Fix our wonky floor

We’re moving forward—slowly but surely—with fixing up our new old house. (New to us, built in ’52.) But we’ve hit a snag when it comes to the kitchen floor.

The home inspection indicated water damage and likely rotted sub-floor around the sink and dishwasher. This wasn’t exactly a newsflash. Construction-ignorant as I am, I knew kitchen floors shouldn’t have peaks and valleys. But the inspector didn’t seem to think this was a huge deal. He recommended hiring a qualified contractor to pull up the existing floor and repair the sub-floor. Sounded OK to us. We even thought we’d have new flooring installed while we were at it. It’s 200 square feet. How big a deal could it be?

Ha. Haha. Hahaha..

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Crushing on retro

I have a crush on my neighborhood.

For those of you familiar with Atlanta, we are renting a 1950s ranch house in the urban/suburban area near Toco Hill Shopping Center. It’s one of Atlanta’s first “car suburbs.” (Atlanta’s first suburbs—now considered by many to be intown neighborhoods—were the streetcar suburbs of the 1920s and ’30s. Our section of North Druid Hills was still dairy farms until the mid ’50s when these subdivisions, designed for the city’s new car commuters, were built.)

Why is this woman smiling? Photo credit: RetroRenovation

Maybe it’s that I’m getting older, or maybe it’s the oddly “retro/modern” bent of my current life, but I find myself attracted to and comforted by these aging strip malls and flat brick rectangles of houses on huge lots with carefully manicured lawns.

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