More progress

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

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!!

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

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

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

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...

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...