Les Jones

The renovation of Millennium Manor is still coming right along. It’s taking longer than I thought it would, and nothing is easy in this place, but I finally caught a break when I hooked up with Karen. She’s fantastic- a hard worker, skilled and smart. She also brings a badly needed woman’s touch to the decorating. We are a perfect team for this. She’s even nice to look at when we take breaks, and that’s a plus. I made that first pass through the downstairs, doing just enough to get by, and now we’re doing the good, high quality, permanent work on the upstairs. We decided to finish out the 3 back rooms first, in order to have a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen to live in. A temporary door was installed, to isolate those rooms, and we pressure washed the bedroom. This removed years of paint, loose concrete, and it cut grooves into the remaining concrete. Then we built scaffolding and used a special high strength concrete mix to plaster-over the rough surface. This was not easy…not easy at all, but we now had a smooth finish that would hold paint and last a long time. So then we painted it and Karen added a metallic copper finish to the off-white ceiling. The walls are something called ‘taupe’….which looks a whole lot like ‘tan’, if you ask me. By chance we found some real marble tile on sale that worked with her plan and we put that down. It’s our first time doing tile work, and it somehow turned out almost perfect. Then we finally got to that idea I’ve always had about hiding the lights behind some ornate crown molding. It didn’t turn out to be simple and easy either, but it sure looks good. We had some custom woodwork made for the door columns, and I cut grooves into the walls to hide electrical conduit. (That’s the only job that turned out to be about as hard as expected.) We are slowly picking up the right furniture for the room, with a copper color and Rococo style. Karen made the drapes herself, and as an after-thought we put up a chandelier that, it turns out, the room really needed. We still have to make a door, finish the last bit of crown molding over the doorway, do the baseboard wiring, and finish the antique cast-iron gas burning stove. Remember- all of this is being done on a shoestring budget with 99% of the work being done by just the two of us…and we don’t know what the hell we’re doing.
We are chomping at the bit to move on to the next room, since it seems like we’ve been stuck in the bedroom forever. In the middle of all this we’re dealing with broken water mains, lawnmowers, and the roof. The pace is picking up now, and it’s good to finally have a room done right. It’s easier than trying to explain where we’re going with the castle. Now we can just point.
The castle has been in a music video by “Gretchen” that turned out pretty good, and it’s been on the PBS series “Rare visions and roadside revelations”. It’s in two “Moons” travel guides, a few new books, and dozens of web-sites. Some newspapers have been asking for interviews, but we never seem to get to a stopping point where we can clean up for that. Still no progress on a web site by us. Sorry it’s been so long without an update, but we’ve been real busy. Some of you (You know who you are) are still holding out with some old pictures and stuff that you were supposed to send me. Remember the ‘Open House’ is on Memorial Day, as usual.

Dean and Karen.