Oh, Bungalow

And we trudge forward.

2010-11-10T06:44:00.003-06:00

Well, the last couple of days were long and I'm sore all over. Adam had more shop business yesterday, so it was me and pups again...and as usual, they were no help at all. They spent most of the day basking in the sun and trading places on the bed.

Stinkers. Meanwhile, I was able to get started even earlier with the nice weather, but then I immediately lost my keys in this mess while I was tromping down the flowers.

I was a little afraid I'd be stuck sifting through lilies all day, but I found them without too much trouble.

Considering it was just me, I think I did ok. I was able to get all the brick rollered by about 2 or 3 in the afternoon; I started using the sprayer again to get into the mortar, but I was just chasing drips and not getting great coverage, so I went back to my trusting 3" Wooster and a trim cup. It'll be slow-going, but we'll get there eventually. The biggest hurdle has been crossed. I think. At least my arms will be a fully painted, lovely shade of gray before it's over.

All I know is that I don't think I could have worked on it one more day. I've never been so happy to go back to work in my life.

Next time around...

2010-11-09T09:11:00.002-06:00

I keep thinking, "Next time I have to paint a brick house, I'm paying someone to do it."

And then I remember, that if I have one personality trait that trumps "lazy," it's "cheap."

True fact.

More than I bargained for

2010-11-08T21:27:00.006-06:00

I'm tired. I hurt all over.

The pibs is pooped, too.

While I painted the house, Robin ran around after squirrels; River sat next to me and stared at the paint roller; Simon slept. We're all pretty worn out.

I took the day off of work to keep up the painting. Yesterday, Adam and I were rollering the brick, while the kiddo and our friend Jessica cam behind us with brushes to fill in the mortar and other spots we missed. I was using a regular roller with a 1 1/4" nap roller cover; Adam was using a Wagner Paint Mate Plus with a 3/4" nap. The Paint Mate Plus is one of the ones where you fill the handle with paint, and pull a trigger to pump the paint into the roller. This all worked pretty well with 4 sets of hands.

Today, it was just me. Adam had shop stuff to do, and the kiddo went back to her mom's and to school. Just me and the pups-- and let's be honest: their lack of opposable thumbs really worked against us.

I used the Wagner roller for a while, and things went fine. When my arm started to get tired, I switched to the brush. Filling in all the mortar...took foreeeeeeever. It went sooooo slooooow. By about 1:45, I'd finally had it. I looked down the wall, and it was just freakin' miles of mortar to paint.

Luckily, I remembered that Harbor Freight had a 20% off coupon in the paper yesterday, so off I went to buy a cheap, shitty paint sprayer. (I also got a free flashlight! Bonus!!)

I got it home and started playing with it. I have to thin the paint so much, and the container is so small, that I don't want to use it for the majority of the brick, but it was definitely a turning point in my productivity for the day. Here's what I do. I paint with the roller, and then use the sprayer to put a quick, thin coat onto the mortar. Lastly, I take the brush and backbrush the paint into the mortar and splotchy areas. It goes so, so, so much faster. So I'm taking off tomorrow to try and get the rest of the house body finished. I know the trim won't happen immediately, but we will be so very close.

So very, very close.

Long Time Coming

2010-11-07T19:30:00.006-06:00

A VERY long time.

Life, as we all know, gets in the way of pretty much everything. We've been immersed in puppy dogs-- training and socializing and snuggling. I haven't had a chance to start the dog blog that I've been wanting to. Adam has been in the throes of buying, moving and reopening a liquor store for the last several months, so that's been sucking a lot of time away from the house.

We've been busy...just not busy on the house.

Well that all changed this weekend. We have a few days in a row of great weather, and we decided to just dive in and take advantage of it. I sprayed down the house yesterday, scraped a bit, and today we started the actual painting. There's no going back now.

As it was:

And at the end of the day (sorry for the camera-phone pic):

It looks impressively like our photoshopped idea.

So far so good.

The colors

2010-04-13T19:06:00.002-05:00

Here's the column that we painted as it will be...

We'll see... ;-)

April Update

2010-04-13T06:45:00.003-05:00

Wow. We've really been slacking.

It's been awfully hard to want to do much; the weather finally got nice, and while we should be taking advantage of it to do house work, I don't think anyone believes it's really here and just wants to take advantage of it to have fun while we can!

We did manage to finally decide on a paint color. We ended up going with the darker color on the right and the darker, browner red.

The green/taupe/khaki color for the brick; the cream color for wood trim; the red for the eaves and prob frint door; maybe also windows. Haven't totally decided on that.

I'll have to post a pic later of the column that we mocked up to make the final decision. We wanted to try to claim the last of the depreciation, so we had to go ahead and buy the paint, even though the weather isn't quite paint worthy yet.

We were going to use the Lowe's Valspar Duramax when we planned to paint during cold weather since it goes down to 35º. But now that it looks like we can wait until summer, we decided to go with regular Valspar Ultra Premium. It still gets great reviews from Consumer Reports, and we've certainly had good luck with it so far. And it's about $50 per 5gal bucket cheaper. Bonus.

So anyway, we went ahead to try and get it before our depreciation deadline and to take advantage of what we thought was a rebate offer; it was actually only for indoor paint. But no matter-- we got a great deal anyway...

See, when we got there, the paint dude told us he was out of the stuff he needed to do 5gal buckets of one of our colors in the ultra premium and that he could do Duramax for $50 more. Well, we discussed it, and decided to just get single gallons instead; we really didn't need the Duramax. While we were shopping for other stuff, the paint guy found us and told us he'd given the paint to us for the same price as 5gals. Awesome!

We go to pick up our paint and...uh oh. There's been a misunderstanding. He thought we wanted single gallons of Duramax (which kind of defeats the purpose, but we did get fewer gallons, 8 instead of 10, and I think he must have thought we were saving money by getting less...I dunno.). They are all labeled at $29 each, which is the 5gal price, but still more than we wanted to pay. We tell him there's been a misunderstanding and without blinking, the guy says, "Oh. Ok, No problem. I'll just give it to you for the cheaper price."

And not only does he give it to us for the price of Ultra Premium, he gives us the Ultra Premium 5gal price-- $17.90 per gallon. Holy CRAP.

Did we get a wicked deal or what?!? We kept apologizing to the guy, but at that point, his alternative was to put it on the mistint table for $5, so I guess this was better all the way round.

I hope we can get to this in the next few weeks. Honestly, all my time is being sucked up by animals; the new puppy is quite a handful. I'm actually thinking about starting another blog to track her training progress. We found her wandering around our neighborhood for several days and finally took her in as the sleet started coming down, the beginning of a mega snow storm. We looked for an owner, checked for a microchip, left a description and our phone number with the Humane society. Nothing. She was underweight and had worms. She's finally settling in, but we have a long way to go with her...

She is scared of everything. She barks at people and things that are unfamiliar, and cowers and gets stock still if she's scared and thinks someone's going to handle her (the vet). She was spayed and then had a bad reaction at the suture site, so the increased vet visits and handling didn't help matters. She also doesn't really know how to share her things with us-- she gaurds her toys and balls and bones (in fact NO MORE BONES for a while-- yikes!). Thing is, I already have a fear aggressive dog, and do not want another one! So most of my time is spent with her at the park, clicker and treats in hand, teaching her to be calm around unfamiliar stuff, or playing games of trade with her toys. She's super smart and sweet, and warms up to new people pretty quickly (treats help!), so I'm optimistic.

And that's the news around here! If I do start another blog, I'll post a link to it here, for any of you dog enthusiasts. It's sort of taken over my life-- I'm reading animal behavior books and scouring training forums and researching holistic remedies for any and all problems. I never thought it would be so fascinating to me, but there you have it!

Just a little Wordless Wednesday cute...

2010-03-31T06:16:00.002-05:00

I'm grateful...

2010-03-07T18:37:00.007-06:00

Grateful for the great weather.

Mother Nature finally gave us a weekend worth spending outside. I spent Saturday doing some dog training outside the house and picked up a bunch of paint samples from Lowe's. Today, we chose a few and here's the result:

Of course, the colors don't translate, so it's a little pointless for me to post these pics.

The red on the left is an old color sample. The middle color is somewhat more taupe-- warmer-- than it looks in the picture. The white is perhaps not quite right, but I do like the red:

The color on the right is actually greener than it looks, and I'm not crazy about this red; also, perhaps too dark(?):

What to do? What to do.

He likes it!

2010-03-03T06:42:00.002-06:00

He really likes it!

Adam and I both agreed that the top picture (the dark neutral gray/taupe) in our previous post was pretty darn good.

The trick now is finding that actual color in a paint swatch.

And if the weather cooperates this weekend, I can get some samples and make some decisions, buy some paint and submit some receipts to the insurance company.

Here's hoping!

Or...

2010-03-02T06:53:00.002-06:00

Maybe something in a warm gray instead of taupe-- something to compliment the gray roof better, or will it just look cold all over...? Or green?

More photoshop!

The light gray does seem a bit too cold (obviously we'd choose a cooler off white for the trim, but still...), but I could live with it, I think...On second thought, I don't think I could.

I really like the green, but Adam has been adamant that the body of the house not be green. I photoshopped it in anyway!

And the dark gray/taupe is really nice, too... The green and dark gray seem the most bungalow-y. So many choices in such a time crunch!

Spring colors

2010-03-01T05:43:00.003-06:00

Well, it's crunch time. We basically have to get the house painted this month. We also have to fix the hole in our ceiling.

I'm hoping that the weather will stay nice, but I can't count on it. Considering the weather and our budget, we're leaning toward using Valspar Duramax paint. It's supposed to be good down to 35º, it's acrylic so it's ok for brick, and it's got a fairly quick drying time, so they advertise that it's less likely to be affected by wet weather (within a certain time frame, obviously) or morning dew. We've had such great success with other Valspar paints that I'm willing to give this a shot.

Now. As to color...

Last time I talked about this, we had decided to scrap the idea of a brick color, due to the horrendous tuck-pointing on the front of the house.

We then moved on to this color scheme-- Adam slapped this together (with an old photo that doesn't include our new gable vent) and he is MUCH better at Photoshop than I am:

Basically, a nice taupe on the body, buff on the trim, and the red brick for the eaves.

Now, Adam hasn't seen these offenses to Photoshop that I concocted last night, but they are basically colors that we've discussed...

With a red stripe continuing across the front:

And without:

I'm torn. The taupey/beige and green and red are very Craftsman and earthy and I like them very much. But the taupey/beige and buff is so clean and simple, if a bit boring. Flowers in the spring, summer and fall, and holiday decorations in the winter go a long way to helping with that, so...Admittedly, it was hard to get the right color green and the crispness that it should have since I did such a quick, down and dirty job of mocking it up. At any rate...

I just don't know.

Edit-- clearly needs a richer green...more olive, less mint. But hopefully this is enough to get an idea...So torn.

It's crunch time

2010-02-21T19:42:00.007-06:00

Well, it's been almost 2 years since the hail storm. That's how long the insurance company gave us to get things finished. We're still not done, so that means a whirlwind of work should be gearing up!

During the last couple of weekends, Adam has been working on a few things. I did my part today. First of all, Adam cut a threshold for the entrance between the kitchen and laundry rooms. I cannot believe I neglected to get a before picture. The closest thing I can find is this--a blurry crop from an even blurrier photo of the oven:

So Adam built a threshold out of pine:

Simon decided to pose with the wood...

Today, I shellacked it.

It's nothing special, but it'll get the job done until we have the time and money to replace the laundry room floor.

Next, we dealt with the broom closet. Before, it was too short and didn't reach the ceiling.

On one side, we added a little strip of wood:

And Adam put the crown trim back up...however, it doesn't really fit. the ceiling slopes, the closet slopes more, and to top it off, the cabinet also bows out.

It was my job to do a little creative caulking:

The splotches are due to wood filler-- I still have to paint pretty much all the trim in the house, starting with that ugly green door in the threshold pic above.

I also worked on cleaning up the patio in anticipation of nice weather to come. I'm ready to be done with the snow, to be honest. Our last big bout of snow and ice was certainly pretty and gave Adam a chance to use his new camera...

...and the puppies definitely had a great time romping in it.

You may be wondering who the little black and white piebald pup is. Meet Robin:

It's a long story; however, the long and short is, we weren't seeking out another dog, but she is a sweetie and is sticking around. Unfortunately, she went into heat pretty much immediately, so she's been a diaper dog and Simon has been a hot mess. She's only about a year old, and I'd guess this was her first heat. We'll be taking care of that ASAP.

And that's about it. Not much else to report around here. It's a long post, but I'm hopeful that the future holds lots of shorter posts with lots and lots of progress. In the next day or so, I'll post some new ideas for painting the house and soon thereafter, my trials and tribulations trying to match the texture on our ceiling.

Good times.

Washing machine heaven

2009-11-30T06:24:00.000-06:00

That's right. All I have to report in house-related news is our great pleasure in using a set of fully functional appliances. It wasn't without hassle, but it's all worked out in the end.

Last time I checked in, we had bought a closeout LG washer and dryer set for $700. They had to be ordered and were to arrive on Thursday. I waited until after the Friday shopping craze to call. Saturday morning, this is how the conversation went:

"Hi, I ordered a washer and dryer and want to know if they are ready for pick up..."

"What's your name?...Oh. The LG front-loaders. [Long silence...] Just a minute. [Long Wait...] Ok, ma'am? There's been a massive mistake. We oversold those machines. We sold WAY too many. There aren't any more in the store or in the warehouse...We can't order more. There are no more. You can bring in your receipt for a refund or get another set."

"For the same price?"

"No, you'd pay the difference."

Seriously, Best Buy? I calmly (well, mostly calmly) explained to the poor customer service rep that I had skipped out on the good Black Friday sales because I had already bought these and now I was going to be out more money because they screwed up and that was really not ok. He got a manager and I was promptly informed that I could come back in the store and pick out a new set for the same price.

We went in and while we weren't given the option of picking out another set (that would have been ridiculous-- I'll tell you right now I'd have opted for steam!), we were given the nearly identical set that is replacing the closeout model we had ordered. The machines were in stock and we started our washing marathon yesterday.

It's wonderful. A little vibration, no air hammering, and no walking so far-- and that's on the high and extra high spin speeds. I love it. LOVE IT. I watched the first cycle and I took a shower while one was running without losing pressure. Most of all, I'm completely smitten with little song they play when they're done.

Black Friday resting

2009-11-23T06:41:00.002-06:00

I've never EVER stood in line for a Black Friday deal. This is partly due to never caring enough about what was on sale, and partly to the fact that I've had to work retail on that day more times than I ever cared to, and have absolutely no desire to be a part of inflicting that much headache on fellow retailers. Its a shitty day to work.

But truth be told, we NEED a new washer. We need one BADLY. And the dryer is starting to make a suspicious squeaking noise.

We have been looking, and looking, and looking...and now it is mega-sale time.

I've been keeping my eye on the Friday sale ads as they've been leaked. First we saw that Sears had a set of Kenmore front load washer/dryers for $500, and these new appliances started to look like a worthwhile proposition. Then I read the reviews. Not good. So we started considering the Samsung set for $1000. Excellent reviews, and probably worth the money, considering a bargain basement top loader and dryer would cost us $600+. Then the Home Depot ad was leaked; LG set for $800. Sold. I was more than willing to get up at 4am for these, especially since my local McDonald's has 24 hour drive-thru. Sue me-- I love their coffee. And yes I used to work at Starbucks and am usually a coffee snob. But I love the Micky D's plain ole coffee.

Anyway, at my in-laws yesterday for an early Thanksgiving get together, we were perusing the paper and saw that Best Buy was trying to offload their warehouse stock of LG washers and dryers before Thanksgiving. We were also informed that my sister-in-law has a Consumer Reports subscription allowing us to check out everything first. The model on sale was recently replaced with a redesign nearly identical in features at a slightly lower price point. It looked like BBY needed the space. And this model is a Consumer Reports recommended washer. They were selling these for half price. HALF PRICE. A washer and dryer for $700.

The LG DLE2516W and the LG WM2016CW.

So we bought 'em. We should get them next weekend. I let them know, too, that I've worked for Best Buy, which generally keeps them from harassing me about extra warranties and financing.

And now we get to rest on Black Friday.

I'm a little apprehensive, though. I've never had front-loaders and have heard some walking-washer horror stories on these old floors. One of the reasons I was partial to the LGs was that they have some lower spin speeds that I've heard help in older homes. And I'd like to side vent this dryer and eventually stack them. But right now, I'll just be happy to get them inside the house.

Anyone have any experience with front loaders in old home or with LGs in particular?

Put another log on the fire...

2009-11-03T21:23:00.000-06:00

Or turn up the gas.

I'm ashamed to admit that we have owned this house more than 2 years and we'd never even bothered to see if the gas logs work.

A good friend of ours used to be a chimney sweep; while he was over for beers, he started geeking out over the fireplace-- we didn't force him to give us free advice/labor, I swear! He took a look through the flue, and even climbed up on the roof in the dark to check the state of the chimney. He burned some newspaper to see if it drew, and then took the logs apart to see if they worked.

Long and short is this: chimney is super clean, as in, it's possible it was never used for wood; if it was used for wood, the creosote has dissolved over the last 40+ years, as the logs are a 1968 model. The chimney draws really well, and the logs are indeed still hooked up to gas and light up like they're supposed to. However, the ceramic logs didn't get very hot (the cat jumped on them while lit, so...yeah.), but it was still neat to have a fire.

Now we have a decision to make. We can use these logs or get a new set of gas logs-- they aren't very expensive at all. We can take out the gas logs and burn wood, but we have to clean it extremely frequently. We can have the chimney relined, so we don't have to clean it so often. And I would assume that we could convert the gas line into a starter if we wanted to.

We had a fireplace in one of our houses growing up, and it was nice when we used it; most of the time, though, we were all too lazy to light it up. I sort of like the idea of gas logs that I can just turn on and turn off when I feel like it, and it sounds like this may have been original to the house in terms of use (the logs in there aren't original, but maybe there were always gas logs there).

On the other hand, you sure as hell can't beat the smell of a real wood fireplace. And a gas starter would make me more inclined to use it; but if we're going to use it a lot, we should get it lined, I guess.

So many choices. Any thoughts?

Night of the ADULT Trick-Or-Treaters

2009-11-02T06:03:00.002-06:00

Happy Halloween, folks.

Not much has been happening in the blog because not much has been happening at the house that doesn't involve our various animals.

Simon, our 14 year old fluffy little lamb dog, appears to perhaps have doggie Alzheimer's, so we're keeping an eye on that, adjusting his diet, and trying to do mind-stimulating things with him. River was supposed to begin obedience classes last week, but the trainer had to postpone them; in the meantime, we're trying to get a little ahead of the game. Since there's only 3 dogs in the class I figure the faster we can make this go, the more we can learn for our money. We're also spending a lot of time at the dog park. Fort Smith has a 40 acre dog park with ponds and brush and pastures. It's great. My mother, also had animal trials and tribulations, managing to get 2 feral kittens hiding out in her house, and every time she caught them and tried to put them in either the bathroom or a kennel, they escaped. She finally got them out of the house and out to a friend's house in the country. They were really old kittens and really feral, but we were going to try to socialize them and get them fixed; unfortunately, they were proving more than a handful. Hopefully, they will have a great time catching barn mice.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

We did a little Halloween fun stuff. Pumpkins:

And skeletons:

And passed out candy to about 300 trick-or-treaters. Then a funny thing happened. Adults trick-or-treated. Grown ass women. Women old enough to collect social security. Women NOT EVEN IN COSTUME, wearing their sweatshirts and jeans, carrying sacks and getting candy. WTF. We were so gobsmacked that we gave them candy, but we were truly baffled.

At any rate, we now have to have to have to focus on the house. We can't finish up the insurance claim from the hailstorm until we plug the hole in the living room ceiling and paint the damn house. It might be getting too cold to paint, but we can at least tuck point. And really, we're in the south-- it's still 75 degrees some days, so I figure that if Thanksgiving weekend is a warm one, we might have to get some painting done anyway.

We only have until April.

We're still alive and kicking

2009-09-09T06:36:00.002-05:00

...although you'd probably never know it looking at the house. Another slump has hit us. There's just a lot going on. Our new puppy is taking a lot of time to train, though she is sweet as ever. And our old man dog, Simon, was taking trips to the vet several times a week for a while to get arthritis shots and blood panels. He's started on a total dietary turnaround; we've transitioned the dogs to Nature's Variety, and both get a nightly treat of salmon oil and canned pumpkin. Then Simon gets joint supplements, vitamins, monthly adequan shots and Rimadyl. Whew! Just doling out the damn pills takes up all my time! But he feels so much better, so far, at any rate. And thankfully, so do I since PetCo had a mega moving sale and let everything go for about 60% off.

And then there's the historic neighborhood walk. I wrote an article about it for our local magazine and we've been trying to pretty the place up and make the front presentable. Top that with the fact that our washing machine is dying a slow and painful death, so while we were hemming and hawing over whether to take advantage of the labor day sales or wait until the Thanksgiving sales, laundry was piling up swiftly. We finally decided to wait and I've been catching up.

One cool thing to come out of this historic walk, or perhaps leading up to the walk, is the area's place on the National Historic Register. We're getting "historic" street signs tomorrow, and I woke up to find a manilla envelope on teh porch yesterday, stuffed with the papers from the architectural survey done on the house during the petition for addition to the register. Kinda cool. Not a lot that we didn't know, but some confirmation of things we suspected (like that the house was not built in 1940 as HUD suggested, but rather closer to 1922 or so. My research says 1920/21). Gives the place of whiff of the Bona Fides.

Meanwhile, the university is back in session and I've hilariously decided to take a class for fun. Ha ha ha! I have an assignment due on Friday. We also had a lot of grilling and beer drinking to do this weekend.

So anyway, the long and short is, life got in the way. Once again.

But! We at least still have plans. If it weren't for all the rain, Adam would be tuck pointing this week. That's my drive home. I can't really complain when I get a double rainbow
into the prettiest damn valley in the world.

Maybe this coming weekend. We want to start painting by mid-October. It stays pretty warm and temperate quite late into the fall around here, so early to mid-October ought to be a good time. I think I might have chickened out on the red color. Here's the problem. Now think of this picture as Highlights magazine. What's wrong with this picture...

Nope, not the walkway; I've edged it already. Not the peeling paint... Give up?

There it is. See how all those bricks mush into each other? That's all over the house. Terrible, horrible, no good, very bad tuckpointing. Even though WE know we're not trying to fool anyone, the people who drive by don't and that flat space will scream "fake painted brick." I've also sort of grown accustomed to a light, bright house. So we're working through some combinations of buff, taupe and brick red for the house, decorative trim, and gable trim. More to come, I suppose.

And that's the big picture. We're still alive and doing very boring things, being "those people" about our dogs (or maybe it's just me...) and trying desperately not to be the worst house on the block. Can you blame us for being unproductive?

Trudging along

2009-08-24T06:46:00.001-05:00

We've been slowly working on the laundry room. I've managed to get the place primed, and mostly caulked last weekend; since it was sort of cobbled together with that paneling, I had a lot of seams to hit. This weekend, we wrapped up the caulking and painted it our fabulous five dollar mis-tint. The sample on the paint lid looked sort slate blue/grey...but once we got it up, it turns out it's more robin's egg blue. Adam looked up at one paint and said, "Someone's going to hate this color when we go to sell." But we actually like it. And it's a far cry from what was previously there. Now we just have to paint the trim.

So. Before:

As it stands now:

It's nothing to write home about, really, but for $5, I couldn't be happier. Granted, it looks a little pukey with the floor; at some point, we'll tear it out nad install the bargain slate we bought almost 2 years ago!

Meanwhile, our most recent set back has occurred in the yard. I received a notice last week from the city that I needed to clean up my yard in a week. This cleanup included mowing (granted, we'd gone a little longer this time, but it had rained a bunch and grass was exploding; I mowed it that night, and it needs to be mowed again badly); they noted the dead limbs at the side of our yard that we had trimmed a few days before and hadn't moved to the back of the house yet; the boxes in the carport and tucked to the side of things that we were preparing to take to the salvation army; weeds IN THE ALLEY; and a few branches that hung over the street, only in the way of MY car when I park curbside in front of MY OWN house.

Fine. We'll get it done.

The next day, I get a certified letter in the mail. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Those things are never good. When I went to the post office to pick it up, it was, I kid you not, the top copy of the notice that was plastered to my door. Then I found out that basically the whole neighborhood had received these notices.

The Arkansas Historic Preservation Program is hosting an historic walk through the neighborhood in a few weeks, and I think the city is trying to whip us into shape.

At any rate, while we were at it, Adam decimated some of the bamboo and trimmed everything. Our mosquito problem is out of hand, and I think it's because they are breeding in the bamboo. So at least some of it has to go.

And that's about the long and short of it for the moment. Hopefully we can get the trim finished, soon, and get working on the exterior.

More progress

2009-08-04T17:13:00.007-05:00

I should probably preface this by saying that the laundry room is definitely an afterthought kind of room. It's clearly been converted from something else and was done extremely half-assedly by the previous owners. The wood paneling was installed around the trim and they didn't even BEGIN to cut it in straight lines or flush to the trim-- and then to top it off they didn't top it off. Nothing was caulked, and it's just a sad little space. We would love to do a little more back here, but we've got much more pressing matters, and we have all that beautiful slate to eventually redo the floors. Unfortunately, though, the floors have had water damage and there's several layers of linoleum, so we'll want to take all that up and start from scratch-- definitely more than I want to deal with right now.

That said, the holes in the wall needed to be filled, and there's nothing wrong with making it a bit more tolerable in the meantime!

When we installed the gas stove (POs had electric, we just had a line diverted from the gas wall heater in the laundry room to the other side of the wall. This left a big ass gaping hole:

Go ahead and click on that pic to get a close-up of the rocking wallpaper peeking out from under the paneling..Go ahead! It really is awesome; parts of the design even shimmer in the light!

Anyway, I got some of the paneling that we stripped from the kitchen, ahem, two years ago. Somehow it never made it to the dump. It's slightly different, but we were able to find enough of the repeating pattern to fit. A few cuts, some liquid nail, and two actual trim nails later:

A little caulk and paint, and it'll be good as new.

You might also have noticed in the right hand side of that shot, there's trim. We got the trim fitted around our ghost door, too.

I wanted to get some priming done, too, but that will have to wait for another day. I've got that awesome $5 mistint paint for the walls and the luan and regular ol' antique white for the trim. I'm planning to treat that weird piece of drop trim at the top of the wall and everything above it like crown molding paint it all white.

It'll be so nice when it's all painted and done and we can bring the big freezer in from the garage.

Weekday Eats

2009-08-03T20:17:00.006-05:00

It's been a while since I posted a recipe, but tonight I decided to keep track of what I was doing and post a twist on a recipe from Epicurious-- Chicken Breasts Stuffed with Goat Cheese.

I've made this before using slightly less butter and omitting the breading, and it is really fantastic. But when I got to the grocery store this evening, I discovered that they don't carry goat cheese. Sigh. So I took a few suggestions from the reviews, made a few of my own changes, and ended up with a lovely result.

The List:

4 boneless chicken breasts
Butter (about 1 1/2 T)
2-3 green onions
4 oz of cream cheese and
~2 oz queso fresco (both in place of the goat cheese)
6-10 basil leaves

for the sauce:

~2 T butter and olive oil if needed
8 oz mushrooms
1/4 c white wine
2/3 c chicken broth

for the starch:

couscous cooked in chicken broth

Step one: Chopping and mixing
Thinly slice 2 or 3 green onions and the basil leaves.

Add the cheese...

And mix. Salt a pepper just a little bit.

Step Two: Imagine stuffing

By this point, my fingers started getting all chicken-y, so no pictures for this step.

Here's where I stuff the breast. The recipe calls for pounding and rolling, but that sounded like too much work. So I slice a little hole in the side of the breast and slide teh knife around inside the breast to make a little pocket.

Then I stuff the cavity and put a toothpick in it to pinch the hole shut.

Step Three: Baking

Each of the stuffed breasts are placed in a 9X12 Pam'd glass pan and drizzled with a little melted butter. Put, uncovered, in a preheated oven at 350º. It will need to bake for about 35 minutes.

Step Four: The sauce

Melt a couple of tablespoons of butter in a pan and sautee the mushrooms; add olive oil if needed. Once they're nice and smooshy, add the wine and let it boil for a couple of minutes. Then add the chicken broth and reduce.

Step Five: Starch it up

Make the couscous-- I use chicken broth instead of water, but then again, we buy broth by the case.

And that's it. I was too hungry to take a pic of the finished product. I can say that our final dish could have used that third green onion, more basil, and I think it would have been amazing served on spinach steamed with lemon or collard greens with the couscous on the side. One of these days I'll try it.

I'd say it's probably better with the goat cheese, but goodness knows this is cheaper ;-).

Finally!!

2009-08-03T06:27:00.000-05:00

It has been so long since we worked on the house. We kept talking about it; then we were preparing for the new puppy dog; then we were settling the new puppy dog. At any rate, we finally did it. We did some work.

When we tore out the kitchen walls, we ended up with this:

Apparently there had been another door between the kitchen and laundry room. You could see the remnants of it on the laundry side, but it's covered up on the kitchen side. We had to tear out some pretty shoddy framing-in when we sheetrocked and we just hadn't filled this side in again. Before, it had more of that lovely wood-paneling you can see there on the rest of the walls.

We (meaning, "I") forgot to take pictures in the process, so I will simply explain what we did here. First, we decided to fill the space with some super thin luan-- the washer's drain and water lines are practically in the doorway, so there's not a lot of space to work with.

Then we put blocks around the perimeter to attach the luan to something-- we made these blocks no deeper than the existing 2X4s you see there; that way, everything stayed pretty even. then we nailed in the luan, trimmed out the doorway's "jamb" with 2x4s ripped to size, and finished it out with quarter round. We'll replace the trim once I've painted. I really like the idea of our little ghost door.

Here's where we are so far:

Now to get the trim re-affixed and we'll be in good shape. I'm so proud of us.

Our Plus-One

2009-07-21T06:08:00.002-05:00

Last night we welcomed our new member of the family. Meet River.

But please ignore the dust bunnies and muddy paw prints ;-)

River was an owner-surrender at the shelter. The day they were going to euthanize her, one of the foster moms took her. She's 4 years old, but still seems like a gangly puppy. She's got a great personality, and thanks to her foster mom, she has excellent manners. She is housebroken (though we won't be surprised if there are accidents; it's a new home, after all) and knows most of the basic commands, including S-P-E-A-K. I'm afraid to even write it because she unfortunately doesn't know "shut-up" yet. We've got a ways to go on leash skills and re-crate training, but she seems super smart. She was in a crate in foster care, but this a slightly different size and different bedding, home, etc. She has a lot to get used to!

The cats are still under the beds, though River is wholly uninterested in them. And Simon is in love. He's always liked dogs more than people; people make him anxious, but dogs usually know how to communicate. We all woke up to roaring thunderstorms at 4 am. This morning, Simon was upset for a while, but after a little time with River, who is totally unaffected by the noise, and a valium, he calmed down more than I've seen him do in ages. It was great to see.

Did I mention she has the longest tongue in the world? And beautiful brown eyes that a camera flash simply doesn't do justice to.

Casualty

2009-07-14T06:30:00.001-05:00

First I want to mention, by request, the number of the most recent paint sample. The post just before this one shows Pittsburgh Paints Warm Mahogany, number 430-7. I go back and forth about whether it is too red, too brown, too bright. But somehow I think it's probably just right. Mind, if any of you are trying it out, don't be too alarmed by the baby shit brown color that it is when wet. Yikes.

So. Our latest casualty is one of our red bud trees. I was going to hang our hammock on it. At about midnight last night, I took the dog out to do his business. While we were walking around the yard, I started thinking that the yard was a little wilder and shaggier than I thought-- I mean, it definitely needs a mow, but this was out of hand. Unfortunately, it needs more than a trim.

I'm not sure I even understand how or when this happened. That tree was living, so I guess it just got too heavy. There weren't any major storms yesterday. At least it was that side of the tree and not the side that sits next to the electrical lines.

Guess I know what we'll be doing over the next few days.

Summer showers

2009-07-05T18:12:00.007-05:00

The forecast predicted rain for yesterday through today. It looked like it was supposed to start late in the evening, so I decide to test a paint color after lunch.

We slapped it up there and it looked awful-- we wondered if it was even the right color. But as it began to dry, it improved, so we decided to let it dry more and put on a second coat before making a judgment. About 30 minutes later, it started to blow and storm and dump buckets of rain...and wash away some of the still wet paint.

After a little while, I checked the weather and, again, it looked like it would be a couple of hours before more rain, so I went to put a second coat on what was left (which was significant, actually). About 10 minutes after I finished, round 2 of our mid-summer storm popped in and washed a lot of it away, too. But the coverage of each coat seemed great, although the paint itself was runnier than the Valspar.

Today has been just humid and wet, but not rainy. After a day and a half of being cooped up, puppy and I went to check on the now dry paint.

Well, I think it looks great.

You can see the sad bleed... And here it is with the real brick in the background:

This second pic shows how it's a bit more purple than it appears in the other one; it looks pretty similar to the lighter brick. The thing is, real brick is so variable that I know we'll never actually get a match. But that color looks pretty good on its own.

I'm thinking it's ok.

We continue the quest...

2009-07-03T16:40:00.004-05:00

I'm sure I've mentioned before that my dad was a contractor. He always used Pittsburgh Paints, and the painter that he worked with when he was a crew foreman and who he would hire for larger jobs when he was independent also always used PP. (Just an aside-- this particular painter was a great friend to my dad and a great guy; strangely, he died of some form of liver cancer almost 2 years to the day after my father also died of liver/bile duct cancer. Strange world...)

When we bought the house, my mother told me she'd had great luck with the guys at our PP dealer, saying, "They always worked with me to get the right color."

I'm not sure what I thought she meant by that, but clearly I wasn't paying attention.

I went on a paint swatch gathering extravaganza this morning on my day off, and found a swatch I like at Sherwin-Williams (btw, ALL paints are 30% off today, tomorrow and Sunday!!) and one from PP. I decided to try the one from PP first. When the much older gentleman working asked me what I was painting, I told him what's going on, that this is just a sample.

"Well, if you put the color up there and you don't like it, don't throw it away! Bring it back. We'll keep adjusting it until you like it and then we can set down a formula for larger quantities." And he said 5 gallons would run in the range of $100; I've prepared myself for a cool $250/5gal, so this is great news.

Normally I'd be skeptical of this procedure. However, these are guys who have been doing this a loooong time and are probably good at both computer-matching and hand-matching. The main selling point here is that they cater primarily to contractors and interior decorators; these are people who have clients to please. And they're not trying to sell me gallon after gallon of colors that aren't right. My mother (an artist, btw) continues to tell me that they know what they're doing.

I haven't put the sample up yet-- there's hamburgers and brats to grill, after all-- but I thought this was a practice worth mentioning, something I would imagine many of the more "professionally" oriented places practice. Our Kelly Moore and Benjamin Moore dealers seem to have similar clients, so it wouldn't surprise me if they did the same thing...

We'll see how this turns out. Do any of you have paint guys who do this for you? What's been your success? And for those of you using SW, don't forget it's 30% off this weekend if you have projects on the horizon...

Yum

2009-07-02T12:37:00.003-05:00

Fresh mozzarella, basil, tomatoes, and garlic on french bread, with basil and tomatoes from the garden =

Best Sack Lunch Ever.

Color by numbers

2009-06-29T12:49:00.000-05:00

...or by brand name.

I found a few swatches that looked more "brick-y" and I was planning to try them out this week; but they're from Home Depot, and I hear nothing but awful, awful things about Behr paints. I'm stopping by BenMoore on the way home, and will try to pop into SherwinWilliams if they're still open by the time I pass them en route; I will likely also revisit Pittsburgh and Kelly, but if I can't find a match...?? Does anyone have anything good to say about Behr? I know they have fancy computers and everything, but I still do not trust color match systems, especially if we were to need more at a later date.

I was really pleased with our Valspar experiences, and not so much with our cheap-end SW experience. I'd have to go to the pricey end. And since we are covering up WHITE (not beige-- WHITE), we're going to need 2 coats of whatever-- at least. Such a dark red may require 3.

Sigh.

All I know is that I want to hurry up and get to tuckpointing so it can cure and we can move on this paint job. And then we can tell the bank we are 90% complete with the insurance claim and get the rest of the moolah. :-)

Color and light

2009-06-27T19:04:00.006-05:00

So beautiful.

Anyway, we got our office light up. We bought it a year and a half ago or something like that and it took us this long to get it on the ceiling.

And then I started testing a sample color-- Martha Stewart Valspar Picnic Table. It's hard to see on the computer...

In this shot you can see the very dirty unpainted brick chimney:

We're sampling on the back side of the porch so we can take our time. Up against the unpainted brick, it doesn't look real without the grout lines, but honestly I think I'm ok with that. I think I like the color anyway:

It looks a little off on my computer screen-- too pink or dusty or something-- but it looks pretty good in person. I dunno. Maybe I'll try a couple more colors, something a little browner; I've even considered sponging something just a half step browner very lightly over this. At any rate, I think painting the body of the house a dark color will make the trim stand out, and that's really the best detail of the exterior.

We're getting there.

Salsa time

2009-06-25T06:29:00.001-05:00

Assuming the veggies keep it up, I'm going to have fresh salsa soon!

I finally got back from about 10 days in Daytona Beach scoring AP exams again. It was the last year in Daytona, and I do hope I'm invited back next year; it moves to Louisville, KY, which is a place I've never been. It looks like a lot of fun.

On my return, I saw that Adam had begun screening the porch. Seeing as how I didn't notice it until practically putting my hand through the screen, I don't think it's worth a picture at this point.

The plants are also positively thriving. For many of you, this seems like no kind of news. But I've killed everything I ever potted, and last year our tomato situation was embarrassing. But now, it's like I've been given a whole new green thumb! Coleus before:

Coleus now:

So bushy and fluffy and lovely!

And the veggies before:

And veggies now:

Time to thin out the surrounding cannas again, and start staking things-- I think I'm going to stake the peppers out to the side so there's a little more light getting to the tomatoes in the back...

Still, the tomatoes have little baby tomatoes starting and lots of blossoms, the jalapenos are growing,

And so are the eggplants.

I'm past due for fertilizer and copper fungus spray, but hopefully I can get a good little crop if I keep it up.

Watch. Now I've just jinxed myself ;-)

Where's wormy?

2009-06-06T19:50:00.005-05:00

He's not too hard to find, really...

Our compost is so beautifully packed with gigantic nightcrawlers, it's wonderful. Today I got my last veggie planter put together. If this is successful, we'll probably branch out more next year; Adam was going to do some raised beds, but I fear the summer is slipping away from us...

For this container, I bought an 18 gallon Rubbermaid tub. First, I drilled a ton of 1/4" holes in the bottom and sides.

Then I put some river rock in the bottom...

Followed by cheap potting soil...

Then a half-and-half mix of potting soil and compost... And then the plants! Two more patio tomatoes and a few very small eggplant starters. I sort of figure that you can do each of these plants in 5 gallon containers or less, so this should sustain 3 or 4 plants at least. We'll see. I fertilized and treated for fungus and slugs, and voila!

Who knows. That sad wilty one in the back already looks better, so I'm hopeful.

I also mowed and picked up more paint samples for the house painting. We're feeling like painting the house a brick color is the way to go...What do you think? A number of houses in our neighborhood are painted "red brick" and you can't tell until you're standing right next to them. I don't even need it to be super convincing-- just something a little more appropriate to the house, maybe? Thankfully, the POs didn't paint the chimney so we have something to match the paint to. It's such a major change. I'm having a bit of a hard time with it. But the insurance settlement gave us money to repaint, and part of that money is in escrow until we actually do the job, so we figure now's the time.

Worst case scenario? We repaint. Again.

Wave of mutilation

2009-06-02T06:14:00.001-05:00

That fungus surely did kill it dead; but there's a new plant in its place:

And one more little herb patch...
And now the weather forecast is predicting thunderstorms all over again-- just when I thought we were in the clear with beautiful weather...

Another day older...

2009-06-01T06:43:00.000-05:00

And, yes: deeper in debt. But not for long. We had to front a little money for supplies, since this weekend we worked on my grandmother's house, getting it ready for sale. Sigh. I wish I had all the money in the world to fix up houses. Her mid-century, one-owner house is definitely dated, but what a lot of potential. And a great yard, awesome because of her fantastic landscaping. The dogwood tree in her yard was a gift from her father when she moved in-- a cutting from a wild dogwood back home in North Arkansas. I'm going to try to propagate some cuttings for our yard before the house sells.

Adam and I replaced an exterior window sill a few weeks ago; this week Adam replaced some storm door glass and siding panels and I scrubbed and washed awnings and helped replace some broken shutters. Still a bit more to do, but so far so good.

Our house didn't get much attention, though we did mow the yard and finish off that gift certificate to the plant nursery. This time, I got 3 more tomato plants, 4 eggplant starters, and another chives and oregano. $7. I'm going to try to get those planted this week as soon as possible. Also-- does anyone have any opinions about neem oil? It's supposed to be a natural pesticide and fungicide, but I've never used it and have no idea of its effectiveness...

Other than that, we just grilled (with our new-to-us grill) using all natural charcoal for the first time and some hickory chips for flavor and hung out all weekend. That natural charcoal makes a huge difference-- nothing tastes like chemicals and it's cheap AND you don't have to use very much of it.

I'm a fan.

Well, crap.

2009-05-26T20:33:00.006-05:00

The tomato plant that I thought was suffering from over-watering and poor drainage after all that stormy rain... actually has a fungus. I mean, it's been over-watered, too-- the fruit is starting to split along the top. But the real problem is the uninvited guest.

A few weeks ago I bought a mature tomato plant with existing green fruit so we could start getting a crop while our starters develop. I bought this plant at Wal-Mart. Apparently, this is yet another lesson to buy locally. I get it, Mother Nature, alright? I get it!

Anyway, it has septoria leaf spot. It's controllable with a fungicide, but our plant is too far gone. We can continue to treat the other plants in the container, and then it's probably a good idea to not plant tomatoes in that container for a year or so, I think. The half dozen tomatoes still on the vine are just turning yellow and orange, so in a day or so, I can put them in the window for final ripening and take that plant out altogether.

Supposedly copper can help control this? I'd like to avoid chemicals, but I'm not entirely opposed to using a fungicide. Thankfully, I used to work in the Agri College at the UofA, so I'm going to check in there with the tomato researchers and/or Extension Service people and see what they have to say; alternatively, I have friends at our farmer's Coop. Also, my grandmother's family were tomato farmers, so she may remember some things they used.

The white dots are telltale.

Grrr.

Stupid fungus.

Container Mania!

2009-05-26T06:52:00.000-05:00

The weather wasn't perfect this weekend, by any stretch...but it wasn't stormy and the rain wasn't torrential. There were a few little downpours and a few sprinkly bouts. Otherwise, it was lovely.

After the Lowes debacle, in which they tried to charge us $16 and change for 2 little coleus and a caladium, we went to our local nursery, Neumeier's. They've been there for 40 years, and they do a lot of their things from seed. It's such a great place-- people are great, the plants are great, and they know anything you need to know. And I had a gift card.

We got hearty oregano and chives; a small patio tomato; 4 small jalapenos; 12 tall coleus; 2 small caladiums; and a persian shield all for the grand total of $18. I love them.

So we transplanted our currently suffering large patio tomato, the new small one, and a couple of peppers into a large container with a good helping of compost, and we potted the chives and oregano separately:

We also have some basil and a few strawberries; the basil has been pretty well stripped for pesto Thursday night...

I dug up a bunch of the cannas, so the containers get good sun, and saved them for Adam's grandmother who wants some red lilies to mix in with her yellow ones:

For the pretty stuff, we put together two planters of a mix of coleus and caladiums for the porch, as well as a solo planter of persian shield:

Our hostas continue to grow, and the one plant that I didn't split is blooming:

The four o'clock seeds I planted are coming up, as are the cuttings I stuck in the ground...

I'd say everything's coming up roses.

Is this crazy?

2009-05-20T06:15:00.001-05:00

This houseblog is about to turn into a petblog if I don't get to work on the house soon...

Anyway, I need to keep our front yard cat out of the back yard. She's bullying Kiara, our 12 year old kitty who thinks she's a dog, and who never even leaves the back yard. She's a total softie and she's being completely bullied by Bella.

She enters the back via two routes (at this point). One is the screened porch, which isn't screened, and the other is our back fence next to the garage.

First things first, we need to screen the porch. Next, I'm thinking of two things. One is the super sticky furniture tape to keep cats from scratching. Maybe put this along the top of the fence...? I'd have to change it pretty frequently until she got the picture. Or aluminum foil along the top foot or so of the fence? I know cats hate aluminum and she'd have a hard time climbing it. It'd be ugly, but maybe I could get fancy with it and use copper flashing to sort of wrap the tops of the fence slats ;-)

My last solution is good old fashioned clothespins. Just run clothespins along the tops of the fence sticking straight up. Or a combination of all of the above? I'll probably put some sort of chickenwire Elizabethan collar around the adjacent tree to keep her off that, but...

I dunno. Something's got to be done. Inside is not an option, as we'd have the same problem (we have a total pushover in the house who already gets her fair share of being walked all over by the other two). Bella's no longer scared of the dog.

Any ideas? I've had a lot of cats over the years (I don't think I'm allowed to say; they'd call animal control on me), but I've never had any that didn't eventually work it out. This, however, only seems to be getting worse.

Seriously. I think I need to just suck it up and buy one of those motion activated water sprinklers. Stupid economy, ramping up my cheapskateness.

Bee You Tea Full

2009-05-18T06:05:00.003-05:00

Seriously. Beautiful, gorgeous, sunny, pleasant... DRY...weather for most of the weekend. Love.

Friday night was a bit of a stormer. But I gave Simon his meds in time, wrapped him in his anxiety belt, put toddler boots on his feet, and went to bed. When I woke up in the morning, he was asleep on his bed next to ours. The vet and I talked about trying to not so much ignore him, as minimize incidents where I need to be on him all night, telling him no, or otherwise overloading him. Toddler socks it is.

Saturday was a little drizzly early on, but we got to clean house all day and then grill out. I've been trying to figure out the best thing to mop our floors with now that I've decided Wet Swiffers are a waste. Not only are they literally wasteful, but they seem to just push the dirt around into a fine haze over everything. And then I was going to use ammonia, which, while not exactly a friendly cleaner, at least leaves things streak free; however, that will strip shellac if there are any scratches that let it in. And then I thought I'd use vinegar, but that's not very pleasant to the nose.

So in the end, I bought a bottle of Method's Wood for Good and a 2-pack of microfiber kitchen towels. I put the kitchen towels on the Swiffer sweeper part, and went to town. Let me tell you, that Method almond scent is heavenly-- not too overpowering and as a bonus, smells edible-- like I'd just opened a box of marzipan. Yum. And there's no bucket necessary. It's no good for getting rid of anything caked on or tough, but it generally does the trick for everyday traffic.

Sunday was as a matter of true fact gorgeous. So we tried to get the last of our herbs and veggies, but Lowe's selection was a little bit meh. I then tried to buy some coleus and caladiums for a couple of planters; the coleus were in trays with a BIG sign that said "Assorted 1-Gallon Perennials, $2.50." Now, I do realize that coleus are annuals, but these were literally the only plant near the sign, and there were a lot, not just a few misplaced stragglers. Of course, however, they rang upa t the full $5. When I took the worker to see the sign, she just pointed at the word perennials, impatiently said "Those are annuals," and walked off. Screw that.

This is what I get for being too impatient to wait and go to the local nursery-- where they are NICE, have better plants, and where I have a gift certificate anyway. The price isn't that much different. I worked in retail, I know how thing get mislabeled-- I was a customer service rep for a big box retailer for years. I know how these things happen. But I always tried to make it right, and at the very least I was pleasant, even when a customer was unreasonable. My favorite was a woman who felt she deserved a refund, but she didn't and the company wouldn't give it to her. I called the manager over and he proceeded to ask me if I had a dollar in my pocket (this was the quantity in dispute, I kid you not). I did, and she took my dollar (again, I am not kidding) and walked off. The manager made it up to me, but things like that have given me ZERO patience with rude customer service people. I've been there. And I've sucked. It. Up.

At any rate, word on the street is nice weather for a few days. With my luck, it'll storm here just until I leave for Florida (during hurricane season, of course), where it will promptly storm on me every day.

At least I'll be at the beach. Reading AP exams, but definitely at the beach.

Sitting here waiting

2009-05-13T23:17:00.004-05:00

Waiting for the storms to arrive. Three weeks-- four weeks?-- of this shit has completely sucked the life out of me.

Update?: They're here.

Get to work!

2009-05-12T08:29:00.004-05:00

I need help, and you're not cutting it.

You're falling down on the job!

You're supposed to take care of things outside, but it's still raining. Rain, rain, rain, rain, rain. I know plants need water, but this is absurd.

I really can't take it much longer. I've taken off yesterday and today to work in the yard, but that has quickly turned into working on the house. It's spring cleaning time, so we've been getting everything spic and span.

However, all this moisture is causing a whole other problem. See, the dog likes his bed, but the fleecy lining gets hot in this weather, so I put a nice cool sheet over it. I went to change the sheet and noticed that there was a bunch of white stuff underneath it. At first I thought it was disintegrated litter (Simon thinks the litter box is a snack bar), but on closer inspection, it's another casualty of the weather:

All the tiny scratches from cat and dog nails created little doors to the shellac underneath; the moist air that gets trapped under the dog bed, plus any moisture that soaks through when he comes out of the rain has caused the shellac to discolor. And I can't just wipe it with alcohol. I tried that-- it's UNDER the poly. I scratched a little off, and luckily, I think it's the clear dewaxed layer that we applied to help the poly adhere that's hazed, so hopefully, I can work on these few boards individually. I plan on rubbing with sandpaper or steel wool to remove the poly and perhaps wipe with alcohol. Then put another layer of dewaxed clear shellac and re-poly.

Anyone have other suggestions? I'm going to try spot treating first and then re-polying the entire board, but I'll redo the whole thing if necessary. Thanks to the blog, we have a very detailed account of what we did with the finish.

I need to re-poly a few boards in the kitchen, as well. They were particularly dry and I think they soaked up a lot of the finish. At any rate, once these things are done, I think I may take up a suggestion left many moons ago to wax the floor. I should be able to just spot wax for a few years if I do that, right? I don't have to wax the entire house every year, I hope... And what do you clean waxed floors with? I don't know. It will make refinishing that much more difficult down the line since we'd have to remove all the wax before screening or sanding, but it might protect the floors underneath, meaning we won't have to refinish so soon...?

It's just such a bummer.

Summer Reading List

2009-05-05T06:23:00.000-05:00

This weekend was the annual public library used book sale. The kiddo picked up another great round of Babysitter's Club Books, as well as a few classics, and Adam and I found these:

I am very optimistic that these will come in handy over the summer. First of all, we've got a lot of tuckpointing to do before we paint-- a lot of the mortar in the porch columns is disintegrating, and there's some spots in the foundation that could use a bit of building up, if for no other reason than to fortify it even further from the elements. And as you old home owners (not old homeowners, but owners of old homes!) know, these aged houses require some special attention regarding mortar type.

As for the built-ins, you can see it's a book from the 1950s, so the style of the built-ins isn't necessarily what we're looking for, but there's a lot of pictures and diagrams of how to put these things together-- types of joints, etc. We'd like to build in some basic craftsman style bookshelves with doors under the big window sill in the dining room, just deep enough for trade paperbacks, and we've considered putting some cabinets around the fireplace, as there very well may have been at one time.

I think we hit a DIY jackpot!

Rain, rain, go away

2009-05-04T06:05:00.001-05:00

Maybe I'll change my mind in July when we'll have had 6 weeks without a drop, but I'm ready for drier weather. I can't stand this.

On the good side, I think the hostas that I planted last weekend have gotten bigger, and the one that I split is doing equally well as two new plants...I've never split them before, so I was prepared to be disappointed. But so far so good. the rain also meant I didn't have to deal with the basil and tomatoes that are already planted...

What it did mean, however, were tornadoes and mud holes and thinset. See, Cake played here Friday night. While killing time at the mall waiting for friends, I heard that the news was reporting a tornado headed straight for the mall. The amphitheater was evacuated and everyone wandered around a little dazed and scared, looking for the storm shelters in the building until the folks at JC Penney announced we were in the clear. Luckily, we had covered seats for the show; still, I realized I am too old for concerts. When everyone piled in to get out of the rain, I got increasingly frustrated with inconsiderate folks knocking my lovely and pregnant friend over. A couple of guys were just being assholes and I wanted to tell them they didn't PAY to stand there; I, on the other hand, PAID for my seats.

I really, really would have hated me when I was 19. Then again, I wouldn't have been knocking over the pregnant girls.

Then it stormed, off and on, all day Saturday. The valium seemed to take some of the edge off the dog's anxiety, but when we tried to run a few errands between storms, we were too late getting home and he had torn into a bag of mortar mix. So I am on poop watch yet again. So far so good, but the whole thing makes me nervous. Also, a couple of the holes he had dug the day before became horrible, muddy sinkholes.

The good news, though, is that we got to try the anxiety T Touch wrap. I put it on him late at night, took him into Adam's office and told Adam that he could take the wrap off in a few minutes, it might be too tight, and I was going back to bed. A couple of hours later, Adam told me the dog had been asleep. Well, then he got worked up, digging. We took a walk; we stayed on the leash in the house. Then I checked the wrap and saw it was loose. I redid it, and there was no change. Then I redid it TIGHTER. And he laid down. I woke up 10 minutes later with his leash in my hand and him asleep by the bed.

Progress.

We'll see if this continues. Of course, there's more storms in the forecast for the next week. I'll have ample opportunity.

If only it would clear up, I could get the garden done. While the dog and I took a walk for Poop Watch 2 Electric Boogaloo (Poop Watch 1 was the ribs ingesting incident), we looked at other bungalow landscaping. I think we're just going to edge with monkey grass, and do big huge planters of coleus, caladiums and flowers. Or maybe just do small ones this year. Last week killed my shoulder, and we'd have to do it every year, anyway. So planters it is!

Yay

2009-04-28T07:01:00.000-05:00

Simon appears to be using his bed-- we found a big, warm, dog-sized crater in the middle and a pile of bedding outside the box. At least it's easier to sweep up than the flower bed dirt, not to mention the fact that it doesn't cake onto the brick or create a fine haze over everything.

All the storms that came through yesterday never actually culminated in much. Adam was off work, and he tells me that there were a few rumbles of thunder, but Simon handled it all well. No need for the meds and the house was intact when I got home, as was the yard. Of course, more is supposedly on its way tonight and for the next several days, so I continue to hold my breath.

On another note, our neighbors have the sweetest brindle boxer and another small dog. The two of them bark and bark and bark. I don't really mind, but it's a bummer since we just got Simon trained to understand that barking at nothing is not cool-- one bark plus lying down facing the house = get to come inside. Now they're talking at each other pretty constantly. But it's so cute when they're both up at the fence. They lick through the cracks and love and love and love on each other. Simon's just a lady's pup, apparently. When he was at my mom's, we used to come home frequently to find other lady dogs from the neighborhood who had climbed INTO our backyard to hang out with him. He's just that irresistable.

Home Depot Giveaway

2009-04-28T06:12:00.000-05:00

I'm sure I'm a little late to the table with this, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed for my chances in the latest One Project Closer giveaway, sponsored by Home Depot. To boost awareness of their tool rental program, Home Depot would like folks to go to One Project Closer's blog entry and leave a comment letting them know what tool from the Home Depot tool rental arsenal they would rent. That gets you one entry... Doing what I'm doing now-- blogging about it and linking back to the article-- gets you 50 entries.

The prize? A $200 Home Depot gift card. And who couldn't use that these days.

The possibilities are endless.

A storm's a-brewin'...

2009-04-27T06:53:00.001-05:00

And it's been brewing all weekend! Every second, it looked like it could start pouring. But it didn't. Instead, it was breezy and warm. Absolutely perfect.

Saturday, we got the front flower beds cleared out and weeded. Then we planted 2 varieties of hostas around the bird bath-- 3 small plants and 3 bulbs. I should have planted the tubers last fall, but I never got around to it. So if they don't make it up out of the ground this year, I'll see them next spring!

Here's the best shot I can find of the flower beds "before":

It basically looks as though there's no flower beds there. We had let the grass sort of take over under the gold dust plants, and the vinca and cherry laurels had taken over the bird bath area-- that's right. By the time we got to the weeding, we had small cherry laurel trees growing in the bed. I may transplant one of those trees to the other side of the yard; they're hardy and evergreen. Lovely. And don't get me wrong. Vinca is fantastic as ground cover. But it was looking a little unmanageable. Same thing with what I thought was ajuga under the gold dust plants. It had somewhat similar leaves and purple flowers were appearing; however, the flowers didn't spike up...Now I think it's some variety of dichondra..? Regardless, it is insidious.

Now the front of the house (taken in the dark):

Holy crap, right? There's an actual edge to that flower bed. And let me preempt the stern talkings-to that I anticipate about the cypress mulch. My mom worked in a nursery and did landscaping, and it's what we always used. I love the smell, the color, the texture. I have found out, since buying my front yard supply, that it is not sustainable. I will look into equally attractive more sustainable alternatives in furture. Until then, this is what I have.

The plan is to transplant some of Mom's monkey grass from her garden to fill out the border, to trim or tie back the low-hanging gold dust branches, and then to go behind the grass with brightly colored foliage-- coleus and caladiums. There's too much shade for constantly blooming flowers.

Then we planted some hanging baskets. A fuschia:

And petunias and impatiens:

We also bought some basil and a rather large tomato plant. It's lazy. I know.

In addition to a number of other little minor repairs, Adam and the kiddo put together an outdoor doggie bed. When the weather is nice, the dog wants to stay outside. While outside, he likes to dig his bed. Some have suggested it's for the coolness of the dirt, but I think it's even more instinctual than that. (BTW-- I did consider the pool idea suggested last summer, but this is a dog that hates getting his skin wet SO MUCH that I can't imagine he would use it. Might be worth a shot, though). A lot of dogs dig their beds inside, as well. And as I've mentioned, he's 14-- a lot of habits are pretty ingrained by this point. Simon is also a bit leery of closed spaces. He doesn't even like us to close the door in the bedroom, which is why I think he doesn't like to go into the shed where his comfy dog bed is at present.

So the final product has a roof and bed, but no walls; it's against the house (where he seems to prefer), and it is diggable.

Ok. Now to preempt bed filler discussions. Yes that is cedar bedding. Yes I am aware that many people think cedar bedding is a no-no. I have looked into it and am using it for a number of reasons. The main objections to the bedding appears to be that it can cause allergies. Simon had cedar bedding for 12 years at my mother's house with no problems-- in fact, he seemed to like it very much, and for such a creature of habit, the more that's "the same" the better. So no allergies. Pregnant dogs and puppies shouldn't use it for a few reasons. There are some worries that some dogs eat it; he doesn't. Another concern is respiratory problems. This seems to be primarily involving small animals that live 24/7 confined in cages or glass tanks with the stuff. Again, he doesn't. And finally, people who use their dogs for hunting say that it interferes with their sense of smell.

We used it because, again, it's something he is very familiar with and has enjoyed in the past, it has a number of pest repellant properties, it will keep him drier than blankets and it's cooler than straw, I believe. I may mix straw in with the chips, and it's not that he spends all day there. He is in and out, but with the weather as nice as it is, he's out more than in. I open the door and he stands and looks at me and dances around for me to come play, but doesn't want to come in. So be it. We'll shingle and paint the house if he does indeed use it and like it.

The vet did give us new meds that we hope he is tolerating. We have mega storms blowing in this afternoon and evening, so we'll know a bit more tomorrow on how effective they are with the the thunder and lightning. I'm hoping to add in the anxiety wrap, as the vet warned these meds will only "take the edge off." Fingers crossed. He had such a happy weekend with the beautiful weather and lots of our time spent outside. He's a very helpful overseer of all my outdoor projects, following me all around and keeping a very close watch on what I'm doing. I think he's officiall my General Yard Manager!

More progress

2009-04-23T06:23:00.000-05:00

It's a real flurry of work at the house. Apparently, this is only when I'm not at home. No complaints from me!

I came home last night to see that Adam had mowed and installed the last of the kitchen counter trim. The place is too big of a mess to take pictures of that, and my camera needs batteries anyway; at this point, I am dampening the battery connections every time I need to take a picture. Just rest assured: we're getting there.

The dog, on the other hand, is getting better and worse. I tried melatonin and it definitely helped-- he's not shivering or panicking quite so hard, but he is still scrabbling at the floor-- and now it doesn't take much of a storm at all, sometimes no storm whatsoever (no storm elicits more of a "fluffing"; it's less panicked and he will stop on command). I fear that the TERRIBLE storms we had last weekend have made him extra anxious at night and with storms-- it had already been a traumatic day with 2 trips to the vet and a bad med reaction. I wish we'd never seen those pills. I still haven't given it to him again, and I am going to continue with the melatonin and perhaps add Rescue Remedy or one of the pheromone diffusers. I've also heard good things about valerian-- any thoughts? We will also go with a new bigger bed (it's time anyway) with lots of blankets and sheets to dig at and fluff-- the vet also suggested some counter-conditioning with thunder CDs. Finally, we'll try this:

Even at 2 am I thought this was a photo worth licking the batteries for. Those are just socks and velcro cable ties. His nails are pretty short and smooth (thanks, concrete!) but they still poke through a little; those are, after all, my old holey threadbare shitty socks. But they got me a few peaceful moments. I will invest in real dog booties or make some out of a canvass or something more heavy duty. Then he can just dig himself silly. It seems to either soothe him or be something he cannot control. Punishing him (ie-- putting him out or scolding or shaking coke cans with pennies), therefore, seems like the wrong response.

Anyway, I haven't slept now in about a week and it's killing me. Maybe we can get something working soon.

And just like that...

2009-04-21T06:29:00.001-05:00

Summer is creeping up on us. And I'm ready. Yesterday, I came home to another great summer surprise:

Yep. Our porch swing that we got a year ago is finally up... Normally, I think swings should face the rest of the porch, but in our case, we use the side entrance to the porch a lot and didn't want to block it.

Now we have perfect push-off abilities with the porch ledge. It swings slightly off center, since we had to stagger the hooks up top (hanging it on an incline), but I don't really care. It's perfect.

Adam also wanted to try out the new compressor, so he fixed the front door. Since the DAY we closed on the house and we changed the locks, it has looked like this:

See there on the left? We had to pull that piece of trim off to change part of the lock. Well. As of yesterday? It looks like this:

I can't tell you how much it changes the entire room. Obviously still needs caulking and all the inside trim needs to be painted this spring when I can open the windows and confine the cats in the laundry room for a while. We want to wait until the base shoe is there so I can blend it in a bit more seamlessly. If you recall, we had to buy baseshoe quite a bit larger than regular quarter round because of the way the house has settled combined with that assy job the POs did sheetrocking AROUND the trim, rather than removing the trim, sheetrocking, and THEN reinstalling the trim. Grrrr.... Anyway. All in the past. No need to get worked up over it again.

As for the pup, he tried to dig the floor last night again-- 2nd time now that he's tried to dig when there's no thunderstorm, both times have been since taking the meds. I'm going to try the melatonin this week. Though, honestly, he may just want out-- the weather's been perfect and he's barely wanted to come inside at all...

So yeah. Things are chugging along at the ol' bungalow.

No, really! Housework!

2009-04-20T06:46:00.001-05:00

So, full disclosure. A while back I posted pictures of the new gable vent. We had not installed it really. We propped it up there, made sure it fit, then went back to having a gaping hole into the attic. We tried keeping it covered with plastic, but these spring storms have made keeping it covered impossible.

But by the time I got home on Friday, Adam has secretly painted and installed the vent. TaDa!

I think I'd like to trim around it, but I must say I am very pleased with how it turned out. I also think I mentioned before that we recycled even more of the garage door wood to make this and I couldn't be happier.

We also got a new Porter Cable compressor. It's got two valves, so you can have 2 tools hooked up at once. It certainly wasn't the cheapest one, but we looked at Craftsman compressors at Sears, and they seemed so flimsily built compared to the PC. And the PC one is almost identical to my father's, which is what we had been using. Since we liked the older one, we went with the newer version of the same model. At least it was on sale. At any rate, I look forward to installing our base shoe, screening the porch, airing up our tires, and filling in the ghost door, among many other projects, I'm sure.

We had hoped to get the porch swing up this weekend, but had a doggie emergency. The puppy has developed terrible storm anxiety over the last year and it's reached a breaking point. If he's outside he digs up the yard until it starts raining, then he curls up-- not in his dog house-- but under the eaves. However, he has a serious double coat, so no matter how wet and soaked he looks, his skin is dry; I check every time, and am amazed still, every time.

But if he's in the house, he pants, paces, shivers, and tries to dig up the floor boards. I worry for the house and mostly I worry for his blood pressure. So I took him to the vet to see if there was something we could do or give him to quell his anxiety. They gave me some pills to try out and, since there was a storm rolling in that afternoon, I went ahead and tried them out. Unfortunately, the storm took longer getting here than was expected, and puppy wanted to go outside. Mind you, this is 2 or 2 1/2 hours after taking the pills, so I was less concerned about having my eyes on him at all times. He curled up in the flower bed and went to sleep. When I went to check on him, he was twitching like he was running in a dream. But then he couldn't stand up, couldn't really open his eyes, his third lid was up and he was shivering. So we had to rush him to the emergency vet. The vet techs looked at us like we were at least a little stupid when we showed them the pills. One said, "You know these are a sedative...?" The other just let us know that while the third eyelid makes things look a lot scarier than they are, it's pretty normal. All his vitals were good-- temp, heart, breathing. He was just out of it. Apparently, this was a fairly usual reaction to this med, a tranquilizer; however, it was a bit much for him-- or more like a bit much for me and especially the kiddo! We sort of expected drowsy and loopy. The vet did warn me that it was a tranquilizer, so it shouldn't have been a surprise. I think his 2 hours of totally normal were just deceiving.

He's ok now. He managed to get back to normal in time to dig his way to China, via the bedroom floor when the storms did get to Fort Smith, but he was still a little anxious last night. Apparently we can give him 1/2 or 1/4 the dose next time, but I don't know. Being outside where he at least calms down during the storm, if not in its run-up, might be preferable. That whole experience was terrifying. The second vet also suggested we try some storm CDs on sunny nice days to decondition him...

So that was the weekend. A little bit of home improvement, some spring cleaning, and a very sick puppy.

Here's hoping next weekend is better.

Hi-ho, hi-ho...

2009-04-07T12:47:00.002-05:00

heehe... We're doing a workshop on using blogs in the classroom as I type. Work work work!!

Spring is here again

2009-04-06T06:01:00.003-05:00

You wouldn't necessarily know it considering temps in the 20s last night. But everything is cropping up. Our gold dust plants and liriope and canna lilies and ajuga all have new growth. Everything is lovely. In fact, despite a hot hot hot summer last year and a failure to sufficiently water on my part, the dogwood looks even better this year. Can't wait for the summer heat and cold beer on the porch!

It's been a while

2009-03-31T06:51:00.001-05:00

I know. It's mainly because there's not been much to report. The winter doldrums, back ache (and the physical therapy that accompanies it), vacation planning, and a car crash all sort of put housework on the back burner. We are now almost one year out on the insurance claim from last year's hail storm; we have 2 years to complete so this summer will have to be a whirlwind of work. I suppose I'll update and then set some goals...

My back stayed bad for long enough that I've done a round of physical therapy. I have home exercises and little tricks that seem to be making things slowly better. Unfortunately, I didn't really stay on top of the home portion of the routine last week while we were in...

London!

It was a great trip, the kiddo's first, Adam's second, and my too many to count. I lived there for about a year and a half, so it's always a bit of a homecoming for me. I just love it. We went to the Darwin and Picasso exhibits, Hampton Court, Windsor, Shakespeare's Globe, the Tower and lots of pubs and great restaurants. We managed to find a Holiday Inn Express for $49 a night through Hotwire; normally I love staying at local B&B type places. But they are a crapshoot, and we couldn't afford one that was fully en suite. So Holiday Inn did the trick. We had a great set of 2 for 1 coupons to most of the big stuff (Tower, Hampton, Globe, etc.). And a lot of restaurants have great kids menus or lunch deals.

We also did a couple of London Walks-- which I poopooed for years until I finally broke down and took the Jack the Ripper Walk they're so famous for. It was great; they're not hokey or boring. The guides are really knowledgeable. And at £7 per adult (kids free), it's the best deal in town.

We have a tradition of buying things from Portobello Road market; my in-laws brought home candlesticks, Adam and I got a sexton, I got a compass thingy, and now, on this trip, we got an antique walnut British mantle clock. I've been reading about them and how to make all the adjustments so that it keeps good time and chimes approximately correctly. It has the Westminster chimes and it is lovely. Pictures to come.

Best of all, it was 60º and sunny. All. Week.

However, I did catch a nasty cold on the plane and spent one afternoon under the covers watching television (which frankly, was fine with me; I love TV there.) and I was nursing a sprained neck, to boot.

Yeah, that's whiplash. Whiplash sounds silly, though. Sprained neck sounds more correct. It's better now, but my shoulders still ache. See, a few days before we left for London, I was driving to work in the rain. Apparently, the temperature was a little lower between my house and work than I had anticipated. When I tried to change lanes on the interstate to avoid a wreck on one of the bridges, I hit ice and lost control of the car. I was the third accident there on that bridge.

Goodbye Beetle. I will admit that I was not crazy about that car. I got roped into buying it brand new full price off the lot not even knowing how to drive it (it was a standard; I was young). So we started out a bit poorly as these were highly overpriced cars. Being German, they require a certain amount of higher-cost maintenance (special coolant, for example), and the inside was plasticky... Poor gas mileage considering hte size of the car. But I did learn to drive a stick on my own in that car, so we bonded a little. And I can say that it performed when it came to safety. It seriously performed. That was a highway speed crash into a concrete guard rail and that's it. The cabin remained mostly untouched. Way to position those crumple zones, German engineers. And thanks for the airbags. A bruised nose is a small price to pay.

So now I'm buying a new car. A Hyundai Elantra, I think. Lots of airbags. Lots of crumple zones. Great gas mileage. I want a stick shift, but I won't be picky. If the price is right, the car comes home with me.

Anyway, you can see that we've been a bit swamped since the new year. But we have to refocus on the house.

Wrap up that kitchen trim and the ghost door and get the inspection
Repair the hole in the living room ceiling
Screen the porch
Insulate
Paint exterior
Base shoe
Paint interior trim

Those are the main things that need doing so we can wrap up the insurance and the inspections.

Time to focus.

A perfect Storm

2009-02-12T06:55:00.002-06:00

Literally and figuratively. We've also been getting a minor amount of work done on the house. And I'll get to that in a second. First I'll explain the storms...

Literally speaking, the weather's been really crazy; I didn't get any sleep two nights ago while the dog panted, paced and shivered through the same series of storms that caused those terrible tornadoes in Oklahoma. The storm system had stretched out by the time it reached us, so it wasn't quite as nasty, but Simon still shivered and panicked every time it thundered. Poor pup.

Figuratively speaking, the time became right to plan a trip to London later this year. I won't get into too many details except to say that we've been saving for this for years, the exchange rate is at a decade low, and airfare plummeted. We'll be tightening our belts big time when we get back. I used to live there and like to go periodically. The kiddo's never been. So a lot of time has been dedicated to planning for that. One little nice bit of info I will share, though, is that some airlines will continue to "rebook" your flight at lower fares if you ask without charge. We booked our tickets thinking they couldn't possibly go lower; then they did go lower on the same flights, same airline. So I looked into it a bit and found that they allow changes up to the first day of the trip. You are charged the difference if there is one, or credited with the overage if there is one. Pretty sweet.

So, on to house issues. Notice anything different?

Besides being a messy counter, it is now a counter with trim! But it's a pretty thick trim. We had to cover up the area over the dishwasher, due to accidents removing the cabinets when we gutted. I think I like it, but I'm not sure. For that reason, we only installed that piece and haven't sunk the nails or caulked. I'd also still like to sand the doors and bottom cabinet bases to make them a bit more natural and a little less yellow. It's a pretty piece of wood-- we decided on a chamfered profile:

I think I'm happy...

Just a lazy afternoon

2009-02-03T06:01:00.001-06:00

This is pretty much how we spent the entirety of last week:

Fayetteville, where I work, got the brunt of that mega ice storm-- so much so that the university closed for 4 straight days, and the day before saw a lot of people heading home early to avoid getting caught in the ice. Fort Smith on the other hand, got 4 inches of rain in 24 hours. Which then turned to ice. So we stayed at home inside all week. The puppy decided that maybe this inside thing isn't so bad after all...

The Audacity of Neighbors

2009-01-20T07:50:00.001-06:00

About 6 months ago, our neighbors across the alley stole our dumpy black trash can and replaced it with an even dumpier, dented, smaller black trash can. I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and use the moment as an excuse to buy a new, nicer can with wheels. Life has gone on as usual.

Yesterday morning I went to take out the trash. I forgot to bring in the can a few days ago, so I carried the bag out to the alley. And there I saw that the neighbors have now taken the opportunity to upgrade to our new wheelie can-- and...wait for it...replace it with the first can that they stole. Wow. They stole one, waited for us to get a newer one, then stole the new one and replaced it with the first stolen can. So I took all their sticky garbage out of MY can and left it, open, in the alley, and took BOTH of my cans back. Then Adam told me I couldn't leave them with no trash cans. So I gave them the dented, dumpy, small changeling trash can they left for us the first time.

And then the garbage truck never came because sometimes they pick up on holidays and sometimes they don't. So my wheelie can is still at risk in the alley.

Sheesh. Simon really gets worked up over these neighbors because there's always cars coming in out of their driveway through the alley. He hates it.

Not a lot of work on the house going on-- my car was broken into last week, so I finally got the window replaced. We've been doing some cooking-- I have a recipe to post shortly. And the dog ate some cooked and splintered rib bones, so I was on poop watch for a while.

There was a skunk on the porch today. Eek!

But it's Inauguration Day-- so let's all enjoy it!

Let's play catch-up

2009-01-05T06:08:00.007-06:00

Last you heard from me, I was preparing to fork over a few good holiday recipes and get a little housework done. And then my hard drive crashed. Fatal, nothing spinning, dead as a doornail hard drive crash. So yeah. It's up and running now, and I took lots of pictures in the meantime...

Baking Day
I had such high hopes for delivering these great recipes with step by step pictures. And I started out in the right vein.

Here's the sifted flour and butter/sugar for pecan butter balls-- those melt in your mouth powdered sugar covered cookies:

Here's the butter for 4 recipes worth of almond English toffee:

And the melting sugar and milk for candied pecans:

But then, before I knew it...Oops! All done!

Bagged, canned and ready to go.

But I will still give you one recipe...

Orange-Candied Pecans and Cranberries

1 cup packed brown sugar
3 Tbs condensed milk
1 Tbs butter
1 tsp orange zest
2 cups of pecans
1 cup dried cranberries

Combine brown sugar and condensed milk in saucepan over medium-high heat (see pic above). Bring to 234ºF (softball stage).

Once you've reached 234, turn off heat and stir in butter and orange zest. Add pecans and cranberries until coated. Pour out on wax paper.

Once cooled, break pecan halves apart and bag. I ended up adding a little more than 2 cups of pecans and however many cranberries looked good. You can see that the above is more than one recipe. That's maybe 4? Anyway, easiest thing in the world and magical.

Holiday Business
The kiddo finally got to paint the ornaments I mentioned in the last post:

We hosted Christmas Eve dinner and munched on ham for several days of leftovers. For Christmas, Adam's folks got us a new toaster/convection oven. I'm loving it so far. And my mother got us an espresso machine. It's a much nicer one than I'd have ever bought for myself, and being a former Starbucks employee/Kool-Aid drinker, I've been having a great time fiddling with it and making fancy beverages. It's a wonder that with the DAILY whole milk lattes since Christmas morning I haven't gained 20 pounds. It was lovely.

For New Year we went to friend's house. She has a passel of kids so there was much Rock Band being played and much rum punch being imbibed. By the grownups, of course. Fizzy grape juice for the little ones and ummy yummy Ro-tel dip.

House Business
We did actually get a little done. I got a couple of coats of poly on the countertop trim and made a little progress on the remaining kitchen crown (one little fussy corner is giving me hell). I also started painting that hellish green window in the kitchen, at which point we made some decisions. The kitchen is being finished in alkyd paint. If we lived in a perfect world, I would do the trim throughout the house the same way. But there's circumstances beyond my control. First, I was told by two POs ago that they stripped most of the trim. It now only has one or two layers of paint on it. This was less than ten years ago, and they were living in the house. It's not a high gloss. I'm betting it's latex to begin with. Also, WE live in the house and alkyd is stinky and toxic. And finally, I would have to confine the cats for DAYS depending on the weather and I'm just not interested. We've already given the baseshoe a thin coat of alkyd, so I'll probably want to sand and prime with Zinsser 123 to make sure the latex will stick. Eh. I'm ok with it.

Adam got the garage cleaned and fairly organized, which was a feat of mega proportions and we got the basic box of the gable vent built:

The slats are one more recycling of the garage door boards. And the 2X4s were salvaged from another project. We'll get it permanently set and then trim around it. First I want to paint it. This thing was a monster-- 42" across, and nobody makes a stock size that's horizontal like that.

That's the main stuff. Mostly, we sat on our butts or cleaned or baked. And going back to work is tough now. Really tough.

What's the best kind of Christmas tree?

2008-12-22T06:42:00.003-06:00

Are you partial to Douglas or Fraser?

I'm partial to free, myself.

About 5 or 6 years ago we found that Lowe's always overstocks their trees and if we wait until the final days of Christmas, we get a beautiful, full, perfectly shaped beauty for $5-$15. This has worked for us, every year since, without fail. This year, we went to Lowe's on Saturday to find 6 scraggly FULL PRICE trees-- short trees that lacked a discernable top or bottom. We prepared ourselves for 2 outcomes: a very expensive tree or a the first fake one of my life. Wait, I take that back. There was one year where I had a 2 foot fiber optic rotating tabletop tree that changed color. I bought it at the grocery store.

Anyway, We found a lovely Fraser fir at Home Depot. It ran about $45-- the signs were stacked up on the ground, so we were hoping it was on sale, but we weren't holding our breath.

We looked around the store at a few other things, and when we got back to pay for it, the tree was freshly cut, stray branches were removed, the whole thing was bagged and ready to load...and then they sent us on our way, with pocketbooks none the lighter. They told us that employees get these trees for free, and sometimes they like to just give one away. We must have looked very pitiful, indeed. It was quite a Christmas miracle.

And it is a lovely, old-fashioned tree.

We completed the decorating this weekend and tried out a new pecan glaze recipe that I will absolutely share this week. The kiddo and I (mostly the kiddo) painted some salt dough ornaments we made several years ago-- I'll post pics of those as well. We found some holiday-themed cookie presses at an antique shop 2 years ago and made a bunch of the ornaments. Then my father was in the hospital, and last year was my family's first year without Dad, not to mention the fact that we were in a mad race to get moved into the house...Life got in the way. But they are ready for distribution this year.

Lots more to do-- we are hosting Christmas Eve dinner, as Thanksgiving was such a success, thanks to the dishwasher! This means a ham and all the trimmings to prepare. The blog may just go into recipe-only mode before this week is over!

"The Crooner"

2008-12-18T06:13:00.001-06:00

This is my grandmother's response every time I say Bing Crosby's name. Boy was he one hell of a whistler.

This is my favorite holiday movie. A Christmas Story is great, It's a Wonderful Life is a Classic, but this one has been so overshadowed by that showy Danny Kaye nightmare White Christmas. It always comes on in the middle of the night on a weekday when I can't watch. It's out on a special edition 3 disc DVD set now-- I've had it in my basket 3 times at the store this season, and yet I put it back on the shelf every time. It seems like such a frivolous waste of money. But I had a tooth pulled yesterday, so I'm going to make this a little Get Well present to myself, I think.

Not that I'll have much time to watch it over the break if we get everything done that we hope to. Which we won't. The To-Do list is always longer than what can be reasonably achieved. But it would be super nice to get the kitchen countertop trim installed and the kitchen window and door painted white to eliminate all traces of that awful green. Caulk the trim in there. We also need to fill in that ghost door. I would LOVE to have the hole in our ceiling patched. We'd also really like to build some basic bookshelves in the dining room below the buffet window sill. We have TEN boxes of books. 10. TEN. Ten boxes of homeless books.

And I still have holiday baking and ornament making left. And the Christmas tree! We've yet to buy a Christmas tree. So much left to do.

On a good note, I did get that red ribbon for the gas light while wandering around Walgreens filling my heavy duty painkiller prescription post-tooth-pull yesterday This makes the outdoor decorations complete.

Holly Dayz

2008-12-14T19:42:00.007-06:00

Well, we finally got a little bit of the holiday spirit going on in the house. Gingerbread...

And lights:

That last shot is with a high shutter speed. I just thought it was kinda sweet. I also think that gas light in the front is just screaming for a big red bow. Maybe I'll get to it yet this year. The previous owners had nails all along the eaves, so we can't claim this one for ourselves completely, but it has made me disproportionately happy. My dad only did lights about twice the whole time I was growing up. This is a long time coming.

Adam got a ton of raking done over the weekend and the kiddo and I got the patio cleaned up ahead of a winter storm they're predicting may come through here. Great timing, considering I really need to get to my dentist tomorrow-- an hour away. I had a crown fall off over Thanksgiving, and we decided I should just get a bridge. apparently the crown's been loose for a while. But I decided to wait until the first of the year so I can use flex health savings account dollars. Then the crown fell off again this weekend and won't stay on at all. Sigh.

Good news is 2 weeks off of work coming right up. I may be half toothless for the holidays, but I will be watching daytime TV. Last year I was refinishing the floors and drywalling the kitchen. this year? Oprah. Tyra. Days of Our Lives.

This is gonna be the Best Christmas Ever.

Best doors ever.

2008-12-08T06:31:00.003-06:00

Or, you know...Best Garage Doors This Sad Little Shack Has Ever Seen.

The kiddo and I scraped, sanded and primed the new barn-style garage doors. Actually, I wet scraped and then quickly sanded with my super duper respirator on, just in case the paint was lead-based. Then the kiddo helped me prime. Next weekend? Real paint.

When we were through, I was a little disappointed that they didn't look brand-spanking new. But the more I looked at the doors, the more I decided that this was a good thing; they look like they've always been there, and at least half of them always have. I would much rather save much of the wood and a little money than spend more and waste material on doors that would look a suspiciously good for their location.

They are sturdy and functional and not an eyesore. And really, that's all that matters.

I give thanks for new garage doors

2008-12-01T06:36:00.003-06:00

Yay! Here is the before, as it looked after the hail storm:

So you can see that this is one of the old fashioned sliding doors. You can probably also see that the rod/track is bent and rusty. I've been unable to move the door by myself for a while now. For one, the door dips down in that bent part and starts to drag on the ground; it's too heavy for me to lift up and move along. Also, there are places where the bolts holding the track up have rusted and/or rotted out of the building. The wheels on the door then snag on the loosened brackets. If I got a running start, sometimes I could get past these two hiccups, but usually one of the wheels fell off the track altogether and caused a whole other host of problems.

Recently, the track gave way completely and the door was pretty precariously leaning on the frame. The final straw was a windstorm that blew the door down and onto the car parked in front of it.

The hailstorm insurance settlement included money to repair this door-- reset the track and replace most of the wood. We decided a new door system was a better use of the money. The end result:

Tada! Obviously still needs to be painted, hence the candy stripe effect. It just seemed such a waste to buy all new wood when at least a portion of what was there was perfectly good. We broke down the big sliding door and salvaged about a dozen of the most intact of the 1X5 tounge and groove boards. Then we ran them through the table saw to take off the tongue and chopped off the ends. Then we alternated them with 1X4s on a frame of 2X4s. Added a few 2X4 bracings for the hinges and slapped those puppies up.

It took many, many trips to the hardware store, which officially makes it a project in my opinion. We still need to add diagonal support cables to the inside to reduce the inevitable sagging, and some scraping and painting will top it off. But it made me seriously so happy.

We also had the heater looked at on Wednesday...the guy who came couldn't find the smell, but suggested that the hallway where the return vent is located might be creating a negative pressure situation and sucking air up through the patched floor furnace hole. The vapor barrier under there is pretty ragged and not really working well anymore. Add that to the list.

And then we cooked and cleaned for Thanksgiving. It was a great excuse to get the house cleaned up and usable and a really great excuse to have a whole lotta leftovers for a very long time.

All in all, a great use of 5 days off in a row.

(I should add a disclaimer here that, while the kiddo and I did most of the cooking and cleaning, Adam did most of the work on the doors. I did a lot of holding, going to the hardware store, replacing spent batteries with charged ones, catching boards on the other side of the table saw, and helpfully pointing out when we were screwing things into the wrong end. Adam deserves most of the credit on this one.)

Something to watch

2008-11-24T12:33:00.003-06:00

One Project Closer posted some great info on HELOCs and what to do if yours is frozen. We bought our place at well below its appraised value, so I was pretty OK with getting one when we figured out all of the renovations we wanted to do to the house. I've been keeping an eye on it since we started hearing stories about freezing and canceling as the housing market crumbled and so far so good. I also watch Zillow and our bank's Home Value Estimator in the home equity section of their website. I've noticed a few things that I thought others out there might want to know about. Here's our situation.

The bank's estimator is the higher of the two, but our HELOC didn't bring our debt against the house anywhere near that amount, even if we maxed out all the available credit. Zillow seemed pretty consistently reasonable, if a little on the low side-- again, though, maxing out the HELOC wouldn't ever put us upsidedown. Lately, both these values have been going steadily up and this reflects the market in our town and in our specific zip code. Several houses on our street and directly behind us have recently sold for much more than I thought they would, the neighborhood became an Historic District, and the town as a whole never experienced a housing boom, so there's been very little to slump; it simply steadily, but in very small increments, showed increases in home values.

Last night, I took a look at Zillow, just for shits and giggles. We're in this house for 5-10 years and so my monitoring of the value has been mostly academic. Zillow shows a relatively healthy increase over the last month or two. Well if that's what Zillow shows, I thought, what must the bank's estimator show!?! So I checked. Um...it says our house has decreased by an unrealistic sum of money (interestingly, to a sum that makes our debt suspiciously close to 80%). It's now similar to the Zillow estimate, but that's beside the point-- the bank is showing what I think is a false decrease in home value; in other words, whether the new number is correct or not is irrelevant. What matters is that the bank is looking at the house and saying that it's decreasing rapidly. The same estimator shows other decreases in our neighborhood of 30k, 8k... It's all over the place, over a very short time and in a neighborhood I know to be going up in value as evidenced by numerous recent sales. Hopefully, the estimator simply recalibrated and the bank is looking at it as such, and not as an actual decrease in value. It also doesn't take into account any improvements that we've made.

So then I decided to check our HELOC-- to see what the new rate would be if we locked it. Our bank has a feature with their HELOC that allows the consumer to lock a portion of his or her debt into a fixed rate. It's higher than the revolving rate, but it's fixed. The website also used to allow you to do the whole thing online; get a quote, lock the rate and transfer the money without dealing with their operators. This feature has disappeared within the last couple of weeks.

This may mean absolutely nothing-- or it may mean that the bank is about to do another mass reappraisal of its HELOCs like it did earlier this year. Now may be the time to think about anything you want to do in the near future and pull the cash for it. Most of our remaining repairs are from the storm, and therefore covered by insurance, or we've bought the supplies already and now need to simply install the items. But it's been nice to know the money is there and I do find the sequence of events very peculiar indeed...

Good News Monday

2008-11-24T07:55:00.001-06:00

I called the HVAC installers and they told me that the warranty started when they did the initial "start up" on the unit. This means we are squeaking in just under the warranty wire.

They come Wednesday to see what's up!

And...it's back.

2008-11-23T10:49:00.003-06:00

Sigh. Now I have to call the HVAC guys-- 2 months, almost to the day, since the unit went out of warranty on labor. Still under on parts, but I'm always a little afraid they'll find some way to pin the blame on the consumer. I worked in retail. I remember how it goes.

Update on the stink

2008-11-19T06:37:00.001-06:00

Adam ran the emergency heat for a while early in the day on Monday, and I ran it for 30 minutes or so that same night, and we got one bag of insulation that was tucked in a corner out of the attic (fyi-- it smelled like nothing, though that doesn't really mean anything). Neither of us smelled it at all yesterday, and I think Adam was home pretty much all day.

So far so good.

Stinky coils?

2008-11-17T06:25:00.001-06:00

As per usual...I need help.

We started noticing a musty smell in the house, and we think it's coming from the heat registers. It's a musty, mildewy, damp crawlspace kind of smell (but our inside coil and ductwork are in the attic)-- not bad, just stale like hose water.

Anyway, the first thing I did was change the filter-- it was in very, very bad need of changing. We thought that did the trick, but I think it was just warm enough outside for the rest of the day that the heat wasn't really kicking in.

This morning I was doing my yoga stretches for my back and could smell it again-- and trust e, this made it very hard to relax-- "what could that be?" "is it dangerous?" "will it be expensive?" Shut up, brain-- you're supposed to be concentrating on breathing!

So now I've resorted to Google. It appears that there are several possibilities here. One is mildew and mold on the inside coils and drip pan-- something called dirty sock syndrome. I guess heat pumps don't get hot enough to kill the bacteria, and that's all we have. It doesn't generally get so cold that a heat pump can't do the job for the most part, so there's no gas furnace in addition-- just the pump. But, anyway, I'm not sure this really smells like dirty socks-- it's not all that offensive. It did occur to me that we might have left a bag of wet insulation up there from after the storm; I know Adam got it all bagged up, but we need to make sure we didn't leave one up there. Still, that shouldn't necessarily affect the air inside the sealed ducts, and anyway, most ducts are in crawlspaces with much more moisture than any poorly ventilated attic would have; plus, it's been super cold lately.

The other possibility seems to be that it might be summer "build-up" on one of the coils which, again, never gets hot enough to totally burn off. I saw one suggestion to turn on the emergency heat for 20 minutes and crank it up so it gets hotter and burns off whatever's there.

We all know it's never fun to have someone come work on the house. I'd like to try anything I can do myself first. I'll start with the emergency heat plan...but I'm wondering if any of you have had this problem and any suggestions that don't involve calling the HVAC guys...

Help?

Other than pondering our stinky air, we got more unpacking done; Adam went on a tear with that and it's looking so much better. We had friends in town this weekend, so we got some cleaning done and other various maintenance projects worked on. One of these friends is moving back to town, so I took her one of the neighborhood houses that I know is going on the market soon. Every time Adam tried to router the countertop edging, it started to rain, so that's still on the books. I'm afraid it's officially too cold to plant my hosta bulbs-- hopefully it'll warm up enough that I can get them into the ground. And my back is slowly, slowly mending.

In other words, life has been pretty low-key-- Sam's Club restocked the variety pack cases of Leinenkugel, so really, I couldn't ask for much more.

A perfect fit

2008-11-13T06:46:00.001-06:00

Whoa. Are these pipes from a 1982 Playboy?

I couldn't figure out why everything was in soft focus this morning, until I considered that the camera had been in my car all night, sitting at about 35º. The lens and viewfinder were both all foggy.

Anywho, that right there is the trap and the purple lid of doom that was clogging said trap. Then there is the pipe that shattered in Adam's hand:

I swear to god I don't have man hands like that in real life, stupid perspective. So yeah-- it was a dirty job, but in the end,

And so far, it works.

The End.

Pipe Fittin'

2008-11-12T12:29:00.001-06:00

What I really should title this post is, "Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit." I just called home to see if I needed to pick up anything for dinner, and was greeted with a rousing tale about our bathroom sink. A while back, we took the little plug out to clean all the gunk off of it; it didn't get put back in immediately. Then we started noticing a very slow drain. We tried 2 rounds of gel drain cleaner, and it was no better. We assumed something fell in the trap and was clogging things up-- nothing else was backing up. Easy fix, right? Just take the trap off, empty it out, put it back. That's what traps are for!

Apparently, the pipe behind it shattered when the trap was disconnected. Great. These are old, old pipes and I'm a little concerned that we won't be able to find any that fit, and even if we do, we'll end up shattering something else or causing a leak behind the wall, IN WHICH CASE, my pink tile is at risk. Homegirl is not happy. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Incidentally, I'm told, the culprit was a purple lid to something.

I see that's it's been almost 2 weeks since I last posted. Not much has happened housewise, hence the absence. I ended up spending all morning on the Saturday after Halloween in a walk-in clinic for a sinus infection-- by that point I had completely lost my voice. I'm pretty sure you don't know hell until you've been in that particular place on that particular day. It was full of ENTIRE FAMILIES to take care of one sick person. Multiple adults, one of whom probably could have stayed at home with the kids eating their Halloween candy at 9 in the morning, crowded the waiting room. All for literally 2 minutes with the doc.

I have also been continuously dealing with the back pain and discomfort for several weeks now. It's taking a while, but I am in full assault mode-- new office chair, new shoes, exercise balls (for home and office), daily yoga, heated vibrating chair pad, body pillow, lumbar cushion for the car. The works. I want this shit done with. The problem is that I had let my health and fitness go for so long, that the exercise almost makes it worse before it makes it better. Muscles are being asked to keep me sitting up straight that haven't been used this regularly in years. They're not taking it lying down, though, I can tell you that. I was taking muscle relaxers, but I started weaning myself off of them. Though some ibuprofen will be mighty welcome by day's end.

Adam's been trying to work on the house during the week, but the rain keeps making it difficult. And now I suppose I'm going to have to hire out the ceiling drywall work-- I don't think hoisting sheetrock and standing on a ladder staring up all day is a very condusive to my full scale back attack.

Someday, there will be news to report. And hopefully, it will be good news.

Happy Halloween

2008-10-31T08:05:00.003-05:00

Pumpkin designs by the kiddo. Pumpkins picked out by me. Carving done by Adam. :-)

This is the first Halloween, not living with my parents, where I've been in a popular Trick or Treat spot. The neighborhood I grew up in was so poor and rundown that nobody ever came. Then we moved to a new house when I was 10 or 11 that was in one of those areas where people bus the kids in. The street is only 3 blocks long, so it's perfect. Then after college I went back to the too poor and rundown to have many visitors kinds of places.

And now, I'm going to have to go out on my lunch hour today to buy a small fortune's worth of candy so that we can keep up with the deluge I anticipate. And if I'm wrong, well...there's nothing wrong with a little extra candy.

My back is kind of on the mend, meaning, if I don't sit down all day, it's ok. I spent half of my birthday in the doctor's office, and part of it fetching tapeworm pills for that damn cat. Speaking of b-days, how sweet is this?

If my mom says I get to be 29 forever, then who am I to argue? You can see, we'd already started picking at it before we took the picture...And today is my grandmother's 90th birthday! I have lunch with her every Sunday and she is the best.

At any rate, with the whole back things, I'm actually looking into old lady cars now-- the lists of top ten cars for seniors have been very helpful. Anyone got experience with the Ford Five Hundred? I never thought I'd give up my manual transmission. Sigh. Anyway... Then I got the cold of my life. I've been afraid to take any cold medicine with the Robaxin, so I've been suffering through snot and cough and sneezes. It's currently migrating to my chest.

So that's about it. I have hopes of getting things done this weekend (don't I say that EVERY Friday?), things like countertop trim so we can officially get the city off our backs and get the house weatherized.

One small consolation? The leaves are finally changing and so an uncomfortable drive is at least a lovely commute.

Running to stand still

2008-10-23T11:51:00.000-05:00

I wish I could say that all the efforts of the last 2 weeks had been house improvements; I really wish we'd been hunkering down and getting ready for winter hibernation. We need to caulk and weather strip and insulate. This morning was the first truly cold morning-- in the 30s and wet. The pup even slept in the bedroom with us until it stopped raining and he couldn't take being cooped up anymore. He's got his winter coat and is loving the change in weather; a doggie with an undercoat is no summer doggie indeed.

As for our little Bella who had the accidental second spay and the upset tummy? Talk about cooped up. She's been living in the laundry room while recovering. I started cooking her plain chicken and white rice to ease her digestive system, but it just wasn't working. We finally took her to the vet. Turns out she had an overgrowth of bad bacteria in her stomach. She's been on a round of an antibiotics, anti-protozoans and pro-biotic powder. Today she was deemed healthy enough to return to the outside world.

My sister is finally understanding what REAL cold is, preparing for her first New England winter and had a tough weekend to boot...Remember my story about the stolen purse and its ultimate recovery? She had a similar incident this weekend with a similar outcome. Not all the contents made it back, but the majority of them did. Boston really is full of some remarkably honest people. Still, the whole event was stressful.

Between cooking for a damn stray cat, visits to the vet, consoling my sister, and finally throwing out my back, the last 2 weeks have been quite limited in their productiveness. The city had its fall cleanup with dumpsters located in each city ward, which we took advantage of. Cleared out old mattresses, boxes and other trash, and sorted through our building materials and the casualties of the move to decide what goes to Habitat's ReStore and what goes to the Salvation Army. We have a lot of ceiling fans, and a lot of clothes and canned goods. I like to wait until Sundays when the Salvation Army thrift store is closed and then leave the donations on their doorstep; it gives the people who really need it the chance to get at it and saves me the hassle of dealing with the 8,000 other people who decided to clean out their closets this weekend. It's only a few blocks away, so I should manage to get it done this weekend.

So now that the sickly cat is better and everything else is shaping up, I thought we'd get a lot done...Instead, I may be laid up with my muscle relaxers. Of course I decided to take Monday off for my birthday and so it figures that I might be stuck nursing my stupid spine-- granted, I hadn't planned on doing much more than watch daytime TV, but still. I like to know I have options!

The time of the half project

2008-10-13T06:36:00.000-05:00

Seems like I got a lot of things halfway done this weekend.

I got the lawn half-mowed before running out of gas...

I got the halfway done on the crown-- got it sanded and about 6 feet of it painted...

Our little front porch kitty's been recovering form a spay surgery; it turned out that she had already been spayed, but it was not a certainty before they put her under. She was a little drunk Friday night, but she's purring and loving and rubbing her sweet little face on everything in sight now.

We also went to Oktoberfest. It's a small affair here, a charity event for a children's treatment facility. Some extra yummy brats and sauerkraut, and some good German potato salad, but not as good as my mother and grandmother's recipe. My mother grew up very, very German Lutheran and let me tell you there is nothing better than good, authentic German potato salad. I'll have to make that my next recipe post-- I'm long overdue for one anyway.

And lets not forget the beer. Pitchers of Sam Adams Oktoberfest were $10 to start with and $6 for refills and we keep the pitcher. Not bad over all. A girlfriend of mine split a few pitchers with me while our kids ran wild and the men stayed sober to drive us all home. Then she and another friend and I went to play bunco with her mother.

Wow.

I'm not sure how I've missed this game. It was the first time I played and I think it's fantastic. They eat a lot of food, drink some booze and play this bizarro combination of bridge and craps. And there's prizes! I won some sweet little harvest-themed scarecrow decorative statues.

I might be hooked.

Oh! Speaking of hooked-- I've taken up crocheting again. I haven't really done that in a good 15 years, so I had to spend Sunday practicing and boning up on my stitches. I'll be back in the swing in no time, and making some new throw pillows for the living room.

Frankly, this was all to distract me from the news. I'm a politics junky and I watch news from the time I get home, to the time I go to bed. I listen to news podcasts on my drive home, I listen to Morning Edition on the drive to work. I just read the John Adams biography and I'm about to wrap up reading a book about the 1787 writing of the Constitution. I really should have moved to DC.

I never wanted to get too bogged down in it here on this blog, though. DIY knows no politics.

I will just say, however, that I'm concerend about the level of misinformation in the world and the amount of negativity that's been spewed forth in the last few weeks. The world is in a precarious place at the moment, and race, gender and religion shouldn't factor negatively into the way we move forward. It's become almost hard for me to watch.

Let's talk issues, solutions and plans and then let's get ourselves out of this mess.

All trimmed out

2008-10-06T06:12:00.006-05:00

Another moderately productive weekend, I'd say. And a few lessons learned, of course. I can already see this is going to be a long post, but hey-- at least there's pictures!

I know I mentioned our newly purchased and primed crown for the kitchen-- "crown" is really stretching it; it's a large cove molding. Anyway, Adam and I spent Saturday cutting and installing it.

I don't know if you've ever done crown, but it's a little insane. We knew that the bottom of the molding had to be against the fence of the miter saw if we were going to get consistent corners. But somehow we missed the fact that cove has a top and bottom-- one side's thicker than the other-- and we were trying to flip the pieces over rather than move the to the other side of the saw or just move the saw. We were being lazy and stupid. But Adam finally got in a groove, and things moved right along.

Once we realized that there had to be a better, easier, less stress-inducing way to do this, we ended up using DeWalt's tutorial for cutting crown, and I found this one pretty helpful, too.

To install, we used our handy-dandy Harbor Freight stapler/brad-nailer twofer that we got for $18 with One Project Closer's coupon. It's been a GREAT addition to the tool arsenal; we have a larger Porter-Cable finish nailer, but it's 15ga, it's so heavy and cumbersome and provides such a kick. For these little projects, the 18ga brad nailer is lightweight and easy to handle when you have to hold your arms up and crick your neck to see, and the tiny brads don't tend to split the wood. It is awesome.

Anyway, we got it up there and I spent yesterday caulking and putty-ing the nail holes.

It looks like it has the pox. This (the caulking, not the pox!) brings me the newest addition to the tool box-- a new caulk gun. The one we had was the 99¢ blue one that everyone has in their kitchen tool/junk drawer. In fact, ours either came from Adam's dad or my dad, making it probably a minimum of 15 years old and a maximum of 30. When I used it on the porch, caulk was constantly oozing out and I didn't feel like I had a lot of control over the bead. Ok, ok. I suppose this might have something to do with the fact that I had no clue what I was doing.

But caulk guns are inexpensive even at the top end, and if there's one thing I've learned from this house, it's that the right hands can make cheap tool work; but a cheap tool in the wrong hands is a fucking disaster. So I splashed out on a $5 model that advertises "no-drip technology."

I couldn't see any difference; I stood in Lowe's for a while with a cheapo model and this one in each hand, pulling the triggers and watching them work and...I don't know. But whatever the difference, it's a good one. It absolutely did the trick. My beads were smaller and smoother and the tip stayed pretty mess-free. (I'd like to also point out that caulking is just about the most important part of finish work-- I cannot BELIEVE the difference it makes between looking halfway legitimate and looking like a monkey did the work.)

One bit of a disaster, however, is the space above the broom closet. This closet was a modular afterthought.

As you see, the gaps are too big for the crown to attch to anything on one side, and there's a gaping hole below it on the other side. The side in the first pic is also severely bowed. My solution? Liquid Nail, baby. The bowed side will be more difficult, but I started by gluing a scrap piece of poplar in the other side's gap:
I'll wait for the glue to cure and then glue these two piece of crown together and then to the ceiling and closet. Then I'm sure there will be creative caulking and puttying. We'll see.

Another little kitchen miracle...drum roll...Baseboards!
Not having ragged bottoms and ragged tops has made a world of difference. For this project, we did have to bust out the big finish nailer. These baords were just too much for the little guy.

We also tested some countertop trim profiles on a scrap piece of oak (no decision yet), and I primed the laundry room. Or well, I started to prime the laundry room.

That paneling is a bitch! Or, again, wrong tool wrong hands...I was using a regular roller with a regular nap, and this left nothing in the grooves between "panels." So the whole room turned into one giant "cutting in." I gave up at this point and will buy a thicker napped roller and see where that takes me.

And we changed the battery in my mom's car...OH! One other weird thing. The kiddo was at camp all weekend. But when I woke up this morning, the stuffed teddy bear that she won at the fair last week was laying splayed out in the middle of the bathroom floor. I'm sure the most likely answer is that one of the cats dragged it in there; it's as big as they are, but lightweight. Still, there was no evidence of claws or teeth on it...I like to believe that our little girl ghost who goes from the kitchen to the bathroom at night has taken a shine to it :-)

Success...I think

2008-09-29T06:46:00.001-05:00

As foggy as I am with these allergies, I'm not sure I would know the difference between success and failure. I'm reduced to staring at small shiny objects and snuffling all the snot in my head.

So I won't do a lot of talky wordy business this morning. I will, however, show some pictures.

The main thing that got done this weekend was the porch ceiling. I stuffed the cracks with backer rod and caulked and painted, and we installed the new ceiling fan. It had some god-awful ugly "weathered oak" faux-wood faux-grained blades, so I also spray-painted those black. And we bought the crown for the kitchen and primed it, and bought oak to trim out the countertops.

We're on a roll. Here's some pictures of the finished porch ceiling. Some before shots can be found here and here. Now we just need to screen...

That business on the left isn't as bad as it looks here-- the wide-angle lens is distorting, and a fresh coat of paint behind it will do wonders. It's one of the many things we simply couldn't fix without tearing out a huge portion of ceiling, all for something cosmetic.

I need help

2008-09-26T06:55:00.005-05:00

No really.

I didn't take any pictures of the problem, so I will describe for you, as best I can, the nature of this beast.

Umm...Some tape peeled the paint off my trim.

I think that sums it up pretty well.

What's happened is, during the course of taping off our kitchen to work on drywall, floor, etc, the masking tape-- and even blue painters' tape-- has peeled bits of paint off of the doorway trim. I blame part of this on a certain someone's reckless ripping off of the tape. But mostly, I think this might mean that some PO painted latex over oil without proper prep. Or that the oil is so old that its doing its whole crumble and FAIL routine.

It's not terrible, and it's only on a few pieces, but I'm trying to decide how best to alleviate this crap. I want to paint this trim soon. I will be using a low-VOC alkyd. It seems to last much longer than latex; I know that latex has come a long way, but I was sitting in my mother's house the other day when I realized that we painted her trim almost 20 years ago. A good scrub with a magic eraser, and it'll be like new. That shit's like a candy shell.

Anyway, I cannot take the trim off of the walls for a variety of reasons, namely due to the fact that the house was drywalled around the trim. I fear I would be opening the most giganticest can of worms ever.

I also considered priming with a serious business primer and succumbing to latex, but we've already painted the yet to be installed base shoe with oil.

So, I'm not sure how to proceed here. The trim is a variety of shades of white throughout the house-- so I think some is oil and some is latex (and the bathroom's is, whatever the base, FLAT FINISH. grrrr. That irritates me so much. It looks sooooo dirty. It IS so dirty). Considering the age of the house, and the many colors that we have see on the trim, I know that whatever's under the possibly-latex layer is oil.

My questions are these: If I prime with something like Kilz2 and paint with oil, am I, somewhere down the line, going to see a problem wherein the maybe-latex layer and surrounding oil/primer lose adhesion? Or will the oil, with its hard candy shell, be ok once it's cured?

Also, how should I handle the pieces with peeling paint-- should I use a stripper (heh.) to get the top layer or two off? Since we're not taking these pieces off the wall, they'll have to be stripped in situ, so I'd probably want to use something like a citrus or soy based remover. I'd prefer to sand as little as possible, due to the lead content.

Should I just wet scrape and prime-- then paint? I'm using a semi-gloss finish, so I don't want too much bumpiness...Scrape, "fill," sand, prime, paint?

Ugh.

I guess I'm leaning toward first trying to scrape. If that's bad, then chemically (or citrus-ally or soy-ally) stripping the face of the trim, then doing some serious priming and painting; and then simply priming and painting the un-peeled trim.

Suggestions?

A mighty, mighty breakthrough

2008-09-25T11:33:00.001-05:00

So this is what I saw when I woke up this morning:

Pardon the blurs-- it was still dark out and he was sleeping soundly when I started taking this picture...Anyway, that right there is a dog sleeping on his Coolaroo raised outdoor bed. When he sleeps inside, he lays on a store-bought bed. He likes it. So then I bought him this bed that's raised off the ground for hot days, it's washable, it's sturdy, it's low to the ground for easy climbing in. It got great reviews. But outside, well...he likes the flowerbed. He'd jump on the coolaroo and sit when we went outside-- so he could get a treat, of course. He'd lie down on it-- while I was petting him. But never have I seen him, OF HIS OWN ACCORD, go to it and sleep. Without my presence. Without treats. I even brought it inside for a while, and still, never did I wander to the back room to find him curled up on it. Luckily, it wasn't, like, major award expensive, and the Sneaky kitty likes it, so I didn't exactly consider it a wasted purchase-- just not really being used for its intended purchase.

But last night, that all changed. It made me so happy. I just laid in bed and watched out the window for a while.

And then, what a lovely drive to work, eh?

And then there's the projects we started...

2008-09-22T06:48:00.001-05:00

But we were foiled.

I wanted to take care of this over the weekend:

Ok, yeah, that's how we iron around here. Anyway, that's an old door into the kitchen. It's located behind the stove and cabinets along that wall. Judging by this:

we think perhaps the ghost door once led to a butler's pantry or thereabouts. The doorway on the left of the photo still goes to the kitchen; we wondered if that crazy ceiling beam once belonged to a wall separating the pantry form the entryway for the backdoor. Who knows.

That's beside the point, though. We reframed it in when we sheetrocked the kitchen-- a little more solidly than our POs had done before. So now we have to deal with this side. Since we don't want to deal with sheetrocking this entire room yet, we're just going to put the trim back up, as it was when we moved in, and put the piece of paneling back over the hole, again, as it was when we moved in.

Problem now is that we framed it in so that the door jambs aren't going to just slide in. It's going to take some sawing and shimming and rigging. But that's ok. I still sort of like the idea of a ghost door there. It's a nice nod whatever originally went on in that space.

Anywho, we discovered that the panel was too warped to work with right now. It's going to sit like this for the week until it's flat enough to deal with.

And then, I get to paint. Look what I found on the $5 mistint shelf at Lowe's!
If it suxks, I'm only out five dollars and little labor. Can't go wrong!

Slowly, slowly

2008-09-22T06:14:00.001-05:00

Slowly, but surely, things are getting done around here. It's not major steps-- the weather's been too beautiful; on the other hand, we bitch and moan when it's bad and CAN'T work, so...there you have it.

Anyway, the porch ceiling got a little attention. Remember, it looked like this:

I primed the ceiling and we got the crown installed:

You can see I misjudged how far the primer needed to go along the edge, and there's a lot of caulking that needs doing before we finally paint. And boy is it dirty up there!

Still, it's a step closer.

Breaking our promise

2008-09-15T06:33:00.004-05:00

I think we have a good excuse. We really had planned to get a ton of stuff done. We promised. We were committed. We were motivated.

And then we were hurt.

Actually, Adam was hurt. He threw his back out at work on Friday. And then we were wet. On that front we were very lucky. I think Ike hit Arkansas as a tropical storm and quickly became a tropical depression. The winds were 50 mph or so, but no trees or limbs lost and no other damage that we could see. Our outside kitties ducked out Saturday morning. Sneaky was in hiding by 10am, and our new recruit, little Bella, ran off after her early morning visit with the vet. (Clean bill of health, btw. She's about 3 and has some scars and broken teeth from life on the streets, but otherwise ok, it seems.) They both came out yesterday evening when the coast was clear.

At any rate, I dedicated Saturday morning to bathing the dog, filling in all the backyard holes and tying down anything that might fly away.

The rain didn't come until later in the afternoon, and it was gone by Sunday morning. I got all the supplies to paint the porch ceiling and install the crown, but we decided to wait until everything was totally dry. So I focused my efforts elsewhere.

Sunday's beautiful, breezy, fresh and clean air meant we could turn off the a/c and open the windows. I mopped and finally unpacked boxes of pictures and trinkets.

I was hesitant to put holes in the walls, but I got over it. Yes, we have lived here 6 months and only just now are we getting around to hanging things on the walls. I also bought a new runner for the kitchen.

Doesn't it look lived in now?
My mother just bought the same rug, so she let us give it a test run before I bought it. And my favorite poster-- a watercolor that my mother did when I was little-- finally got a frame. Oh yeah; the sad little laundry room also got a burst of, er, neutral with some curtains.
That little tragedy of a room is going to have to get painted very, very soon. One day, it will have slate floor tiles. At the moment, though, our washing machine dances out into the middle of the room whenever it has a slightly less than full load. I know part of this will be fixed with better leveling, but I'm pretty sure the washer is on its way out. I'm shopping the scratch and dent stores. Until then, the room will remain the tragic mutant of this house. No love.

Sisyphus and the Bunny: A Revelation

2008-09-15T06:09:00.001-05:00

I spent a large portion of the weekend cleaning, as I always do, but my area of special focus this week was the floors. And that's where I had my epiphany.

As I swept all the little dust bunnies (read: "clumps of cat hair covered in dust"), I knew, with a tiny hint of exasperation, that the little kitty hair tumbleweeds would be there in the morning-- no! by evening, even! And it occurred to me that the great analogy of home ownership is Sisyphus and his rock. However, in my house it's the bunnies. We roll that stone all the way to the top, only to have it roll right back over us on its way back down.

In fact, there's not much in this house-- or in life, for that matter-- that's done once and finished. Everything begets other projects, problems and perturbations.

I suppose it makes me feel better that I am at least able to anticipate the repetition. Can you imagine how much more disappointing it would be if we were shocked every single time the rock rolled back downhill?

Our other visitor...or perhaps a PO?

2008-09-12T06:49:00.001-05:00

So. Back to the beyond thing...

Well. I was pretty sleepy, so this is a far from definitive sighting. Not sure how much of a believer or non-believer I am. I did have what I decided was a ghost in another house I lived in. That one rummaged through our kitchen drawers at night. This one still freaked me out, though.

I've had some tooth pain lately and been generally a bit under the weather. I woke up a few nights ago at about 1:30 for no reason. Perhaps my tooth was throbbing, but I certainly didn't wake up thinking I was in pain.

After sitting there awake for a few minutes, I thought I heard knocking at the front door. I decided to wait a few more minutes, just in case someone was there, then go check on the front of the house-- I'd left the living room light on and wasn't sure if the porch light was off, that sort of thing. When I got to the front door, I could see out of the corner of my eye a flash of a little girl looking in the front door window, cupping her hands over her eyes to see inside, like she was on tiptoes. But she wasn't there. Of course I jumped and double-checked the chain, and ran back to bed.

Every time I put my head on the pillow, my tooth throbbed. When I finally started drifting off to sleep, laughter woke me up.

And here's where it gets really silly. For a while now, when I sit in bed working on my laptop, I think I see out of the corner of my eye a child-sized figure walking from kitchen to bathroom. Of course nothing's there when I look and the kiddo is usually gone or in bed when that happens. When I was working on the house by myself before we moved in, I also often thought I saw someone at the front door, but of course nothing was there. I've blamed all of these things on lighting, reflections, and my own bad eyesight.

But after this week, I'm reevaluating. After the laughter woke me up, I needed to pee. But I was afraid that the ghost I'd just made extra sure was locked out was the same ghost that walks from kitchen to bathroom! What if she couldn't get back in? She was bound to be pissed!

Luckily Adam woke up and went to the bathroom, so I sheepishly got up then.

As I said, I've been in some pain (though no pain killers that night!) and was terrifically sleepy. I also have a wild imagination and worrisome mind.

But things definitely got a little unreal around the house this week.

Some strangers came a-callin'

2008-09-12T06:13:00.003-05:00

One from the neighborhood, and one from Beyond, perhaps. Yeah. That's THE Beyond to you.

Our neighborhood visitor is this gal:

I think cats choose their owners, and they seem to just keep choosing me and my mother. Mom ended up with the last stray...Guess it was my turn. She's ultra sweet, we've named her Bella for the time being. Adam doesn't seem too keen on letting me live out my dream of having an orange and white cat named Fluffer-Nutter. She's not much of a marshmallow personality anyway, so I suppose it's ok. I'll take her to the vet tomorrow, hopefully, to see how unhealthy she really is. Skin and bones and starving all the time. Worms, probably. Don't know if we'll keep her, and I'm going to keep checking around the neighborhood to make sure we don't start medicating and fixing a cat that isn't ours...

Anyway. I know you're thinking, "Yeah, yeah, so what. A cat. Great. What about the ghost?"

Next post. ;-)

18 Million Cracks

2008-09-09T06:14:00.002-05:00

in my bathroom. Trust me-- I'm not making light of those more important 18 million cracks*; I'm just getting a little concerned about the stability of the joints in my bathroom.

I was a taking a shower a few days ago (I've taken them since!), and I noticed what looked like mildew in the grout lines. Admittedly, I'd noticed them before, and bought some extra heavy duty tub and tile cleaner. But this time I stuck a fingernail in the grout line...

I think these are actually places where the grout is beginning to fail. Morelike, has already failed. There's quite a few of them. My other guess was that perhaps there was a darker grout to begin with and someone decided to regrout in white. The floor looks like maybe it was a darker grout, not just stained. (We're clean people-- I swear!).

So I'm thinking-- and correct me if I'm going about this all wrong-- I'm going to clean the grout in the tub/shower and walls well with a soft brush and regrout. The sticking point is that it's the whole bathroom's wainscoting, but I think that if I just pay special attention to the areas of failure and do the entire thing with the same batch using a good float, then I should be good, right?

Then I noticed this:

That's the hot water knob in the tub. And that black thing you see is a hole. Bondo and some chrome paint? I know I should just replace them, but I LOVE these knobs. The hole is on the backside and they're perfectly vintage for the rest of the bathroom...Or can you buy those sleeve things separately?

Then, there's the crack between shower and window:

Trust-- the first thing I want to do in this joint is paint the trim. The most recent paint job was done with FLAT paint. Sigh. Dirty fingers galore. However, you'll see that the first thing I ought to do, is address the "why you shouldn't just grout your tile to wood" issue. Clean it out and caulk it, I assume.

An finally, the real crack in the ceiling that haunts me daily:

The AC guys did this and offered to knock a few hundred dollars off the total if I let it go. I was fresh off the kitchen drywalling, so I thought this was the bargain of the century and a good opportunity to practice my texturing. I'm not so worried about the texture as I am about the sheetrock falling down. I think my plan is to perhaps put a couple of drywall screws into the portions that are sagging-- there's plaster with lathe underneath, so it's something for the screws to go into, and they don't have to hold the weight of the whole sheet; just the little saggy bits. Then tape and mud and patch as otherwise.

It's a little daunting, but should be a good trial run for repairing and successfully cammoflaging the, ahem, canyon in our other ceiling:

This weekend was a bit of a dud, so we've promised ourselves greater progress next weekend. We want that final inspection and we want it now. Or at least before the permit is a year old. Yikes.

*After the last 10 days, politically speaking, I feel I need humor more than ever. I'm getting a little worried.

Hub of the Universe, Part II

2008-09-08T07:50:00.003-05:00

Photo by my sister...I haven't asked her permission for this, so hopefully she won't make me take it down when she finds out! And the pic is of Cambridge...but it's from Boston...

Well, I made it home. I didn't talk about this second Boston trip in my last post-- partly because my laptop was indeed dying, and partly because I didn't want to jinx the final steps of the travel homeward. And largely because I needed a little distance.

Let me begin by saying that I'm finding myself fonder of the city now with that little bit of distance. And I should also say that it is quite easily the prettiest city in the US-- it's also very English, and it makes me nostalgic; I lived in London for a year and a half, and it is my favorite. The people of Boston are the nicest I've been around in a large city and the most helpful. I just finished the McCullough John Adams biography, and have been working my way through a book about the 1787 congress, so the place was definitely of special interest.

And I have not given up on having a good experience there-- I'll be back! This one, unfortunately starting badly before we even left.

My sister was beginning BU last week, so my mother and I went to help her move in. But the only flight she could find for us that was affordable was out of Little Rock, with 2 connections: 4 hours in Atlanta and 40 minutes in Detroit. We would arrive late at night, so we Pricelined the hotel at the airport. Unfortunately, Mom and I had a failure to communicate, as they say. I managed to get the date wrong for the hotel. So since the Pricelined room was already paid for, we had to just buy an extraneous night and rearrange the car rental.

Long story short, the Little Rock airport's skycaps were awful; the TSA people said out loud that they weren't going to talk to us; and we were put on another airline without being told. There were multiple delays and we barely made it. The hotel restaurant was closed and we had to get room service ($$$$$$). We went to pick up the car the next morning and it was soooo far away.

A GOOD note: driving in the Boston city center, mostly throughout Back Bay, the Government Center area, around the Commons, and throughout the Fens, was positively enjoyable. Once I settled into the one-way streets and the 3 lane roads, I was loving it. And meters-- METERS! You can just PARK at a METER!

Back to the frustrating. It took us 2 1/2 hours to get to Dedham that night, where we were staying. A friend of ours has a house there-- an 1880's Victorian with some amazing details. I'll talk about those in a minute...
Several reasons for the long drive. Mapquest's directions were baaaad. But mainly, things just aren't well-labeled in Boston. You'll be driving down the street for miles without any kind of indication of what street you are actually on. Grr.

Ok. So after that, we decided to take the train in from then on. Mapquest directions to the train station were wrong again. Asked for directions. They sent us to West Roxbury. At the station, we see that the parking thingy only took cash. Back to a grocery store to get cash. Back to train. Stuff the parking slot. Check the schedule. NO TRAINS TODAY. Find a police station for directions to another station. Get there-- NO TRAIN for TWO HOURS. So this time, it took us 4 hours to get to Boston, door to door.

More poorly labeled things throughout the city, short T trains that didn't wait for anyone to get from one end of the platform to the other.

The trip back: Many more delays and tight connections. Assurances that our luggage would make it. It didn't. Then we realized the car keys were in the luggage. Stayed at a friend's house that night. Got to the airport to pick up luggage-- that flight was late.

UGH.

However. As I mentioned, an amazing house. Jet doorknobs and 5 panel doors throughout. Wide plank floors. The kitchen cabinets that I think Adam and I are going to get. A cool tile floor in the bathroom that's just like ours, but updated:
And one of my favorite effects involved the doors in the kitchen. You saw that the wood was simply finished and in gorgeous shape. I was standing in one of the kitchen doorways and noticed that the doors and trim had been painted. They'd color matched either an opaque stain or thinned paint to the other doors in the house and sort of haphazardly brushed it on. When I shot it with the flash on, it was really obvious. But this pic shows it in all its cammoflaged glory.

If you really look for it, you can tell...But it's a damn good effect. It's something I may experiment with in the future. Lucky for our friend, though, it's only the one room. If you had this through a whole house it might be really obvious. I remember seeing on another blog (I don't remember which one, but if you're reading this, let me know and I'll post a link!!) who did a similar thing with shellac and it looked like a fumed oak, if I remember correctly. So if anyone's interested in doing this and wants more info, I'll ask her if she did this and any tips she has...

So. The long and short is-- this trip was also a bit of a dud. But we were moving my sister in and were successful, so it met its goal. We saw the MFA's Winslow Homer exhibit and had a beer at Cheers (shut up.) and ate some PHENOMENAL food. Next time, I know what to expect a bit more. Detailed driving maps will be purchased, and since we were able to priceline a 4* place for $80, it looks like it's almost as cheap to stay at the hotel. Having a kitchen was certainly nice, but $20 a day in train fees and $40 or $50 on a rental car to get to the train station (no taxis there), and you might as well stay in the city or at the airport.

I haven't given up. Just a lesson learned. And I will say, yet again, it is the most beautiful city in this country.

Me and Boston...Boston and Me

2008-09-04T11:41:00.003-05:00

I just don't think we were meant to be...I'll start with my first trip there.

In 2005, I was living in New York and went to visit a friend in Boston. I took the Chinatown bus. The second night I was in the city, we went pin bowling (which is super fun, I might add) where my purse was stolen. It had my glasses, phone, wallet, inhaler, and a very special necklace in it. There was good news, though: one person thought it was suspicious that a man was running out of the bar with a purse. He tried to stop the guy, but couldn't really keep him there. That guy was a Sprint salesman, so he helped me get a discount the next day on a new phone. Bonus number two: my license was at the desk. I'd had to give it up to rent the bowling shoes. So I could still get back on the bus. Lucky stroke number three: my friend wasn't as broke as I was and could lend me money. I cancelled all my cards and continued to enjoy my time in the city.

In the morning, I remembered one card that I forgot to cancel. When I called, I asked the girl if the guy had made any purchases. "Oh yeah," she said. "Some big ones. $150 for Chinese food at 4am and he checked into a hotel early this morning." She told me which hotel-- a place in South Boston-- and I called the hotel. When I told the front desk girl that my purse had been stolen she actually shouted, "It's you! Hold on!!" They told me to come to the hotel.

When I got there, I found out that the girl at the desk had been new; she could tell the card was stolen, but didn't know what to do. And the guy was so strung out he could barely stay conscious. So she checked him in and called the police when he went up to the room.
Pretty smart in my opinion.

Anyway, I went to the police station to get a copy of the report and pick up all the cards I'd already cancelled. The guy had been a heroin junky and the Chinese food was likely drugs. Everyone was very nice, very helpful. It was an okay trip, if otherwise unmemorable. I helped my friend clean her place and decorate. I hated borrowing so much money and I wasn't interested in being a super tourist that time. Just a weekend with a good friend.

THEN. On the bus home, I got a phone call from the Blockbuster in Arkansas. Someone in Boston had found my wallet with nothing but a blockbuster card in it. I called the guy and he said he saw glasses and a wallet. He thought the glasses were worth calling about. I told him the story and got his address. My friend could go pick up the glasses.

He called back a few hours later. He'd found my purse in the bushes outside his business. No phone, but everything else. My friend got the purse as well, and finally mailed it to me 3 years later ;-)

So you can see that my first brush with Boston was a less than perfect one; but the people had been so nice and the place so beautiful, that I held high hopes for another trip when I had time for tourist traps and money for fun.

Meanwhile, my laptop is about to die, right now, here in the Little Rock airport. Part 2-- my second trip to Boston-- is not yet over, so I'll wait to post the full account when I'm home...

More house history

2008-08-19T06:29:00.005-05:00

The kiddo and I spent a few hours at the library on Saturday looking through the old city directories and deed indices on a creaky, lop-sided microfilm machine. We got a little bit of new information, perhaps-- I'll need to go to the courthouse and look at the actual deeds to confirm.

I believe we left off where I had read the book about our neighborhood; the author listed TH Brannan as the first resident listed in the directory at our address in 1922. Here's where we deviate. The deed index only lists grantor, grantee, date, and which book the deed is in-- it doesn't identify the actual property, not to mention it's handwritten and not really in alphabetical order. I looked up Mr. Brannon, but couldn't find anything where the dates coincided. I did, however, find a Gertrude Brannon with appropriate dates. Hold that thought...

In going through the city directory, we found a lot of cool stuff, including advertisements for the Goldman Hotel, European rooms, with rates from $1!

Postcards from the Fort Smith Historical Society's website. The link there is to an article about the hotel. In 1985, my father was on the crew that was looking to restore the hotel, so I did get to run around the inside a fair bit; it had been mostly gutted by the time they were involved, I think, but was still a cool, monster of a structure. You just knew it had been grand.

We also confirmed something we'd seen in the neighborhood history. In the 1921 directory, there's a resident, W.D. Baker, at a mystery address between ours and our neighbors. There's not an empty lot between us, and that address only appears that one year-- never before or since. I had assumed that this was a garage apartment or something, but I decided to dig a little since I had the index right in front of me.

Follow me here: Mr. Baker is listed as a grantee in February of 1921. He bought the property from H.P. Lyman, et al. Lyman owned a very active real estate agency, and the Lyman, et al, name as a grantor shows up a lot around this time period. My assumption here is that Lyman was a realtor and developer. So now I went to see where Mr. Baker is listed as the grantor, to see when he sold the property that he bought from Lyman. There's a listing showing William Dudley Baker selling a property to Gertrude Brannan in December 1921. See what I just did there? The person who lived at the ghost address (one number over from ours) sold a property to a woman with the same last name as the first resident in our house at the same time that our first resident appears.

My current assumption is that the address was a typo in the city directory, or the neighborhood was rezoned; there was a huge amount of development going on at this time in an area that had been in the country until now. It wouldn't surprise me if the neighborhood itself was still being sussed out.

So. Looks like the house was built in late 1920. By a developer. I'll make a trip to the courthouse to look at the actual records at some point in the future; unfortunately, the research librarian tells me that the courthouse only has 2 microfilm machines and the place is currently crawling with oil and gas speculators. Sometimes you have to wait hours.

So the oilmen screw me every morning and evening when I drive to work and back; now they're gonna screw me in a whole different way.

Real work!

2008-08-18T06:20:00.005-05:00

We actually made a little progress this weekend. Saturday brought the usual catch-up of cleaning, laundry, etc. But on Sunday, we drove over to Harbor Freight, armed with the 15% off coupon we got through One Project Closer and found the pneumatic stapler that we needed-- a 2-in-1 18 ga stapler/nailer for $29. We got to the counter, where the girl thought our coupon was a fake; it wasn't. Apparently there had been a rash of counterfeit HF coupons. Anyway, she scanned the coupon and gave us the grand total of... $18. Not only was the coupon awesome, the stapler was on sale for $19.99. Perfect. And it did the job splendidly. AND it was fun to use.

Then we went to Home Depot to get fake beadboard for the porch ceiling. Unfortunately, they hadn't restocked in the last 6 weeks, so there wasn't enough of the lightweight stuff; the MDF is just too heavy for the ceiling; the cheapo panels are made of composite fiber, so not exactly water-resistant; and the real wood is too expensive. We ended up with water-resistant ultra thin luaun.

And then we discovered that the panels didn't exactly fit into the vehicle we brought. So we went through an exceptionally long fiasco of buying straps and tying it to the roof.

After quite a bit of futzing and fussing and trimming and false starts, we got the plywood up. A little recap: here's how it looked right around move-in:

And here's after we replaced the plywood; you can see that the seams are pretty uneven.
And now, with the luaun:

There will always be a bit of a bow in the ceiling, but it's a vast improvement. The ceiling beams are not parallel, but run at various angles from house to outer edge, so there's not beams for the seams to run along. What we did was run 3 4-foot panels, plus a another foot off a fourth panel, from one end of the porch, then did the same with the luaun, but starting from the other direction. In other words, this means that the luaun seams were staggered in the middle of the plydoow underneath. Does that even make sense? It's 2 layers of wood, but run from opposite ends.

Anyway, by the time we'd hit this point in the project, it was 6pm and all our energy had been spent on tying the damn stuff to the car.

We called it done. We'll add crown next week and I can caulk and then paint everything white; the consistency of color should mask the undulations.

And then...

We screen.

Local advice

2008-08-15T06:50:00.000-05:00

This is not house related, though I suppose it could be...

I'm going to Boston for a long weekend in the very near future. We won't be able to do alot of walking (one of us doesn't get around particularly well sometimes), but we will have a car, and a friend who lives in the area.

Even though we have a city resident and I think all of us on this trip have been at least once before, I thought I'd solicit any good recommendations-- restaurants, shops, pin bowling alleys, bakeries, architectural salvage, flea markets, antiques. Great tourist sights, even. Whatever's on your DO NOT MISS list when you visit Boston, or if you live there, what do call a must do/eat/see?

Bring it on!

Wino Friday

2008-08-15T06:37:00.002-05:00

...and a little kitty eye candy to start with.

So. The wine. In the summertime, I want beer or white wine (no, not pink wine. white wine.). I'm off beer right now, but it's been rainy and dreary and mild enough lately that I'm moving along to the red stuff. A nice glass on the porch is hard to beat.

Yesterday, I was killing some time in Target and came across this hanging wine rack:

It was only $6 on one of the endcap clearance racks, so I'm giving it a try. There's a third wire piece that you can attach, so it'll hold up to 6 bottles. Do I like it? I don't know. Six bottles hang a little low, but the top bottles are a little hard to reach. I'll try it out. The hooks were already in the ceiling, so no extra effort required. However, I'll want to make sure that they're tied into ceiling beams and not just sheetrock; those bottles carry a lot of weight!

More high hopes for weekend advancement-- and yet more forecast of rain. Sigh. We need it. The dogwood needs it. The grass needs it. The long ass list of shit that needs to be done to the outside of my house patently does NOT need it.

And my favorite liquor store appears to be out of business or otherwise closed for some undisclosed reason. Things are not shaping up quite the way I want them. Oh well. There's always unpacking!

Lucky duck

2008-08-13T06:45:00.001-05:00

At least, I feel like a duck. We got all that rain on Thursday that cooled things off, but brought out the mosquitoes-- apparently my choice is 75º weather with mosquitoes, or 105º weather without. Can't have both. Then Saturday was looking clear and bright when the dog started freaking out. That usually means more rain. And not just rain. Storms. From Saturday evening through last night, we had nonstop rain, with a lot of thunder and lightning thrown in for good measure. It really battered all the plants.

So that's the duck part-- and the lucky part? Bit of a long story, so here goes...

I mentioned a while back that our neighborhood was finally named to the National Register of Historic Places. It's very exciting! I looked on the state's and the National Park Service's websites to make sure we weren't going to need special permission to make exterior changes. No permission needed, so I went on my merry way continuing to chose colors and whatnot.

And then it occurred to me that I hadn't checked city guidelines. We have one other historic district, and I discovered that it requires residents to make formal requests for any exterior changes, including color schemes. And get this: the commission approves these requests by granting a required "Certificate of Appropriateness." Jeez Louise. More dealing with the city. Shit. Shit shit shit. (Whoops! Language like that won't get me any Appropriateness certification, now will it?)

The thing is, I'm not worried about the historic color correctness of our choice. What I was concerned about was the consequences of the possibility that we may only paint the facade; and I was doubly concerned about the painting of brick, fearing that they'd tell me to strip it, or leave it.

I went back and forth. Do we just paint and claim ignorance? Do we ask and hope that we're approved? Do we do nothing?

I finally sent an anonymous email (I'm a pansy. I know this.) to the city planner. And guess what? National Registry is honorary only; our other district is concerned with preservation. No approval necessary.

Now we can paint and paint to our heart's content without the prying eyes of the city.

Whew.

Meanwhile, you can probably guess, the rain meant cool weather, but zero exterior work done at all. I unpacked some boxes of clothes with the puppy watching from the bed with a big stupid puppy grin on his face. He couldn't believe his luck, getting to spend all day on the bed.

See? Lucky ducks all around.

And he said, "Stand back, I'm gonna make it rain!"

2008-08-08T07:58:00.005-05:00

After something like 10 days of 100º + weather, topping out at a whopping 105, we got a day of 9os and finally-- rain. That's right. RAIN. The dog was so happy-- he was a big muddy mess; I was so happy because it cooled things down considerably. The high today is supposed to be in the 80s and I can't believe it.

Post-summer rain is just so pretty. The drive to work this morning:

I mean, I don't mind the heat; once you pass 100, 102, it all starts to feel the same. But high 80s is my ideal, and Adam is not nearly so fond of this season as I am. I'm hopeful that the cooler temps mean we'll get some outside work done on the porch; like, I don't know, maybe give it a ceiling and some screen, get the porch swing up. Fingers crossed!

Now, while thinking about this post, my brain went on a tangent. I thought of Shel Silverstein's Unicorn Song:

A long time ago, when the Earth was green
There was more kinds of animals than you've ever seen
They'd run around free while the Earth was being born
And the loveliest of all was the unicorn

There was green alligators and long-necked geese
Some humpty backed camels and some chimpanzees
Some cats and rats and elephants, but sure as you're born
The loveliest of all was the unicorn

The Lord seen some sinning and it gave Him pain
And He says, "Stand back, I'm going to make it rain"
He says, "Hey Noah, I'll tell you what to do
Build me a floating zoo,
and take some of those...

Green alligators and long-necked geese
Some humpty backed camels and some chimpanzees
Some cats and rats and elephants, but sure as you're born
Don't you forget My unicorns

Old Noah was there to answer the call
He finished up making the ark just as the rain started to fall
He marched the animals two by two
And he called out as they came through
Hey Lord,

I've got green alligators and long-necked geese
Some humpty backed camels and some chimpanzees
Some cats and rats and elephants, but Lord, I'm so forlorn
I just can't find no unicorns"

And Noah looked out through the driving rain
Them unicorns were hiding, playing silly games
Kicking and splashing while the rain was falling
Oh, them silly unicorns

There was green alligators and long-necked geese
Some humpty backed camels and some chimpanzees
Noah cried, "Close the door because the rain is falling
And we just can't wait for no unicorns"

The ark started moving, it drifted with the tide
The unicorns looked up from the rocks and they cried
And the waters came down and sort of floated them away
That's why you never see unicorns to this very day

You'll see green alligators and long-necked geese
Some humpty backed camels and some chimpanzees
Some cats and rats and elephants, but sure as you're born
You're never gonna see no unicorns

Then I came across something I bought the other day. The special edition reissue of The Last Unicorn.

I think this movie is how I learned to draw horses. They all had impossibly long legs and lashes. Anyway,

Happy Friday!

**See? Despite their side effects, the antibiotics and subsequent lack of infection have raised my spirits considerably!

Salivary Gland Stones

2008-08-06T06:43:00.000-05:00

Really?!? They exist?

That's what the doc thought I had, but no stones could be found. So I'm on a super fun round of penicillin. Yay.

In other news...Enjoying that porch furniture! Heat or no, with or without stones, it's a great place to be.

Just keepin' it house related.

Back to the grind

2008-08-04T06:52:00.005-05:00

The weekend is over and I'm sorry to see it go. You already know how I spent most of my day yesterday; add to that mowing the grass and cleaning front and back porches. Once I got the porch set up, you were hard pressed to get me off of it if unless there were tasty things like grilled burgers involved (there were indeed eventually burgers and beers to lure me away; in fact, Adam and his friend had a burger-off. Both were so good, I really couldn't choose a winner). And at cooler times in the day, some other outside lovers relaxed in the shade, too--

The kitty's name is actually Kiara, but my mother's neighbor dubbed her Sneaky when he kept finding her slinking out of his work shed. She and Simon like to lay together-- not too close, mind you, it's hot. In the wintertime, though, they will gladly snuggle up.

And I mentioned that Adam put the French doors back in their rightful location.

If nothing else, they hide the mess behind them.

That and the usual cleaning up and catching up from the rest of the week pretty much covers it. Kids' birthday parties and helping someone else pack up to move took up the rest of the time. Really, though, I can't complain.

Summertime, Southern style

2008-08-03T16:34:00.009-05:00

As in, on the front porch. We got our patio furniture put together and arranged on the screen porch in time to have coffee and the Sunday paper out there this morning. Granted, no screen or ceiling fan, yet, but soon enough.

And yes, these were taken with the new wide-angle Nikon. I love it. This is basically on auto, with minor brightness/contrast adjustments. It's picking up some pretty bad hotspots at this setting, but I'm just glad the shots are in focus-- it's a major improvement. It does soooo many things, and I need to learn how to find and use them all. I'm having a great time playing with my new toy.

The first pic shows our new fancy furniture-- from Wal-Mart, of all places. It went down so much in price that I couldn't say no. The second shot shows our tragic little pea green couch that was "destroyed" in the storm; it had previously been "destroyed" by the cats, and "destroyed" by a lot of flopping down on it. But cover it with some old sheets, and it's perfect for this space.

Porch swing also came in--

Once we get it hung up, it's going to be great. Ugh. Note to self. Save down the pictures from 8 Mp before loading into Blogger-- they take forever! The old camera maxed out at 4 Mp, so I'll have to remember to do some adjusting.

We've done some more unpacking and cleaning this weekend, and finally reinstalled the French doors between office and living room. They look great, but I'm not going to post anymore about them right now; I'm actually on the front porch, where it is, no lie, 105º, and any more time on this computer will heat up my lap too far beyond the boiling point.

So more tomorrow. Time now to lay back and enjoy this fragment of a breeze.

A new pair of eyes

2008-08-01T06:30:00.001-05:00

Nikon P50 eyes, to be exact. I just got it last night, so I don't have any feelings about it yet except that I really need to a refresher in Photography 101. I remember juuuust enough to get myself in trouble, and it has juuuuust enough options to facilitate that process.

So now, bad photos will no longer be chalked up to the dying Olympus, but rather to the, um, "complexity" of the new Nikon...

A day late and a dollar short...

2008-07-30T06:26:00.007-05:00

I've been a bit behind this week, what with work and all. It seems that I've failed to report on something important.

Yesterday marked one year since we closed on the house. Of course we're not anywhere near where I naively thought we would be by this point, but knowing what I know now, I think we've done pretty well for ourselves.

We've:

Rewired the house
Added CH/A, including the ductwork
Built 2 fences
Took the kitchen down to studs, including 7 layers of stubborn flooring and plaster out the wazoo
Drywalled said kitchen and installed cabinets
Installed new granite counters and tin backsplash
Added all new appliances
Refinished the floors and began new base shoe
Painted 5 rooms so far
Started work on the screen porch-- new coat of paint and the beginnings of a new ceiling
Got a new roof
Sealed the gaping holes in the floors that lead to the outside world
Built trap doors to attic and crawl space
MOVED
And did all the other sundry crap that goes along with these things-- tested out 18 different methods for doing each project, fixed all the mistakes we made as we went, made a minimum of 4 trips to the hardware store for each project, and added some of the decorative details like new light fixtures and repurposed furniture

Doesn't seem like quite enough until I remember that we learned everything as we went along-- and for months it was a weekends-only event; then once we moved in, we had to keep up with all the other things that go along with, you know, actually living somewhere-- leaks and yards and feeding ourselves. Not to mention the fact that we fought with the city for a while, and only hired out the AC and the electrical (oh yeah, forgot about the roof. hired out the roof, too)-- and we even helped with some of the electrical to speed things along. We did most of this by ourselves.

I think we've come a long way, learned a lot, and I'm pleased to say that we have a shit ton left to do.

There's painting the interior trim, and screening the porch, and painting the house, and replacing the window AC with an actual window, and repairing the hail-damaged ceilings and carport, and finishing the kitchen trim, and lining the chimney, and unpacking, and...

It's hot

2008-07-28T06:52:00.003-05:00

Me? I like it. As long as I can sit in the shade and be generally motionless.

Pretty much everyone else I know hates it. And to be fair, it was well over 100º this weekend. The humidity was pretty easily in the very high percentages. Adam and his boss worked on making sides to a trailer Saturday while the boss's girlfriend and I grazed on Pringles and watched, raising helpful concerns such as, "Ummm, how do you plan on bracing those walls again?" I had a good time, but didn't get much in the way of progress done.

Last night, I broke the garage door track. That should count as progress, I suppose-- we have to demo that door soon, anyway, in order to salvage the wood and make new ones! I'm just looking long term. Doing my share.

We also got some good old fashioned scrubbing-type cleaning done on kitchen and bath-- like with heavy-duty cleaners, not just a cursory wipe. The dog got a bath. And promptly got dirty again. The grass, did not get mowed.

So, you see? Not much in the way of visible progress. So for today's eye-candy, I give you: the screened-in porch furniture I'm going to buy this evening, assuming it's still in stock now that it's gone on sale.

It's the kind of thing I hate buying-- but it's gone down in price to cost really next to nothing. And I do have a couple of chairs that I'm upholstering for the porch. We just have so much outdoor space-- and we've got so little to work with!

And for the kitchen light...what do you think?
I'm still trying to find it on clearance. I know the metal is different than the other finish in the room, but I think it's otherwise pretty awesome.

Oh yeah. That's the other thing I did this weekend...

Internet window shopping.

Moments in DIY history

2008-07-21T06:55:00.004-05:00

Our best DIY moment-- the point where we really turned the corner and realized we could do stuff! with tools! and make it not look like crap!-- has to be our floors. When we first bought the house, we were so happy to have hardwood under the carpet that we didn't think much about them. We got an estimate to have the refinished and they were **choke** going to cost $4000. That was clearly not in our budget, especially after being told we had to rewire the whole house. No sir.

But getting the estimate did glean some good information; we found out that the floors were heart pine. They were in such bad condition that they had to be redone, but we wanted to recreate the color of the floors as they were under the carpet. They were a beautiful deep red and amber-- we looked into stains and oils and polys. We've since found out the the color was creosote, I believe, mixed with shellac. I only have a few "before" pictures that show their paint and carpet pad stained, scratched, worn down condition. The first two pictures show places in the house that weren't covered by carpet (The dining room and hall were hardwood when we bought it). The third picture shows floor that had been hidden by carpet...

There's definitely some debris that leads directly back to us, but you can see the carpet pad stains and how dark they were originally in the third shot and the worn down places in the previous two.

Turns out the creosote is illegal, I think, and therefore something we can never recreate exactly-- a lot of time wasted, really. But shellac by itself is certainly available. A little research with some of the wood salvage specialists, some excellent advice from Gary at This Old Crackhouse, and a better understanding of the properties of the wood and how each finish would alter the natural characteristics sold us on shellac. And a few good websites with directions on refinishing floors got us started on the labor.

But our most useful tool came in the form of a couple of cowboys that run the equipment rental store by our house. They helped us with the tools and materials, showed us how to use everything, gave us supplies and extra days free when they "forgot" to give us something before they closed-- mostly these were things we didn't know to ask for. Most importantly, they laughed at us when it was clear we had no idea what we were doing and when we screwed up by not removing the wax from the floors before we started. They kept us from taking ourselves and the project too seriously. They were great.

At any rate, many trials and tribulations. I did a couple of the rooms on my hands and knees with a palm sander one board at a time. We were afraid that the soft pine was too thin to handle any diagonal leveling passes with the drum sander. We left some chatter marks. And it was cold. We did this over Christmas.

But the sanding all worked out well eventually...
And so did the shellac...

We had to use regular amber shellac, one coat of it; this was more difficult to get hold of than I thought-- everyone thought I was too stupid to know what I was asking for and tried to sell me poly. Then we had to put on a second coat on of clear dewaxed shellac. And finally a water-based poly to preserve the color and finish.

Love. I don't think I've ever been so proud of myself. Maybe the drywall...Both of these were projects that everyone made a face over. You know, when I told people we were doing it ourselves they made a face, to which I responded by asking if they would like to give us the $3200 that hiring someone would cost. To which they, of course, made another face. We're poor. There was no other option. And looking back, even if we had the money to pay someone, I don't think I would do it. I've become so territorial about the house. I'm not sure we'd have found anyone who would have done rooms board by board or used shellac for that matter. This way, the house is renovated as we want it to be and with just a little extra care because it's ours.

This post was written for Houseblogs.net as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by True Value.

We're Bona Fide!

2008-07-21T06:48:00.010-05:00

Our biggest news of the weekend, in my opinion, was that our neighborhood has finally been added to the National Register of Historic Places. I never understood why this part of town wasn't already on the list. Even as a little kid, I noticed that these houses weren't so much older than others, but they were old AND well-maintained. And as I've mentioned, the street used to be brick and that gave it an even more charming, old-timey, historic feel. Nice to know that we've been made an Official Historic Neighborhood. And we can still paint the house whatever color we want. Whew!

Our other history-related discovery is house specific. We started on the plywood ceiling of the screened in porch. We've wondered at various times whether that side of the porch was original. We sort of assumed that at least the screening portion was not.

So anyway, I was spraying the rafters with bug spray-- yes, I know it's bad stuff and that I am killing bees, which are important and dying and I feel like a bad human being, trust me. But they are carpenter bees. They bore perfectly round holes in the wood and continue those holes into extensive tunnels that can render boards too weak to support whatever they are supporting. Also, I seem to be particularly allergic to wasps/yellow jacket/big bee kind of stings. Not honey bees, just the big guys. So it's me or the bees.

SO. I was spraying the rafters and beams when I noticed this:

Ok. See above the beams? There's trim. So I know that at the very least, the ceiling's been dropped. And when I climbed up to see...
That is actually the rest of the NON-screened in porch. And the white splotchiness in the back, on the right, is the old decking of the foremost gable angling in. I could also see the eave of the rear gable sticking into this space. Basically, this seems to indicate that perhaps...

...were added on. It explains a number of curious things about the house, too. First of all, it explains the weird shape of the porch roof-- totally flat, then angling down. It also explains why, when all the bungalows in this town have a doppelganger, ours doesn't. And there are quite a few porches in our neighborhood that are only partially covered, so it would make a certain amount of sense that only the right-hand side of the porch, under the gable, originally had a roof. At any rate, the bottom-heavy, in-your-face columns and expansive porch that we love were in part a savvy addition, probably in the fifties, if other renovations inside the house are any indication. I'm just so..so...Oh, I'll just say it. I'm so happy the POs did this! How often do we get to say that?!?

This has also reignited another interest. When we first bought the house, I spent a while looking through kit house plans to see if it was from one of the catalogs. I really wanted it to be, but wasn't holding my breath. However! The write-up about our neighborhood for its registry listing says that the majority of the houses appear to be kit homes. Time to visualize the place sans half a porch and see what I can find!

We spent all day Saturday picking up the kiddo from camp and visiting with family, so Saturday was a wash (re: the house) and Sunday was devoted to the porch ceiling. We replaced some 2x4s and painted the less damaged boards with rot sealer. We ended the day a few screws short and with it looking like this.

You can see that some of the boards sag a bit. That's because there's no beam to attach it to. The beams run diagonally, which means we have to anchor them where we can. I've got a few ideas for evening out the seams, and then I think we're going to cover it with faux beadboard or some other kind of thin wall covering so I can stagger the seams and make them a little less disparate.

All in all, a good weekend. Sore, aching weekend, but an exciting one nonetheless.

Ain't too proud to beg

2008-07-16T14:54:00.003-05:00

And luckily I don't have to!

The inspector showed up early (!) and deemed our insurance claim at 70% completion! Yay!!

This means they'll send us more money very soon; this also means I can breathe a big ol' sigh of relief.

Wish me luck

2008-07-16T06:02:00.005-05:00

'Cause I'm gonna need it.

The inspector for the mortgage company is coming today to inspect our progress on the insurance claim items. Basically, we're supposed to have the inspection at 50% completion. All we know is we've blown through the first disbursement of funds, so we need more. They've basically told me that we can have more, they just have to do the inspection first. If the inspector says we are, indeed, at around 50%, we can have more. If not, then we have to write a letter and beg for it, though I've been told they're 99% sure they'll say yes to said letter of begging.

I understand why they're doing this. It's just that I hate jumping through all the hoops. It stresses me out and then I yell at people and my blood pressure skyrockets and it generally pisses me off. At any rate, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the porch ceiling that I started working on last weekend and the screen windows that need replacing will get us that much closer. The porch is halfway through and I'm starting to replace the screens this afternoon... I'm hoping that they'll see that we have all the supplies (except for the plywood that I need to borrow a truck for) and are in process with these two items-- one weekend will finish them up-- and credit us for both projects.

Then I won't have to resort to any unseemly begging.

Another weekend over

2008-07-13T20:25:00.016-05:00

I keep busting ass all weekend and it still doesn't seem like enough! So this is when the blog is helpful. It's a good chance to assess...I did stuff after all. Who knew?

Adam had to work aaaalll day Saturday, and the end result was a nasty sunburn. I was on my own.

First things first, I got a wild hair and busted out the scissors and garden shears. Here is the front walk right after I started

Yes, that's a coffee mug. It was about 8 am and I was perfectly happy to scoot on my butt with my coffee until it looked like this

I was pulling up toupees of grass. At any rate, lots of good clippings for the compost.

In other front of the house news, we've decided that the next item on the insurance money list is the porch-- we've got funds to redo the water-damaged ceiling.

I spent this afternoon removing the fan and tearing out the ceiling.

Next weekend we should be able to reinstall the ceiling and replace any boards that have rotted out.

Finally got our bedroom light hung...

But what was simultaneously the greatest accomplishment and biggest disappointment of the day was the kitchen cabinet doors. I got the hinges on them and got them hung. Ugh. Aside from the fact that I really don't like them, I wasn't able to get some of the stiles lined up perfectly, and they almost all hang askew. I put the same style hinges into the very same holes, but they still were crooked. And then I thought maybe I had them on upside down, but that didn't fix it. It just reminded me that the damn things were crooked when we bought the place; we took them off the cabinets a few weeks after we closed, so I had completely forgotten. Also, several screws broke off in the cabinets. If anyone has good solutions for getting those out without destroying the face, I'd love to hear it!

My main complaint is how yellow they are. We could take them apart and sand them and put them back together so that they're square, and rehang them so that they're not crooked, but that's far more time than I want to spend on something that I hate. I hate the design. It's just too, too MUCH for the rest of the kitchen with all the other clean straight lines-- in the counter, in the backsplash, in the floor.

Ugh. I almost don't want to show the pics.

It's so hard to tell how anything looks without the countertop trim, the crown, and the baseboards-- not to mention with the green window-- don't worry; it'll be white and the trim will be caulked. I'm also not sure whether natural wood will be ok for the doors. The sanded red oak is pinkish. The poly makes it a little yellower, but not like they are now. Remember this?

Do we think that finishing new doors like the top one above will help out the yellow insanity? The company said they could choose the wood for red undertones (like that red strip on the door above)...If it doesn't, can we stain dark? And if we can't stain dark, I guess we'll repaint the walls...

U.G.H.

The one thing making me a very VERY happy camper is the fact that we are getting new doors. It's decided. We just don't know when. That's one reason we put the old doors back on; the other reason? We didn't know how badly we wanted new ones until we saw the old one. Soon enough. I can be patient. I love the counters and dishwasher enough to make up for anything else that's wrong with that kitchen. And I still have high hopes for it once the trim work is finished.

I just need about 720 more weekends to get there...

Settled

2008-07-10T18:03:00.003-05:00

We're painting the porch columns brick red and leaving the trim white. If it looks too stark, we'll begin considering trim colors. No sense in making more work or worry than required. However, any suggestions are always appreciated-- something may revolutionize the whole process for us unexpectedly!

Paint obsessions

2008-07-10T07:40:00.004-05:00

Adam hasn't seen these yet, so this may all be a moot point...I guess my questions here are this. Does the cream look funny with the grey roof? And if I painted the trim cream, could I leave the rest of the house white, or would it clash too much or look super unfinished? There are also beams running across the porch ceiling that could be painted cream, and the gable vent could be both cream and red. I have seen white clapboard houses with red brick porches, so it might actually work. I sort of like the idea of the porch as a facade... I'm just worried about the cream fitting into the equation. I'm mostly just not sure I'm ready to take the leap of painting the whole house a color.

These things stress me out.