freezeriffic

On an entirely different note, I can't wait until we can get a spare standing freezer. I saw this fantastic-looking recipe on the Food Network over the weekend, and it and a few others I have in mind are perfect for freezing. I plan to either go to the restaurant supply store (there's one down the street!) or look online and get some disposable aluminum baking dishes of various sizes with sealable lids so that I can prepare dishes and then freeze them pre-baked. Plus, I'll be able to freeze things like fresh strawberries and cubes of pesto (that may be going a little overboard, considering my general lack of aptitude for productivity). Right now, we have just a regular above-the-fridge freezer, which is crammed full all the time, so there's no room for big containers full of pre-made meals and the like.

I did try my plan out in miniature the other day, though: I was grilling chicken breasts for fajitas, and instead of the usual two, I went ahead and grilled four and stuck the extra pair in a tupperware container in the freezer (crammed it in under the ice cream, barely had room for the bagels!). Then, several days later, I came home on a busy, stressful weeknight, pulled the grilled breasts out of the freezer and defrosted them in the microwave while I boiled some pasta, then chopped them up and threw them into a baking dish with the pasta, a jar of alfredo sauce, and some shredded cheese (I keep shredded mozzarella and cheddar in giant ziploc bags in the freezer at all times, we heart cheese). Threw it in the oven for ten minutes at 400 and dinner was ready. So easy! And almost no extra dishes! I love it. I can't wait to do it on a larger scale. A couple of extra minutes on the weekend or a free day, and I'll have practically instant food for those nights (read: all of them) when we are busy, stressed out, and exhausted. And so much cheaper than going to Let's Dish (although I still think it would be fun).

Don says that once the downstairs subfloors are in and we stop throwing things through the floor into the basement, I can get my big freezer. Yay!

Got any good freezing recipes? I've found that most of what I've been coming up with are pasta dishes, although YNL's pre-marinated chicken variations are awesome.

ten points if you can figure out what's going on

MATERIAL SAFETY DATA SHEET

SECTION 1 CHEMICAL PRODUCT IDENTIFICATION

SUBSTANCE: PLYWOOD

PRODUCT USE: Building/construction product

-=-=-=-

SECTION 3 HAZARDS IDENTIFICATION

COLOR: natural wood

PHYSICAL FORM: solid wood board

ODOR: faint pine or no odor

POTENTIAL HEALTH EFFECTS

SKIN CONTACT

SHORT TERM EXPOSURE: Wood dust may cause: irritation, allergic reactions,

rash

hey, bungalow people

So I'm looking for some good pictures of a classic bungalow feature -- a wall that's got an opening framed by columns, which in turn are resting atop short built-in bookshelves. I've got a couple of images, but nothing quite what I'm looking for, and I know it's out there, I've seen it! But in all the ones I can find, the bookshelves are too tall, or the columns don't go all the way to the ceiling, or there aren't bookshelves, just a bit of wall. Help!

I want to do this to the wall between our dining room and our living room, but I have to convince Don, and for some reason he can't picture it when I explain it -- so I need pictures. Help me out, y'all.

tra la, tra lay, the month of may

I've run out of pictures and I have rather a lot of work to do today, so I think for today's post you get a list. Here are some things I plan on doing this month:

-This weekend: I'll be doing laundry, writing my final paper for my 'Visual and Verbal Rhetoric' class, working on several proposals for work, and watching Don mow the lawn.

-Next weekend: I plan on heading to the Fairie Festival at Spoutwood Farm (in Glen Rock, PA, about an hour north of Baltimore) on Saturday. This is the 'original' fairy festival in this area. I'm trying to convince Jason to go with me, since my usual cohorts are both busy that weekend.

-The weekend after that: Probably nothing, although I might head over to the 32nd Street Farmers Market to see what they've got on Saturday morning. Also, I'll call my mother on Mother's Day. I promise.

-Thursday the 17th: The semi-quasi-bi-monthly Baltimore Blogger Happy Hour. I will try to be there, even though it's all the way out in the county. Plus, when I asked ACW if he was going over gchat, he abruptly signed off. Totally a bad omen.

-The weekend of the 18th: The Maryland Faerie Festival. Lindley and I will be there again this year -- we didn't get accepted as vendors, unfortunately, but we'll go just to enjoy ourselves (and take cute pictures of kids dressed up as fairies).

-Memorial Day weekend: Balticon 41. I'm going to try to be there for at least one day this year.

I don't think I'll be going to Intergem in Chantilly this month -- it conflicts with the Faerie Festival and it's a long way to go to spend money I shouldn't be spending on beads. Besides, there's one in Timonium in June.

If you want to catch up with me at one (or many) of these events and/or places, either leave a comment or drop me an email at jamailac at gmail dot com, I'll let you know more specifically what my timing is going to be like and give you my number if you don't already have it.

restoration and renovation

A lot of the housebloggers I know are restoring their houses, not renovating them. If you don't know the difference, generally speaking, restoring means that you are trying to make the house look like it did when it was new -- which was usually quite a long time ago -- and renovating means that you're just plain changing it. There's no definite division -- a lot of renovators try to keep the historic touches that make their houses unique, and a lot of restorers put in modern amenities like central heat and modern kitchens -- but you can usually put yourself into one category or another for the most part.

We definitely fall into the 'renovator' category. We talked about it when we first bought this place; it was built in 1920, has some historic bungalow charm -- we could go the restoration route. But over the years, Don's family made so many bizarre changes that it's hard to find the bones of the house anymore -- and we really didn't want to anyway. We discovered that we were more committed to making the house a place that suited our tastes than we were to restoring the house with historic accuracy. The big factor there, of course, is that our tastes and lifestyle just don't match the house's original architecture. Neither did Don's family's, apparently, since they changed it around so much. So we decided to create an open floor plan, replace the hardwood floors, take out the funky old windows, and generally just change everything around.

There's one place, however, where we both mysteriously found ourselves in full-on restoration mode: the staircase. Neither of us wanted to bring it up -- we each assumed the other wanted to replace it, to renovate it and make it new. There's nothing truly remarkable about it -- the rail is solid wood with layer upon layer of paint on it, and the newel post, when we moved in, was a simple straight column made of thin, cheap wood. But when we took off the outer casing of the column, we discovered the original post underneath -- falling apart, almost utterly destroyed, but still recognizable. And it's perfect!


We both love the look -- the clean lines with classic bungalow charm, simple structure and geometric shapes. But the post isn't salvageable (seriously, pieces fall off of it when you touch it). So we'll rebuild what we have to and save the rest. Don's dad will build us an exact replica of the post in his shop, while I strip all the paint off of the stairs and railing and pull out the staples (!) that were used to hold the old carpeting in. We'll buff and sand and stain and polish, and when we're done we'll have the staircase that our house deserves -- beautiful, original, lived-in, and just right for us.

alas, ye floors

We were originally really hoping to save our hardwood floors. They're original to the house, and in most places the wood itself wasn't in truly horrible condition. Unfortunately, one of the major structural problems we found ourselves needing to address was the fact that every single floor in the house was severely out of level -- to the point that when I sit in my desk chair in the office, I roll backwards constantly! If I don't catch myself or lock my foot around the desk, I'll find myself all the way across the room in relatively short order. It's like that everywhere. The upstairs landing in particular had a huge dip when we bought the house; this is what we found when we tore up the carpet:


The thing is, even though those floorboards look like they're in pretty good condition aside from the whole massive-tilt issue, they have to come up. There weren't any subfloors in the house (hence the subject matter for my last I don't even know how many posts). So to level the floors so I'll stop rolling around the house every time I try to get some work done, we have to install new, level joists and a carefully leveled subfloor.

All that said, we thought we could still save the floors and maybe carefully put them back over the new subfloor, with a little fiddling to eliminate the obviously warped ones. Unfortunately, when the demo crew went to pull up the boards, we discovered that they're so old, dry, and hard (the boards, not the guys) that they crack and splinter no matter how carefully they're pulled up.

So, new floors it is. Or will be, someday. For now, we live on plywood.

don't be alarmed

Please don't freak out. I'm working on making some changes to the blog (those of you who are bloglines-ing me or reading me through some sort of feed or whatever won't even notice). I'm putting it into a three-column layout to accomodate some (gasp!) ads. I know, I'm such a sellout. Aside from that, the new layout adds some space for other things, like tag clouds and the like, which I'm fond of. Eventually I'll put together some kind of banner for the header, too. Maybe I'll get really crazy and buy a domain name. Stay tuned.

those clever nailmakers

This is a duplex nail.


It's called that because it has that little mutated head on top of it, so that it has double heads. Kind of freaky. Duplex nails are great for when you need to do something temporary, because you just nail it in up to the first head and can use the second head to pull it out later. Like, for instance, if you're cutting a board that is as long as your room and have to stick it through the wall for balance!


You just nail a piece of scrap wood to the studs with duplex nails at the appropriate level, and boom! Instant -- and temporary! -- sawhorse. Fantastico.

how to add cross bracing to your floors

There's no special secret to cross bracing. No special material, no special technique. You may remember the old cross bracing between our joists -- it was made of spare pieces of hardwood flooring. For the new cross bracing, Don and his dad just used spare pieces of joist beams, since they had it around from putting in new joists (this technically makes it "solid blocking", since it's just one piece of wood). They measured carefully and cut a piece of the board exactly to fit in between each joist (yes, you have to measure each space, since they are all going to be a little different) and then just nailed it into place.


The one thing they did differently than the old system was to actually add more cross bracing. Originally, the bracing just went in a straight line across the middle of the room. What we did instead was to install cross bracing at every seam in the subfloor. Every place where one sheet of plywood ends and another starts is reinforced with cross bracing all the way across. Basically, this winds up meaning that there's a row of cross bracing going across the entire space every four feet (since plywood comes in four-foot-wide sheets!). It makes the floor a lot more sturdy.

Good construction starts where you'll never even see it. Doing it right the first time means we won't have to go back in and do it again, and what we're building will last a long, long time. Adding the cross bracing every four feet certainly adds some time to the process, but it also creates a really strong foundation for everything we're going to build on top of that subfloor.

And heaven knows we don't want our grandchildren going in and renovating this house many years from now and complaining about us like we complain about this stuff!

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.