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Pretty Ply for a White Guy...
Aug. 31st, 2021 09:00 pmAs the waning hours of August pass, things in the reno department got a lot more real. Yesterday, our latest refi funded, which meant we could go ahead and schedule the major part of the upcoming work. The new furnace goes in on September 13th, and the new AC four days later. They will also be insulating, adding glass block windows, and fixing various holes in various places that shouldn't have them.
Then today, Eleanor finally got a line on plywood for the bathroom floor. The price was been up and down like an elevator, and availability has fluctuated about as much, but as of this weekend it was go time. Except the friend with the van big enough to hold the plywood sheets was out of town until yesterday. Glenn dropped off the Caravan and the keys around 4:15, and it was off to a local lumber joint to pick up the haul:
There's a sheet as big behind that, or under it as we drove it home- but not from one of the usual suspects in the Big Box Business. Rather, it came from the only retail building in Western New York I can say, with certainty, my sister has been in with me:
Just about 40 years ago this week, I arrived in Buffalo for the first time as my permanent home. I'd taken a single unfurnished room near the UB campus housing the law school, and I was in need of minimal but useful furniture: bed, dresser, desk. Donna recommended a sofa bed for the first, since it could double as a couch when my needs got that far. Somehow we settled on this very warehouse building, then housing a furniture chain called Alpert's. This all being decades pre-Siri, we were working off a newspaper ad, a phone book and a map. All of them told us this too-big-to-miss store was at the corner of Sheridan Drive and Transit Road, which even then I knew was a pretty major intersection in the grand scheme of Suburban Buffalo Things.
Right. Then, a left- from the law school environs onto Sheridan, heading east. Not much had been built out on that highway in that direction back then; the original Sheridan Drive Wegmans wouldn't arrive for a couple of years. We passed where it would eventually be, then passed Youngs, and Harris Hill, and then, we reached the literal end of the road- at Main Street with a green sign pointing to Batavia 20 miles beyond. How could we have missed such a major intersection?
Because it was so major, Sheridan Drive had been rebuilt over it on a bridge, with solitary signs pointing to offramps for 78 North and 78 South without any name of "Transit Road" itself. (These eventually arrived, sometime around 20 years later.) We turned back, and, probably with gas station help, figured it out. That sofa bed, way too big for Donna's (and my future) Ford Mustang II, was delivered days later. It moved with me twice that first year, and a third time for my final summer- before I finally sold it, and the dresser and desk and even my landline phone, to the incoming occupant of my final downtown apartment.
That Alpert's lasted only a few years after that one and only time I was ever in there; it was a New England chain, eventually subsumed by Raymour and Flanagan, but that too-big warehouse stayed empty for years beyond before it became a just as humongous location for a branch of the Syms clothing chain. By the time Sy Syms bit the bankrupt dust, too few educated consumers became his customers here, and the warehouse again sat vacant for more years until Len-Co, a staple of the Southtowns, took over most of the building a decade or so ago. (A baseball card shop carved out the northernmost quarter and still sells its wares there.)
The affable cashier had heard of Alpert's, even mentioning some leftover pieces of office furniture that survived both transitions in their back halls. We loaded our lanky plankies into the van, and made it home by 5- but not before stopping a final time a couple blocks from home for some freecycling of a tabletop somebody had put out:
Hey. At least it's not a barber chair. Or the cigar store Indian I found at that now-perpetual yard sale a couple of days later:
How!
----
Tonight, I mostly flew Solo on the first of the recipes I done larned two weekends ago, and it came out pretty well. During dinner, we finally began watching Annette, the Adam Driver film from the director of Holy Motors. It's as bizarre as his previous work, and is almost operatic in its delivery of the material. We got about halfway, and hope to make it through the second half of the Carax Run in under six parsecs;)
Then today, Eleanor finally got a line on plywood for the bathroom floor. The price was been up and down like an elevator, and availability has fluctuated about as much, but as of this weekend it was go time. Except the friend with the van big enough to hold the plywood sheets was out of town until yesterday. Glenn dropped off the Caravan and the keys around 4:15, and it was off to a local lumber joint to pick up the haul:
There's a sheet as big behind that, or under it as we drove it home- but not from one of the usual suspects in the Big Box Business. Rather, it came from the only retail building in Western New York I can say, with certainty, my sister has been in with me:
Just about 40 years ago this week, I arrived in Buffalo for the first time as my permanent home. I'd taken a single unfurnished room near the UB campus housing the law school, and I was in need of minimal but useful furniture: bed, dresser, desk. Donna recommended a sofa bed for the first, since it could double as a couch when my needs got that far. Somehow we settled on this very warehouse building, then housing a furniture chain called Alpert's. This all being decades pre-Siri, we were working off a newspaper ad, a phone book and a map. All of them told us this too-big-to-miss store was at the corner of Sheridan Drive and Transit Road, which even then I knew was a pretty major intersection in the grand scheme of Suburban Buffalo Things.
Right. Then, a left- from the law school environs onto Sheridan, heading east. Not much had been built out on that highway in that direction back then; the original Sheridan Drive Wegmans wouldn't arrive for a couple of years. We passed where it would eventually be, then passed Youngs, and Harris Hill, and then, we reached the literal end of the road- at Main Street with a green sign pointing to Batavia 20 miles beyond. How could we have missed such a major intersection?
Because it was so major, Sheridan Drive had been rebuilt over it on a bridge, with solitary signs pointing to offramps for 78 North and 78 South without any name of "Transit Road" itself. (These eventually arrived, sometime around 20 years later.) We turned back, and, probably with gas station help, figured it out. That sofa bed, way too big for Donna's (and my future) Ford Mustang II, was delivered days later. It moved with me twice that first year, and a third time for my final summer- before I finally sold it, and the dresser and desk and even my landline phone, to the incoming occupant of my final downtown apartment.
That Alpert's lasted only a few years after that one and only time I was ever in there; it was a New England chain, eventually subsumed by Raymour and Flanagan, but that too-big warehouse stayed empty for years beyond before it became a just as humongous location for a branch of the Syms clothing chain. By the time Sy Syms bit the bankrupt dust, too few educated consumers became his customers here, and the warehouse again sat vacant for more years until Len-Co, a staple of the Southtowns, took over most of the building a decade or so ago. (A baseball card shop carved out the northernmost quarter and still sells its wares there.)
The affable cashier had heard of Alpert's, even mentioning some leftover pieces of office furniture that survived both transitions in their back halls. We loaded our lanky plankies into the van, and made it home by 5- but not before stopping a final time a couple blocks from home for some freecycling of a tabletop somebody had put out:
Hey. At least it's not a barber chair. Or the cigar store Indian I found at that now-perpetual yard sale a couple of days later:
How!
----
Tonight, I mostly flew Solo on the first of the recipes I done larned two weekends ago, and it came out pretty well. During dinner, we finally began watching Annette, the Adam Driver film from the director of Holy Motors. It's as bizarre as his previous work, and is almost operatic in its delivery of the material. We got about halfway, and hope to make it through the second half of the Carax Run in under six parsecs;)