This Weekend's Activity: Archaeology

So, apparently we had enough separation from the last de-wallpapering task, and decided to tackle the guest bedroom this weekend. This was a joint decision this time, not one made unilaterally by one or the other of us. We didn't expect it to necessarily be an easy task, but as with all of the other rooms, it will be more work than we had optimistically hoped for. I'll show why in pictures.
Uh oh. First sign of trouble:

There were multiple layers of wallpaper. Not all that surprising. But there were more than two or three. We finally found the wall and tried to figure out how many layers there were (thus the archaeology). I got pictures of them. The top layer is one. Then we have
Two:


Three:

Four:

Five:

Six:

Seven:



The progress on the room so far has been mostly limited to making it into a total disaster (but we are making progress and finding areas of drywall). We have a deadline of the last week in March to finish it, since my in-laws are coming to stay. Hopefully that won't be too pressing a deadline.

Update

I know I have not posted in a while. Between travelling and visitors and simply being busy this blog has fallen by the wayside. And this post isn't going to consist of much, because I still am busy. But some things that have happened with the house and yard that I have not yet reported:

• I dug up the front lawn (with my husband's help). Will be turning it into an herb garden this spring
• Both of our bathrooms seem to have leaks. I seem to have stopped the dripping from the attic bathroom by caulking it all over the place (including places that need new grout), but now the one on the second story seems to be leaving water stains on our first floor ceiling
• I got a chipper-shredder for Christmas, because my husband is awesome, and just got it going last weekend. Turning all of our old twigs, and our Christmas tree, into mulch
• We desperately need to insulate our house better. When it gets cold, air streams in around the windows and doors. And the floor of the kitchen where there is no basement underneath gets ridiculously cold, making the whole kitchen cold.
• The radiators work very well. In the summer we thought we would get rid of the radiators and use forced air for both air conditioning and heat, since the radiators are ugly. Now you couldn't convince us to get rid of them if you tried.
• The pizza oven is pretty awesome, even though my husband is still getting the trick of cooking in it. We have some ribs cooking in it as we speak.

That's what I can think of right now. I'll probably add to the list throughout the next couple days as I think of more things.

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.

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!

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

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.

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.