This has been a week in which I have spent a lot of time doing manual labor. I have not had a lot of time to do regular tea. In fact, all of my tea things have been packed away, and so I would have had to unpack them in a kitchen full of mess in order to do so.

 

This is a drink my husband brought me from the grocery store, which was very nice of him. It’s…fine. It is cold, which is quite frankly the most important thing. And it’s liquid. And my husband got it for me.

 

Would I go out of my way to tell people to get this? No. But it’s fine when you’re hot and tired.

My husband got this from a local butcher called Edward’s Meats.

I meant to send this newsletter a week ago.

 

Let me rephrase: I had hoped to send the newsletter about this thing a week ago, but unfortunately, I’m sending it at late o’clock on Wednesday because I literally just finished the project I did. 

 

(I did not finish; I just got to the point where I could take pictures. There are still six more things to do. I am in fact writing this with candy-coated fingers because I’m putting the newsletter together in between waiting for things to dry.)

 

Backstory: at the end of January of this year, I fixed a door handle, and that made me feel like I could do things up until the point that I remembered that I owned no tools and didn’t know how to do things. But then someone told me about tool libraries and I realized I didn’t have to buy tools only to discover I didn’t know how to use them. I could take classes and borrow tools.

 

It is now approximately ten classes later. I have done lots of little things and a variety of big things. I have patched annoying drywall patches. I have switched out that one light switch that I wanted to be a timer instead of an on-off switch. I built garden beds and set up trellises and irrigation.

 

All this time, I have had a specific project in mind, and of course it has to do with tea. You see, I have a lot of teacups. A lot of beautiful teacups, in fact.

 

I do not have storage for a lot of teacups. For many years, they were on a cheap wooden shelf that’s in the transitional space between our living room and dining room—not quite a hallway, more like an awkward opening.

Here is the picture I remembered to snap right before I dismantled everything as the “before.” It’s fine, I guess. Except when I accidentally run into the shelf. Except when my sister comes over with her Dog with A Big Old Tail. Except for the fact that it‘s a very boring place to keep very beautiful tea things.

 

I have known what I wanted to do for ages, but it turns out that contractors don’t like tiny jobs that requires multiple subcontractors to show up for an hour, and I don’t want to pay someone five thousand dollars just to give my teacups the beautiful storage they want.

 

I have been learning how to do things with this in mind: I want my beautiful teacup storage space. Two weekends ago, my husband went to crew one of his friends doing a hundred mile race, and I thought I would surprise him by just doing it all while he was gone. I made a schedule. I could do it and all I had to do was about six hours of work on it every day while he was gone.

 

(For the record, we’d talked about it together: we had even picked out tile and made a request, which was “I want to still be able to put up my poster, please.” He just didn’t realize that we were in the “go” phase of it.)

 

So as soon as he left that morning, I got a sledgehammer and knocked holes in the wall and cut a stud with a reticulating saw. (Yes, I had already checked that it wasn’t a structural wall, thank you.)

By the end of the evening, everything was framed out and I had a little bit of drywall back on and I was a little bit ahead of schedule.

“This will be a fun weekend!” I predicted foolishly.

 

It then proceeded to take me a full day and a half to get the electrical working, for reasons I will not go into, but include the fact that I planned to run wires through the attic but noped out at the last minute when I realized I was home alone and if I fell through the ceiling nobody would be home and then had to change everything around so I went in the crawl space. Rest assured I was very very safe and checked whether the circuit I was working on was live every single time, and then again, and then also again, which is part of the reason it took so long.

 

By the time my husband was due back on Sunday evening, I had some of the drywall in.

My husband was duly impressed with the fancy holes in our wall when he returned. It helped that I spent a few hours before he came back frantically cleaning up drywall plaster, which had got everywhere.

 

My brain is not great at time. It thinks things like “just do the drywall” and not things like “you will have to mud the drywall more times than you think, because you’re not an expert, and by the way, you have to wait twelve hours for it to dry between each application, and also, remember that inside corners and outside corners need to be done separately thank you.”

 

Thereafter I spent a week doing drywall. Putting on the drywall. Mudding the drywall. Sanding the drywall. Mudding the drywall. Attaching the corner bead. Mudding the corner bead. Sanding the corner bead. Texturing the wall. If I had understood how much drywall there was, I would probably not have been so excited about the project, but luckily for me, at that point there were already holes in the wall and there was no way out but through.

 

Finally I finished the drywall and got to painting and tiling. I finished the grout this morning. Then I cut the shelves for the bottom and routed the edges and sanded the shelves, and then I mixed my own shellac and shellacked them. (You have no idea how long I spent watching YouTube videos of people finishing the exact wood I got for my shelves in eighteen different ways before I decided that I was going to just go for regular old shellac.

 

I wrote this between waiting for coats of shellac to dry (which is luckily not that long.) Which means I am typing with my fingers encrusted in the same stuff they cover Raisinets and M&Ms. My fingers will melt in your mouth, not in your hand. (That sounds dirtier than I intended.)

 

And now that I have gotten this to the point where I can take pictures of my new teacup storage, lo: here it is. (One is with the lights off because it’s hard to see when backlit.)

This is pretty good for a girl who didn’t know how to use a miter saw until February of this year.

Oh, and if you’re wondering: of course there’s still room for my husband’s poster!

This has been Courtney's Weekly Tea, a weekly newsletter about tea, books, and everything else. If you don't want to receive this email, or do want to receive additional emails about Courtney's books/book events/etc, please use the links below to unsubscribe from this list or to manage your mailing list preferences.