Blue is the new ugly white

The boy's bedroom is all put back together, and this morning I cleaned up all the Lego wreckage and carnage in order to take pictures of it. When I imported the pictures to my computer I wound up putting them in the wrong directory, and in searching for their location I found a folder full of bad memories. A folder named "Original House Pictures". And this was how Nicholas' bedroom looked when we bought the house - back when Nicholas was explaining to our real estate agent, Stacey, all the grand plans he had for it. Our grand plan for the room was "less ugly".



As an aside, I can't believe how tiny he looked in this picture. It was only 8 months ago and I swear he's grown a foot since then.

On our second day in the house Tom ripped up the carpet, and while I have several less blurry pictures of this event, I chose to post this one because by sheer stroke of luck I managed to capture the pet-stained Berber carpeting, a small pool of the powdery "pet stain smell cover upper" that covered the carpeting pad throughout the house, the lacy pink curtains, the wallpapered closet, and all the original woodwork. And Mo, of course. He always has his paws in whatever anyone is doing. You can enlarge the picture by clicking on it, but do so at your own risk because this level of ugliness could burn itself to your retinas and haunt you in your sleep.





This is how the room looks as of an hour ago (with a cameo appearance by "the boy" playing Lego Star Wars II):

I promised him that Bumblebee would receive VIP treatment. This was one of Tom's gifts to Nicholas for his birthday this year. It's almost as tall as he is, and Nicholas' desire to have it hung up on his wall is what drove us to get the room painted.

It's still not done

Nicholas chose his room color months ago - "Silver Blueberry" from Pittsburgh Paints. I felt that his choice was too dark for the entire room so we compromised with one another by painting two walls in his choice and the other walls in "Pageant Song" which is two shades lighter. Nicholas would have undoubtedly declared that Pageant Song is "a girl color" - so I never told him the name. I only told him that it was exactly two shades lighter than Silver Blueberry, and if he ever asks I will tell him that it's called something like "The Totally Manly Steely Blue Color of Death and Destruction" so that he doesn't demand that I repaint it.





Still haven't hung the blinds up, but I did manage to find his curtains from our old house stuffed in the back of the linen closet. I have high hopes for productivity this weekend. I can hear Tom in there banging on something, achieving some home improvement, even as I type this.

Note: I didn't paint the window slide in this room because the windows in OUR room now require a disproportionate amount of force to open and close. Live and learn. Blinds will cover up any unsightliness. We still hope to have all the bedroom windows replaced within the next two years anyway.

2008 Resolutions, Project 365, and the OCD kid's closet

Historically I've never been much of a resolution maker, but for some reason in the past couple of years I've given it a half-hearted effort every year. For 2008 it seemed like I had my resolutions all mapped out before the leaves changed colors. Which leads me to believe that I was prone to pissing myself off in 2007. Tom has his own take on resolutions:

"I think it’s a silly day to set goals on. Goals can be set and achieved any day with my new system: Tom’s Goalsetting, the not gay New Year’s way!"

I'm not going to rattle off my whole list of New Year's Resolutions here, it makes my eyelids a little heavy just thinking about how uninteresting the entire topic would be. I will share that one of my goals this year is to give Project 365 a try, because I have a lovely D50 that hasn't been fulfilling its photographic destiny for over a year now. Tom was the one who turned me on to the idea of tackling this project, and I'm intrigued by the idea of being able to see an entire year of my life through the photographs I took. I feel as though I have a love/hate relationship with my camera which could be alleviated somewhat (if not totally) by using it on a routine basis, so that would be a definite benefit to trying to keep this resolution. I warned Tom last night that it means everyone will have to get used to the sight of my heinously large camera bag around the house. I'm a routine victim of the "out of sight, out of mind" phenomenon. At some point I will have to pick up a smaller SLR case but it's not real high on my list right now.

At the house:

We spent the weekend painting my son's bedroom (finally) but it's not entirely done. So I don't have any "entirely done" photos of it. But I do have photos of how we repurposed his closet a few months ago. To start I stripped all of this lovely wallpaper from his closet.



We tried to convince Nicholas to accept the wallpaper. We told him all about little boys who would KILL to have pink and blue flower wallpaper in their closets but ever since he started school he falls for these tricks less and less. The wallpaper came off about as well as the wallpaper in our closet did, which means "not very well at all". It came off in little shreds of paper and required constant reapplication of wallpaper remover because it sucked it up like a sponge then dried out almost instantly. If I ever experience a moisture problem in my basement I'm going to want to get my hands on some of this magic, moisture absorbing wallpaper that they put in the upstairs closets. If our roof were to start leaking I'd install this stuff on every ceiling in the house.

Since we knew we'd be painting the bedroom a dark shade of blue EVENTUALLY, I wound up painting the inside of the closet a color that looked like light khaki at the store - but in reality it wound up being more of a pale butter yellow. I wasn't a huge fan of it in the end, but it's a closet.

Then Tom tackled the frustrating task of installing the shelving system I wanted in half of the closet. It's a fairly straightforward bracket and standard system, but I never really thought about the fact that we'd have to screw the brackets into the shelf boards. The one other time I had used these particular shelves it was a more utilitarian application where I had bare metal shelf brackets with a lip at the end to keep the shelves from sliding forward. In Nicholas' closet we bought some more aesthetically pleasing white brackets with no safety lip on them. It wasn't rocket science or anything, but there wasn't any wiggle room as far as installing the brackets went because once attached to the shelves they still had to match up perfectly with the notches on the standards. This required MATH. Which is a recipe for disaster for me, but Tom makes up for what I lack in the book learnin' department and it all went up securely - and LEVEL. Imagine that!





The shelves are for Lego storage sorted into plastic bins based on the size requirements of each kit. This is most definitely ME imposing my neurosis on HIM, because Nicholas would be fine stuffing them all in a paper sack. The colorful open-bin storage rack is your basic Target special that he's had since he was a toddler. As his toys become smaller and more intricate, this open-bin system becomes less and less practical for toy storage. For now it still serves its purpose for Transformers and various little boy "weaponry" of the Power Rangers and Star Wars variety. Because I recognize his need to be able to grab his lightsaber on the fly. There's no time to search for these things. I'm a cool mom that way.

His actual clothing storage needs are minimal, so in every house we've lived in I have modified his closet for toy storage in a similar way. I wanted the option to hang his winter shirts and sweatshirts and that's about it. He has a giant dresser to hold everything else. In the wasted corner space we installed some double coat hooks to hang backpacks, robes and crime fighting costumes on. This keeps all that stuff up off the floor. The closet doors are down in the basement being painted. Leaving the closet open like this would cause Tom and I to hyperventilate every time we were in the room, although I'm sure Nicholas would appreciate the easy access. Because opening and closing those closet doors is just one more annoyance in his everyday life, and he's all about streamlining his playing experience.

Once we get the closet doors up and the blinds hung I'll post them. And since I have to find things to photograph every day, the chances are very good that I'll actually follow through with it.

He told Bill that if we move his desk one more time, then he's quitting

My son's computer desk used to be in his bedroom right under one of his windows (and he could see the squirrels, and they were merry). It was one of those things that seemed like a good idea at the time. Like rolling your jeans. Or Color Me Badd. The reality was that it left his room quite cramped.

In July a solution came to us in the form of the local Home Builder's Association moving to new offices. They sent out an email to members offering up cubicle walls of various sizes on a first-come-first-served basis. All we had to do was pick them up, which Tom did one afternoon with one of our work trucks.

With the cubicle walls we were able to section off a space in the unused (because of the PLAID CARPET) rec room downstairs into a little computer haven for Nicholas right outside of Tom's office. Not that Nicholas spends much time down there playing on his computer anyway, so the little "room" also serves as storage space for a lot of his old gear - which we keep around because even though he doesn't play with all the stuff his three cousins sometimes stay with us and then we need more toys and we need them all in a place far, far away from wherever we are.





This is another one of those awkward angles that are so prevalent in our house. But here's a wide shot of the whole set-up, which winds up forming a long hallway down to the two downstairs bedrooms that currently serve as Tom's office and our guest room - while giving us more places to store things where people don't have to see it.




But if we take his stapler, he'll burn the building down.

Master Painting

In an effort to reduce the volume of snotty emails from a certain someone, I figured I would post a little "Hi, how are ya?" on some of the ongoing projects we have been finishing up around the ol' adobe - starting with our master bedroom.

Yes ... it WAS the first project that we tackled in the house, but initially our goal was really only to get it to a point where we didn't have a panic attack and then spontaneously break out into hives when we walked in there. Anything after that was like sweet, sweet Benadryl-laced icing on the proverbial cake. We started by tearing up the carpet to reveal the original wood floors (you can read about it here) and then we spent the next 24 hours soaking ourselves in bleach.

After that, we removed the stunningly retro daffodil wallpaper in the closet, primed all the wood trim and painted it white, and painted the walls a lovely shade of barely-there blue and this was where we left you:




At that point we had to declare the bedroom "good enough" while we moved on to some more urgent projects. Like troubleshooting that aroma that was coming from the dishwasher, recarpeting and painting the living room and all the other things I've posted about between then and now.

What I neglected to share was that right around the end of May Tom managed to finish painting the closet doors white and hung them back up, with a pair of new, brushed nickel "knobby dealies":





He also removed all the old tan outlets and switches and replaced them with white ones, and then THAT is where we actually abandoned the project. Now you're up to speed.

Late last week I started getting a bit irritated with myself for not tying up a lot of the loose ends we'd left in the bedroom, so I spent Friday evening and most of the morning on Saturday painting our two bedroom windows and ripping down the horrific plastic roller shades. In their place we hung these 2" faux-wood (because our last name ain't Rockefeller!!) blinds.





Once I had finished all that, Tom took the time to hang some of his Vegas photography over the bed. We had been avoiding this task like the plague because these particular frames have two hangers (one on each side) - which is nice once they're hung because they always stay level - but the actual act of hanging them equidistant and level can leave the wall looking like it was peppered with lead shot. This time around we bought some of the 3M Picture Hanging Strips (free plug) and while hanging them still required a lot of math and measuring, it was infinitely easier to fine-tune their placement so long as the strips were up in the general vicinity of where they needed to be. You just pop the frame off the wall, nudge it up/down/over where needed, then it clicks back into place. Plus if we decide to take them down or move them, we just remove the strips and we're not left with 8 holes in our wall.




And just to show that no place is sacred when you work for the family business, here's a picture of the nightstand on my side of the bed. If you can't reach us by phone, cell, fax or e-mail within a reasonable amount of time ... chances are we're dead, folks.





We're still not 100% done with the bedroom. Tom is still itching to get the 1/4 round down around the perimeter of the room, then that will need to be primed and painted to match the rest of the trim. Also there have been talks of putting up some crown molding, but that will probably be put off until we've made considerable progress on some of the other areas of the house - like the kitchen and the bathrooms. Never can tell with Tom, though, because the man likes to miter!

Our room is hard to photograph because of its size and the location of its door off the hallway, but despite all that I try to take pictures of the rooms from the same angle as the original pictures we took of the empty house, purely for comparison purposes. So here was the original master bedroom:





And here it is now:

Tempus Fugit

The picture of the dining area that I was going to post last week:





We painted the common wall the same darker green as the living room ("Dill") and then the two other dining room walls two-shades lighter ("Pickling Spice"). And of course (!!) the casement is now painted bright white because wood trim sucks. It all blends quite nicely and at certain times of day it's hard to tell whether the dining room paint is actually a different color or whether the light is just hitting it differently.

Tom has the new return air vent propped up against the old one there on the left side of the room. The HVAC industry must have changed their sizing standards sometime between 1960 and today because every single return air vent we purchase is about 1" wider than the existing one, which means Tom has to take a saw to the baseboards on each side to get it all rigged up. Or in this case, he just set the fully wrapped one in front of the nasty old brown one and proclaimed "Voila! It's installed!" then walked away.

The grandmother clock in the corner was the first clock that my grandfather ever built. He went on to build hundreds more of them in his lifetime and they reside all over the country (so I've been told). After my grandpa's death over a decade ago each of his grandchildren received one of his grandmother/father clocks and this first clock was to be given to me. I believe either my sister (or my cousin?) has the last clock he ever built. This first clock was built just for my grandma, though, and for it's entire life it sat in the same place, against the same wall in her living room, where it continuously ran for every minute of its life. When my grandma eventually moved to a nursing home my father brought the clock down to my first house and after many months of tinkering I finally got it to keep accurate time most of the time. Although out of the blue, for no reason whatsoever, it would start running a little too fast or a little too slow, and I'd have to mess with it again. It was as though my house was horribly inferior to my grandmother's house and the clock was going to make this painfully clear every chance it got.

Then I further angered it by moving it down to Indiana back in 2002 and it never ran for longer than 90 minutes at a time the entire time it was down there. I tried *everything* to get it to stay running. Nevermind whether it was running too fast or two slow, I just wanted it to stay running and it was not going to give me the satisfaction. It would have just as soon transformed itself into a digital alarm clock rather than let me feel even one second of satisfaction for getting it to run. My grandmother passed back in the fall of 2004 and I never tried running the clock again after that. I wasn't going to argue with it.

I moved it back up here last Autumn and boy was it happy to be back in Wisconsin! It was going to run for me again ... but only sort of. First it ran really slow and chimed completely sporadically for no apparent reason whatsoever. Then I finally got it to keep accurate time and it stopped chiming all together. (F@!#!!!!!) Once I got the chimes working again it started running too fast. After three months I finally got it running properly and keeping totally accurate time. The weights need to be raised on it *about* every 4-6 days, and wouldn't you know it one day I ran out the door for work and forgot to wind it. Then it never ran in that house again.

::: slamming things around ::::

Soooooooo, we moved it to the new house and we secured this safe corner in the dining room for it. One evening Tom cracked one of the funniest jokes I had heard in a long time when he asked "Are you going to get that clock running?"

Sure I am. Sure. Right after I solve this pesky World Peace problem and modify my car so that it can run on vegetable oil.

One night (just for fun!) I set the pendulum in motion just because it had been a few days since I'd felt a crushing sense of disappointment in myself and I figured the clock was always good for that. Low and behold it took off running and it hasn't stopped since. It still sends out a hearty "F U!" to me every once in a while by chiming at a totally arbitrary interval, but I figure I probably have that coming.

Electricity is fun!

My parents are visiting for the weekend and my dad is practically a Master Electrician so I decided to put him to work. We spent all day in the basement checking out all the interesting ways people decide to move electricity from one place to another. Let me tell you, people have some strange ideas.

Our house was built in 1959. The wiring is old, but sound. I know most people probably haven't seen a main panel before, but ours uses fuses instead of breakers. It looks ancient.


It looks much worse right now with the panel cover off. All those satellite panels are add-ons that control various add-on circuits that wouldn't fit in the main panel. People's interesting ways of moving electricity. We actually had to search for an insurance agency that would cover this. But it all works pretty well.

Our whole purpose for this study in wiring was to install a switch to control the three lights in the utility area of the basement. We started at about noon and ended somewhere around 10:30pm. We found and rerouted three different circuits. We installed a grounded outlet for the washer, an outlet for our "beer fridge" and our deep freeze and then half the outlets and light switches for our newly painted living room. I started tracing the circuits to see which fuse controlled what. It was quite the game of hide and go seek with all the new additions people have put in over the years. We found and corrected two circuits that not only went into one box, but were run through one 220v wire! We also made our obligatory three runs to Menards and one run to the Wal-Mart.

As an added bonus, my dad gave a hands-on safety demonstration! Make sure the hand that might get the shock is grounded so the DEADLY POWER doesn't have a path across your body. He knows what he's doing, so he's quite ok. But I am going to say main panels are dangerous and screwdrivers melt sometimes.

The final result?

Tanker?! I barely knew her!!

Tanker desk! It has arrived!! It actually arrived about two weeks ago to its special home. Thanks very much to its donor, also to our friend from work who helped move it in. A van, two pulled doors, a removed handrail, a man with the strength of Atlas while carrying the Heaviest Desk In The World down a flight of stairs AND the desk has landed!



Sorry for the mess, I'm still "moving in". I hope to save up some money and hopefully some time next year get it painted a nice red. It may look a little something like this...


But, you know, red and stuff.

I'm just so excited to finally get one of these. It's sturdy and space age and engineering and total geek! As a plus, my super-sized monitor, which I can tell people how huge it is but you really have to see it in person to get a good idea of its girth, sets perfectly on top of this desk. Sturdy!

It also has a typewriter tray that pops out of the big door on the left. I have strategically placed my printer in there for easy access. And a tray for paying bills and doing extra paperwork. And a file drawer. And a storage drawer. And a supplies drawer. Super cool!

Alright. I'm done fawning over my desk.

SOO COOOOL!!!

Green with Envy

My initial goal to get the painting done by Friday night was nothing but a pipe dream. I didn't even start priming the woodwork until Friday night after work. While I did that Tom finished off the laminate floor in the entryway by putting the quarter-round down. After all of that was done we WOULD have cracked open a gallon of our chosen paint ("Dill" from Pittsburgh Paints) if we had ... you know ... purchased it.

Then I was all like "I'm going to get up early and I'll be waiting at Menards when they open the door!" because I was DYING to paint. I was going to paint me some walls! But we all know how 8am turns into 9am, and then before you know it ... it's noon. Right? Happens to all of us. Then Tom just wound up going by himself so I could get the lawn mowed (of course!) before the weather turned on me.

(Note: For my birthday, I bought myself a new lawnmower. It's not the "Cadillac of lawnmowers" like the guy at Sears kept showing us over and over again. The one I bought is more like the "Chevy of Lawnmowers" but it doesn't have a broken wheel (woo!), it doesn't need to be primed (score!) and it has big ol' wheels on the back for maneuverability.)

(And it's cute.)

Back to the topic at hand. I won't make you go back searching for the before shots of our living room. Here it is before we moved in, when we did a walk-thru with the home inspector:



Then we moved in and we ripped up all the carpet, put down laminate in the entry and had new carpet installed. The living room now looked like this:



Getting better, EH?! These pictures don't really capture the fugliness of the paint color, though. The funny thing was, almost everyone who has been in our house so far has liked the paint. That kept throwing us for a loop. It's sort of a purple, sort of a beige, sort of a gray - a whole lot of dirty, that we know for sure. People would walk into the house and say things like "Oh! I see you guys have already painted." No we haven't! We wouldn't have chosen this! DO YOU KNOW US AT ALL?!



The green on the left is our new color, that awful color on the right is the one we eliminated every trace of.

Voila!



Note the gorgeous window! I can't stand wood trim. Maybe you didn't know that about me. So as we paint each room we're painting all the trim white - including all the windows (until we can replace them). Painting the windows, alone, makes such a huge difference in this house. We love that our house has these great, deep eaves on the outside because it affords us a lot of shade - which is great for a south-facing house - and also because unless rain is coming down horizontally we don't have too many problems with water getting into the house. The drawback is that the house can seem a bit dark even on the sunniest of days. And the orange-ish 1950s wood trim wasn't helping matters any. That 5-lite casement on the front of the house wasn't a real show stopper before, but painting it white really makes it the focal point of the room. Late last night I ordered five white roman shades for the front window and the vinyl mini-blinds that were there before are already out on the curb for garbage day tomorrow. In 4-7 days we should have them in our grubby little hands.

We also painted the dining room casement white and painted the walls a lighter shade of green on the same pallet ("Pickling Spice") but I'll save that room just in case I don't accomplish anything else this week. As I type this, Tom is painting the hallway the same shade as the dining room and is priming all the trim and doors in there so they can meet the same fate as their friends. I don't paint the doors because Tom has proven that he's a genius when it comes to painting these flat doors. I don't have the patience or the attention to detail to do it properly, and I'll freely admit it. I'm a wizard with a paint brush. As a matter of fact, I never touched any of the green paint on this weekend's projects because I spent the entire time priming and painting (and re-painting, and re-painting) all the trim and windows. Hand me a paint brush and I'll keep myself occupied for the entire day. Painting large, flat, unforgiving surfaces like the doors in this house is not a project you want to put me on.

The hallway is four doors with a little bit of wall in-between each one. We may not see Tom for weeks. We're still planning on painting the front door, also. It's just that all the hardware needs to be removed and that means we have to be able to sit around the house for a day. Tom's parents are coming to visit next weekend, so the front door will probably have to wait until the weekend after that. Darn, eh? DARN.

Now you see it, now you don't

Things have been pretty fricken (on a sticken) quiet on our blog, and you have my sincerest apologies for that. I'd love to say it's because we reached the point in our home remodeling process where we get to lounge around in a backyard hammock drinking fruity drinks and reading trashy romance novels. (Or I guess, in Tom's case at least, a COMPLETELY MANLY tale of forbidden passion between a Bajoran officer and a member of the Starfleet crew aboard the USS Defiant.) The real story is that most of the projects we've been tackling around the ol' casa aren't immediate gratification projects that we can photograph and say "Look at what we did this weekend!" like some of the previous projects.

For instance, I have been spending a lot of back-breaking hours working on the lawn. It turns out that scowling at the yard through the living room windows while muttering under my breath about what a patchy, weed-infested plot of hell on Earth it was shaping up to be didn't have any effect on it. I actually had to haul my carcass out there and work on it. Tom has allergies (lucky bastard...) so the lawn is all mine. It's quite a change for me because I've never been the one responsible for the lawn care before, BUT I'm pretty anal retentive about it and instead of nagging someone endlessly about taking care of the lawn now I just have to nag myself. I mow and trim it every 2-3 days, I fertilized it about 4 weeks ago, and today I dropped 40lbs of pelletized lime on parts of it because despite all my TLC there are still sections of the lawn that are ... to be completely honest .. really pissing me off.

Lawn care is probably not the best project for my ego, because while I realize that the fruits of my labor won't become apparent until weeks/months/years from now, it doesn't stop me from standing out in the backyard sometimes resisting the urge to yell 'GROW DAMMIT!!" at the sections that continue to try every last bit of my patience.

Also today I had to spread 40lbs of topsoil around by the back patio and gate area because while it may have seemed as though the POs dogs did all their urinating on the carpeting inside (as evidenced here) they also did manage to make it outside often enough to kill large patches of grass - which only adds further weight to my already hefty belief that dogs suck. Even better, turns out one (or both) of them was a digger, and I had grown sick of the wheels of the lawnmower getting caught in their little efforts to tunnel to China so I filled them all today and threw down grass seed on them.

The lawn looks about 200% better than it did when we moved in, but it's still my pet project and I won't rest until it looks like something out of a Scott's commercial.

Also I happen to own the mother of all weed trimmers and today I cleared out all the underbrush below Tom's Tree so that tomorrow at work I can order a hammock chair to hang from one of the beefiest branches. My mom has two such chairs that hang under a giant spruce tree in her yard and last summer my six-year-old could most often be found lounging in it for hours while reading a book, playing Gameboy, or just belting out strange tunes at the top of his lungs then laughing hysterically every time he managed to change the original words to some sort of bodily function. Our neighbors are so going to love us!

As for Tom, he works around the clock on projects everywhere, all day, non-stop. I couldn't even begin to rattle of a list of all the things he's been spending his time on because honestly a lot of the time I just walk into a room and something has been completely changed, cleaned, moved, painted or taken apart. Like last night while I was taking a shower he moved a large, mirrored hall tree from the basement up into the hallway by the bedroom and I walked by it four times going to and from our bedroom and still didn't notice it had been brought upstairs until he said "Did you want this thing on this wall or the other one?"

One thing thing I can confidently say that he has completed, though, is the installation of the ceramic cook top we picked up over Mother's Day.




I already posted about the removal of the original cook top. The new one was, of course, ever-so-slightly smaller than the original and it was also completely squared off at the corners instead of rounded like its 1959 counterpart, so some sawing and shimming was required. Also Tom had to make the wiring "safe" as opposed to "a fire hazard". As for the gaping hole in the backsplash (hardly noticeable, eh?) we figured we'd just take all the tile down, fix the sheetrock, then install a new backsplash. This weekend we managed to find a great deal on an over-the-range microwave and on my mother's suggestion we're going to remove the top 2-3 spans of tile that the microwave is going to cover and use those tiles to patch the existing backsplash.

Voila!

Or ... the more likely scenario is that we'll break every single tile trying to remove it and wind up having to install an entirely new backsplash anyway.

We also got my computer set up on the home network early this week after some pretty aggravating arguments with a D-link USB Wireless Adapter that I wouldn't recommend to my worst enemy. The only way we got it to work was by returning it to the store and buying a Linksys USB wireless adapter. Hah! Hopefully the revival of my desktop computer means I'll update the blog more often because it's really the central nerve center of most of what I do, and my laptop is just sort of a semi-empty vessel that I use for work. Having to rely on it for the past couple of weeks has been frustrating on most days because it's not nearly the powerhouse that my desktop computer is and was prone to crashing and/or locking up when I was editing graphics.

We also managed to wrestle Tom's dream desk, a half-ton (I swear) behemoth of a tanker desk, into the basement so that he could get his computer set up, which officially puts all four of our household computers back into use, pulling down our requisite number of kilowatt hours each week in order to keep the electric company flush with cash.

Today I bought supplies so I can paint the living room and dining room this week. My goal is to be done by Friday. My 30th birthday is this coming Sunday and since no one was going along with my original plan to curl up in the fetal position and cry for the entire weekend, we have decided that I will go out and drink large volumes of alcohol on Saturday night so that I can spend my 30th birthday curled up in the fetal position in front of my toilet instead. For those of you keeping track, this means you only have 5 shopping days left to buy me the present of my dreams.

I think we're going to need that monkey

As I type this Tom is in the kitchen removing the old General Electric cooktop. Attempting to remove it, I should say.

When I was a kid our playground consisted of a bunch of giant tractor tires stacked haphazardly on an asphalt playground and a 6 foot tall metal slide strategically placed in the sunniest section of the playground. A section of the playground that hadn't seen shade in years! A couple years later they decided to expand our horizons by installing a monstrous galvanized steel jungle gym apparatus that reached heights of 6-8 feet in some areas. To protect us, they spread out a couple bags of wood chips. Not delicate, cushion-your-fall woodchips either. They were woodchips as big as your shoe - large, jagged-edged pieces of broken sticks. People really used to hate kids.

My point is this - When they say that they don't make things like they used to, THEY are not f'ing kidding. And there's good reason for that. Things used to suck. If things hadn't sucked, they'd still be around. No one would have toiled away for the better part of their life inventing better things.

We looked at several houses before buying this particular one, all in this same area of post-WWII era ranch homes. Three of them had the exact same original GE electric cook top and oven. Ours is the only one with the controls mounted into the wall behind the stove. Everyone else had their push-button controls mounted on the cabinet or counter top in front of the cook top. At some point in our home's history a tile backsplash was installed in the kitchen and they tiled the control panel into that backsplash. So in order to install the new cook top Tom had to chisel out the grout all around the controls and then pry the entire panel out and disassemble it - because the wiring runs to the control panel. We need those wires to run underneath the counter, inside the cabinet, not up the freaking wall. So there's a big rectangular hole in the wall where the electrical housing was installed and it will obviously need some fixing. Yes, we already knew this going into the project but it's always different when you're actually face to face with the problem.

I suppose I should be grateful that we just have to remove a backsplash and install a new one. After all, we were looking forward to learning how to install wall tile. At some point we're going to be taking down what can only be described as "an assload" of wall tile in our bathroom, so the backsplash will be good practice. It would have been much harder to try to patch a hole in the front panel of these 1950s cabinets, right?

I still tried the whole "Maybe we could just hang a picture there?" suggestion, but Tom wouldn't hear of it.

Who's your daddy now, house?!?

Things started looking up considerably last Wednesday when I was able to cut through all the caulk around the dining room casement windows and pry them open. It's amazing what a difference a little bit of fresh air can have on a person's general demeanor. For example, my demeanor was hovering in the general vicinity of "about to go batshit crazy" and when those windows finally popped open I felt an almost immediate down-shift to my normal level of psychosis. I can't wrap my head around what drives a person to caulk perfectly good windows shut. While I was working on the project I started to worry that once the caulk was removed I'd find that there was a rotten sash or that one of the chain winders that controls the casement was broken, but I found no such problem. Famous last words in this house, or any house, tend to be "I'm just going to [insert project here] REAL QUICK". The house threw me a bone with this one, though. It was a fairly simple project, hindered only by my inability to use sharp tools without gouging myself and then narrowly avoiding falling off the ladder.

A couple of days later we were also able to get two of our more stubborn aluminum storm windows open. The previous owners must have relied heavily on their A/C, that's all I can come up with. The whole air-lock system on these two storms, where the plastic weatherstripping fits into the groove of the fixed sash above when closed, was somehow fused together either due to a moisture problem at one point or the age of the materials themselves. While I was working on the one in the upstairs bathroom, Tom took a pry-bar to bottom edge of the one in our bedroom and that provided just enough force to free it up. The one in the bathroom, though, seemed to be fused on a molecular level. You couldn't even cut that weatherstripping away with an Xacto knife. We had to combine Tom's pry-bar technique with several "love taps" from a rubber mallet (::cough::) in order to get that one open. Officially every window in the house now operates, it's just that some of them operate a little better than others.

In other news, Tom got the laminate installed in the entryway in plenty of time for the carpet install on Thursday morning, and it looks beautiful. We still have to put down the quarter round molding but even with the red spacers it looks a million times better than the carpet. Our house sees way too much foot traffic for a carpeted entry. (I think every house sees too much foot traffic for a carpeted entry, personally.)



Then after a quick 10 o'clock supermarket run to pick up sack lunch components for my son's field trip the next day, I pulled up the remaining wall-to-wall carpet in the living room and we took it to it's new home out in the garage. At this point I'll share something simply for the sake of sharing, but it's something that Tom and I do not want to spend any real time or energy thinking about:

The living room carpet had the distinct smell of human urine. Human. Urine.

Now let's never mention it again.




There wasn't a layer of PetFresh in this room, probably because there's no such thing as HumansWhoPeeOnTheirCarpetFresh (that we know of). We also were told to leave all the tack strips in place for the new carpet, so it wound up being a fairly early night by our standards.

[Although after I showered (three times) I found Tom removing more random weatherstripping from around the house. The POs must have gotten a fabulous deal on weatherstripping at one point, or else they had a penchant for sticky-backed foam, because we find it all over the place and it's become Tom's mission to remove it all.]




New carpet! I don't know too much about it except that it's Karastan carpet, the color is "cashmere tan", it's a Stainmaster carpet with Stainmaster carpet pad, and also it's not covered in urine. That last part is really all I need to know about my carpet. It could be Bob's carpet in hot pink and as long as it wasn't soaked in urine we'd find a way to make it work.

This particular carpet came from Independent Flooring, and I have it on good authority that their carpet is of a much higher quality than their volleyball skills. I'm giving them another free plug tonight because I was told they read my blog on someone's Blackberry tonight inbetween their double-header match and anyone who kills their time reading this deserves some sort of reward. Although there was beer involved, and I'd imagine beer makes the whole experience easier.

Thursday night we celebrated the new carpet by going to bed at 10:30! Its installation marked the light at the end of the tunnel as far as livability goes. We knew there were things, like ripping up the carpet, that we were going to need to do immediately for our own sanity. What we never really took into account is how emotionally draining it becomes to have nowhere to relax in your own house. Tom and I also work about 10 feet from one another every day, and after only 3 or 4 days in the new house we found ourselves drawing ... out .... our ... work days just so we didn't have to go home yet. WE FOUND OUR OFFICE MORE RELAXING THAN OUR HOME. That's just sick.

I have a new appreciation for the chaos a little remodeling can bring to a person's life.

For Mother's Day weekend we took it way easy by our standards, although when I was telling my friend Gwen about the things we'd done she seemed to think we we were still accomplishing way too much. There wasn't much that we did over the weekend that wasn't voluntary, though, and mainly we focused on sprucing up our outdoor spaces, lest we forget about them entirely. We got the lawn all mowed and watered, and on Saturday we took my mom out to Chippewa Valley Growers to pick out some annuals for container gardening - because I'm not even going to entertain the idea of doing any actual landscaping. While Nicholas and I planted flowers, Tom reassembled the wood swingset in the backyard with the help of our EXTREMELY nice new neighbor, John.

Then on Mother's Day we drove to Minneapolis because I had found a new (to us) ceramic cook top on Craigslist for $100. It will replace the original coil cook top that came with the house. The search goes on for a wall oven. I can't say enough great things about Craigslist. The people we bought the cook top from are in the process of remodeling their kitchen and living room, and he was sharing with us how hard daily life has become ever since they gutted both of the rooms. We just nodded along somberly. We didn't have anything near that going on back at our homestead and we still found it hard to suck air from day-to-day. If we had been tearing walls out of our house I can only imagine how horrifying the scene would have been. I was only another day or so away from showing up to work in sweats with strawberry jam in my hair and two different colored shoes. (But I would have rocked that look.)

We also stopped at Ikea and picked up a few things. Tom got a Poang chair in Alme Medium Red for his office downstairs and the coordinating footstool. He says he's wanted it for two years, even though on the Ikea site they list the chair as "new". Sure he did.

We also picked up some other odds and ends for around the house, but mostly we looked for some inexpensive ways to attack some of our future projects, like the upstairs bathroom. Also Tom bought Nicholas this little SPÖKA light for his bedroom and you would have thought that he bought him a puppy by the way Nicholas was going on and on about it. We stopped at my mom's for ice cream cake after we got back to town and now she wants a SPÖKA of her very own so we're going to have to make another trip to Ikea at some point.

Damn. Road trip, anyone?

Tom asked if I wanted to install the new cooktop last night after we put Nicholas to bed and I gave him an emphatic "No!" As much as I'm looking forward to the new cooktop (I loves me some cooking!) I wasn't about to fall for the whole "It's so simple!" instructions that the seller gave us. Supposedly you just unscrew some brackets under the old one, pop it out, pop the new one in and wire it up, then screw the brackets into the countertop underneath. But knowing our luck this simple install will require 6 trips to Menards, a new section of countertop, a complete re-wiring of the south wall of the kitchen, and probably a monkey.

Six of one, half-dozen of the other

I could have SWORN that when we had the living room measured for the carpet installation that he said the hallway was 4x3. Turns out it's more like 6x4 and I'm just a really poor listener. So all my "Hey, it's only 12 square feet" babble was a gross misrepresentation of the actual space.

Also grossly misrepresented was the amount of leftover laminate my mom had. What looked like a full box of the natural oak was actually only 3 full pieces and then the rest were ripped down one side (the "groove" side of the tongue-and-groove"). So I drove back over to my mom's house to rummage through her garage some more and wound up grabbing the leftover floor tile laminate she had - same idea, but made to look like 12 x 12 tile. I don't like it as much, Tom likes it more, but desperate times call for desperate measures so I tossed it in the trunk and headed home with it. As far as I was concerned, any floor was better than no floor.

Long story short, there wasn't enough of that either. We were a little *less* short with the tile floor, but still short. So basically the only thing Tom was able to do last night was remove the carpet tack strips from the entry area, then stare at two piles of laminate floor that we couldn't install.

This morning Tom from Independent Flooring called and asked if he could stop by and re-measure the hallway going to our bedrooms just to make sure the carpet they're installing tomorrow is going to fit. While he was there he asked why we didn't have the laminate down yet, I explained my poor observational skills, and he said he'd check his warehouse to see if he enough of any one thing for that space. We stopped at his store on our way into work and he had two boxes of maple laminate (plus a couple loose pieces) ready and waiting for us and they appear to be almost exactly the same color/finish as the oak, just with a maple woodgrain. So TONIGHT we will install laminate floor and rip up the remaining little strip of old, disgusting carpet we left down purely so the couches have something to sit on.

We have a little over 40 sq feet of laminate floor to cover our 24 square foot entryway so there shouldn't be ANY way that we could screw this up. Ha!

It's okay to love a tree, but don't LOVE your tree, you know?

First and foremost, a picture of what we now just refer to as “Tom’s Tree” because I’m pretty sure one of these days I’ll find him outside carving “Tom + This Tree = 2gether 4ever” into the trunk of it.

Based on our exhaustive research (we Wikipedia’ed it) it’s a Larch – either a Tamarack Larch or a European Larch, but we lost interest pretty quickly when trying to figure out which. When I was cropping the photograph I noticed how the north side of the tree is infiltrating the overhead line that runs along the fence, and I think it’s either cable or phone? If a strong enough gust of wind comes through our backyard, that sound you’ll hear will be Tom and I bitching about how our Internet is down. We can live without a lot of things, but Internet is not one of them. Another thing we can’t live without: A dishwasher that doesn’t smell like dead animals. Here is our new one in all its glory, after having narrowly escaped an incident with a crowbar.

The other night while Tom was having words with the dishwasher I was camped out in our bedroom closet removing wallpaper. The closets in both upstairs bedrooms are wallpapered floor to ceiling INCLUDING THE SHELVES. It must have filled someone with quite a sense of accomplishment back in the 50s to see their totally wallpapered closet, and apparently every inhabitant of the house in the years since didn’t have the heart to destroy all that hard work. Had the wallpaper been in good condition I might have wrestled with the idea of leaving it up, because the pattern in our closet was *just* kitschy enough that it bordered on likable.

We spent most of the day on Saturday priming and painting the bedroom, which we had agreed to paint the same shade of “barely there” blue as the bedroom in my previous house. In my old house I left the original wood trim because all the windows were new with a woodgrain finish and I didn’t want to paint new windows white. I prefer white trim for its clean line and the contrast against the walls, so this time around we painted it white. We also gave the ceiling a fresh coat of white paint as it was in desperate need of it. The room still isn’t totally done, but you can get the general gist of it from this picture. Mostly you see how there is no wallpaper in the closet anymore.

There will be no lying around tonight - even though I have what I believe is a chemical headache from attacking the bathroom tile with caustic chemicals last night. Our new carpet is scheduled to be installed on Thursday morning, and before they get here we need to lay down laminate wood floor in the entry because we’re not going to go with a carpeted entryway like the previous owners. We lucked out because my mom had almost a full box of laminate floor left from when they remodeled their house and since our entryway is only about 12 sq. ft. it winds up being more than enough to meet our needs.

While Tom is tackling that, I promised Nicholas that I’d have all his toys unpacked and moderately organized before I pick him up from school on Wednesday so I'm going to get started on that. Since most of our bedroom furniture is crammed into his bedroom, I’ll also be moving all of that back into our bedroom now that it’s predominantly painted. And I’d imagine at some point I’ll be watching Tom stare longingly at the power sander because the dining room floor is really eating away at him.

My-my-my-my music hits me so hard, makes me say Oh my Lord

Pictures to come of our weekend warrior projects, but I forgot to grab the memory card out of the camera this morning.

After a 3-day struggle Tom managed to wrestle the new dishwasher into place late Saturday night. It takes very little to get me to throw my arms up into the air, shout a few obscenities and walk off a job - but Tom seemingly has the patience of a Saint and I very rarely (read: never) see him frustrated. I reserve the right to find this endearing and annoying as hell all at the same time.

However, at one point on Saturday I walked into the kitchen and found him with both arms underneath the dishwasher, his head leaning up against the door, and he was just staring blankly at the floor ... not moving. The thought immediately crossed my mind that he had gotten stuck under there and after a week of home improvement projects he no longer had the strength or the will to shout for help.

After I asked him what the problem was he informed me that he was trying to get the supply line to thread onto the elbow on the bottom of the dishwasher, which had to be done while the dishwasher was already in place due to the copper pipe (of course!) in our house, and that he was now resisting the urge to beat the dishwasher with a crowbar because it refused to cooperate.

I had to fight back the tears because I was ready to beat the dishwasher about 10 minutes into the whole project, and I was glad he was finally on board.