artist). A fourth woman, seated nearby, looked on smiling. She was waiting for a friend, and when that friend arrived, she turned out to be someone Roz knew. They hugged, and soon the five of us were introducing ourselves and having a communal chat about art, books, families, real estate, and what a pity it is that there’s no more atmospheric place to gather for a cup of coffee, and how we ought to organize some kind of get-together somewhere so we can all meet up through the winter on a regular basis.
I don’t know if that will ever come to pass, but if it does, it will probably be at Starbucks.
BIG DOINGS around here this morning. I had a large doublefile viburnum (viburnum plicatum tomentosum ‘Shasta’) delivered and planted by Spielberg, a nursery in Amagansett. That’s right. Two nice guys came and dug a hole and positioned this gorgeous red-purple shrub in all its fall glory, then made the little moat around it to hold water, while I stood and watched, not straining my back in the least. It was wonderful.
View out my kitchen window at 10AM:
View out my kitchen window at noon:
I followed them with handfuls of milorganite, a fertilizer said to deter deer, and then whipped up a batch of homemade deer repellent, adapted from this website.
Then they planted two other, smaller shrubs I’d ordered: an abelia ‘Little Richard’ and a boxwood ‘Winter Gem,’ evergreens that are sure to cheer me up each time I enter the driveway this winter.
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