Long, Hard Weekend

We had a long, hard weekend of work at 86'n it.

I'm too tired to write all the details, so here are the photos:

I stayed home Friday afternoon to wait for the cooktop delivery. Here she is. So nice!

Stair

Before........Scraped.........Done! (Mostly)

Upstairs View

Before....... Done!

And what is that you see down the hallway in the downstairs "Done" photo? Is the door open?

Nope! That is one of our 2 new back doors! Yeah for no snow coming in them this winter!

Crap photo of door #1 from the hallway.............Good photo of door #2 in the kitchen

We also had my sister and the boys up and went to get a Christmas Tree!

We went to Sandy Holler Farms. This year all the good trees are up by the entry, but you can still do a tractor ride out to see the animals!

And here she is. We haven't had time to decorate yet.

Yipppee! A cool stroller that fits in Winnie's Trunk!

So I have been meaning to publish this for a while. Last month, I was really stressing about which stroller to get. This is an important purchase for us because we walk to work currently, and will continue to walk to work AND daycare. (The daycare is 3 doors from Marc's office and 2 blocks from mine.)

But of course, we needed one that looked great (because we are design snobs), that fit in the Mini's trunk (no mini van here) AND one that was not $900 (because I'm cheap).

My search was exhaustive. I did days and days of research online. We stroller stalked people the whole time we were in Boston for my brother's wedding. We made the poor lady at the baby store in Boston fold and unfold every single (pricey) stroller they had.

I figured out I wanted to Maxi Cosi carseat because I read that it fit nicely in the Mini Cooper, it looks great, is not too heavy and has good safety ratings. Check out the Citrus Green color. So cool! (This is the color we want even though our dumb registry will only let me add the blue one! So frustrating.)

Anyway, then I saw the Maxi Cosi Foray stroller online. The carseat snaps right into it with no adapters! It looks great! It has good reviews. AND it sells for half of what the similar looking ones go for! Marc and I headed over to BabiesRus. Marc spotted it right away. We had to get the manager to let us take the floor model outside to my car, but Voila!

It fits in the trunk! I was WAY too excited! (This one is in the brown color, but we are getting the all black.) The other great things about it is that the baby can face you OR out. The handles extend for taller people (like Marc). It reclines. And the big back wheels make it move nicely too!

  

Phew! So glad that is over. I thought I'd post about this because my exhaustive search I found other Mini Cooper owner blogs to be really helpful!

Things I Love: Good Friends, JCP & Laser Cats

The countertop guy said today or tomorrow for installation, which means Friday or Monday. We shall see!

I had a VERY bad case of the itchie bitchies yesterday (like the heebie jeebies, but for bad moods, not scary stuff). I was going to go home and go shoe shopping. (I need a pair of black ankle boots.) Good thing that my BFF JCP had delivered me the backordered roman shades! Seriously, JCPenny can't be beat for prices on thermal blinds and curtains. So instead of going shoe shopping, I hung those.

Unfortunately, the newness of their white excentuates the dirty white of the window trime, but oh well. Marc and I still think they look great!

I have also been meaning to post these photos. With great thanks to good friends, the parlor is looking pretty good! The rug is from Calder & Aaron who's daughter wouldn't stop eating it. Bad for her digestion, good for us. I have always wanted one of these felt pile rugs. They got this at the pottery barn outlet.

The newest addition is from my other great friend, Accent Table Fairy Michelle! You already know Michelle from the other THREE coffee tables she picked up for me. Nothing says awesome person like a voicemail stating: "I found a coffee table for you, I think you will like it. It is $5. I will leave it on your porch." AMAZING! This one fits perfectly in the parlor!

My favorite photo, though, has to be the one below. Look closely. Our house is haunted by laser cats! I about fell off my stool this morning when I re-looked at this and noticed the window!

Then I spent the rest of the night doing little things like using an entire roll of painter's tape on the stairway. (And I am still not done!) Painting starts tomorrow night!

Heat Gun - Take One

As part of operation "De-crack House for Thanksgiving" I decided to tackle the stairs. There are numerous issues with these stairs. First, the design is a little crazy. The railing at the 2nd floor is, I believe, 20" off the finished floor. While Marc and I are completely used to it, it makes guests feel like they are about to plunge to their deaths. In addition, the treads are pine and the risers are oak, so it is not like we can strip and stain both and have it match and look nice. Nope.

Our nightmare floor refinisher dude sanded and restained the treads (good), but he also removed and did not reinstall 15 of our pickets. We have been WAY too lazy to do that ourselves, so the weakness of the railing made the newel post SUPER unsecure (not helping with the guest's death-by-stairs fears).

Marc hates the stair railing and I do too. We will eventually remove it and do something modern. But in true de-cracking style, we (read: I) decided it must be fixed and painted. So I spent all weekend striping the risers and stringer of paint. Why not just paint over it? Because all of our woodwork was originally shellac'd, which is great except latex paint doesn't stick to it worth a damn. (Which led to Marc's paint peeling disorder and my subsequent multiple "WHY are you making our house look WORSE?" freak out sessions.)

I now have blisters on every single fingertip from the heat gun. The heat gun is pretty amazing, but it did make me realize that I DON'T want to strip and stain the woodwork in our house. The heat gun is really great at getting the majority of the paint off, but the thought of getting it out of every little crack and hole? No thanks. I think we will stick to the plan of having painted woodwork and stained doors (because those you can take off and have dipped!).

Having successfully NOT set my hair on fire with the heat gun. I moved on and then reinstalled all 14 of the 15 missing pickets I could find. Next up, we did a truly ingenious fix to the loose newel post. I installed two 6" long carriage bolts and tightened. Viola! Ready for paint. I'm pretty excited about this painting.

Oh, and I also installed the ceiling fan in the nursery. (Which included some Black Lung from going to the attic to install a new fan ceiling box.) The fan is a little bigger than we imagined, but it looks great and runs smooth and noiselessly.

But the Maytag it is more "Architectural"!

I have a great husband.

I really do.

Because when we bought this crack house, I promised him that he could design the kitchen...

Then when the time came, I told him he could pick the appliances. Oh, but they had to be white, they had to be glass and they had to be Jenn-Air.

But he could REALLY pick the cooktop... because I really didn't care about that....

Then when that time came (today), I ONLY pouted for 2 hours or so when he wanted the Whirlpool, not the Maytag.

Whirlpool ............... Maytag

I'm not proud of myself either, because when I fight, I fight dirty, and when I pout, I pout dirty. It went something like this:

I stuck my bottom lip out.

I "Le Sigh"ed.

I photoshopped a sad, frown-y face on the Maytag.

I even busted out the "I'm carrying your child."

Tre Embarrassing.

I mean, he is a tough guy. He can carry heavy stuff. He owns a table saw and an F-150. He listens to Hockey Night in Canada for pete's sake!

But: "I'm carrying your child"? That is too much for even the toughest guy. And I'm mortified that I stooped to it.

And I PROMISE, PROMISE he can pick out the faucet with no interference from me.

I PROMISE. :)

Ready for the beer and cards!

Marc did back-breaking work all weekend sanding, staining and finishing the back porch wood floors. They look beautiful!

It is pine flooring with a Zar stain in rosewood with black dye added (by the kind folks at our local Benjamin Moore.) Between coats of finish he'd have to lay flat on the living room floor to ease his back. Poor guy.

So this area is almost ready for a porch party! Break out the chips, beer and cards. NA beer for me of course. Guiness makes a pretty tasty one called Kaliber.

 

Meanwhile, I was doing some back-breaking work of mine own. One of the items on my pre-thanksgiving list was to stain and paint the dining room chairs. My mom graciously bought these chairs (and a small round table) a couple of years ago at auction. They are sturdy, but in various states of painted and unpainted. So I sanded, stained, sealed and painted them to blend better in our dining room! Here is the before and after:

 

If I was smart, I would have taken the "before" picture of the worst chair, but I didn't, this is actually the best one. You can see the most challenging one behind it, it was competely covered in about 5 layers of paint! 

Slab Sneak Peak!

The countertop guy was driving thru to show the neighbors their slab and also came by our house. This is their slab, but ours will look almost exactly like this because it is cut from the same block. 

It is a little more vein-y then we would have picked had we gone to the stone yard, but I really like it. We both agree that the natural look will be great next to our shiny modern cabinets. As Marc put it: "It looks like the bottom of a canyon!"

In related news, we had to hop on buying a sink, so we could give him the template to cut the hole. Good thing we have already researched the crap out of appliances and such things. We ended up going with a zero-radius undermount stainless steel sink. Thanks to a great tip from Grassroots Modern, we got a good deal at overstock.com.

 

...and we bought countertops.

In a truly bizarre turn of events, we bought soapstone countertops today for a really great price.

The whole story: neighbors of ours just bought their house +2 months ago and are doing a significant renovation/repair. Honestly, their speedy progress has been really hard to watch. It is like a beehive over there with contractors working away making crazy improvements. I've just had to force myself to envision all those workers as big walking dollar signs in order to not loose my mind! (The owners are doing a fair amount of work themselves too.)

Anybunny, we have several mutual friends, one of whom told us that our neighbors just got a screaming deal on soapstone countertops. So I walked over last night to get the scoop. Turns out a stone company in Charlotte is going out of business and 14 hours later, we have bought countertops sight unseen! Scary, but at ~$45/sf installed, we decided to just do it!

Marc and I can't stop laughing. It is just so bizarre. Best thing is, that is better than the price we would have paid to go pick up stones and cut and install them ourselves! Now we have to finalize our sink, faucet and cooktop selections. The poor, broken hot plate will soon be outdated! :)

More info to come, we are hoping them will be installed in 2 weeks!

What is worse than a sink full of dishes?

Q: What is worse than a sink full of dishes?

A: The adjacent dishwasher that you bought ELEVEN months ago and never hooked up.

If anything screams pathetic (well besides the broken hot plate knob, more on that below), THIS is it. The excuses for not having hooked up the dishwasher were sort of justified at first, but got more and more lame as the months stretched on. First it was that we are waiting on the garbage disposal (slumbering comfortably in its box in the basement btw) which was waiting on the sink, which is dependent on the countertops, which was dependent on both availability of a large soapstone slab and cold hard cash. Well, wouldn't you know it, when big slabs came in, the money was gone. :( So now here we are many, many months later with plywood countertops, a $30 Home Depot sink, no garbage disposal and a very sparkly virgin dishwasher.

Le Sigh.

I guess some people call it "nesting" when pregnant women get a burst of energy in their 2nd trimester, but I don't think that is what I have. (Marc says we've been nesting in this crack house for +2 years now.) For me, it is more about exhaustion and using my pregnancy as a way to get Marc to cave in on things I want to do. So I put "hook up dishwasher" on my pre-thanksgiving list and presto! from 8pm-10:30pm last night it happened. I wish it had been more "plug and play", but the work included installing a new water connection, a plywood boost on the floor, re-rigging our drain situation and drilling the crap out of the cabinet side-wall. When it was all said and done, I shed a tear, and I'm not even blaming it on the hormones.

Of course, no good deed goes unpunished. As soon as we get the dishwasher working, the trusty "temporary solution, turned 1.5 year cooking device" hot plate gets broken. I twisted the knob too hard and it just kept spinning. Then I accidentally swept up the little broken piece with the shop vac before we had a chance to super glue it back into working order.

So goes my life.

You can turn the metal part with your fingernail to turn it off and on, which I'm sure we will continue to do for another 1.5 years until we get the real gas cooktop (again dependnet on big slabs and big money.)

I'm really resisting the urge to put vise grips on it .

(You can take the girl out of Ohio, but you can't take the Ohio out of the girl.)

Window #2

We are currently tackling our pre-thanksgiving to do list. Marc has the big items (porch floor, new back doors) and I have a million little things. Like painting the kitchen window. I know it isn't a big deal, but it is not a great window, so I wanted it to not be the dirty yellow focal point of the kitchen.

Before..........After

I know it is just a little thing, but that window was driving me crazy. The paint was THICK and gobbed on and filthy dirty. Plus, whoever painted it that horrid yellow never scraped the paint off the glass (just like the teal upstairs!).

Here's a belly shot (don't I look enormous?) showing the crappy window a little closer, and then a finished close up.

I wanted to get new hardware, but of course, this stuff is so old that they don't sell hinges that size anymore AND a new similar latch is nowhere to be found.

So I soaked them 24 hours in turpentine and got the 15 layers of paint off. The hinges still looked like crap, so I just spray painted them white, but the latch actually looks really great stripped!

I need to get blackened screws to match that original finish (I think it is just patina'ed brass) and then I'll be all set!

A sneak peak at Marc's work: Here is the really beautiful back porch step. It might actually be good weather at the end of the week for staining!

No More Flashing the Neighbors :(

Here is my long-overdue window repair post. Goodbye, peeling yucky teal paint!

Before..............After

Here is a little detailed before shot. Nice painting job right? I had to scrape the old paint off the glass before I could even start. I got new hardware too.

Then we had to tackle window coverings which was a tall order. We wanted something room darkening, dark in color but white on the backside, thermal, oh and cheap too. I originally ordered roman shades on sale at Penney's (JCPenney to you non-Ohioans) and got white curtains in-store to go in front.

Then a happy accident, we went to target late one night and found really nice, chocolate brown thermal, white backed shades for 75% off! We got these for $8.75 each!

I took $110 of curtains back to JCP, but left the order in for the white roman shades because we decided to use them in the living room downstairs. Too bad they are on backorder until November 23rd!

Here are the pics:

The color scheme is not quite pulled together yet, but the green bedspread has a chocolate brown thread pattern.

Anyone know how hard it would be to stain the crib and chaining table darker?

In other progress, I ordered a really cool ceiling fan last night. It is the Minka Aire Concept I. Lists for $330, normally sells for $270, but I got it on clearance at LightingUniverse.com for $173! Minka fans are supposed tobe really great quality, and I have to admit, I really struggled with finding an affordable, quality modern ceiling fan. Especially hard was finding one where the light didn't hang down 10 more inches!

Sexy no?

We will only have it on the shortest drop rod (3"), but it should still look great.

Now all I need is a rug!

Stay Tuned...

We are having some guys come out today to do an inspection and quote for a new firebox... very exciting!

This is a unit from Morso that will go into our existing fireplace. It qualifies for the tax credit AND will help us use our gas heat much less. Stay tuned for more info.

Post inspection note:

If you see a photo on the internets of a pregnant lady in a dress lying on the floor looking up a chimney... that would be me!

We just had a the fireplace/chimney sweep company come over and give us an estimate on the new firebox. He was showing Marc how there was a bunch of creosote build-up in the flue and I wanted to see it too. I must have looked hilarious to him, because he asked if he could take my picture. I didn't think anything of it, but I guess he doesn't get many women interested in fireplace flues, let alone a pregnant one in a dress!

HA!

Frita's Room Fabrics!

So, big news! It's a.... GIRL!!

Now I really need to get started on the nursery! The first thing is the windows. The windows are currently a peeling teal yucky paint. I need to scrap and paint this first, then put up the window treatments.

I was supposed to pick out fabric for the curtains and other things BEFORE we knew the sex of the baby so that we wouldn't end up with a too girly or too boyish room, but I slacked and didn't make a decision. I decided today on a pretty neutral green tree-print fabric, that I will embelish with the other accents. Here are the swatches:

It is a Joel Dewberry print. These are the colors I like, but all 4 might be a little much, eh?

In real life, the green is lighter and goes very well with the indigo. I'm thinking the green for the curtains and the pinks for pillows and other things. We need the orange because we are using our orange Poang chair from the parlor as the nursery chair, and sadly, they don't offer the ottoman in the orange anymore, so I'll have to make one.

Junk Room Slightly Less Junky

You know what is really discouraging? When you bust your butt all weekend, diligently taking before and after photos only to discover that the end result is sort of embarrassing.

We are hosting Thanksgiving this year, which means no fewer than 10 people will be sleeping at our house. I used this as a great excuse to finally clean and stage the downstairs junk room as a guest bedroom.

We don't have time right now to patch and paint the walls & ceiling because these are REALLY damaged. This is the area right under the upstairs bathroom. If you remember when we bought the house, the tub was leaking like crazy and while sitting on the toilet, you could see into this bedroom below. Awesome.

So staging this room included cleaning and organizing the future downstairs bathroom which is adjacent. We have been using this area to store tools, hockey equipment and junk. Here is the before and after of that space:

And here is the before's of the junk room. It is pretty out of control. Stuff stacked to the ceiling, dried cat barf on the floor, an old refrigerator... We are really pigs.

I managed to reorganize and purge it down to this:

And because Marc and I are on a furniture buying ban (until we can afford nice stuff), my coworker generously donated a bed! (Which I promptly painted matte black.)

And here is the disappointing part. These photos are sad. I promise it doesn't look this bad in person. The wall damage is not that noticeable. I'm going to post these small.

The sidetable is actually a storage shelf with a skirt made of pillow cases. :) I really like the bed painted black too. These photos are dark, but I wish you could see the flooring. I cleaned it 3 times, then oiled it. It looks nice.

I made a closet enclosure too to shade that wall-o-junk.

I'd love to actually patch the walls and REALLY fix this room, but alas, we have too much other stuff to do. It is right now what I wanted, which is a room that is clean enough to have someone sleep in at Thanksgiving.

Sigh.

First "Nursery" Endeavor

While most of the weekend was spent doing this:

I made some time today to undertake my first nursery endeavor: hanging an awesome print!

Yes, this is 3d! Don't you just love those little butts? Thanks Adam!