Long, Hard Weekend

11/23/09

We had a long, hard weekend of work at 86'n it.
I'm too tired to write all the details, so here are the photos:

I stayed home Friday afternoon to wait for the cooktop delivery. Here she is. So nice!

Stair

Before........Scraped.........Done! (Mostly)

Upstairs View

Before....... Done!

And what is that you see down the hallway in the downstairs "Done" photo? Is the door open?
Nope! That is one of our 2 new back doors! Yeah for no snow coming in them this winter!

Crap photo of door #1 from the hallway.............Good photo of door #2 in the kitchen

We also had my sister and the boys up and went to get a Christmas Tree!


We went to Sandy Holler Farms. This year all the good trees are up by the entry, but you can still do a tractor ride out to see the animals!


And here she is. We haven't had time to decorate yet.

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Yipppee! A cool stroller that fits in Winnie's Trunk!

11/19/09

So I have been meaning to publish this for a while. Last month, I was really stressing about which stroller to get. This is an important purchase for us because we walk to work currently, and will continue to walk to work AND daycare. (The daycare is 3 doors from Marc's office and 2 blocks from mine.)


But of course, we needed one that looked great (because we are design snobs), that fit in the Mini's trunk (no mini van here) AND one that was not $900 (because I'm cheap).

My search was exhaustive. I did days and days of research online. We stroller stalked people the whole time we were in Boston for my brother's wedding. We made the poor lady at the baby store in Boston fold and unfold every single (pricey) stroller they had.

I figured out I wanted to Maxi Cosi carseat because I read that it fit nicely in the Mini Cooper, it looks great, is not too heavy and has good safety ratings. Check out the Citrus Green color. So cool! (This is the color we want even though our dumb registry will only let me add the blue one! So frustrating.)

Anyway, then I saw the Maxi Cosi Foray stroller online. The carseat snaps right into it with no adapters! It looks great! It has good reviews. AND it sells for half of what the similar looking ones go for! Marc and I headed over to BabiesRus. Marc spotted it right away. We had to get the manager to let us take the floor model outside to my car, but Voila!

It fits in the trunk! I was WAY too excited! (This one is in the brown color, but we are getting the all black.) The other great things about it is that the baby can face you OR out. The handles extend for taller people (like Marc). It reclines. And the big back wheels make it move nicely too!


Phew! So glad that is over. I thought I'd post about this because my exhaustive search I found other Mini Cooper owner blogs to be really helpful!

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Things I Love: Good Friends, JCP & Laser Cats

11/18/09

The countertop guy said today or tomorrow for installation, which means Friday or Monday. We shall see!


I had a VERY bad case of the itchie bitchies yesterday (like the heebie jeebies, but for bad moods, not scary stuff). I was going to go home and go shoe shopping. (I need a pair of black ankle boots.) Good thing that my BFF JCP had delivered me the backordered roman shades! Seriously, JCPenny can't be beat for prices on thermal blinds and curtains. So instead of going shoe shopping, I hung those.

Unfortunately, the newness of their white excentuates the dirty white of the window trime, but oh well. Marc and I still think they look great!

I have also been meaning to post these photos. With great thanks to good friends, the parlor is looking pretty good! The rug is from Calder & Aaron who's daughter wouldn't stop eating it. Bad for her digestion, good for us. I have always wanted one of these felt pile rugs. They got this at the pottery barn outlet.

The newest addition is from my other great friend, Accent Table Fairy Michelle! You already know Michelle from the other THREE coffee tables she picked up for me. Nothing says awesome person like a voicemail stating: "I found a coffee table for you, I think you will like it. It is $5. I will leave it on your porch." AMAZING! This one fits perfectly in the parlor!

My favorite photo, though, has to be the one below. Look closely. Our house is haunted by laser cats! I about fell off my stool this morning when I re-looked at this and noticed the window!


Then I spent the rest of the night doing little things like using an entire roll of painter's tape on the stairway. (And I am still not done!) Painting starts tomorrow night!

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Heat Gun - Take One

11/16/09


As part of operation "De-crack House for Thanksgiving" I decided to tackle the stairs. There are numerous issues with these stairs. First, the design is a little crazy. The railing at the 2nd floor is, I believe, 20" off the finished floor. While Marc and I are completely used to it, it makes guests feel like they are about to plunge to their deaths. In addition, the treads are pine and the risers are oak, so it is not like we can strip and stain both and have it match and look nice. Nope.


Our nightmare floor refinisher dude sanded and restained the treads (good), but he also removed and did not reinstall 15 of our pickets. We have been WAY too lazy to do that ourselves, so the weakness of the railing made the newel post SUPER unsecure (not helping with the guest's death-by-stairs fears).

Marc hates the stair railing and I do too. We will eventually remove it and do something modern. But in true de-cracking style, we (read: I) decided it must be fixed and painted. So I spent all weekend striping the risers and stringer of paint. Why not just paint over it? Because all of our woodwork was originally shellac'd, which is great except latex paint doesn't stick to it worth a damn. (Which led to Marc's paint peeling disorder and my subsequent multiple "WHY are you making our house look WORSE?" freak out sessions.)


I now have blisters on every single fingertip from the heat gun. The heat gun is pretty amazing, but it did make me realize that I DON'T want to strip and stain the woodwork in our house. The heat gun is really great at getting the majority of the paint off, but the thought of getting it out of every little crack and hole? No thanks. I think we will stick to the plan of having painted woodwork and stained doors (because those you can take off and have dipped!).

Having successfully NOT set my hair on fire with the heat gun. I moved on and then reinstalled all 14 of the 15 missing pickets I could find. Next up, we did a truly ingenious fix to the loose newel post. I installed two 6" long carriage bolts and tightened. Viola! Ready for paint. I'm pretty excited about this painting.

Oh, and I also installed the ceiling fan in the nursery. (Which included some Black Lung from going to the attic to install a new fan ceiling box.) The fan is a little bigger than we imagined, but it looks great and runs smooth and noiselessly.

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But the Maytag it is more "Architectural"!

11/11/09


I have a great husband.
I really do.

Because when we bought this crack house, I promised him that he could design the kitchen...
Then when the time came, I told him he could pick the appliances. Oh, but they had to be white, they had to be glass and they had to be Jenn-Air.

But he could REALLY pick the cooktop... because I really didn't care about that....
Then when that time came (today), I ONLY pouted for 2 hours or so when he wanted the Whirlpool, not the Maytag.


Whirlpool ............... Maytag

I'm not proud of myself either, because when I fight, I fight dirty, and when I pout, I pout dirty. It went something like this:

I stuck my bottom lip out.

I "Le Sigh"ed.

I photoshopped a sad, frown-y face on the Maytag.

I even busted out the "I'm carrying your child."

Tre Embarrassing.

I mean, he is a tough guy. He can carry heavy stuff. He owns a table saw and an F-150. He listens to Hockey Night in Canada for pete's sake!

But: "I'm carrying your child"? That is too much for even the toughest guy. And I'm mortified that I stooped to it.

And I PROMISE, PROMISE he can pick out the faucet with no interference from me.
I PROMISE. :)

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Ready for the beer and cards!

11/8/09

Marc did back-breaking work all weekend sanding, staining and finishing the back porch wood floors. They look beautiful!

It is pine flooring with a Zar stain in rosewood with black dye added (by the kind folks at our local Benjamin Moore.) Between coats of finish he'd have to lay flat on the living room floor to ease his back. Poor guy.

So this area is almost ready for a porch party! Break out the chips, beer and cards. NA beer for me of course. Guiness makes a pretty tasty one called Kaliber.


Meanwhile, I was doing some back-breaking work of mine own. One of the items on my pre-thanksgiving list was to stain and paint the dining room chairs. My mom graciously bought these chairs (and a small round table) a couple of years ago at auction. They are sturdy, but in various states of painted and unpainted. So I sanded, stained, sealed and painted them to blend better in our dining room! Here is the before and after:

If I was smart, I would have taken the "before" picture of the worst chair, but I didn't, this is actually the best one. You can see the most challenging one behind it, it was competely covered in about 5 layers of paint! 

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Slab Sneak Peak!

11/7/09

The countertop guy was driving thru to show the neighbors their slab and also came by our house. This is their slab, but ours will look almost exactly like this because it is cut from the same block. 


It is a little more vein-y then we would have picked had we gone to the stone yard, but I really like it. We both agree that the natural look will be great next to our shiny modern cabinets. As Marc put it: "It looks like the bottom of a canyon!"

In related news, we had to hop on buying a sink, so we could give him the template to cut the hole. Good thing we have already researched the crap out of appliances and such things. We ended up going with a zero-radius undermount stainless steel sink. Thanks to a great tip from Grassroots Modern, we got a good deal at overstock.com.

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...and we bought countertops.

11/6/09

In a truly bizarre turn of events, we bought soapstone countertops today for a really great price.


The whole story: neighbors of ours just bought their house +2 months ago and are doing a significant renovation/repair. Honestly, their speedy progress has been really hard to watch. It is like a beehive over there with contractors working away making crazy improvements. I've just had to force myself to envision all those workers as big walking dollar signs in order to not loose my mind! (The owners are doing a fair amount of work themselves too.)

Anybunny, we have several mutual friends, one of whom told us that our neighbors just got a screaming deal on soapstone countertops. So I walked over last night to get the scoop. Turns out a stone company in Charlotte is going out of business and 14 hours later, we have bought countertops sight unseen! Scary, but at ~$45/sf installed, we decided to just do it!

Marc and I can't stop laughing. It is just so bizarre. Best thing is, that is better than the price we would have paid to go pick up stones and cut and install them ourselves! Now we have to finalize our sink, faucet and cooktop selections. The poor, broken hot plate will soon be outdated! :)

More info to come, we are hoping them will be installed in 2 weeks!

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What is worse than a sink full of dishes?

11/4/09

Q: What is worse than a sink full of dishes?

A: The adjacent dishwasher that you bought ELEVEN months ago and never hooked up.

If anything screams pathetic (well besides the broken hot plate knob, more on that below), THIS is it. The excuses for not having hooked up the dishwasher were sort of justified at first, but got more and more lame as the months stretched on. First it was that we are waiting on the garbage disposal (slumbering comfortably in its box in the basement btw) which was waiting on the sink, which is dependent on the countertops, which was dependent on both availability of a large soapstone slab and cold hard cash. Well, wouldn't you know it, when big slabs came in, the money was gone. :( So now here we are many, many months later with plywood countertops, a $30 Home Depot sink, no garbage disposal and a very sparkly virgin dishwasher.

Le Sigh.

I guess some people call it "nesting" when pregnant women get a burst of energy in their 2nd trimester, but I don't think that is what I have. (Marc says we've been nesting in this crack house for +2 years now.) For me, it is more about exhaustion and using my pregnancy as a way to get Marc to cave in on things I want to do. So I put "hook up dishwasher" on my pre-thanksgiving list and presto! from 8pm-10:30pm last night it happened. I wish it had been more "plug and play", but the work included installing a new water connection, a plywood boost on the floor, re-rigging our drain situation and drilling the crap out of the cabinet side-wall. When it was all said and done, I shed a tear, and I'm not even blaming it on the hormones.


Of course, no good deed goes unpunished. As soon as we get the dishwasher working, the trusty "temporary solution, turned 1.5 year cooking device" hot plate gets broken. I twisted the knob too hard and it just kept spinning. Then I accidentally swept up the little broken piece with the shop vac before we had a chance to super glue it back into working order.

So goes my life.

You can turn the metal part with your fingernail to turn it off and on, which I'm sure we will continue to do for another 1.5 years until we get the real gas cooktop (again dependnet on big slabs and big money.)

I'm really resisting the urge to put vise grips on it .

(You can take the girl out of Ohio, but you can't take the Ohio out of the girl.)

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Window #2

11/3/09

We are currently tackling our pre-thanksgiving to do list. Marc has the big items (porch floor, new back doors) and I have a million little things. Like painting the kitchen window. I know it isn't a big deal, but it is not a great window, so I wanted it to not be the dirty yellow focal point of the kitchen.
Before..........After

I know it is just a little thing, but that window was driving me crazy. The paint was THICK and gobbed on and filthy dirty. Plus, whoever painted it that horrid yellow never scraped the paint off the glass (just like the teal upstairs!).

Here's a belly shot (don't I look enormous?) showing the crappy window a little closer, and then a finished close up.


I wanted to get new hardware, but of course, this stuff is so old that they don't sell hinges that size anymore AND a new similar latch is nowhere to be found.

So I soaked them 24 hours in turpentine and got the 15 layers of paint off. The hinges still looked like crap, so I just spray painted them white, but the latch actually looks really great stripped!

I need to get blackened screws to match that original finish (I think it is just patina'ed brass) and then I'll be all set!

A sneak peak at Marc's work: Here is the really beautiful back porch step. It might actually be good weather at the end of the week for staining!

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