Category: home improvement

Playroom Update 1

Our house is on the smaller side but we like it.  It’s our first home and while I know that we’ll move eventually we don’t want to do so now.  But we were bursting at the seams a bit with all the kids’ stuff so we decided to finish part of basement to use as a playroom.  I’m so excited to chuck all the toys down there and clear up some space in the rest of our house.

I didn’t take a picture of it before, but the hardest part was clearing the room of all the junk we had stashed in it when we moved in  Ten years of junk is a lot of junk!

Drywall going up.  I am still finding dust around the house in random places.

I found a good deal on some gray laminate flooring which helped us come in under budget which was  great.

I spent most of the day today sorting and organizing toys.  I just need to hang up things on the walls and tidy things up and then I can share pics of the finished room.

Some Assembly Required

It was nice getting back into our normal routine this week but boy, am I ready for the weekend.

Number one on my to-do list for this weekend is to assemble our dining table so we have something to eat on.  Up until now we’ve been using the small table we bought when we were in college. It didn’t expand and it was a tight squeeze to fit any more than four people around it.  Also the chairs were wiggly and close to breaking.

I had thought about building a table in woodworking class but knew I wouldn’t be able to finish one before next December (there’s no class during the summer) so we’ve been on the lookout for one to buy.  I saw a set at Costco that was a good deal so we bit the bullet and bought it yesterday and my lovely neighbors/friends helped me schlep it home in their pickup truck.

Last night I gave away our old set so assembling the new set has a, um, certain sense of urgency.  I thought it would be easy to get rid of since we were giving it away for free and I had a lot of responses to my ad.  The first person to response told me she would be by at 8pm to pick it up so N and lugged it out to the driveway.  And then when I messaged her to let her know it was in the driveway SHE TOLD ME SHE HAD CHANGED HER MIND.  Super frustrating!  I messaged back and forth with some of the other people that had expressed interested and finally found someone who actually picked it up.  

Anyway…I hope you have a good weekend.  When you’re sitting at your already-assembled dining table enjoying a meal think of me.  See you next week!

Tree Trimming

 

Lumberjacks ARE COOL–at least that’s the agreement E and I came to yesterday as we watched these guys work. We were glued to my bathroom window for a good twenty minutes. Climbing really high in trees = awesome.  Climbing really high in trees and operating chainsaws = several kinds of awesome.

When our big willow tree blew down this summer all the tree services who came out to give us a bid on hauling it away from us recommended topping the 11 tall cottonwood trees we have lining our back yard.

We wanted to get it done before the snow came so yesterday these guys came and trimmed the top 15-20 feet off.  Hopefully now we’re finished with trees falling down.

And hopefully the kids enjoy the imagination Christmas we’re going to have because, yeah…yeesh.

Act of God

In our backyard we have a big 50-foot willow tree which shades half of our yard, always nice during the summer. But today during an intense wind storm I heard a sharp”crraaack!” and when I looked out the window I saw this:

The tree split right down the middle.  I don’t think the rest of it is salvageable and it will probably have to be cut down–I have a tree service coming to look at it tomorrow.

I’m sad about losing the tree but I’m grateful that no one was hurt and that nothing else was destroyed.  The kids and I have been spending a lot of time in the yard lately and when I think about what would have happened if we had been out there…*shivers*  (I know that we would never have been outside during such a crazy storm, still.)

It really did fall in the most perfect way possible, any other direction and it would have torn into the house or wrecked the fence.

And on a somewhat related note, we’re having tile installed tomorrow to replace the carpet that had to be ripped up with our toilet overflowed.  So no more walking around on rough plywood. Huzzah!

I am going to get this house put back together if it kills me.  When our toilet overflowed the drywall in our family room (directly underneath the bathroom) had to be ripped up/drilled into to let the moisture out and the drywall repairs were so extensive that now we need to repaint the entire room.  But I am not even going to think about it for at least a few weeks.  Removing the giant sideways tree from my backyard has jumped to the top of my list.

Ah, the manifold joys of homeownership.

Torn Up

This is what my bathroom looks like right now:

What you can’t get from the photo is the sound, a loud, low grumblely growl of a roar of 3 industrial fans plus a dehumidifier going full blast confined in a small room. We turned them off to sleep but I still tossed and turned most of the night, mostly from anxiety.

I get stressed out enough when my home is torn up due to my own choices (i.e. my kitchen update) but when something out of my control happens and I have groups of strangers tramping through my house and our routine is thrown off completely I just get depressed.

Sink or Swim

It’s frustrating: I have several things I want to post about but work and the ever-ongoing kitchen remodel (along with the kids) have been sucking up all of my spare time.

Right now I’m trying to figure out which of these two under-mount sinks to install. It’s the same price for either of them. I can see the advantage of the 60/40 split (more room to pile dishes!) but can’t decide if it will look off balance.


What do you think? Which would you be prefer to see in a house you were thinking about buying?

Kitchen Remodel

(Click to see larger)

So for some reason I decided that this was the ideal time to start the kitchen remodel that I’ve been wanting to do for years. I’m doing as much of the work myself as I can because 1) our house isn’t fancy to begin so it doesn’t make sense to spend the $$$ it would cost to have it done professionally, and 2) I am under the delusion that I enjoy doing things like this myself.

I was really gung-ho to get started and have already taken down most of the cabinet doors to start sanding and painting them. But along with the “I am woman, hear me roar!” enthusiasm sometimes I feel overwhelmed and wonder what on earth I’ve gotten myself into. To tell you the truth it largely depends on how well Mimi (and I) slept the previous night. 🙂

But I’m already past the point of no return so I better just buckle down and get it finished. The goal is to have things largely put back together by Thanksgiving (fingers crossed).

Master Bedroom

We’ve lived in our house since 2004 and up until last month our bedroom was an embarrassment. It had turned into a de facto dumping ground for worn out clothes, random toys of E’s, and piles of paperwork waiting to be filed/shredded. We didn’t even have anything on the walls. I had framed some collages by Bob Pollard that N collects and some posters but they had been leaning against the wall waiting to be hung for years.

And while I had hung up some curtains I hadn’t hemmed them and they puddled messily on the floor collecting dust. Overall, it was not a relaxing room to spend time in and I hated the idea of other people seeing it.

But no more! We’re planning on keeping the baby in our room for the first little while and so I was motivated to organize and declutter. I shredded boxes of old papers. I hemmed the curtains to get them off the floor. I got a second bookcase to get piles of books off the floor and onto shelves. And then I hung up our art for good measure.

(I made the Chinese-style lattice headboard in woodworking class about 5 years ago.)

These photos were taken at different times of day which is why the wall color looks so different. There are still several things I’d like to do to really finish our room; after I hung up our prints I realized that they had a gray/yellow theme going on which I’d like to carry over to the whole room. I’d like to paint the walls a soft gray, get some some coordinating bedding (maybe something like this), replace the outdated ceiling fan with a fun chandelier, etc… all which will have to wait until this summer at the earliest.

But at least now I like walking into the room. It makes me feel like a normal person instead of someone with a mild hoarding problem 🙂 And with the curtains hemmed and all the junk off the floor the room seems half again as large which is great.

Now on to the baby’s room!

House Works

I am in the happy anticipation phase of spring cleaning: imagining how great it’s going to be to have things organized and tidy and freshly-scrubbed. And this book, Houseworks: Cut the Clutter, Speed Your Cleaning and Calm the Chaos, is just fueling the fire.

I actually ordered it from Amazon the last time I was on a serious cleaning/organizing kick (over a year ago!) but I picked it up again this week and was impressed again by its sound advice (which I’m actually going to try and follow this time around. Ahem.)

The author, Cynthia Townley Ewer writes in a clear and calming style: she breaks things down into reasonable steps and has a lot of good ideas. And she’s not without humor. In the introduction she tells the story of how she realized she had problem with organization.

It was Christmas eve and she was recently divorced with two small kids. She had been out visiting family and returned to find the window by her front door broken. She called the cops and they came and checked it out. “Lady,” the cop said, “I don’t understand. Your deadbolt held but somehow they got inside and ransacked the upstairs.”

The rooms were “knee-deep in crumpled photocopies, legal pads, fabric scraps, piled clothing, holiday wrap, stacked files, spilled coffee and dirty dishes.” Ewer then had to confess, extremely embarrassed, that she had actually left things that way herself. (Ouch!)

After that Ewer worked hard to develop good habits and methods for keeping things clean and organized. She started a website, organizedhome.com, and then wrote this book. I know it’s kind of silly to read a book about cleaning instead of spending the time, you know, actually cleaning but she does have some good ideas. And sometimes I just need a little inspiration and motivation.

(I know I haven’t posted photos of E recently. I’ll get some up later this week, so hang in there, grandparents!)

So I guess we’re THAT family

The ugly side of autumn hit us this last week. Until then we enjoyed a gorgeous abnormally warm autumn. The colorful leaves lingered on the trees much longer than usual. But then the temperatures dropped, the leaves fell, and we got about 3 inches of snow. There’s a line of trees in our backyard that overhang the fence and when the temperature fell they dropped their leaves seemingly overnight. With the basement guys being here this last week, it getting darker so much earlier, and the several inches of snow we didn’t get around to raking the leaves this week.

But Saturday was warmer and it was apparently Official Neighborhood Leaf Raking Day. But it was also the day we had a small birthday dinner for E over at my sister’s house (ours being all torn up still from the basement repair) and so I was busy helping set it up most of the day. While I was away N and E (in the Baby Bjorn) worked on raking some leaves, but they didn’t get to the ones on the sidewalk.

On our way to Jan’s house we saw some teenage neighbor girls raking the leaves our trees had dropped over the fence onto the sidewalk. I was so embarrassed! When we came home we saw that they had piled all the leaves into a huge mound on the side of the road. I rolled our trash can out to the pile, cringing at the unearthly loud racket it made in the quiet night, and stuffed it full of leaves. But there were still at least 2 more trashcans worth left over. *Sigh* The evidence of our lax home maintenance was still there this morning. (I was kind of hoping they might have blown away in the night.)

Oh well, there goes the neighborhood!