Sunday, December 16, 2012

Pizza Oven

My husband has finished the functional parts of the pizza oven (we plan to spend some more time making it pretty). We had some delicious pizza out of it for dinner tonight and he's baking 8 loaves of bread this evening for his office holiday party tomorrow. And we roasted a chicken in it last week. One of the best chickens we have ever made. I'm pretty much sold on this wood-fired oven thing, about a week into having it.

Update: We had brisket roasted all day in the oven yesterday evening for dinner. It was falling-apart tender, and took almost no effort. Awesome.







Sunday, December 2, 2012

Happy Holidays

This is the first year in our new home, so our first Thanksgiving and Christmas in the home. It was our first time hosting Thanksgiving. We just had my parents visit, but we had a very nice visit and dinner turned out well. We'll take a couple years to perfect our Thanksgiving recipes, but we had a pretty good first round of them.

Here's our Thanksgiving table:


Next year we'll have my grandmother's china. My parents have been holding it for me until I got settled someplace more permanent than our apartment in California. Now I'm ready for it.

We just started decorating for Christmas. We decided to get our tree from a lot instead of hunting down a U Cut place (like I would have in California). My husband doesn't have strong ties to cutting down his own tree, but it was a family tradition for me. But, with a bit of reluctance, I gave in to picking it out from the lot. We are urban dwellers now, after all. And now we have a tree, which is much better than no tree.

Even though she has a cold, my daughter had fun decorating the with us. She immediately accepted the idea of the Christmas tree that lives in the house and actually started crying when we left it outside to hunt down the Christmas tree stand. We had to go visit it on the porch to make sure it was okay.


Isn't it pretty. Love it next to the red brick fireplace. Just need some stocking hung with care and maybe a big ol' wreath over the fireplace instead of the fan.  Merry Christmas!


Saturday, December 1, 2012

Impulse Purchase

So, I'm going to start this post with the moral of the story. If your husband checks in before making an impulse purchase, make sure it fits into the house before agreeing to it.

Now the story: We have a nice finished attic in our big old house. A big space that seems like it should be useful for something but so far has not been used for much. My mother in law used it as a writing garret when she was here a coupe weeks ago and I sometimes go up for a change of scenery. There's a bathroom up there that I was using for showers until the shower started leaking (another story). But that's it. Otherwise it was a big, empty space.

So we were talking the other night about how we were going to use the space. We really want to use it as a TV room, since we are dead set against having a TV in our living room and watching shows on the computer in our office is getting a bit old. But we need a TV, some way to broadcast stuff to our TV (another computer? An internet tv box? A DVD player? Something else?), and somewhere to sit. We did a little shopping for these things, but didn't really decide on anything.

Then my husband emails me yesterday with a Craiglist ad for a couch and a loveseat that are a decent price and the guy will deliver. I have a paycheck coming in next week, so I said sure. The guy came that night with two quite nice, and quite large and heavy, pieces of furniture.

Remember, I said it was a nice finished attic we needed the furniture for. They needed to go up two flights of stairs with several sharp corners involved. The couches live on our porch until my daughter is safely in bed, then we try getting the big one up. I was at the top, huffing and puffing as I tried to figure out where on earth I ought to hold it such that my legs wouldn't get stuck beneath it as I pulled it up towards me. Somehow we got it up the first flight of stairs, including around the first tight corner. We took a little break on the landing then started on the next flight. The next flight of stairs was narrower and the couch wouldn't fit. Solution: take down the hand rail. That seemed to work at first. We got the couch about 1/3 of the way in, but then it got stuck again. We learned that our new couch has a nice decorative arched back, which meant the middle of the couch was taller than the ends. It was starting to look like the couch simply was not going to go, but we really had neither the stamina nor the will to carry the darn thing back down again.

There was one more thing to try. My husband pulled the door to the attic off of its hinges in order to make the doorway as wide as it possibly could be. He didn't quite understand what was (or wasn't) securing it, so it came down with a bang, but it didn't kill any cats or break any walls, so all is well. And that was enough to allow the couch to go through, with only a little bit of additional difficulty. We somehow summoned the strength to get the loveseat up there too. So now we have a partially furnished attic. The story has a happy ending. But I think when/if we move, the attic furniture comes with the house.

Now for some pictures:
The first flight of stairs

The second flight of stairs (with hand rail and door re-attached)



Our new couches, with their lovely decorative arched centers

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Philosophic Gardener

So, I have always been a gardener. My dad and I planted our vegetable garden together every spring when I was a kid. Tomatoes and cucumbers were our specialties.

Then I went to college, and then to grad school, and lived in dorms and apartments and other rentals where I didn't have much of a place to plant anything. I did some potted plants, but it really isn't the same. So, instead I read about gardening. I found books, Gardenweb.com, I followed links on Pinterest, etc. And in this time I developed a gardening philosophy revolving around organic, chemical-free gardening and landscaping with edibles. A philosophy developed completely separately from the practical aspects of actually growing plants. This is probably not a good thing.

This new philosophy may die a quick and relatively painless death if I learn my green thumb turns brown when not artificially enhanced (by MiracleGrow), and that I am not a good enough designer to make a front yard that is simultaneously both pretty and edible. But for now I have my compost pile and my worms and I fully intend to dig up the lawn this spring. Maybe everything will work out fine and I will be in the market for some chickens next, the sure sign that I have gone off the deep end of this organic food business. Then I'd need a rooster so that my chickens would lay eggs...

I think I'll just stick to my worms. I don't care how good the fertilizer that chickens provide is for the garden, having a cockatiel as a kid was more than enough bird owning for me.

Monday, November 12, 2012

Garden Notes

I haven't posted on the blog lately because not much has been happening lately between my husband working on his big project (it's awesome. Take a look at his progress here: http://www.fornobravo.com/forum/f8/36-pompeii-dc-18213.html) and a busy toddler and a hurricane and some seasonal colds. But here and there I've fit in some garden work. One variety of lettuce is doing very well: 
It's the Grand Rapids variety. I've had less luck with the Royal Oakleaf and Buttercrunch. But I'll have lettuce to serve up as a salad for Thanksgiving, which is something I had really hoped for. No peas to serve though. The growth of the peas has been less than stellar. I thought they would be both larger plants and more productive plants. I'll have to plant more of them (on a more petite trellis) next year, since the fruits are delicious.

I also planted some potatoes this weekend. It seems to be a bit debatable whether they should be planted in the fall or spring, so I decided to give it a try in the fall. If successful  they will develop a really good root system over the winter so that when springtime comes around, they will grow like crazy. If not successful, they will rot and I'll add them to my compost pile and start over in the spring. I have this funny bag that I grow potatoes in, and add soil as they grow. 



Other than watching my plants grow, my main garden task has been raking leaves. And raking more leaves. And raking even more leaves. It is amazing how many leaves my trees produce. And even though I have bags and bags of leaves, there are still lots of leaves still hanging on the trees. I like raking, but not to the exclusion of all else, which is what I fear these trees demand. I think I don't mind raking, in part, because I don't think of leaves as trash, but as organic matter. I decided my worms would never keep up, so I set up a compost pile in the back part of my yard where I'm throwing a portion of my leaf supply and excess kitchen scraps. The leaves I don't compost I will shred up and use as mulch. I'll still probably have more leaves than I have use for. 

Here's a picture of my compost heap.  Nothing pretty, for now. I'll give it walls as soon as my husband is finished with the pallets he has construction supplies stacked on. I saw a nice compost bin design using pallets a couple weeks ago. For now the heap works. It's only a week old, but I'll start turning it every couple of weeks to keep it from getting smelly. That seems to be the gist of it, as far as I can tell. I'm very new to this organic gardening thing. But I'll probably write a separate post about that later.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Blueberries and Kiwis

I received the plants I ordered on Wednesday and hurried to get them into the ground before dinner, since we were headed to dance after dinner. The blueberries look good, but I was surprised at how small and pathetic the kiwis were. They don't look intimidating at all. In fact, I kind of doubt they will last the winter. But everything is in the ground and mulched well. I covered the main bed with some decorative bark to make it look more complete. I'm planning on adding a retaining wall sometime soonish, but haven't done that yet. Here are some pictures:

The front planter bed. I swear there are plants in there.

Here's one. A lovely little blueberry plant with its fall colors

And here's one pathetic kiwi

And another pathetic kiwi (I didn't quite have the side bed ready, but ready enough)

Monday, October 15, 2012

Fall Planting

I ordered some plants yesterday evening. They will be here sometime this week while I scramble to finish up the garden beds for them. I have three different types of blueberry plants coming and some hardy kiwis. I think the blueberries will do very well. They thrive on the same type of soil that roses like, and I have some roses on this property that I think have lasted decades with little care.

But I'm suddenly afraid of the kiwis. I read this post as I was trying to figure out how to add additional support for the kiwis I'm planning on planting out front: http://www.sustainable-gardening.com/archives/450 Great, as if I didn't have enough problems with agressive vines, with the English ivy, Japanese honeysuckle, and the rest of the vines that seem to pop up everywhere around here. At least this one will grow tasty kiwi berries... I hope. And if it doesn't, I'll hack it back with the rest of the misbehaving vines.

Sunday, September 30, 2012

More Work in the Garden

As I said in a previous post, I've been doing a lot of work in the garden. One of the first things I took care of was killing the ivy that was killing the tree by our back porch. I've killed the ivy (pictures of both the live and the dead ivy are below), but I'm not sure yet if I've saved the tree. The fact that fall has arrived doesn't make it any easier to tell. And I'm not sure how to get that ivy down. It is quite ugly now.

Tree smothered by ivy

Tree with Dead Ivy

I also have cleaned out several areas with overgrown planters. Most of them are just left as dirt right now, but I do have my little fall garden. I also cleaned out a couple of the planters in the back yard. 

Backyard planter before

Backyard planter now

Once again, that doesn't look like much of an improvement. I left the azaleas, but everything else was overgrown and ugly close up. I'll plant something new in it next spring, then it will hopefully look pretty both close up and from a distance. 

And I cleaned out the planter in front of our front patio. You can see the before in this shot of the house, the area to the right of the stairs. There wasn't much there to begin with, other than some weedy grass. I dug it up, along with some giant roots and pieces of cement that were hanging out there.


Front Planter now
It's all ready for the blueberry bushes I plan on planting there. I need a bit of a retaining wall to keep the dirt in as well. The sidewalk there has a slope, so the wall will be tall near the stairs and short over at the corner of the house.

My most recent task has been freeing the back fence from it's maze of ivy. I don't really have a great before picture. Here's my best one, but it had gotten much more overgrown. When I cleaned out the ivy, I found 3 overgrown rose bushes underneath. I'm going to try to bring them back to life by pruning them. I know very little about pruning, so we'll see if they are still alive next spring. I don't have a huge fondness for roses, but my grandfather loved them, so I hate to purposely kill them. I have two in the front yard too that I don't really want in the front yard. But if they can survive the transplantation to a different location, I welcome having them around as well. 

Back fence this spring

Back Fence now

Clearly one of my yard tasks will be repairing that fence. I'm hoping the fence posts are solid and I just have to replace the broken boards, but I haven't looked closely enough to know yet.

]All of this yardwork has resulted in a lot of yard waste. Too much for our weekly trash pick up. I had several piles going in the yard and it was starting to look messy, so I piled it up all in one place as if it is a compost pile. With pieces this large, it would probably take a decade for it actually to decompose, but at least it's all in one centralized location. Maybe I'll get a wood chipper some day and turn it into an actual compost pile.





Monday, September 24, 2012

The Joys of Homeownership: Appliances

We've lived in this house for 2 1/2 months and already had two broken appliances (plus the ice dispenser on the fridge, which was broken when we arrived, but since the fridge otherwise functioned, that hardly counted).

The disposal was a real bear. We were just finishing the bulk of our big home improvement projects and looking forward to an evening of relaxation when the darn thing just stopped working. It had gotten totally jammed up. My husband sat trying to unjam it for several hours the evening it jammed, but it just wouldn't turn freely. He ended up buying a new garbage disposal from Home Depot and installing the next day. I suspect that all the paint we washed down that sink wasn't good for the disposal. When we painted our bedroom, I wouldn't wash anything in the side of the sink with the disposal.

This weekend our washing machine stopped working. It wouldn't drain, it wouldn't spin. It just made a sad little humming sound then would trip the circuit breaker. I unloaded all of the clothes and wiggled thing to see if it would start working, but no luck. We pulled the box off so we could take a look at the inside. I successfully diagnosed the problem as something to do with the pump. We disconnected one side from the pump so we could try to turn it. Sure enough, it didn't turn. We were tired and still recovering from colds, so we decided to go to bed instead of dealing with it more. Water was still pouring out from it anyhow, so it was a bit hard to work with (my husband bailed the water out to the best of his ability, but there was still a lot left).

The next morning the water had completely drained and my husband took the pump off the rest of the way. He found one of my daughter's socks inside the pump, torn to shreds but still successfully jamming the wheel that is supposed to churn water through. Once reassembled, the machine works fine. Thank goodness for easy fixes. And for the internet with lots of how-to guides to help us discover the simple fixes ourselves instead of calling in the professionals.

Sunday, September 23, 2012

Yardwork

While we did all the work inside the house, we were wanting to be outside, working in the yard. I'm a gardener and my husband has been dreaming of building an outdoor wood-fired pizza oven for months. So with the conclusion of the bedroom saga, we've been able to start focusing outside, where we have wanted to. I've done some more boring things (killing ivy, weeding, trimming roses), but also created a little garden bed for myself with some winter veggies growing, plus a large basil plant we bought a month or two ago from the farmer's market.

There are lettuce seedlings popping up here and there and the sugar peas are starting to climb the trellis I made for them from fallen tree limbs that I found around the yard.

My husband's project is much more impressive. Here's a picture of the current state of the pizza oven. 

That's just the stand. Firewood will be stored in that cubby-hole. A big igloo-like structure is planned for the top of that stand. He's keeping a record of his building progress here: http://www.fornobravo.com/forum/f8/36-pompeii-dc-18213.html


Bedroom Finished!

We finally finished with our bedroom. (We actually finished the painting a couple weeks ago, but we couldn't get the crown molding up by ourselves, and it didn't look done without the crown molding). If you missed it, here is the post about all the trouble we had with this room: http://paintedbyeconomists.blogspot.com/2012/08/wallpaper-hides-many-surprises.html

It's done now though. Here are some pictures. First a before picture or two:


And here's how it looks now:



It looks a little yellower in the pictures than it does in person. It's so clean and fresh and nice. It was a lot more work than I had anticipated, but I'm so glad it's done. Hooray! I'm not sure when, after that experience, we'll get to the wallpaper in the guest bedroom. Possibly not until kid #2 is on the way. Who knows. Maybe we'll feel ambitious in a couple months and tackle that one. It can't be as bad. Even if the walls are equally beat up, it is much smaller. And the wallpaper is normal stuff, not horrible hay embedded ugliness.



Friday, August 24, 2012

Carousel Room

I decided the theme of my daughter's room should be carousel, since she loves animals (at not quite two, she had no input in the choice, but seems to approve). I found a cute, if complicated, carousel border stencil. I put a fresh coat of light blue paint on the room during the painting extravaganza, so it was all ready for decoration when my mom visited.

There isn't much of a story to tell, this project went pretty smoothly, so I'll just show pictures.




Thursday, August 23, 2012

Wallpaper Hides Many Surprises

I started stripping the wallpaper from the master bedroom several weeks ago. I knew my husband didn't care as much about it, but I really wanted our bedroom walls painted before I started work. I considered it the ugliest room in the house. Here's a picture:


 I was hoping I could just do the job myself. I couldn't. This was, in part, the fault of our daughter who quickly decided that mommy working up high on the ladder instead of playing was simply not okay. But mostly it is the fault of the room itself.

There were two types of wallpaper to deal with, a solid blue layer on the bottom and a weird grassy top layer. The bottom layer pulled off like a dream. Once the wooden trim was removed from the middle of the room, it pulled off in large sheets, leaving no scraps behind. The grassy layer, on the other hand, was stubborn. Sometimes it pulled up just fine, other times it ripped up into a pile of strings that clung to the walls in bits. They weren't hard to get up with the wallpaper remover, most of the time, but there were a lot of little bits.

Still, the job seemed like one I could get done myself, if only my daughter would let me have a little time each day (which she, of course, would not). But then I started scrubbing the walls to get the extra adhesive off. And I scrubbed, and I scrubbed. It was amazing how little I got done in the time I spent. And there were still stubborn little bits of wallpaper here and there that I hadn't gotten to yet. I needed help.So my husband started helping after my daughter went to bed. Part of the reason the scrubbing took so long is that this nasty brown stuff would get our water dirty almost instantly. We asked my father in law about it and he thought we were scrubbing too much and were actually scrubbing off some of the drywall paper, then was puzzled that so much stuff was coming off with water. We discovered the answer on the third wall, when there was finally enough of it in one place to detect a pattern. It was old, decayed wallpaper. Three layers of old decayed wallpaper.

Here's what it looked like on the wall:


And the stuff that flaked off under my sponge:



They not only wallpapered over it, which is standard for these old houses, but in many places plastered over it with drywall mud or something of the sort. I washed more of it off, but then we took the electric sander to the walls, since our ultimate goal was to get the walls smooth enough to paint, not necessarily to get all the junk off of them. That old wallpaper made clouds of dust, so now our bedroom looks like it's experienced a dust storm as well.

And that's not all that was hiding under the wallpaper. We had holes. Some of them may have been knocked out sometime after the wallpaper went on, but some of them must have been there and they just wallpapered over it.
Hole 1: 

Hole 2:

Hole 3:

Hole 4:


We're not done yet, so no pictures of the finished product. Hopefully soon.We had a handyman come in to fix the big holes and I'm in the process of fixing the smaller ones. Then we get to paint and finally put our room back together.

Tuesday, August 14, 2012

A Revolving Cast of Contractors

We have done a lot of work on our house already, and we want to have a lot of work done by professionals as well. Despite not having any money yet (my husband's first paycheck comes Friday), we are having a parade of contractors come through to give us estimates. Someone came last Friday to estimate how much it would cost to put in ductwork for central AC, we visited a cabinet showroom over the weekend. Yesterday we had a flooring person by to estimate the cost of refinishing our floors. Tonight another HVAC person comes, then we have two more flooring people over the weekend. And we still haven't found a general contractor or handyman that is both professional enough to return calls and willing/able to fix the wall in our kitchen.

Since we can't afford to get all this done at once, once we have all the quotes in hand we will have to decide what exactly we want done and when.

Monday, August 13, 2012

Painting

So, we apparently decided the whole house needed to be painted (thus the blog name). And my husband decided much of it needed to be painted before my mom came for a visit because he wanted to get more boxes unpacked before she arrived and didn't want to unpack the boxes until the walls were painted, since the boxes contained books that were to go onto bookshelves in those rooms.

If you follow that logic, and I either did or was too tired to argue at the time, the rooms needed to be painted and painted soon. And the rooms in this house are big. A good thing for living in, a bad thing when they need painting. This involved a exhausting schedule. We started prepping walls of my daughter's room and the living and dining room the day after my husband finished the trim in the kitchen. I painted my daughter's room the next morning while my husband kept her occupied, then that night we primed the dining room. We primed the living room the next day, then painted both the dining and living room the day afterwards.

The living and dining room didn't even need a new coat of paint. They were fine, probably painted just before the house was put on the market. But they were orange, and made the rooms look dark. So we painted them. Now they are a nice, cherry yellow.

The entryway, on the other hand, needed a new coat of paint. It was peach-colored, which was actually rather nice, if still a bit dark for our taste, but it had nicks and scuffs and just looked a bit dirty with time. We were going to paint it yellow, like the living and dining room, but as we sat in the living room the night we finished painting it and looked toward the entry, we decided we really liked the peach. So my husband went out the next morning for his first of three trips to Home Depot that day to get some samples of peach paint and a big heavy extension ladder that we needed to reach the part of the wall above the stairs. We liked one of the samples, so he went back for a full gallon and we painted during my daughter's nap.

While my husband went back and forth to the hardware store, I made a pie to bring to our friends' house, where we were going for dinner. We almost got it all painted during nap, but had to finish that evening. And my husband had to finish pretty much on his own because I was a klutz and tired, and was wearing bad shoes, and tripped and fell while carrying the glass pie pan home from our friends' house. The pie pan shattered, and I cut my finger badly enough that I was pretty useless the rest of the evening.

But now it's painted. And it's lovely. Here are some pictures:
Living Room Before
 

Living Room After




Dining Room Before

Dining Room After



Entry Before

Entry After


The after pictures aren't great quality. I'm not a photographer and was using my phone to take the pictures. I've been waiting for my husband to take some nicer photos and upload them on the computer for me, but he's been busy. So I'll update these with better pictures once they are available.

So the rooms we haven't painted are: the master bedroom, the guest bedroom, the bathrooms, the office and the attic. And all of those need new paint too, except for possibly the main bathroom on the second story and the office. The two bedrooms are arguably the ugliest in the house, but we couldn't get ourselves to do another round of battle with wallpaper after finishing the kitchen. It took several weeks before I decided to start doing battle with the master bedroom wallpaper. To whomever thought a wallpaper made out of straw was a good idea, I'll tell you from the perspective of the person removing it, it was not. It looks like our bedroom somehow got overgrown and then someone took a weed-eater to it. But that room will be a future post. We are in the midst of that project at the moment. And I still haven't shown off pictures of my daughter's adorable room.

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Worms

I got 1000 pet worms in the mail yesterday. They are now happily in a bin in the basement eating away at my food scraps. This is much more exciting to me than it ought to be. I keep checking on them. They remain worms. But they are already fatter and more wriggly and healthier looking than when they arrived.



I got my worms from Uncle Jim's Worm Farm (via Amazon). It seems like they do the best they can to get the worms to you alive while still being inexpensive. They only ship on Mondays to keep it from sitting in a shipping station over the weekend and send them priority mail.

I mostly used the instructions on this website to make my bin: Make a Worm Composter for Less Than Five Bucks, but also benefited from reading Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Appelhoff.



Thursday, August 2, 2012

Mosquitos

The mosquitoes were another surprise that came with this house. I've lost track of how many surprises we've had, so I won't give them a number. In any case, the mosquitoes are vicious and numerous here. We get attacked every time we venture into the back yard. The front yard isn't as bad. I soak myself in "Eau de OFF" and still get bitten. My poor little girl is covered in bites. It looks like she has some strange skin disease. I cover her arms and legs in OFF and they get her cheeks. I wiped some on her cheeks today and they went for the area around her eyes! They are terrible. And they don't just come around in the morning and evening. They are there all day. Waiting. Making our yard practically unusable. And we picked this house in part because of the nice yard.

I tried a mosquito fogger, despite not liking spraying poison on my yard, and it had no effect. We tried a concentrated garlic oil yesterday, which apparently is supposed to either kill or deter mosquitoes due to the sulfur compounds, but my daughter and I were still attacked this morning. But this evening we saw a ton of dragonflies hovering over our property. I suggested they might be eating mosquitoes, but wasn't sure dragonflies even eat mosquitoes. But we looked it up and apparently they are one of the natural mosquito predators. We think the garlic oil stirred up all of the mosquitoes and maybe gave them limited places to land and now the dragonflies are here for a garlic-flavored mosquito feast. Hooray! Go Dragonflies!!

For future years, I may invest in a bat box. But I'm not sure if my bats might eat my dragonflies. Which one will eat the mosquitoes faster?

Update: The garlic oil has not driven them off yet, but we tried a stronger concentration. I also think I discovered a major source of the mosquitoes, an overgrown garden bed back behind the garage. I'm smothering all of the weeds and ivy in that. I think once those plants are dead, the mosquito problem will improve (though it will probably always be a problem).




Monday, July 30, 2012

Timeline

I made a quick timeline so I can remember what we did when so that I can write more about it when I get a chance. This gives a bit of a sense of how much work we've been doing.  I apologize for the tense changes.

Timeline:
Tuesday 7/10 Move in. Get air conditioner working, build beds, get drenched in rain, find flooded basement, build Ikea furniture (Including couch in middle of night due to broken guest room AC)
Wednesday 7/11 Unload cube, Home Depot run, Strip kitchen wallpaper
Thursday 7/12 Rock Creek Park hike, More stripping wallpaper
Friday 7/13 More stripping wallpaper, prep kitchen walls
Saturday 7/14 National Mall visit, Paint kitchen walls, built dresser
Sunday 7/15 Farmer's Market, small additional fixes: under sink, outlets, basement lights. Slave labor (aka my in-laws) goes home, unpack kitchen
Monday 7/16 Built desk, unpack bedroom
Tuesday 7/17 Paint kitchen trim
Wednesday 7/18 Prep dining and living room walls
Thursday 7/19 Paint daughter's room, Prime dining room
Friday 7/20 Prime living room
Saturday 7/21 Paint dining and living room
Sunday 7/22 Prep entry, Flat tire, shopping
Monday 7/23 Paint entry, Dinner at friends', Cut finger on walk home
Tuesday 7/24 Clean up house, broken garbage disposal
Wednesday 7/25 Mom visits
Thursday 7/26 Visit zoo. Buy paints, decorations for daughter's room. Start putting up wall decorations
Friday 7/27 Stencil daughter's room. Shop for new cabinets
Saturday 7/28 Attempt to find curtains for living & dining room
Sunday 7/29 Husband sands bedroom door to convince it to close. Otherwise we relax
Monday 7/30 Husband starts job, I am part time housewife, part time researcher until my job starts.

Work on the house will now be a weekly activity (mostly on weekend), rather than a daily one. But 20 days in, the house is livable, I've recovered from the work and am glad we got so much done. And I will definitely do some longer posts on a couple of these, because they make for interesting stories and/or I have pictures.



Friday, July 27, 2012

The Kitchen

While I read my daughter her bedtime story Wednesday evening, my husband and mother in law started pulling at the wallpaper in the kitchen. They found parts of it were so old they were essentially falling off the walls, so it came off in big swaths.Wow, this was going to be easy. Not.

Where the wallpaper didn't come off in big swaths, it clung to the wall in stubborn little shreds. And sometimes it took bits of the wall with it. Here's a picture of the corner of the room:

My father in law repaired it to the best of his abilities with some drywall compound, but warned us that we will need to set some money aside to have it replaced sometime soon-ish. It was quite badly damaged, especially in the far corner, where there were signs of water damage.

Several days later (including a couple late nights), the walls were finally de-wallpapered and prepped for painting. Compared with the wallpaper removal, the painting went relatively smoothly. My husband and I manned the paintbrush and roller, respectively. There was a lot of brushwork in the kitchen, relative to a room without cupboards and stoves and such. We wished we had a second brush. But we finished eventually. And my husband painted the trim on his own a couple days later. Now our kitchen has a fresh, clean coat of paint and we are starting to think about how we want to update the cupboards and counters.

Kitchen Before:


Kitchen After: