business cards

If you're curious about some of the process that goes into designing products for businesses, you should hop over and check out the Anapurna Girls blog -- I've just put up a post detailing the design process I went through putting together our business cards.

he's no duff

When Don and his dad went to install that first piece of subfloor, they discovered that they needed to do a little bit of work first. See, when they sistered the new joists in, the old floor was sooooo un-level that sometimes the top edges of the new joists were above the old ones, and sometimes the old ones peeked over the edge of the new ones. So all of the places where the old joists were higher than the new joists had to be planed down. Rather than going and getting a power planer or anything sensible, Don decided to use the reciprocating saw to just slice off the bits that needed to go.


The process looked a lot like leveling out a cake for decorating. Just... noisier.

don't worry, he doesn't do ALL the work

Sometimes Don's dad supervises!


Note the disapproving expression. I'm pretty sure this is right before he asked Don what the hell he was doing (again).

garden inspiration

If I had a garden -- okay, if I was at all capable of growing things without immediately killing them -- this is what I would want it to look like.

we're the turtle, not the hare

Slow and steady wins the race! The first few pieces of subflooring are in. There are three or four more joists to put in in the dining room and family room, and then the living room and foyer need to be done, but right now, when you step from the kitchen into the family room, you step on solid floor. It's so exciting!


That's Don screwing in the first piece of subfloor (and making fun of me for asking him to face the camera a little more while he was doing it).

I'll post something a little more detailed about the process later this week; my workload has abruptly picked up so I'm busy trying to cross things off of my to-do list. But I took LOTS of pictures this weekend while the menfolk were working (they kept yelling for me to come downstairs with the camera because they were doing "something interesting" -- once it was snapping a chalk line, good lord). So don't worry, more is forthcoming.

why you shouldn't renovate with kids

Because your kids will grow up thinking that living in a house under construction is totally the norm, and just as you are almost done with your own house and ready to relax, they will call you up and say, "Hey! Want to come over and work on my house now?" And then they will give you all the hard, dirty jobs, like taking out the expansion tank from the radiator system, and while you are doing that their spouse will take pictures of you and post them on the internet.


A big thank you to Don's dad for all of his help with our projects, even if he did say he's going to start charging me for all the pictures I post of him.

for a construction day, they produced a lot of demolition debris

Before Don and his dad could get started on the floors, they discovered that they needed to do some further demolition work. Specifically, they had to remove all of the wiring that had been run through (and I do mean through) the joists in the basement.


I don't honestly know if this is standard practice or not; I don't believe we'll be doing it if we rewire (I think there are little brackets you can buy now to attach wires to other things without drilling through them) although Don, as usual, is the final arbiter of what we're going to do in cases like this (and by "Don", I mean "Don's dad").

In any case, they lost a good part of the morning by having to do this, cutting down on how much floor work they could do, but it wasn't such a great loss, since they wound up getting a massive head start on the electrical work that needed to be done.

For those of you curious about the procedure, they first turned all the electricity off in the house (putting a severe damper on my plans to do my design homework). When you do this, and are working with the breaker box, keep in mind that the main feed into the box is still going to be live. Don't touch it. Next step was to start cutting and pulling. They did this in a mostly-organized fashion, room by room, and followed each line all the way back to the breaker box. Once a breaker was empty, they removed it from the box (sorry, I have no idea how to do this -- maybe Don will comment with his technique, since I was upstairs being cold the whole time [edit: see Don's comment here]).

A large number of breakers were emptied and removed from the box, which is a great start on the rewiring work we need to do. So, not such a loss for the morning.

how to level your old floors

Don and his dad got started on the process of making the floors on the first floor level this weekend, so I had them explain it to me (twice) so that I could explain it to you folks. The first step, of course, is to have some fraternity boys come rip out your floors for you.

Once you are down to the joists, you need to acquire some string. Take the string and use a line level to secure it above your first joist in a level position. You may have to do some triangulating to do this; Don tied one end of the string on the far wall, then took it diagonally over to his first joist in the center of the room and lined it up, then strung it diagonally all the way over to the near wall of the room (yes I know that's not really what triangulating is, I couldn't think of a better word). Just drive a nail in wherever you need an end of the string to be, and tie the string around it. And don't forget to put your line level on before you tie it off. Then you can fiddle the string up and down on your nails until it's level.

The next step is to "sister" your first joist. Sistering a joist means that, rather than removing an old, unlevel joist, you take a new one and put it in right next to the old one, attaching the two together for lots of support. Obviously, you use your now-level string to determine the level position of the new joist. Once you've gotten the first joist in, you can use that to determine the level of the next joist.

That's a fairly simplistic explanation of a slightly complicated process, but that's basically how you do it.

How you navigate your way across the open joists that now comprise your only floor is, of course, up to you.

easter weekend

It sounds like lots of you had pretty fabulous Easter weekends, which is awesome. Go you. Here on Louisiana Avenue, on the other hand, we were cold. Very, very cold. I'm not sure who ordered this April cold snap but I really think it ought to be sent back to the kitchen.

We did finally borrow some space heaters from Chez Brinkley, and since we put them in the bedroom the cat has not moved from her little curled-up ball on the bed as close to the nearest heater as possible (although last week we found her curled up asleep on a towel on the floor with one paw delicately resting on the o-ring she found in the basement, which she's been carrying around with her for days).

In order to avoid the cold (mostly unsuccessfully), we did an assortment of things -- we went out for Mexican food on Friday night, and I did the laundry (finally!) on Saturday morning while Don and his dad started work on the subfloors (more about that tomorrow, I think -- I don't have time today to do it justice). Then I shivered hopelessly in bed (we didn't get the heaters until Saturday night, and I think you can guess on whose shoulders that particular bit of poor planning falls) while they continued to curse and hammer things downstairs. Then another night out to eat.

On Sunday we bought Don new shoes at the only store in the entire city that remained open (don't even get me started about how we utterly failed to find me a dress for the formal in two weeks), and then went to his parents' house and ate Easter dinner and played Cranium. Then we scuttled back into the modest warmth of our space-heatered bed and collapsed.

Someday, weekends will be restful again. Someday.

on bearing walls and floor joists

One of the things that was something of a surprise -- and a challenge -- to us was finding out which walls in our house were bearing walls. Since we wanted to make rather large holes in various walls to create a more open floor plan on the first floor, we need to know which walls might make the house fall down if we touched them. Pretty sensible of us, I think. Anyway, normally the easiest way to tell which is a bearing wall if you've got a little access to the innards of your house is to see which way the floor joists run. The bearing walls will be the ones which are perpendicular to the floor and ceiling joists (if I were better at physics and spatial relationships I'd be able to explain why this is true to you, but I'm not, so I'm just telling you what I know [somebody who is smarter than me will undoubtedly weigh in in the comments, keep an eye out]).

Anyway, so when we first pulled down the plaster in the dining room and family room, last May, we were surprised and a little dismayed to find that our handy little tip didn't work. See, the floor joists on the first floor run in the complete opposite direction of the floor joists on the second floor. Which is not supposed to happen. I mean, it's not like a horrible disaster which might cause the house to come crashing down around our ears or anything, but it's not really normal, either. And of course it made it awfully confusing trying to figure out which walls were load bearing.

As it turns out, all of the walls in the dining room are load bearing. So it didn't really matter anyway.

Anyway, now that the floors and ceilings and walls and stuff are all gone, I thought I'd try to get a photo of this little architectural phenomenon for you.


Somewhere to the left of the photo frame, the floor joists on the first floor actually somehow change direction. Like it's okay to do that or something. Not okay, floor! Not okay!

how does your cat feel about all this violent transformation?

She is annoyed.


Actually she's taken to searching the basement for interesting things. If it's something she likes, she stows it in the upstairs bathroom (Don stepped on an o-ring this morning). If it's something she thinks we would like, she deposits it next to the bed for us (last time she did it, it was a four inch long roofing nail, which I promptly stepped on).

but if you don't have any floors anymore, how are you getting around the house?

On plywood. Carefully.

pictures are all up

Okay, the full set of photos is now up on Flickr here -- I added all the photos from Adam's camera. Go ahead and take a look.

Here's my favorite of the new ones: Don just starting to tear up the very first floorboard!

demo day

I've uploaded the photos I took on my own camera of Saturday's demolition to a Flickr set here. Keep checking back, because I took photos using Adam's camera, too, and he just emailed them to me. I'm going to upload all those to the same set late tonight, after I get back from dinner with my mom. His memory card is bigger than mine (that's what SHE said!) so there's a bunch more pictures from him.

Some highlights, for those of you too lazy to click the link:

Don got his hand stuck under a radiator.


Bobby and Scott headbutted a hole in the living room wall to start things off (because they are really, really cool).


The floors are really, really gone (that's Don's dad working on tearing up the last floor to go, in the family room).

ladies, meet bobby

Bobby is the reason why I didn't have to do any heavy lifting last night.


At about seven o'clock last night, Bobby came over to our house, and he and Don (both, you'll note, sporting some lovely fraternity gear) proceeded to move pretty much all of our big furniture into the garage in preparation for this weekend.


Next step: all the boxes of books. Don has to repack them (we've been rummaging through them for books for the past year, never thinking we'd need to actually move the boxes til we unpacked -- silly us!), and then move them out to the garage. Then he has to move all his tools out of the dining room, and then we are sort of ready to go. Sort of.

All I know is that my job is to be at the donut store at 7 AM on Saturday so that there will be donuts when people start arriving. It's a very important job.

my own surprise

YOU GUYS! Look what I did! Me! All by myself!


Me me me!!

grueling

Peeps, I am losing all my motivation, and this is so the wrong time for it. I'm a little stressed out with my various commitments, and stress sort of makes me shut down. I'm deep in the throes of a seriously down cycle, and I've spent the last couple of days unable to do much of anything besides lay in bed. And Don just emailed me this schedule for the upcoming pre-demolition week (I should probably mention that all bizarre spelling and phrasing is his):

Demo Week List…
Tuesday
Get boxes back from parents
Bag up couch pillows and extra blankets
Breakdown TV area
Breakdown Jamaila table
Put cabinet back together
Wednesday
Into Garage:
Couches
China Cabinet
Corner Cabinet
Bookcases
Coffee table
TV Unit
Dinning room table
Jamaila Table
Thursday
Dumpster stuff in house
Friday
Move TV to parents
Move treadmill to parents
Move electronics to parents
Drain radiators
Sort tools

I have no idea how I am going to get through the next several days.

garage floor

Progress this weekend was about preparation for the big demo day next weekend. On Sunday, while I went out to breakfast with my dad and my grandparents before they headed back up to New Jersey, Don and his dad got in some male bonding time and built a temporary garage floor. I don't know if I've mentioned it, but our garage is actually separated into two halves. It's a two car garage, but there's a wall in the middle of it, dividing it. The right side is a wood shop -- it was Pop-Pop Brinkley's, long ago, and then Uncle Eddie inherited it, and now it's Don's. Or rather, it will be Don's once he sets it up. Right now it's mostly a clearinghouse for all the stuff I didn't want in the house, like various tools and building supplies. The other side of the garage is completely unfinished -- to the point of actually having a dirt floor. When we moved in, the dirt floor had several layers of slowly decaying plywood laid unevenly over it. That's what went in the dumpster last week. On Sunday, Don and his dad put together a simple frame of 2x4s and nailed sheets of plywood into it, making a very basic platform floor for the unfinished side of the garage. This is where our furniture is going to go (not the electronics, just stuff like couches and tables) sometime this week, to clear out the first floor for demolition this coming weekend.

And, for those of you who will inevitably ask, the reason we don't keep our cars in the garage is because they don't fit. It was built in 1920; I drive an SUV. You do the math.

new anapurna blog

Most of you probably already know this, but I have this jewelry business. It's pretty cool. We're working on some brand identity things right now, and as part of that, we've put together a behind-the-scenes blog. We're going to share everything we do and learn about growing a business, marketing, designing jewelry, etcetera. It should be pretty fun. Feel free to add us to your blogroll and come along for the ride.

where i come from

I went to visit my mom in January, as I mentioned yesterday. While I was there, I took a few pictures of her house, since I thought you all might like to see it. See, when I was in elementary school, my parents got it into their heads to build their dream house. They found some property on a mountainside with one of the best views in the city:


The view is a better on a clear day, but hello, I was there in the middle of January. Behind that cloudbank at the back of the picture is basically the entire city of Spokane (downtown is on the right, suburbs to the left). It's pretty amazing -- and the sunsets are worth paying for. As you can tell by the bit of roof in the corner of the picture, this was taken on the upper balcony of the house, which is right off of my sister's room. When we were in high school we used to climb over the safety rail and go tan naked on the roof. Country living has its benefits.

Anyway, my parents are generally pretty awesome people, and they have some pretty awesome ideas about design. So in the middle of the house is this:


Yes, it's a three story atrium with a gothic arch. And skylights. You can also see my mom's collection of rugs -- she brought them home from Afghanistan and India (feel free to ask about this sort of thing -- my mom lurks in the comments here and can answer any questions you have!). At the bottom of the atrium is the basement courtyard, which has a cool feature inspired by the back room in this store in Seattle's U District: the brick floor is not mortared or grouted or even sanded, just laid in loose, so that when you walk on it the bricks crinkle together and make a beautiful musical sound. It's really cool.

The whole house has a warm, earthy vibe, though it's filled with light from the huge windows built to maximize sunset-viewing. Part of this is because my parents chose their materials carefully; the kitchen floor is tiled in a warm red terra cotta tile, and the front hallway was done in this incredible slate:


Note that they chose to pull the slate up onto the stair risers, too -- at the time it was a fairly revolutionary design idea.

a romantic surprise

Remember when Don broke the bathtub? Yeah, the bathtub that was already missing a knob? Well, I never told you guys what happened when we went to fix it. (Oho, you say, a STORY!)

First of all, apparently double-knob bathtub faucets have become very unpopular, because we could only find ONE of them at the store. Most of them now seem to have just the one knob in various incarnations. So we bought the single faucet which fit our specifications and took it home.

First things first, we went ahead and took off the remaining knob -- which, of course, stuck, because it was rusted and gross and old. So Don just sort of hacked away at it until it broke off. Then we replaced the faucet itself -- which was the real problem, of course, since Don had broken the diverter. Next we went to replace the knobs and lo! They didn't fit. They were made to fit the pipes that came with the set, which of course were not the same size as ours. Of COURSE.

So, we had fixed the original problem, but in doing so had given ourselves a new problem. Try as we might, we couldn't get the new knobs on without tearing out the wall to get to the plumbing (SO not an option right now). So we put the old rusty vice grip back onto the left knob and hung a pair of pliers over the side of the tub to use to turn the right knob.

If you are pondering renovating your house, be prepared to have to use common hand tools in unusual situations, people. For reals.

Anyway, so things were that way for a few weeks, and then I went away to visit my mom in Washington state for a few days. When I got back, Don picked me up at the airport and drove me home. When we got in, he told me he had a surprise for me: he'd installed two brand new handles for the tub! Thrilled and excited, I rushed in to the bathroom and saw this:


Two brand new vice grips.

look what i found!

It was under the bathroom sink!

it's that time of year again

That's right -- it's dumpster season!


Our good friends over at Benjer delivered this dumpster on Friday, in the middle of some very unpleasant freezing precipitation (thanks guys!). Now we know why most of their other customers cancelled their deliveries, though -- by Saturday morning when we went out to start work, there was a LOT of ice inside that dumpster! We cleared what we could and left the rest to drain or dry up as it gets warmer, and went ahead and started loading. That's right, you heard me -- we accomplished something! We actually cleaned out the garage! Can you believe it? After months of nothing interrupted by brief periods of pipe-related panic (broken pipes so far this year: three), we have started to work again. And in honor of this accomplishment, I submit unto you a list (I love lists!):

Things We Put Into The Dumpster:
-a cooler
-a fireplace grate
-fake logs (there is no fireplace anywhere in the house, so I don't know where this stuff came from)
-a broken table
-a lot of decaying plywood that was forming the quasi-floor of the garage, having been laid directly onto the dirt
-a wheeled drafting table
-some sort of electric bug killer
-a lot of broken plexiglass
-some mysterious platform things -- maybe proto-floors?
-a big plywood base which we think might have been from Pop-Pop's train garden (a family hobby Don hopes to start up again someday)
-a giant glass window pane (we just couldn't think of a reason to save it -- plus it was pretty scratched up)
-a homemade shelf thingie
-some old homemade weights
-a box of fishing weights
-two really long metal poles

Things Which Could Not, For Legal Reasons, Go Into The Dumpster:
-two window air conditioners, broken
-three car batteries
-approximately twenty four pint sized cans of transmission fluid

Things Which Did Not Get Put In The Dumpster Yet Because They Are Really Heavy:
-the staircase unit from the pool
-the deck platform the staircase used to lead up to
-a fifty gallon drum
-an old barbeque
-lots of really long PVC pipe
-the antenna that used to be on the roof
-a lot of rubble

Things We Decided To Save:
-the school lockers (certain people will be glad to hear that we decided to salvage the lockers -- they are in pretty bad shape but I love them too much to let them go, so we will build the floor around them for now and try to refurbish them someday)
-an ancient post hole digger made entirely of steel (VERY HEAVY and no I didn't know that until I tried to pick it up. Don laughed at me. A lot.)
-several other old tools (maybe we'll start a museum!)
-some cabinet doors, because they were pretty (maybe we'll use them as frames for something crafty! or maybe they'll sit around in the woodshop until the next generation decides to clean out the garage)
-spiders (really we're just wusses)

2007: a pipe odyssey

Saturday, 2/3/07: My mother arrives in town, for yet another meeting plus a visit with her beloved daughter.

Sunday, 2/4/07: Morning: Mom and I go for a driving tour, wondering where she might live if she moved to Baltimore – hip, trendy Federal Hill? Historic Mount Vernon? Country living fancy-free in Sandy Spring? Then we head to Whole Foods, where we win free meat (no, I’m serious, we found a little paper football thingy and it turned out they were having a Super Bowl promotion, we won some hamburgers and some Italian sausage) and buy the ingredients to cook a nice dinner (leg of lamb!).
Afternoon: I teach my mother how to play World of Warcraft. She gets so caught up in fighting spiders and running into trees because she can’t do anything but walk in a straight line that she winds up staying until quite late, and by the time I get back from taking her to her hotel I’m far too tired to contemplate attacking the massive mound of dishes in the sink (roasting pan! cutting board! other cutting board! three kinds of knives! fifteen bowls! plates!).

Monday, 2/5/07: I have a day-long meeting out in Hagerstown, MD, an hour and a half away. It lasts two hours longer than it should, and I don’t get home until quite late. Still not ready to do dishes.

Tuesday, 2/6/07: I come home from work, fling everything I can fit into the dishwasher without bothering to rinse, and go to wash the roasting pan. The sink doesn’t turn on. The pipes, they are a-frozen. Panicking, I rush upstairs and check the upstairs bathroom faucets – if I can’t shower, I’m not leaving the house. Fortunately, it appears that only the pipes which go to the kitchen – which, as you may or may not remember, is an addition – are frozen. These pipes are the only pipes in the house which are actually ‘outside’ – they go out from the basement into the crawlspace under the kitchen before going up into the room. When Don comes home, I inform him of the real issue at hand: if there’s no water to the kitchen sink, I’m not cooking – there’s no way I’m dirtying more pots and pans that I can’t wash, even if we use paper plates. We’re not hungry anyway.

Wednesday, 2/7/07: Pipes are still frozen. Don calls a plumber, who comes out to the house and crawls around for a while, then tells Don he can’t get to the area where the pipes are frozen and charges us thirty dollars for his time. We go to Hardees for dinner.

Thursday, 2/8/07: Pipes are still frozen. We go to McDonald’s for dinner.

Friday, 2/9/07: I’m on the phone with my father when I pull up to the house after work. He is quite startled to hear me say a very bad word as I observe water coming out from the bottom of the side of the house. I rush inside – still on the phone – and find that the plumber, in testing the laundry room sink (which of course did not work on Wednesday) has left the spigot on, so the water is now rushing full strength into the sink. I turn it off and breathe a sigh of relief – until I realize that I can still hear water, from under the floor next to the pantry. I say another bad word. My father, who has never been to the house, attempts to offer suggestions as to what I ought to do. This is hard, when he has no idea where the kitchen is.

I call Don, who had been planning on working late, and tell him that he needs to come home right now. He tells me where the water shutoff for the house is, and I turn off the water and call my dad back to tell him that all is mostly well for the moment other than the fact that now I can’t go to the bathroom and all I can think about is peeing. Don calls back half an hour later, stuck in traffic, and sends me to the basement to turn various knobs and examine various pipes to see if we can isolate the problem. I am, for the most part, useless.

When Don gets home, we spend a great deal of time turning knobs and shouting back and forth to each other – “Do you still hear water? How about now? What if I do this?” We finally isolate the broken pipe – it’s the one that goes to the hose spigot on the side of the house, apparently – and manage to get the water turned off to it and turned on to everything else. I can safely pee again. We are very tired. We order subs for dinner.

Saturday, 2/10/07: We finally do the dishes and can once more cook in our kitchen! We order pizza for dinner to celebrate.

news

When even your grandmother is calling you and hinting that you ought to post in your blog, and is everything all right, etc. etc., you know you probably ought to post.

Hi, Grandma.

Anyway, life's been hectic. The roof is done, the gas is done, the stove is ordered. The scratch and dent store (or, as Don calls it, the bump and grind store) has not yet gotten in a matching set of the washer and dryer we want (the last time we went they had like twenty washers and no dryers). We'll get them when we can, though.

The big news is that today is my last day at my current place of employment. Because, you see, I got a new job. Which is half an hour from my house, and pays a significant amount more than I'm making now. So, you know, awesome. So I've been frantically finishing the last couple of projects I have here, and clearing out my office, and trying to put as many helpful things as possible into one place for whoever has this job next.

Plus, tomorrow morning I'll be on a flight to Washington that leaves at 6 AM, to visit my mommy. Don is staying home, so don't try to burgle the house or anything. I'm staying with my mom until Tuesday, when I fly back home, and then on Wednesday I'll be starting the new job. Busy busy busy!

PS: Mom I need to use your washer and dryer when I get there.

PPS: Yes people, I will be at the Baltimore blogger happy hour on January 24th at the Wharf Rat in Fells Point. Will you?

an extraordinarily large half bath

Don broke the shower this morning. The stem of the shower-pull (what are those things actually called? You know, the little thing you pull to make water stop coming from the tub faucet and start coming from the shower head) fell out of the top bit and fell straight through the faucet and plunked into the bathwater. (I said, "Did you reach in and feel around for it?" and he gave me a look like I might be a dangerous criminal on the loose.)

As we looked upon our poor maltreated bathtub -- yes, this is that bathtub -- Don began making plans to either stay home from work or come home early, in order to go to Home Depot and get a new faucet today, so that I would be able to shower.

"You do know," I said, "that we have another shower in this house."

He looked at me blankly for a minute, and then rolled his eyes. "No," he explained patiently. "We have a half-bath off the kitchen that just happens to have a bathtub in it."

Riiiight.

my preciousssss

We ordered this stove yesterday. It'll be delivered on January 19th, which is the weekend that Don and his dad will be finishing up the structural work and making room for it in the kitchen.

It's so beautiful! *sniff*

wednesday = home improvement

Talk about a productive day.

The roofers got here at 7:30 this morning. By the time they left -- around 5 PM -- the entire back side of the roof was stripped, and they'd begun putting new flashing on. Our sales rep called later and told us that the foreman had called him in a state of shock and informed him that there were in fact three full layers of shingles on our roof, attached with nothing less than four-inch nails (!). Gah. Anyway, the crew was super efficient and astonishingly clean -- they cleaned up all of the shingles that fell all around the house so that right now, while they aren't here, the only sign that they've been here is the dumpster in the driveway. Well, and the half-gone roof covered with tarp, but you catch my drift.

So anyway, right after the roofers got here, the first HVAC estimator got here, and spent about an hour talking to us and measuring the house. As he was pulling out, the plumber pulled in. We got him started, and sat down for a brief distraction (for any of you Wii-owning people, Super Mario Brothers for the NES is finally up in the virtual console. Just saying.). Then the second HVAC estimator showed up, and did the same thing as the first one.

The plumber stayed until about 3, and did an awesome job. We now have a brand spanking new -- and totally up to code -- gas line to feed our dryer, and another to feed our as-yet hypothetical gas stove.

So we tested the dryer and lo! It still doesn't work. Turns out that not only was the gas line all busted, the dryer is a piece of crap too. So buying a new washer and dryer is now necessary, not just a bonus (okay, the washer is a bonus, since ours works, but who doesn't want their washer and dryer to match?). So once we waved our friend Jason the plumber (ask for him, he is nice) away, we headed to the Sears in the Security Square mall, because Don's mom told us they have the biggest appliance showroom in the area. We'd looked online while the plumber was plumbing, and we wrote down a few numbers of a few stoves that looked likely. We thought we knew what washer and dryer we wanted, from a previous drooling expedition, so we thought we were set there.

Well, we got to Sears, and it turned out that the washer and dryer we thought we wanted would have cost a LOT. We looked around and found two other options which do the exact same thing, for a lot less, so we'll be doing some research and deciding between the two this week. But the big news is that we found a stove. And we actually agreed on it and everything. Anyone who knows us will know how monumental this is.

Anyway, I'll hopefully be a little more prepared later this week and I'll give you all links and pictures and that sort of thing, so you can see all the progress we've made. Seriously, I think we got more done today than we have this whole year.

official rules

Here is an extremely fuzzy cell phone picture to illustrate Official Christmas Rule #12:


By the end of the day, no matter what, I will be wearing a bow on my head.

I hope you all had a great holiday, whichever you celebrate -- as a 'blended' sort of family, we get lucky and celebrate Chanukah AND Christmas, which just means that we go to more parties -- and hopefully you'll all have a fantastic New Year.

My personal New Year is looking pretty damn sweet, pardon my language: we will be ordering a new washer and dryer and a new stove, getting a new roof, having heat installed, and finishing the downstairs structural work. All in the next couple of weeks. Talk about turning over a new leaf!

administration

I've just turned on word verification for comments. I apologize if it makes commenting more of a hassle for any of you, but I am getting a LOT of spam on some of my old posts, and it's filling up my inbox. I'm hoping this will solve the problem without me having to resort to comment moderation -- I am lazy, and don't want to have to sort through each and every comment and take action on them!

I'd once thought about switching this blog over to WordPress or Movable Type and getting a domain name for it, but I don't know if I really want to anymore. I suppose it depends on readership. If the masses suddenly start flocking here for my wisdom in great quantities, then it might be worth it, but as it is now -- not that I don't love you, my miniscule masses -- it seems like this is quite functional enough.

special guests

Our upcoming long holiday weekend is going to be filled to the brim with visitors -- paid ones! We have a plumber coming on Saturday to hopefully fix the gas line for the dryer (why yes, that is the 'Hallelujah Chorus' you hear playing in the background), and an HVAC person coming out to give us an estimate that morning. We'll be at Don's parents' place for most of the day on Monday, Christmas Day. Then Tuesday the roofers are coming to deliver thousands of pounds of shingles and a giant dumpster. Plus another two HVAC guys, and one on Wednesday when the roofers arrive to start work.

Maybe I'll feed them all cookies.

Anyway, I don't know how much time I'll have to blog, as the holidays -- yes, ours started almost a week ago, with Chanukah -- tend to be a little overwhelming. But at least more progress is getting made! I hope the plumber can fix our gas line -- being able to do laundry in my own house for the first time in a year would definitely be the best present of all.

here's how i feel about the holidays without all of you

cookies!

We made cookies! My friend Jocelyn came over on Sunday for Girls' Baking Day In (Lindley couldn't make it this time, but she promises to come next time), and we made more cookies than any two people ought to be able to physically produce. Above you can see our somewhat chaotic setup, on the new counter.

Don got me a Kitchenaid artisan mixer for Christmas (!) and gave it to me early so that I could use it for this, so when Jocelyn brought hers over, too, we had dual mixers going for our cookie madness. We made chocolate chip cookies (with semisweet chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, and walnuts), meyer lemon and black pepper cookies (sooooo good), Farmgirl's molasses ginger spice snaps, quatresemali (like cinnamon-y almond biscotti), and sugar cookies.

It was a productive sort of day -- and the Ravens are going to the playoffs, too! Awesome!

reader questions: how to get rid of a pool

I wrote about some of this a few other times -- in May and June, specifically, when we began the whole process -- but not about it as a whole, and someone asked, so I thought I'd tell you how we did it.

The first thing we did was take off the railings and most of the 'deck' planks, since they were in our way. Don started out trying, as he put it, to be 'civilized about it,' using an impact hammer to unscrew all of the bolts that held the various metal bits in place. It didn't work; the bolts all just became smooth and worn. So he got out his trusty reciprocating saw and its 'for metal' blade. Boom. Railings down. Unfortunately, we threw them away before Don's dad told us that they were worth money from the scrap metal recycling place, and after we took the deck planks off, somebody stole them, presumably to sell them to the same place. Damn!

After those large impediments were gone, we set to work draining the pool with a submersible pump connected to a garden hose, with the tail end tossed at the back of our property, in the weeds. We kept an eye on it and made sure that the ground didn't get too saturated, but since we did it during the summer it wasn't too much of a problem.

Once we'd gotten all the water out that we could with the submersible pump, Don donned his goo-proof boots and headed in with his trusty exacto knife, to cut the vinyl liner into easily-folded sections, which we then bundled into trash bags (my job was to steady the garbage can -- v. important).

Finally, it was time to really take that sucker apart. Most aluminum aboveground pools are constructed of slats which slide together on small tracks (kind of like hardwood flooring, but metal. And upright. And... uh... outside. So not like it at all, but whatever). So the trick is to slide the slats out -- they're also seated in a track which, in our case, was neatly buried under the ground. So it takes some yanking. We used crowbars, hammers, the reciprocating saw, leverage, and lots of brute force. It wasn't very fun. Some slats came out easily, others resisted until we literally cut them in half.

Finally, we (mostly Don) got all of it out, and we separated any plastic bits out -- the stairwell that led down into the pool, for one, and a few other drainage-y bits. Today, we rented a truck and loaded everything else up and took it to a scrap metal recycling center (I Googled "recycle maryland aluminum" and got a list; we chose the one Don's dad recommended, in Glen Burnie). They took the aluminum off our hands and we left $220 dollars richer (they give you 50 cents a pound! And 40 cents for the stuff that still had steel bolts in it).

So that's how you get yourself a lovely hole in your backyard, if you're interested. A lot of effort for a hole, let me tell you.

in debt

Last night we signed our lives away to the tune of twelve thousand dollars, to a very pleasant lady who reminded me a great deal of my mother's friend Debbie. It's the loan to pay for our new roof, which is due to be installed sometime after Christmas.

Apparently, our roof is very big. Who knew?

Anyway, we got a pretty good deal on financing, with payments not due to start until June. Don anticipates that (barring any unforeseen tragedies or windfalls or both) this particular debt ought to be paid off in a little under a year, which isn't too bad.

You may recall that we have practiced careful house-related money management before; so far, all has gone fairly well. Don is really astonishingly good at this sort of thing -- he's actually decided to extend his undergraduate career a bit and pick up another major: Financial Economics. It's a good thing he's around, because I can barely manage to total up how much the groceries cost!

this countertop has CHANGED MY LIFE

Because now I have a place to put my empty pizza boxes and coke bottles.

No, just kidding. This is the new counter that Don and I installed last weekend. It's rough, but functional. It makes the kitchen a hundred times more efficient, though. There's room to work! I love it. Next up: shelves! I can't wait!

wide open spaces

This is the view from the living room, through the dining room, into the family room and out into the kitchen. You can see the new framework that Don and his dad put in. This house is going to be so awesome when it's finished.

The next thing the menfolk will be doing is opening another doorway into the kitchen, basically behind where that ladder is right now, to allow direct access from the dining room to the kitchen. In the meantime, we get to start rewiring both rooms -- when they opened the door into the living room, they found one wire in the wall that was almost completely charred through. Hello, fire hazard. We'll be rewiring the whole house eventually. Got to start somewhere!

insert 'rocky' theme song here

Duh na na na na na na na na na naaaaaaaaaa!

ah, november

November was a month of many things, both good and bad, and all time-consuming and making me un-blog-motivated.

At the beginning of the month, I had an extraordinarily painful and wholly unexpected minor surgery on my lady bits. It wasn't fun. Less fun was the fact that I was minorly misled about my expected recuperation time; I wound up flat on my back for more than a week, when I'd expected to be back at work in two days.

In the meantime, however, Don and his dad accomplished something quite remarkable: progress!

They took down the wall between the dining room and family room, installing a header to keep the house up, and ripped open a big door from the dining room to the living room. For a good week afterwards, we were hard put not to giggle gleefully every time we stepped through the new doorway.

And then! And then. We bought a Wii. Yes, people, we own a Wii. It is AWESOME. As soon as I was recovered enough to stand up, we indulged ourselves in a great deal of Wii Tennis and Wii Bowling.

Just as the novelty of the Wii began to wear off (who am I kidding? It's still AWESOME!), I suddenly realized that I was quite alarmingly behind in various important school-related things like actually doing my homework. So I had to catch up. Fortunately, I had that whole Thanksgiving weekend! Like I did any work then.

Thanksgiving at Don's parents this year was hectic! All four siblings were there, with spouses and children where appropriate. It was noisy and boisterous and lots of fun. Then, the next day, we headed down to Don's older sister's house for a long evening of card-playing and baby-cuddling, and were rewarded by both: we won seventy bucks and Don caught the baby's cold.

The next night happened to be our four-year anniversary (!), and Don surprised me with a fabulous (and pricy -- good thing we won at poker) dinner at Della Notte in Little Italy and a movie: "Happy Feet." So cute!

Then we discovered that he'd caught baby Mikey's cold. So it was his turn to be flat on his back, as it turned out to be a very bad cold indeed. Wonderful.

Once he recovered and I'd caught up some with school work, we did the unthinkable: accomplished something.

No, I'm serious. Stop laughing.

Having decided to hold off on the fullscale renovation of the kitchen until a) we have lots of money and b) something else in the house is done (maybe whichever comes first), we decided that we need to make the kitchen a little more functional. Part of this will happen on the third weekend in January, when Don's dad is scheduled to come out and help cut a door between the kitchen and the dining room, and when we'll get a new oven -- they have to move it anyway to make the door, so we're seizing the opportunity to replace the only actually nonfunctional thing in the kitchen. The rest of it, though, we can do ourselves. What we need is more countertop space and more storage space. So we built a countertop. We built a frame out of 2x4s and slapped a prefabricated six foot sheet of laminate countertop over it. It's not pretty, but you can chop things on it. I'll put up pictures as soon as I have time to take them.

Time is currently in short supply, of course. I finally managed to get all of the christmas shopping done, and packages are slowly trickling in (including one yesterday, while I was working from home, just after I'd gotten out of the shower, delivered by a really cute UPS guy who didn't even blink an eye when I answered the door in my white fluffy robe). School is finishing up -- last class is tomorrow, and a final review next week. The holidays are fast approaching, with family commitments and parties and blah blah blah. And fraternity doings take up a lot of time, for both of us.

In conclusion:
- Yes, Snay, I'm alive.
- Got some stuff done.
- Had some stuff happen.
- Got a Wii.
- Still crunched for time.
- Sorry I didn't blog. :(
- Wii is still AWESOME.
- Pictures of house coming soon.

fifteen places i have found my cat hiding recently

1. My pajama drawer.
2. The box our towels are stored in.
3. The access hatch to the plumbing for the bathtub in the downstairs bathroom.
4. The box my laptop came in.
5. Under the chair in front of my cutting table.
6. Behind the treadmill.
7. Behind the shower curtain next to the bathtub.
8. Inside the bathtub.
9. Under the blankets on the couch.
10. On the front screen porch when Don left the door open.
11. On the back screen porch when Don left the door open.
12. The pantry.
13. Under the table the power tools are on in the construction area.
14. The upstairs closet, under the dining room chairs.
15. Under the basement stairs.

come see me

I'll be at the Baltimore Blogger Happy Hour tonight. Details here, provided by our chatty host.

6 PM, Dizzy Issie's on 30th. If you can make it, come out.

And no, sorry, Don won't be there. He's got a fraternity event to go to, so you'll just have to make do with my scintillating company.

how we spent our sunday

Painting, hiking, and snorgling ferrets. Click here to see the full Flickr set. We spent the day over at our friends Lindley and Raymond's apartment, helping them paint one of their bedroom walls. Then we took the ferrets for a walk.

More pictures I particularly like are here and here.

two week recap plus future planning

Well, our project at work has been delivered. I could use a few days' rest and recuperation time, but freedom is pretty awesome by itself (I came into the office today and a coworker saw me and said, "So, how does it feel to finally be free?").

So I suppose now it's time to let you all know what's been happening, hey?

Well. Newsflash: it's autumn. Late autumn. So it's been getting cold. You might remember that we gutted our dining room and family room back in May. Guess where the thermostat was? Since we thought that we'd have a lot more done by now, we never anticipated needing to actually put the old thermostat back on. So when it finally got cold enough that we needed to turn on the heat, a couple of weeks ago, we dithered about it until Don finally got up the motivation to try to wire everything back together. Mind you, he's no stranger to thermostat wiring -- we successfully installed one of those fancy-dancy programmable thermostats in the old house -- but he simply hadn't bothered to make note of which wire went where when he took it down, since we thought we'd have HVAC by now.

Needless to say, he couldn't get it to work. Fortunately, his mom sent his dad over, who promptly fixed it for us. Whew! Then we turned the radiators on, setting the thermostat to bring the house to about seventy degrees.

At one in the morning, we woke up to a house which was about ninety degrees. The radiators hadn't turned off. And then we discovered that the windows in our bedroom don't open. Sigh. So, after having a screaming fight, fiddling with the thermostat, and spending an hour sitting in the living room in our underwear with all the windows and the front door flung open, we turned the breaker for the furnace off. Because, as it turns out, that's the only way to get the radiators to turn off. So, since neither of us ever gets home early enough to, say, turn the radiators on to heat up the house for the evening before turning them off before bed, we don't use the radiators now. And our house is very cold.

Mom, if I never properly thanked you for buying me that gigantic down duvet for Christmas many years ago, believe me, I'm thanking you now.

So as you might guess, our plans to get HVAC put in have suddenly become much more urgent. Fortunately, when Don's dad came over to rewire the thermostat that day, he took a look around and yelled at us. Normally it is not so fortunate when someone yells at you, but in this case, once he finished yelling, he informed us that he was going to press-gang Don, and the two of them were taking down that wall, dammit.

"That wall, dammit" is the wall in between the dining room and the family room. They're going to build little temporary walls and take down the wall and then put in a big header beam, and we will have a gigantic open space. And Don's dad says it will only take a weekend. They're also going to open up the large doorway in between the dining room and the living room.

The big change to the plans (other than the fact that we are actually DOING SOMETHING) is that we are not going to tear down the kitchen wall. Or rather, not right now. We're going to cut in a doorway, so that we can go directly from the kitchen to the dining room. Just a normal sized doorway, nothing special. It'll be right where the door opening will be in the eventual finished room (between the future breakfast bar and the future built-in bookcases, no less). Once Don and his dad have taken down the dining room/family room wall and opened up the living room doorway, the HVAC people are going to come in and do their thing -- and we are taking the radiators OUT. Then we're going to ignore the kitchen, while we finish the dining room, family room, and living room (the doorway from the kitchen to the dining room allows us to finish the dining room, since we'll be able to use it as a dining room if we can get to it easily from the kitchen).

I realize that a lot of this doesn't make sense unless you've seen our house and/or its floorplan. But that's not what's important here. What's important is that this is actually happening. In two weeks. Seriously. I mean, not all at once. But Don and his dad are going to be doing their thing the weekend after this coming one (Don's got a fraternity initiation to go to this weekend, or they'd be doing it sooner). And Don is working on getting some HVAC quotes so that those people can come in as soon as he and his dad are done. Yay! Progress!

And yes, we're getting the roof replaced. More on that another day.

why you haven't seen me lately

I keep a pad of paper in front of my computer at all times. I like lists, you see. Here's today's sheet of paper, which may give you a clue as to the state of my mind for the last week or so (you may have to click the image to get a readable view, sorry).

My publication gets sent out to ONR (that's the Office of Naval Research for you... uh... landlubbers) for review and release on Monday. As soon as it comes back, it gets shipped off to the printers and I wash my hands of it.

This is why I have been absent for the last week or so, and why I will continue to be absent until my bouncing baby book is at the printers. I have spent virtually every waking hour hip-deep in layout, proofs, PDFs, hyphenation, submarines, welding, and indexes. It's a quagmire. So I am unable to update you as to the state of our roof (falling apart), our relationship (we only see each other on Sundays), our finances (no new kitchen), or our future plans (I can't see past the print date anyway).

But I will. After our printer's kill date of October 27th, I will.

yet another disaster

Allstate has just written and informed us that they'll be cancelling our homeowners' insurance in early November unless we replace the roof.

Fabulous.

Because, you know, with production at work weeks behind schedule, grad school work falling behind, business design work piling up, and the cat depositing HALF OF A MOUSE in the dining room, I totally need more stress.

Contractor coming on Friday to give us an estimate. Don will have to take care of this one by himself; until October 27th I'm pretty much chained to my desk at work and will be working late every day -- and, if things don't go well, on the weekends.

Blogging may be spotty for a while, guys. Sorry.

on domesticity and cleanliness

We had some people over for dinner yesterday. It was an informal sort of thing -- and by 'informal' I mean 'sitting on the couches eating off of paper plates' -- but it was still people, coming over to our house, and seeing our living space. It was a terrifying prospect, even if the people in question were Don's fraternity brothers, used to living in... um... less than tidy conditions. They all have mothers -- deep down, they know what a house is supposed to look like, and ours, well, doesn't.

So we indulged in a frenzy of cleaning in the morning, and our house looks much better than it's accustomed to looking. The living room is no longer a tangled mass of furniture, the kitchen sparkles, the laundry is collected in one spot -- even the bed is made! It's amazing. What's really amazing, though, is how satisfying it is to have a clean house. Even though we're still sort of living out of boxes, and there's a construction zone in the middle of the house, and most of our stuff is stored away, having the house as clean as we can make it feels like we're a little more calm and settled.

On the topic of domesticity, I wanted to point you guys to a couple of recent pieces by Hanne Blank, a local scholar who keeps a warm and welcoming house -- and a great blog.

Check out "Why You Need To Own An Apron" and "On Household Routines".

ceiling treasures, episode 879598734535

Don only found one thing hidden in the drop ceiling of the master bedroom when he took it down, astonishingly enough (when we took down the ceilings in the dining room and the downstairs bedroom we found things like Grandma's Easter decorations, a giant spoon and fork, a ceramic fire hydrant, and a vintage video camera all tucked away in the drop ceilings). What he found was this "Poollife" magazine, from 1993. Why somebody felt the need to hide this away in the ceiling is beyond me.

cable from the heavens

One of the Eddies (lots of Eddies have lived in this house, including but not limited to Grandpa Eddie, Uncle Eddie, and Little Eddie) worked for the cable company, lo these many years ago. So our house is wired for cable in the most fantastic way -- and I mean that in the literal sense of fantastic. Look it up. Our basement cable junction actually reduced the cable installer guy to speechlessness when they hooked up our cable. All he could do was sputter helplessly and point dramatically. So nothing surprises us when it comes to cable in our house -- not even when Don took the bedroom drop ceiling down and found a mysterious cable box plunked in the middle of the ceiling, with a length of unattached cable coiled loosely around it.

Really, we half expected it. Because, after all, we took the ceiling in the back bedroom down ages ago, and it's got one, too.

he's so helpful

On Saturday, as we left class, I wondered aloud to my friend Jocelyn what on earth Don had been doing while I was gone all day (my Saturday class is from 9:30 AM to 3:30 PM). I figured he'd either been playing poker online, watching TV, sleeping, or, in some extreme circumstance, doing homework.

Boy, was I wrong! I got home, and lo and behold, he'd spent the day taking down the drop ceiling in the master bedroom (the very last one! hooray!) and ripping down some of the paneling in there, on the wall where the door to the new closet is going to go. How productive! AND -- he even remembered to take a "before" picture for the blog! What a model citizen.

Here's before:

And here's after:

Look how much higher the ceiling is! The wall is actually a slightly lighter version of the purple from the purple closet, although you can't tell in the picture. Don says the room feels so much bigger with even just this one chunk of paneling down. He's right, too.

we've got them too

It's a veritable epidemic. John's got them. Jeannie's got them.

And we have them, too. Mice.

Or rather, we HAD at least one. Until the cat found it, mangled it, and deposited it next to my shoes in all its bloody glory. This picture's kind of gross, I'm sorry. But, you know, I want to share all my experiences with you people, not just the pretty ones! (In other words, if I had to see it, so do you.)

grand opening

Today's the day! Anapurna Fantasy Jewelry and Accessories is officially open for business. Head on over to the website and take a look. Then buy something. You know you want to.