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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
When I went into the study area of the summer kitchen closet in our master bedroom, I found some stuff left there by the studious Brinkleys of yore. Said stuff included a complete set of Funk and Wagnall's New Encyclopedia (I forgot to check what year it was, but I'm guessing it's from the seventies).
It also included a copy of the 1976 Farmer's Almanac.
There was also a box with some glassware in it, which, judging by the newspaper with which it was packed, has been sitting in that closet since 1971.
Ah, history.
Incidentally, the leather case at the very bottom of the first photo contains three empty glass bottles labeled with various liquor types (one for whiskey, one for rum, etc.). Clearly, a study aid.
I had to set up a table in the construction zone to do my portfolio work for grad school. There's no other place in the house with enough room to set up a table!
The cool part is that this table actually came from this house. When Don's great-aunt died and the house was sold (in 2002), a lot of the furniture and things came to Don's parents, including this table. When Don and I moved into our first apartment together, this table came with us, and it was our dining room table all the way up until shortly before we moved out of the townhouse. It's a big, sturdy table, and I love it. I love that I have this link to this house, had it before we even moved in. One of my favorite things about living here is constantly rediscovering and re-establishing links to the past, to all the Brinkleys who lived in this house before us. This big warm table just glows with family history, and we get to keep adding to it.
It's not house related, but I thought you might all like the chance to admire my new Steve Madden sunglasses. Or make fun of them, like Don and Lindley do.
Me: "Aren't they great? Don't they make me look like a movie star?"
Lindley: "Well... you look just as ridiculous in them as movie stars do when they wear glasses like that, so in that sense I suppose you look like a movie star."
Don: "You look like a giant fly."
Tucked into bed, watching the Food Network.
This is what happens when you let dandelions grow: they turn into GIANT SPACE ALIENS.
Somebody came onto our property and rifled through our stack of to-be-recycled aluminum and stole all of the deck planks from the pool.
They could have just asked; we would have given it to them, it's not like we were going to do anything but recycle it. Don is pissed. I am philosophical. We have our suspicions about who might have done it -- I won't relate them, as this is a public forum -- but there's not much we can do about it other than feel wounded.
Because the upstairs level of our house was once laid out as a separate apartment for a younger branch of the Brinkley clan, our master bedroom's current closet actually resembles a summer kitchen. There's a sink, and some cabinetry -- and at the back, there's a study area! It's crazy. Let's take the tour.
This is the view from our bedroom. To the left, you can see the door which leads out to the hallway (or rather, the extremely large upstairs landing -- seriously, it's huge). As I understand it, the front bedroom was the apartment's dining room, while the middle was either a living area or a bedroom or both. The back bedroom was still the back bedroom.
As you get a little closer, you can start to see this closet's closet-within-a-closet. You can also see the lovely copper tile backsplash, which makes Don roll his eyes every time he sees it. I plan on saving the tiles to do something crafty with, which is probably why he rolls his eyes. There's a large cutting board covering the sink, for whatever reason, but the sink is there. It works as far as I know.
Finally, the closet-within-a-closet study area -- complete with exploratory kitty. We keep the door to this closet closed, so she hasn't really been in there. When I opened the door to take pictures, she had to check it all out, too. She also provides a nice size comparison! This little study is under an eave, so it's cramped. Not as cramped as you might think -- our cat is extraordinarily long, so when she stands up like that, she's pretty tall. That desk on the right is a standard-size school desk, one of those really uncomfortable ones.
We're hoping to turn this closet into an en suite three-quarter bath for the master bedroom. Since the water line has already been run, the biggest part of the work would be running the sewer line for the toilet (and making everything fit!). We have no idea whether or not this will happen; it's very low on our list of priorities but it's something we've talked about. We know we can't fit a full bath in there, but it would be nice to have a private shower and toilet for the master bedroom, instead of all three bedrooms upstairs sharing the one bath up here. There's another full bath downstairs, so we're not lacking or anything, but all the bedrooms are up here. And who doesn't love an en suite bath?
It's not what it sounds like. Or rather, it is, but not in the sense you're thinking. It's not the closet in the nursery; it's the closet that is the nursery.
The closet in the middle bedroom is so large that it became a room of its own: the nursery. Brinkley babies lived here!
No, Mom, no Brinkley babies are forthcoming (not from me, anyway -- check with my sisters-in-law), and when they do, this won't be their nursery.
It's actually going to be our master bedroom's walk-in closet. We're going to block off the current door, and make a new one in from the left side (that left wall adjoins the front bedroom, which will be the master). It'll make a nice big walk-in closet for us. Since the middle bedroom is going to be a craft room slash office (okay, I admit it -- maybe even eventually a nursery), it won't need much in the way of closet space. We should be able to frame away a small space for a simple closet, to meet real-estate needs (bedroom's gotta have a closet!).
The nursery closet, of course, has its own closet, just like the others. This is the smallest of the closet-within-a-closets; that little door at the back opens up to what basically amounts to a deep shelving unit. It'll get incorporated into the master suite's closet somehow.
And yes, we'll be repainting it.
So what are we using the middle bedroom for right now?
Why, it's our closet, of course!
No, seriously. We put up rods along the walls to hang our clothes, and stuck our dressers in there, too. The front bedroom has two doors -- one into the hall and one into the middle bedroom -- because the entire upstairs was once a separate apartment for a younger branch of the family (more on this on Monday, stay tuned). So our bedroom connects to the middle bedroom, which is why we made the middle bedroom into our closet for now. It's a temporary solution, but it's the biggest closet I'll ever have.
