The Soil Bank

Photo courtesy Flickr

Topsoil was a hot issue as I paged my way through a fourth-grade geography book one boring Fifties afternoon in Mrs. Mooney’s class. The dust bowl was a living and menacing memory, a significant percentage of the population still farmed, and science fiction writer Robert Heinlein’s children’s classic Red Planet Mars explained the process of soil formation.

I never expected to flash back to concerns about erosion when I decided to homestead a stone’s throw from downtown Seattle, but every time I sweep the beautiful old gutter in front of the house, I get a lesson in soil building. The tiny, drought-resistant weeds that sprout in the paving grab and hold their gritty future as it drifts onto the bricks from traffic and construction. A single seedling will capture half a cup or more of soil in just a week or two.

Pulling seedlings make maintenance easier, lifting clods makes the front garden richer. Either way, the property gains.

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Set Theory

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An acquaintance grew up in a modest suburban home furnished with museum-quality old things, including a Rembrandt etching. I asked her what it was like to be surrounded with that kind of excellence every day, and she said it bothered her that the chairs didn’t match, the way the ones at her friends’ houses did.

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Modules

Photo courtesy Flickr

In her wisdom, my ma clued me in to the importance of standard dimensions. At her knee, I lisped “four by eight feet for plywood”, “golden mean”, and “design to get the most out of a given piece of material”.

When we occupied and began to furnish this 1890 house, I was astonished to discover that the DIY pine dresser my mother designed, and from which she tutored me, dropped into this old space without a ripple. Her maxims had been delivered as part of a discussion of modern design, but I imagine valid ways run deep in the culture.

Choosing and using modular furnishings permits a huge range of improvisation, so the money you spend pays off over time and in varying circumstances. It’s not a bad idea to carry a tape measure when you’re scouting. The Big Box Northern European Furnishings chain gives away paper tapes and nearly gives away state of the art design based on standard dimensions.

24” x 72” is a key flat dimension. It defines the seat of a sofa, a single bed or cot, a self-inflating air mattress, and the top of a folding office table. Standard bedding, table cloths, and cotton dropcloths all work with this module.

12” x 12” is another key dimension. In my life, it’s a vestige of vinyl recorded music and is reinforced by dairy crates, the most versatile of all small furnishings. That’s a sixteen-quart crate. I buy from thrift stores. Crates cost the vendor around $10 each, their loss is significant, and theft increases when gas prices rise and recycling is more profitable.

36” and 48” high-tech wire shelving in the units that come in a box is the most efficient. I have tried nearly every configuration that’s available in this design. Plain vanilla is the stuff that pays off.

Stock photo paper, mats, and frame sizes simplify graphic life. There are specialized museum sizes for the convenience of the fine art community.

Reduce the number of variables in your life to gain time to think. A Reddit post on August 23, 2010, about buying twenty pair of the same black sock generated a huge and hilarious response. My favorite was the comment from the person who was ready to call someone stupid, realized they’d made the same clumsy move, and had decided “the rubber band was on the other claw”. Thank you. Thank you.

Now and then I discover a product that’s so fundamental it displaces everything similar. Black nylon now defines luggage, clothing storage, trousers, and bags. It displaced a huge, motley, and confusing collection of suitcases, dressers, jeans, and sidebags. Nylon is stronger than steel of the same dimension. Glass is similarly rewarding: durable French bistro classics serve hot and cold liquids, and small rectangular storage dishes from an old-line American manufacturer displace plastic ware, numerous other storage formats, and are perfect for setting up MREs.

The central artifact in my life at the moment is this trusty laptop, based on 81/2”x11” or legal 81/2”x14”. It, a scanner, and a fast connection are far more engaging than domesticity as it has been defined. What remains are the English language, the best courtesy I can manage, and life support at its safest, most efficient, and most healthful.

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Doing Simple Things Well

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Doing simple things well is often neither simple nor easy: it takes time to define a task and more time to work out how to do it with the least effort. In this area of home design, traditional often trumps innovation, and expedient solutions are often more profitable than high-end installations.

Flatware reached its finest hour in the eighteenth century. Silver from that period has not been bettered for the graceful table manners it supports, and the market now offers many patterns in stainless steel that echo earlier forms. If flatware interests you, cruise Replacements, Ltd.’s web site for an encyclopedic tour.

When I threw my stove away (see September 4, 2009), I picked up a tinny $15 imported rice cooker at a hardware store. I have used it at least once a day for years for oatmeal, rice, and steamed vegetables, and the hunch that millions of Asian housekeepers could not be wrong has proved out. The electricity bill fell by half, and I discovered that I could (although I do not) feed us with only the rice cooker and a hot pot. Those two little countertop appliances replaced fifty pounds (nearly half a yard) of enameled cast-iron French cookware and an appallingly wasteful conventional stove. For years I had admired traditional old Japanese pots that have a collar to collect heat that rises around their exterior. The little rice cooker has that collar-its lip-and a concentrated heat source that is a mere button at the base.

One key to doing simple things well is to distinguish between the front of the house, the social areas, and the back of the house, production and maintenance areas. Twentieth-century trends in domestic architecture blurred the distinction between the two, resulting in absurd situations like home art studios with wall-to-wall carpeting. Frankly utilitarian solutions to basic tasks, like the rice cooker, don’t impress anyone visually, but the end of the month bank statement is gratifying.

The Great Big Northern European home furnishings chain sells ready-made amenities that suit nineteenth to twenty-first century architecture. A tour of the store is an education in proportion, function, and intelligent service. There’s a trade-off between quality and price, so shop judiciously. Classics like rag rugs, sheepskins, glassware, and kd bookcases have been the best value for me. For other low-end furnishings, I have learned to prefer long-established common national housewares brands found in other outlets.

There’s a mail order operation, The Original Colony Country Store, that carries the definitive collection of housewares that do basic things better than any others, and if you have a hankering for a hardwood clothes drying rack that will serve generations, that’s the place to go.

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Scraping the House

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I learned this phrase from one of the first housekeeping men I knew, an old friend rediscovered after he had married and fathered two toddlers. I called one morning, and that’s what Lane said he was doing.

It’s hard to better the concept, and I spent the past week-end doing just that in anticipation of a family visit. I keep the place near fighting trim most of the time, and since this is currently a toddler-free zone, there’s actually little scraping to be done. Inventory can always stand a baleful inspection, though.

Oprah Winfrey recently rebroadcast an epic assault on a hoarder’s accumulation (see August 12), and the show brought home a basic point: manage inventory so that furnishings can present themselves at their best. I’ve been itching to downsize in place, and even a couple of fine old favorites had made their way onto my hit list. Two days’ subtracting obsolete electronics, redundant tools and supplies, frozen projects, and unused gear freed the interior so that the good things can shine.

Early in my independent life, I mumbled about inventory to a musician, showing him linens that had been spun and woven by her aunts for my great-grandmother’s trousseau. I said something about their having been too good to use all these years, and Fred countered that they were too good to hide. Indeed, they are too good to hide. They are also far too good to misuse and illustrate the difference between valuable and precious.

A wise high school teacher toured my first house, a seven hundred square foot cottage, and advised me to leave room for people. Ever since, I have found repeatedly that when things overwhelm active space, morale and health go to hell.

Futurist Buckminster Fuller published a book entitled I Seem to be a Verb. Fuller’s point of view is one of the pillars of Now, and I find that making sure I have more verbs in my life than nouns is the key to happiness and productivity.

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Straightforward Utility

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Like the cat that prefers to look at a finger rather than the target being indicated, I often extract more information from the backdrop of an interview than from the dialogue.

Recently, Charlie Rose interviewed English journalist Christopher Hitchens, whose comments were rigorous and inspiring. Hitchens’ library, I assume it was his library, was equally inspiring. The room had plain walls, and behind his chair stood a sofa with a low Saarinen tulip table set with a chess board, to the right was a large contemporary portrait, and behind that was a wall of book shelves. At the rear stood a ladder, a traditional accessory for floor-to-ceiling shelving.

This ladder mocked the pretense of McMansion aspirations: it was a clean wooden stepladder whose bucket shelf made it more useful than the traditional mahogany structure on rails. I’ve always loved the look of a wooden ladder: it took this interview to make me realize I could have spent years enjoying the view if I hadn’t been chicken.

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Selfish Elegance

Photo courtesy Flickr: square-ended narrow border spade from S & H first wave

Gardener/economist Paul Hawken wrote in the late Seventies’ Next Economy that the value of a dollar is determined by the price of a barrel of oil, and that manufactured goods worth buying contain a great deal of intelligence. Thirty years on, oil is higher and goods are smarter than ever.

For my purposes, good speakers and a fast internet connection are worth a dumpster full of cheap clothing, third-rate housewares, and bloated furniture. High-tech knits, classic eighteenth and twentieth century interior amenities, and state of the art hiking gear cover most domestic eventualities, especially when supplemented by French cotton damask tablecloths and a handful of tools.

The more my life resembles dorm existence, the happier, healthier, and more productive I can be. The scene doesn’t have to look like a dorm- it’s possible to sneak away from obsolete domestic responsibilities under a conventional roof. The trick is to contract good, better, and best into one layer of very good and then use it to the hilt. Old, new, and waiting in reserve trump cheap, mediocre, and too good to use.

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