Deck the Halls (and paint the walls)

My apologies for the terrible rhyme. It was the only witty thing I could come up with this morning, which should tell you something about my present state of mind.

This year marked the first Thanksgiving since Craig and I started college in 1997 that we haven't traveled. We (well, I) therefore decided it was a good idea to pack it as full of work as possible.

We had a nice Thanksgiving with Dan and Barb in Woodbury. Barb made the turkey and some sides, and I contributed potatoes, rolls, green beans, and apple pie. Our car smelled very good as we drove across town.



Phoebe enjoyed her Thanksgiving dinner of a spiral shaped dried beef tendon.



The Friday after Thanksgiving, we eschewed early morning shopping for painting our bedroom. Good thing, too, since we had a nice wet snow that day. Very picturesque, but I prefer not to drive in it on a day when people are already willing to maim each other for cheap digital cameras.



The new color is Benjamin Moore "Saybrook Sage," a grey-green-blue shade that is remarkably close to Martha Stewart Everyday's "Quaking Aspen." (I drove to a K-Mart in a seriously not nice part of St. Paul just to get the MS paint chip, then got home to discover that it was essentially the same thing as the BM color I had already decided upon. At least I know I like it. Twice.)

The ceiling wasn't very well done, so we re-painted that. We (okay, me, again) wanted to try the cool ceiling paints featured in Menards commercials that go on pink or purple but dry white, eliminating the need to guess where you've already painted. We tried it, but I don't think we'll be using it again. The purple tint, which was profound in the can, stayed on the ceiling for about 10 seconds, and the paint didn't cover well at all. We might have gotten better results by systematically licking the ceiling.

Can you say "gimmick?" I knew you could!



Dan and Barb proved that they will paint for pizza, which we really appreciate.



Goodbye, foul olive green!





Goodbye, foul yellow that previous owners were too lazy to cover up in the closet!



The end results are still green, but a nice, quiet, restful green.





We finally hung a few pictures on our bedroom walls, including this nice antique oak-framed mirror from Bob and Mikki in Jefferson.



On Saturday, we put up the Christmas tree and drove all around town for various errands and decorating supplies.

The tree looked like one of the slimmer models in the display at Michael's, but it's apparently been sitting in the basement gorging itself on candy canes, because it fills up a whole lot of our living room. We don't mind, though. (Note the lovely tree skirt made by Ellen's mom.)



We haven't figured out if there's actually a power supply on the exterior of our house, so our decorating is limited to candles in the windows. But that's all right, it looks nice and homey that way.



Now, on to the baking!

Inspiration / Rumination / Procrastination

It's been a long time since I updated. In early September, we went to Paris and Switzerland for a couple of weeks, and our house progress ground to a screeching halt. (See A Life More Ordinary if you're interested in pictures and commentary.) Our Saturdays have been taken up with Hawkeye football, but a long list of painting jobs and other home improvement tasks are piling up for the moment when we find some inspiration motivation.

Inspiration, we have in spades. We visited a couple of homes in our neighborhood that were part of the Twin Cities Parade of Homes
Remodeler's Showcase. One featured a kitchen/sitting room expansion, and the other re-did a kitchen and added a master suite. Both were lovely examples of hardwood/stainless/granite perfection, and both carried price tags in the high $100,000 range. You could buy a bigger, nicer house for that in much of the country.

I don't know how I'd feel about having one of those expansions done in our little house. Everything was beautiful, but just didn't seem to jive with the feel of the neighborhood or the rest of the houses, which were WW2 era models like ours. I'd love more space, but I don't know how well I could stomach a contractor's pricetag in order to have a little slice of trendy new construction attached to my cute little house. Of course, all these noble ideas might evaporate into a turnkey Summit Avenue mansion were I suddenly to come into money...

Somehow, weekly trips to Home Depot and Abbott's Paint are less painful than contemplating an all-at-once renovation, so that's what we'll keep on doing. This seems to be the week of toilets at our house. Our super-duper low flow upstairs model started running this week, and we ended up replacing all of its guts. It works better than before - truly an accomplishment for two humanities majors.



Broken, rusted out toilet innards.

This morning, I took Phoebe out while Craig was in the shower. I needed to use the bathroom, so I went downstairs. I opened the toilet lid, and saw something in the bowl. Without my glasses, it looked like a leaf, and I bent down to investigate further. Once my head was a foot over the rim, I realized it wasn't a leaf at all, it was a MOUSE. Floating in the toilet bowl. After I got done screaming, I ruminated on how I mortgaged my life away so I could deal with drowned mice at 6:15 in the morning. Being a homeowner is so rewarding. (Not for the faint of heart.) I have no idea how the little guy got in there, but hope that his untimely end is warning enough for his little mouse buddies.

Outside, it's become fall. Fall is beautiful.



But you never realize how many trees you have on your property until fall comes around. And how leaf-covered your yard looks after the neighbor painstakingly removes every shred of leaf from his lawn.



The leaves do, however, cover up things that you had no idea were sitting on your lawn...



Thank goodness for rakes. My desire to get this random suppository box out of our yard was almost as strong as my desire to Not. Touch. It. Some things are better to just not think about. Mice included.

We ripped up the sickly, pale hostas in our front planter and planted daffodils and tulips for next spring. Once the bulbs are done blooming, we'll put some impatiens in.





Craig is apparently too much man for the pitchfork. Well, that lasted a summer. We'll have to invest in a tougher model than the Home Depot standard next spring.

We also set up our birdfeeders for fall and winter. Watching the birds got us through several Phoebe-less winters in Iowa City, and we hope to get a lot of feathered visitors again.



So far, we've had very little but squirrels, who shimmy up the stakes and hang upside down on the feeders. They're entertaining, but some squirrel baffles will be necessary if we don't want Phoebe to explode from pent-up squirrel hunting urges.



Here's our resident albino squirrel - named Morrie II in memory of Morrie the albino squirrel at our last apartment.

As we tuck in for winter and think about painting and working on making our basement a useful space, I'll be turning around yard ideas in my head and calling my mother to get her Master Gardener advice. Some of the problems we hope to address next spring and summer:



Creeping Charlie. Eeek.



The end of the gutter on this side of the house doesn't drain properly, and dumps water over the edge, washing out a corner of the yard and draining dirt down the sidewalk to the carport:





All in all, the yard slopes to the carport. We hope to figure out some way to minimize this - probably with some planting beds built up around the sidewalk.

Before all that, stay tuned for Painting! and Demo! and Snow! But hopefully no more mice.

Basket O' Tools and Junk

Since the entryway project ended up taking about a week and a half, a lot of tools and other random items had to be in easy reach. When the mess got to the point that I was dreaming about finding sandpaper under my pillow, I implemented The Basket O'Tools and Junk. Everything that wasn't in active use got dumped in, and now that the project's done, it can be taken downstairs in one fell swoop.

Kind of like 30 Minute Meals' Rachael Ray's garbage bowl, but I hope Rachael Ray isn't fishing anything back out to use later.

Entryway (Version 1.5)

The original title of this post was going to be "Touch My Door and I'll Cut You," but I'm feeling a bit more charitable than that this evening. You are invited to stroke it and ooh and ahh respectfully.

When the house came to us, the front entryway left something to be desired. I can only imagine that the storm door is original to the house, and the actual door was painted in the same pale baby poop brown as the rest of the house.





















Our first step in making things a bit more inviting was to replace the storm door with a full view model. Several lessons learned from this process:

• No matter how good the directions appear, it's best to read through them and figure out how the pieces work together before you make cuts and drill holes. That way, you don't begin to attach the "Z-bar" upside down. (Yeah, we'll let you know when we actually apply this lesson in a future project. Don't hold your breath.)
  
• Our drill sucks. The $30 Black and Decker cordless model is great for apartment dwellers, but we need a bit more power. In order to get the closing mechanism attached, Craig had to sit and wait for the drill to charge enough to complete each individual pilot hole.
  
• The friendly biker guy down the street is willing to lend a hand if we really get in over our heads. Good to know...

Next was stripping and refinishing the front door. We really liked the door itself, just not the flat icky paint on it. It's a nice solid door, and looks like it goes with the house (unlike a Suburban Special from Menards would). The handle is really cool, and there's a sticker on the side telling us where to go in case of nuclear attack - one of the few "pieces of history" we're likely to find here. Too bad we can't read it, and some child years ago decided to scribble in his own "No Nukes" protest.




















The stripping itself was a learning experience. After browsing through a few library books, I picked up a gallon of "Power Stripper" and was on my way. Most of the paint came off in two coats, but I did spend a fair amount of time scrubbing with steel wool and "Fromby's Paint and Poly Remover Wash," as well as scraping in the corners with my handy dandy teardrop-shaped moulding scraper. The previous owners had apparently stripped the door down before they primed and painted in brown, but I found some bits of Pepto Bismol / My Little Pony pink in some of the corners. Scary. A few flecks of paint and other imperfections remained, but I was satisfied.









The finish on the interior side of the door came off quite easily.



We then rehung the door, since the basement wasn't a very good place to keep it while we were away at work. That's when the trouble began. The bare wood was lighter than we wanted it, so I decided to rub some stain in before the final finish.

This was a Very. Bad. Idea.

The weathered wood on the exterior side of the door sucked up that stain like a sponge. I hadn't applied any sort of sealer, and consequently I was left with a dark, muddy mess.





After some tears and gnashing of teeth, I got out our little handheld power sander, and got off the muddy top layer of stained wood. What was beneath was pretty good. I had to sand the crevices and paneling by hand the next night.



As a side note, it's best not to use your working kitchen as an area to sand down wood, no matter how much hassle it would be to move the door to the basement or garage. Even if you vaccuum as well as possible, you really do get a fine layer of wood dust over everything, the dog tracks it into the rest of the house, and you have wood dust all over your black pants when you try to make coffee the next morning. Anyway.

We then re-re-hung the door for its three coats of satin spar varnish. I applied a sealer coat first (just in case - I think I'm sold on sealer for everything now), then put on a coat of varnish per day. The exterior side of the door looks like what it is - a fifty year old door that's seen some use, and the interior looks pretty dang good.







At some point - hopefully this fall, we plan to take down the awning in front and replace the existing railing. We'll also change out the light fixture, select a new mailbox, and get new house numbers. For now, though, the door changes bring us to Entryway Version 1.5.



And Phoebe likes it.

Gratuitous Phoebe cuteness

I just had to share this shot of Phoebe, which Sarah Hansegard took at the Westie picnic on the Fourth of July.

The Great De-Browning, Stage 1

By all accounts, the previous owner of our house seems to be a nice enough guy. But he seems to have cared for the color brown just a bit more than we do. In this case, "just a bit" is a nice term that means "a whole hell of a lot." We already painted over the living room, and we've embarked on a plan to paint the exterior and get rid of the two shades of brown there.

Over the course of three weekends, we completed the first stage - painting the screen frames, storm windows, and window sashes white. They were a flat dark brown. Luckily, we were able to take all the screens and storm windows down to the basement and paint in a nice cool environment, with baseball and HGTV on in the background.

It turned our basement into a war zone, but that's okay.





So, all of the window frames are painted now. You can see an old picture for comparison here.



Our overall plan calls for three stages:

• Window frames, etc. painted white. - Done!
  
• Rest of the trim painted blue. - Hopefully to be completed the rest of this summer and fall, getting rid of all of the dark brown by winter.
  
• Paint the body of the house light yellow. - Next summer, before we start having 97 degree days again...

Here is a (decidedly not an) artist's rendering of what we're going for. That brown blob in the middle is a beautifully refinished and stained front door. It's cleverly disguised, I know.



We're working with California Paints, which received top marks from Consumer Reports. So far, we're very happy with the quality and the way the window frames look. For the rest of the trim, we plan to use Beethoven Blue. The body of the house will be something similar to Fresh Lemon.

After a while, you run out of excuses.

Sometime around the middle of July, we ran out of excuses for not starting on the yard projects we'd been planning. After one massive trip to Home Depot (the Internet is not big enough for a tally of everything we bought), we were ready to finish off the backyard fence and build a tree ring planter around the red maple in the front yard.

After we decided to actually do these projects and had a ton of landscape stone in the carport, we were resolute. Unfortunately, the next weekend to come up was 97 degrees and insanely humid. And it was the release date for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. But we're tough, right?

Now, the instructions for building a tree ring planter are very simple. You just need a level base that allows the bottom ring of landscaping stones to be buried about halfway. In real life, though, trees have roots, and roots are not level.

An impromptu call to Matt, Ellen's brother and forestry major, confirmed that sawing through the roots to make a level surface probably wasn't the best for the health of the tree. (See, Mom & Dad, our them there college edumacashuns is good for sumfin!)

We settled for making the base as level as possible and doing the best we could.



It took us a few weeks to bring home enough topsoil to fill up the planter (36 forty pound bags, for the record). We plan on planting impatiens or some other shade flower next summer, but for now we just topped it off with cedar chips.

The finished product isn't too shabby, even if it is more of a tree curvilinear planter than a tree ring planter. Because of the roots, it's not perfect, but it will hopefully allow the tree to survive.



While Ellen was hauling landscape stone and swearing at tree roots (which are not generally very responsive), Craig was in the hot sun finishing off the chain link fence for the backyard. As Ellen is writing this, there may be a lack of witty commentary about the process. My apologies.

Anyway, we have half-baked ideas about adding a deck that would encompass the side entry in a few years, so we elected not to mix and pour concrete for the fence posts. This doesn't make for the sturdiest fence in the world, but it keeps 13-pound Phoebe in nicely.



This way, she can run around the backyard without being on a leash or a long lead. Here, she's discovered some sort of mouse hole in the corner of our garage. She barked at this spot for quite a while, and was so intriuged that she even ignored Craig and the lawnmower passing five feet behind her.



It is a very basic fence, but it does the job. It also provide a nice solution to the problem of who mows what in the space between the two houses.