So, This Happened

2011 Recap

Holy cats, it's May and I still have not done a recap for 2011.  Let's, shall we?

Here's what's left on the old punch list:

• Refinish and install new front door - Still not even close
• Repair foundation of back porch - halfway towards financing it, though our saving has stalled a bit
• Install new door & windows on back porch - nope, no point since we're going to tear out the porch
• Squirrel-proof garden (or eliminate squirrels) - zapper in play.  One down.
• Finish stripping and then refinish downstairs trim (yeah, right) - DONE!
• Install shoe moulding - no progress

 Things I actually did that weren't on the list:

• Painted the entryway, stairwell, and upstairs hallway
• Refinished stair treads
• Put a damn door in the bathroom
• Installed additional cabinets in the kitchen, as well as a new sink and countertop
• Got some new (old) furniture, moved stuff around
• Bought a new mattress

Made (in) the Shade

Tired of tripping over our inadequate curtains, I decided to take matters into my own hands.  Using this great tutorial from Little Green Notebook, I got some pretty fabric, shitty blinds, and hey presto!  Roman shade.  I have enough fabric to make a giant pillow for the back of the bed, but that's a project for another day.

Happy Halloween!

Well I never quite got around to making the spider, but the web looks pretty badass.  Though, one of my small neighbors would disagree.  A little girl and her mom were walking by, and the girl said with a righteous indignation, "This isn't real, it's just rope!"  Touche.

Hinge Heads

You know how sometimes you don't even know you need a thing until the internet tells you you do?  Enter hinge heads.

They just hang out, on top of your hinges.  We have ball hinges so I don't think they would work in our house, but how cute is this little guy?

Hinge Heads  via Design Sponge.

High as an Elephant's Eye

So during the travelpalooza of April our grass got really tall.  The biggest tuft was 2 feet tall:

Did you know that clover could grow a foot tall?  I wouldn't have thought it possible.

I had to use the weed whacker on the whole damn yard before we could mow it.  Thanks, April showers.

4th of July

Hey, we put up some decorations.  I can't decide how long to leave them up for, but something tells me they'll be around until we decorate for Halloween.

Also, happy birthday to my mom.  We'll see if she's as diligent a reader as she claims to be...

Cabinets!

Somehow I managed to convince Jason how lovely it would be to get some new cabinets, and then a new sink and countertop.  I keep thinking that I'm going to wake up and he'll have changed his mind.

 

They were surprisingly cheap, which means they are surprisingly cheap...  When I put the first coat of paint on them, the grain pulled up like I have never seen before.

 

Next up: Sink and countertop!

Snow Day!

It's impossible to tell exactly how much snow we got because of the drifting, but I'm guessing the 18 inches they predicted was pretty close to accurate.  We went through 4 rounds of shoveling.

Thank goodness for neighbors with snowblowers.  The guy from 2 doors down did this for the vacant house between us, and about 2/3 of the width of our sidewalk as well.  Which is fantastic, considering that last third probably took me a solid 15 minutes to do.

 My entire office building was closed, so I had time to do some of the things I always think I'm going to have a chance to do over the weekend, and then never get to.

One Step Closer to Being Up to Code

Yes, that's right, smoke/carbon monoxide detectors!

We got the fancy ones--if they go off, you can turn them off by pointing any remote control at them and hitting a button.  Brilliant!  But.  The downstairs one is right above the stereo tuner.  And here's the thing, pointing a remote at it and hitting any button will also put the damn things in test mode.  So if you are, say, watching a movie and are less than diligent about where you aim the remote to turn up the volume, the smoke detector will start yelling at you.  Literally, it yells, and says you need to evacuate the building.

Needless to say the downstairs one is in a few pieces and without batteries at the moment.

2010 Recap

Well well, let's see if we got anything accomplished in 2010, compared to what I wanted to do:

Punch list, 2010

• Install new ceiling lights - DONE
• Restore downstairs bathroom - ALMOST DONE
• Refinish and install new front door - Not even close
• Repair foundation of back porch - ha!
• Install new door & windows on back porch - nope
• Squirrel-proof garden (or eliminate squirrels) - Bird netting sort of works, but you have to be vigilant about sealing the bottom, and you might accidentally trap a bird in it.
• Finish stripping and then refinish downstairs trim (yeah, right) - I actually made a bit of progress on this one.
• Install shoe moulding - We bought some, does that count?
• Rebuild stairs (a girl can dream...) - I don't know why I even bothered putting this on the list.

We talked to our contractors about the porch, and it would be around $16k to dig a full trench foundation, which is what it really needs because the original pier foundation can't support the two stories that the porch now spans.  However, if you add in replacing all the windows and siding and installing a new door, you get pretty close to what it would cost to tear the whole damn thing off and rebuild it, to code, AND add two feet on to the back of the house.  But, since we don't happen to have $50k lying around right now, and can only pull $30k out in a home equity line of credit, we're stuck saving up for a while.  (I'm lookin' at you, 2012.)

It took me a while, but I stripped and refinished the picture window in the front room, restrung the window weights so the windows don't come crashing down, and put up storms so we can have normalish screens now.   It also means Dexter's alleycat girlfriend will be less likely to try to bust in the house.  I hope.

We didn't finish a whole lot in 2010, but we poked away at a bunch of stuff.  The bathroom is nearly done, just needs a bit more trim and a door, which is arguably the most important part of a bathroom.  The linen closet was mostly ignored but made some progress.  I got a real desk/table for my office and some great salvaged cabinets.  We did some landscaping and gardening, though the squirrels are still confounding me.  We got the ducts cleaned--the guy said that they probably hadn't ever been cleaned, so we had I'm guessing 30+ years of dust in there.

We're getting there.

Cats Are Stupid

In a fit of what can only be called extremely poor judgment, the cats decided to make a break for the backyard as I was hauling the weeks of accumulated cardboard boxes and packing materials out to the alley (side note: we have ALL the pieces of the bathroom now).  It's in the upper 30's, which feels downright warm after the single-digit temps we had earlier in the week, but the cats were totally unprepared for the snow.  They managed to find some patches of grass to sit and then chew on.

 Also, I finally put the hammock away...

 Nom nom nom.

 Oh hai!

Halloween Decorations

Bad. Ass.

How Cute Is This?

Give yourself +1 if you said "cute as balls."

Master Bedroom

We got some new lamps and I finally got around to painting the furniture a color that doesn't clash horribly with the walls in the new bedroom.  Let's take a tour of the process, shall we?

First, I started picking at the buckling paint on the crappy plaster walls.  This of course escalated into a full-on OCD paint-scraping bonanza.

So after I had made a giant mess and scraped most of the paint off two walls, Jason decided that it would be best to start from scratch and just gut the room down to the studs.

 

The room sat like this for about 9 months, while we were squeezed into the then-crappy 2nd bedroom.  Although the two rooms are exactly the same size, the other room had awkward window, door, and shelf placement that made it feel really small.  We had to wait until the support beam in the basement was replaced before we could put up drywall.

Eventually, Jason re-framed the closet, combining the two tiny closets and funky pass-through into one giant closet with doors into both rooms.  By then the beam was done, and the drywallers were in and out in 2 days.  They did kind of a crappy job but at least we have walls now.

I'm pretty sure this is where the lazy damn cats spend most of their time while we're at work, paying for the roof over their furry little heads.

Dexter seems to be enjoying it.

And, these are the ceiling lights we got for the upstairs rooms.  Aren't they cute?  The shades match the dining room chandelier.  The flash made the etching and texture in the glass stand out more than it does in real life; it's pretty subtle, especially when the light is on.

One room down, 9 to go!  Oh man, that was supposed to be uplifting but now that I've done the math it's just depressing.

It Really Ties The Room Together

I love this rug so much.  And it was crazy-cheap on Overstock, which makes me love it more.  It's very cushy and I only had to vacuum it twice before it stopped making me sneeze (I'm allergic to wool).

I realized that I don't have any current photos of the living room up since we de-uglied it, so here's a full tour.

 Don't worry, the brackets are in studs, there is no danger of being clobbered by books when you sit on the couch.  The space between the shelves and couch always looks huge in photos but it doesn't seem so bad in person.  I can't think of what to put there that won't make the wall look too busy.

Here's a better view of the rug.  Also, I just rewired the lamp on the right, which had belonged to my great-grandmother.  The chair on the left also belonged to her.

This is where I waste most of my time... Up top you'll notice a Bolesta original, painted by grandpa and the only non-Bob Ross forest scene I think he ever did.

Dining Room Light

Finally!  Goodbye horrible ceiling fan, hello pretty late-Victorian reproduction light!  Who puts a ceiling fan in a dining room?  The mind reels.

In case you can't tell how ugly it is, here's a closeup:

Unfortunately this one didn't come in very focused.  In case you don't speak hundred year old house, I have translated for you.

Yeah, that's right, gas pipe.  When I bought the fixture, which is a gas light reproduction, I thought it would be period-appropriate to the house, but I didn't anticipate having to actually deal with leftover infrastructure (I should have known better).  After trying and failing with the angle grinder and dremmel, Jason broke out the sawsall.

After that, we were able to install a new ceiling box and then the new light.  So pretty!

New Light Switches

Push-button light switches!  (Shout-out to Adam/Lisa/Lois for giving them to us!)  We finally got around to buying switch plates and installing them.  I wasn't a fan of the brass finish at first, but with the stripped doorknobs and the dark wood, they look really nice:

Here's a close-up:

2009 Recap

• Replaced the beam
• Cut down all the scrageldy, half-dead trees and bushes
• Took out all the stumps (so much work it gets its own bullet point)
• Landscaped back yard, planted garden, bought hammock
  
• Painted front porch, installed porch swing (2 major life goals now accomplished)
  
• Installed clay brick pavers in front
• Landscaped front yard
• New roof
  
• Demo'd bedroom closets, framed in attic access
  
• Rewired master bedroom
• Drywalled master bedroom
• Refinished master bedroom and hallway floors, as well as bedroom and closet doors/trim
• Trimmed out bay windows in dining room
• Demo'd downstairs half bath

Punch list, 2010

• Install new ceiling lights
• Restore downstairs bathroom
• Refinish and install new front door
  
• Repair foundation of back porch
• Install new door & windows on back porch
• Squirrel-proof garden (or eliminate squirrels)
• Finish stripping and then refinish downstairs trim (yeah, right)
• Install shoe moulding
  
• Rebuild stairs (a girl can dream...)
  

Downstairs Bathroom

Originally looked like this. The wall tile in no way matched the floor tile, other than both being in the greenish family, though they appear to nearly match in the photo. The wall tile represents pretty accurately here, but the floor tiles are sage/forest green, and clashed horribly with the walls.

Then, even though it pained me to paint the wall tile, it looked so much better:

And now...