Angie's List is checking in....

We haven't been doing anything photogenic to the house lately. The last of the brown on the outside of the house is officially gone, though. Between bouts of swearing, dripping enamel paint all over everything, and surprise rainstorms, Ellen managed to paint the awning on the side door to match the house. We also painted the garage door and touched up the rest of the garage. Our house is now yellow, green, and white. Yay!

This summer, we had a local nursery with a landscaping division draw up a landscaping plan for our yard. It's great to have someone else do the designing and thinking for me. It has, however, had a domino effect. All of a sudden, we're gathering bids for patios, sodding, grading, privacy fences, and gutter repair. Angie's List e-mails me almost daily to "check up," wondering how I'm coming with all the contractors I've been researching.

Tentatively, we think we'll have the back yard regraded and sodded next year (they'll also install the beds for our planned plantings) and add a privacy fence. Our problem gutter should get fixed this fall. The grading and gutter repair will hopefully eliminate the trickles of water we get in the basement from time to time. With our plans for finishing off the basement, this would be a Very Good Thing.

So here's a bit of what we've been doing besides making expensive and grandiose plans for the house.

Vegetables! Between my little garden and our community agriculture box, we've been overrun with tomatoes. The last few Friday evenings have found me in the kitchen, glass of wine in hand, making large quantities of fresh heirloom tomato sauce.



Humiliating the dog! Every year, a group of Twin Cities Westie owners has an entry in the James J. Hill Days Parade in Wayzata. The dogs all dress alike, and walk the parade route. This year, the Westies wore tartan sashes and Glengarry hats. Phoebe shook her hat off after about 90 seconds, but she looked cute anyway. The Westies even made the evening news. You can see a clip in the upper right hand corner of this page: http://wcco.com/pets. The Westies are the middle choice under the video "screen."







Phoebe was a model in a fashion show after the parade. The show was sponsored by the very fancy Lulu & Luigi pet store. Her cute little fur-trimmed tartan jacket cost $90. Yikes.

A summer lull

So. We haven't been doing much with the house lately. We painted the garage ourselves over the 4th of July weekend, and are ready for a rest. We haven't even done touch-ups yet. The garage doors are both still brown, and clash with the fresh coat of paint. We're not quite to the point of caring yet. Maybe in another weekend or two. Right now, we're soaking up the AC.

I have also found that I lose at vegetable gardening. I think I killed my zucchini. Yes, the garden veggie that produces by the power of thought alone. Mine are on life support.

Now, I'd never grown much of anything before, so I didn't know that zucchini plants grow giant leaves that take over everything. I don't have a lot of space in my square foot garden, so when the zucchini leaves attacked, I put a tomato cage over the plant, and the leaves have more or less grown upward. I've been getting lots of leaves and flowers, but no fruit.

In my infinite wisdom, I decided that this must be because the raspberries were flopping over the zucchini and shading it too much. So I took a bungee cord and strapped the raspberries back against the fence, opening up the space around the garden. "Great!" I thought. "I'll just take the cage out, and the plant can flop all it wants!"

I was very pleased with myself. Then I pulled on the cage, and (duh) the entire plant came with it. I panicked a bit, stuck the whole cage back in the ground, mounded dirt over the poor exposed roots, and gave it plenty of water and Miracle-Gro. If the plants live, I might try pollinating the flowers myself. If not, I'm sure someone will provide me with zucchini this summer.

At least I'll have some basil and knowledge for next year out of the garden. The way things are looking now, that may be it.

Aside from killing vegetables, our weekends have been pretty busy. We went to the Schwarzkopf family reunion in Breda, Iowa toward the beginning of the month. The next weekend was the Minnesota Scottish Fair - nothing like haggis in 100 degree temps, aye? We also went to the Jensens' cabin near Hayward, WI, for a weekend. And look, there we are, feeding blueberries to fish! Thanks to Doug & Kathy Freeman for the pictures.

House. Painted.

Well, the painters have gone, there's a hole in our savings account, and the various shades of brown on the house are just a memory. The new colors are Sherwin Williams "Jersey Cream" for the body and "Rosemary" for the trim. Here's the progress:

Day 1:



Day 2 - Scraped, spot primed, and test patched:



Day 3 - One coat of the body color is up:



Day 4 - There's another coat up, although it's hard to see:



Day 5 - Some of the trim is done now:



Day 6 - Mostly done, except for a few touch-ups:



The finished product - we have pretty new house numbers, although I do think Craig put them a little too far to the left. (We'll see how long it takes him to notice this comment.) We also have a new copper mailbox that matches the numbers, which will be installed a bit later:



Closeup of the trim color:



All in all, we're happy with the outcome, and happy with our decision to have someone else do most of the work. It was nice to have it go on while we were at work. So why am I so tired?

If the siding's done, this must be June

Sorry for being a Very Bad Girl about updating. The College of Human Ecology is closing on June 30, and all the work issues that have been percolating for the last year are coming to a head now. There are lots of rumors, negotiations, and stressful situations right now, and all I really want to do is go on vacation and drink margaritas. Hopefully things will improve in the next few months.

Anyway, all the work stress is one of the reasons we elected to have the house painted professionally in the first place, and I'm happy to report that they are there RIGHT NOW. This is very exciting. The house was all scraped and patched with primer last night, and it looked like they were starting on the first coat of paint this morning. We're taking pictures every day, and I'll post them when the job is done, so the Great De-Browning can be seen in its full majesty.

Anyway, here's a little photo tour of what we've been doing in the past few weeks. I want to take a moment to thank Craig's dad for all the help he's given us. An engineer's brain is an invaluable resource.

On Memorial Day weekend, Dan and Craig finished up the railing on the front step. It looks great, and is sturdy enough to support a klutz like me. It's now spray-painted a textured brown color - guess I'll have to get a picture of that, too.



Craig installed our new garbage disposal. Compared to the old one, which was installed in January 1979, it is an amazing piece of machinery. The first time I flipped the switch, I was afraid I might get sucked in.



The next weekend, Craig and Dan installed our fiber cement siding on the peak of the garage. We still have some trim to add on the edges, and it needs to be painted, but it's looking pretty good.

The backerboard was very helpful - it warns that it will smolder or burn if ignited. Come to think of it, I probably will smolder or burn if I'm ignited, too.









And in the meantime, things are growing. I'm beginning to worry that our front planter may actually be too shady for impatiens. I did not know such a thing was possible. This picture is a couple of weeks old, and the plants are nice and leafy now, but not blooming much. Time shall tell.



A crappy attempt at designing my own planters. Apparently there's a reason they sell those pre-made. I do like the tuberous begonias, though.



The vegetables seem to be growing well. Craig wishes I would just leave the tomatoes the hell alone, though. I think I may have pruned the growing end off of one of my Cherokee Purple plants, thinking it was a sucker. What can I say, I'm a novice. I hope it can recover somehow.



Stay tuned for painting pictures!

Destruction makes me happy.

If it would ever stop raining, we might be able to make some real progress. As it is, we've been working in fits and starts to get ready for the painters, who are coming in mid-June. So we've been told, at least.

Last weekend, we ripped down the aluminum awning over the front door. This was extremely satisfying, and the sight of our shiny new reciprocating saw drew in several male neighbors from across the street.



Despite the fugliness of the awning, somebody rifled through the stuff in our carport and took it by Monday morning. The least they could have done would have been to take the vinyl siding too.



I believe I've mentioned before that between the two of us, Craig and I have four college degrees. None of them are in anything remotely engineering-related. We are much better at destruction than construction. We'd planned to rip down the awning and put up our new special-ordered railing on Saturday. We managed to get a quarter of the railing up. Perhaps next weekend we'll deal with the fact that we're mounting the railing to a concrete step that just isn't level. Perhaps.

It looks really nice, though!



That same Sunday, we attacked the ugly brown vinyl siding someone had put up on the peak of the house and painted brown. We'd been planning to take it down and replace it with something like this, but we found a Great Gift from the House Gods under the vinyl - the original wood siding, painted the same color as the vinyl. Mystifying.



It doesn't look the greatest at the moment, but with some scraping, sanding, and painting, it should clean up just fine. We later found that the James Hardie shingle siding we wanted costs $450 for a 4'x8' panel, so we're in love with this wood right now.



Phoebe says: Just Say No! to cheap and ugly vinyl siding.



After Sunday's work:



Mother's Day weekend was cold, rainy, and generally nasty. Ellen spent Saturday shopping for plants at the Friends School Plant Sale and Linder's. On Sunday, it was nice for just long enough for us to build a little frame for vegetables. Craig got to use the reciprocating saw again!



I know I'm not supposed to plant the seedlings I bought this weekend for a week or two yet, but I'm itching to do it. With my gardening skills, though, those little tomatoes need every advantage they can get, so I'll hold off as long as I can. I also bought over 200 white impatien plants - even I can't screw that up too badly.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch

We've been in a home-improvement limbo the past month or so - it's been too wet or too dry to do yard work, our materials weren't delivered in time to take advantage of the good weather, or we've been doing things that photograph pretty poorly. No one really wants to see pictures of me scrubbing the kitchen floor. There have been a few things going on, though. Here's a rundown.

First and foremost, we've been enjoying the fact that everything outside is finally greening up. I'm happy to announce that all of the bulbs we planted last fall are present and accounted for.



We dug up the bare patches in our yard, worked in some compost, and planted grass seed. It's starting to come up, but time will tell how it's going to last.





Craig put up our new light fixture for over the kitchen sink. We bought it from Lightworks Lighting in Minneapolis, who I'd heartily recommend to anyone with an older house style. We were able to pick out our finish, our shade, and customize the fixture with a pull cord switch. Prices were very reasonable, and not needing to pay shipping costs was a bonus. I don't have a good picture of what was there before, but you can get a bit of an estimation here.



The time of the Great Debrowning is getting closer (painters are scheduled for mid-June), and we've decided on "Jersey Cream" for the body color - it's the creamy-yellowy color on the right here. We plan to do white and dark sage green trim, but I need to go visit with the design consultant at Sherwin Williams before making a final decision.



I dug up the weeds and overgrown raspberry bushes in this little plot by our carport. This is the only consistently sunny spot on our property, so I'm hoping to have a little vegetable garden here. After the steady rains we got all weekend, this spot is covered in weeds again, so it needs some attention.



The weekend of April 22, we drove to Lyons, Nebraska to help Craig's grandparents move out of their house and into a retirement apartment in Omaha. Phoebe was a good helper.

One of life's mysteries

Or, why a $300 video iPod seems like a perfectly acceptable purchase, if a bit of a splurge, but $25 for an actual armband or lanyard holder is too much to justify.

Because this works just fine for listening to audiobooks while painting, right?



That is, until I spill oil-based primer all over it.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled cooking.

That's right, we're done with the cabinet painting, and everything has returned to the place it should be. Well, almost everything. Two jars of chicken boullion mysteriously disappeared in the shift between the dining room and the kitchen. (We also bit the bullet and bought a new digital camera.) It's nice to be able to use the kitchen to actually make food, rather than just the place we put the takeout on plates.

Our kitchen is now covered in a fresh new coat of Navajo White. It's amazing how much cleaner the whole place feels. Here's a before shot, for comparison.





And after...


We have a new pendant schoolhouse-type light fixture coming to put over the sink. The one that's there now has a cool '50's feel, but is also covered in 50 years of paint smudges. If I can clean it up nicely, I may put it on eBay.




We painted over the cabinet door in blackboard paint, which has worked out nicely. (I need to remember to buy yeast.)

Sometime, hopefully this summer, we plan to get a new countertop and backsplash, and add some undercabinet lighting. (We'd planned on doing all this during March as well, but a few looks at the checkbook killed that plan.) This will help break up the expanse of white and add a little more interest.

For the time being, we're turning our attention to the outdoors. We have house painters scheduled to come in June, and need to make some exterior improvements before then. Stay tuned - Craig now owns a reciprocating saw....

Tragic.

We appear to have lost our digital camera. Sigh. We remember taking pictures at Adam and Glennae's wedding, but nothing after that.

There's nothing like losing something semi-valuable to make you feel like a little kid again. I feel like hanging my head and rubbing my shoes in the dirt, while some Authority Figure (who is a combination of my dad, my Grandpa Schwarzkopf, and my eigth-grade history teacher) tells me that people who lose things like this don't deserve to have them in the first place.

But these things happen. But this time, they're happening in mid-project, so we can't offer any "during" pictures of the cabinets. I'll have to be descriptive in the meantime.

Our kitchen is currently in chaos, with all the contents of the cabinets emptied, and only the really essential things, like coffee and wine glasses, on the countertops. I've primed the interior of the cabinets, so it's kind of splotchy and white. The frames are still pine-colored, with wood epoxy patching all the holes. Craig manfully ripped down the scrolled piece of wood over the sink, exposing a very 1950's light fixture that's seen better days.

We ended up working with oil-based paint, on the advice of a very helpful gentleman from Abbott Paint & Carpet in St. Paul. (A paint store that knows their stuff is a great resource - they also helped me with the front door project.) Apparently latex paint will always be a little tacky where surfaces touch, but oil-based paint will not, and will hold up a bit better. I'm sure we'll appreciate this when our house doesn't stink like oil primer.

We've also ordered oil-rubbed bronze hardware from a pair of eBay vendors. We ended up getting all of the necessary hardware for about $130. We were excited to receive the box of hinges last night, but then discovered that we ordered the standard hinge, when what we needed was the lipped hinge. Oops.

Well, the wrong hinges are winging their way back to Tennessee to be exchanged, and we're planning on sanding the frames, priming them, and painting those and the cabinet interiors this weekend. Hopefully we will have plates in our cabinets again early next week.

Onward, Kitchen Soldiers

Well, we've decided on painting the cabinets. The prep will likely be as time-intensive as it would be with staining, but I'm much more confident in my ability to produce a nice-looking finish with paint.

After a little bit of thought, we're also planning on replacing the countertop, putting up a subway tile backsplash, and adding undercabinet lighting while we've got everything dismantled.

A couple of photos for inspiration. The first is from a UK kitchen designer, and the second was posted on the GardenWeb Home Decorating forum.

About the kitchen cupboards...

We've finally gotten around to doing something about our kitchen cabinets. They're flush panel pine, and I imagine that they're the ones that came with the house in 1952. After fifty years, they're not in the greatest of shape.



The finish has become quite brassy over the yellow pine, but I suppose it could be worse - they could be knotty pine.


We'd like to remove this piece, but need to figure out how to do it without damaging the existing cabinets too much.



I once saw an episode of "Designed to Sell" in which the illustrious Lisa LaPorta used Howard Restor-A-Finish to refresh some kitchen cabinets. Since Craig and I harbor a soft spot for HGTV's Design Bulldog, we decided to give it a try.

Before:


After: A TSP scrubbing and the Restor-A-Finish definitely cleaned up the finish, but didn't go far enough. The most amazing thing is the feel of the wood after using the Restor-A-Finish - it's silky smooth. Fear not, though, fans of LaPorta. The Restor-A-Finish will be put to good use on our doors and woodwork. But not until summer when we can open the windows - that's some stinky stuff.


We're left with two options to make the cabinets look nice. New hardware is a given. I waffle on this every day. In an effort to get it out on virtual paper, here are the options.

Strip, Sand, Stain, & Polyurethane
Pros
1. Craig likes the look of wood.
2. A medium tone would look nice with the beige appliances.
3. I can practice my staining skills with my mom, who has graciously agreed to come up for a weekend in March and help with the project.
Cons
1. This is a lot of work.
2. In light of #1, these are not particularly nice cabinets. If we had the cash, we'd happily rip them out and start anew.
3. I don't really like pine - the yellow tones look brassy to me, even when they haven't seen fifty years of use.
4. There's a veneer, and I'm a little scared of having the veneer buckle while stripping.

Paint
Pros
1. The workload is considerably less than with stripping, sanding, and refinishing.
2. Painting would allow us to sand down the cupboards, fill old nail holes with spackle or skim coat, and have a nice, clean result. Because of this, could use cabinet knobs without having a noticable hole from the existing hardware.
Cons
1. Craig likes the look of wood better.
2. I might have trouble finding a paint color that would match the appliances.
3. We'd need to touch up more often than with a wood finish.

Have I mentioned that I'm an obsessive planner? And self-doubter? Yes? Carry on, then.