window trim

Only one window has trim. But it's pretty! And I have high hopes that the rest of the windows might get trim, like, by the end of the summer maybe! Cross your fingers.

last of the appliances

Our dishwasher finally lingered its last a couple of weeks ago. It was the last appliance left in the kitchen from when we moved in - the last appliance to die. We have been replacing appliances as they die with the high end appliances that will eventually look snazzy in our new, updated kitchen. Right now, surrounded by ancient cabinets and filthy linoleum, the sparkling stainless steel looks a little out of place.


But appliances are one of the huge, huge costs of renovating a kitchen, and by replacing them ahead of time as they've died, at the approximate rate of one a year, we've managed to spread out that cost so that it won't actually impact the payment we'll have to make when we finally get around to renovating the kitchen. They'll get used in the old kitchen for now, and when the kitchen is gutted and replaced they'll be moved into their new places of honor, and we'll be spared an even bigger bill.

The new dishwasher is a delight. We elected to go high-end but not super-super high-end -- we decided we didn't want to pay hundreds of dollars more just so that the buttons would be hidden, for instance. It's the same philosophy we went with on the other appliances, so everything matches nicely. And best of all, I only have to wash things once now, because it actually works, and we can have a conversation while it's running and actually hear each other, which is a new and different thing.

As for the rest of the kitchen, we're tentatively planning on next year, but as usual it depends on finances. If anybody has a large chunk of money they want to give us, I'll totally cook you dinner in the new kitchen.

the garden has gotten a little out of hand

This cucumber weighs three and a quarter pounds.

caught!

Sorry I haven't posted. We're in the dead of summer here - literally, as fifteen people have died this summer of heat-related causes in Baltimore - and it's hard to do anything but sit around appreciating the air conditioning. What little energy I have goes to work, as we are swamped and understaffed. Scheduling issues have meant that not a lot has gotten done on the house, anyway. But frankly, as long as the air conditioning keeps working, I don't really care.

for the nerds

Remember the big pile of dirt left in the driveway from filling the garden? The other day, Don announced that he'd finally figured out what to do with it:

doors, continued

The door refinishing operations have been moved from under a tent in the backyard into the now-painted guest room, as the weather here in Baltimore has been horrifically humid for the last week or two - not the best conditions to leave untreated wood out in.


Once we scraped off all of the paint stripper and let everything dry out for a day or two, we borrowed a couple of power sanders from my father-in-law and Don went to work on the doors. At this writing, he has finished the first sanding, with 80-grit sandpaper, on the wide areas of the doors. The beveled edges of the inside molding are going to have to be done by hand - I think the best we can hope for is to take the top layer of varnish off and rough them up enough that primer and paint will stick well.


I think when we're done these doors will be beautiful, but they are a lot more work than I anticipated! I shudder to think that we still have to strip and refinish the stairway banister, as well as the (fortunately plainer) doors for all of the upstairs rooms.

meet the project killer

Hard to work on the house when you could be playing with this thing, let me tell you.

father's day brunch

Last weekend we hosted a Father's Day brunch for Don's family (my dad, alas, lives in Seattle, which is a little far to travel for brunch). We had eight people total, adults and children, which was down some from the numbers we hosted on Mother's Day, which required an additional table to be set out.


All this entertaining is really emphasizing our need for more permanent dining room furniture. (The need to remodel the kitchen is already a given!)

refinishing

One of the 'small' projects I'm really excited about is finally refinishing all of our doors. When we gutted the house, we saved all of the original doors and put them in storage (okay, our garage) until we were ready to start finishing the house. When we cleared out the attic, we were excited to find two more doors up there, that Don's dad told us had been original to the house but removed during one of the family's extensive renovations. They were french doors, solid wood with squares of beveled glass inset. They were painted a hideous shade of teal, but seemed to be in good condition.

The discovery of these doors actually changed our structural plan mid-construction. We had originally planned for the transition from the dining room to the office to simply be a large opening, like the one that goes from dining room to living room. When we found the doors, though, we decided instead to install them as pocket doors dividing the dining room from the office. A header and doorframe had to be built where there had been nothing before. Fortunately nobody grumbled too much.

So now here we are, with a mostly finished house, and it's finally door time! We decided to start with the office doors, both because they're the most complicated and because we'd like to get the main level finished as fast as we can, since it's more 'public' space.

We set up a tent in the backyard, got some sawhorses, and got to work.


The citrus-based nontoxic stripper we used worked wonders! Hardly a hint of the teal remains - or the other three shades we discovered under it. Next up we'll sand the doors down with increasingly fine grits of sandpaper (80, 100, and finally 120) and then prime and paint them to match the rest of the trim in the house. They'll also have to get squared up and have pocket door hardware installed - but after all that effort they are going to look amazing!

gardening

Lots of little projects going on around here - to the point, in fact, where we decided we needed to take a step back and do things one at a time instead of flailing around trying to get them all done.

In the meantime, here's a picture of the raised bed Don built me earlier this year. I'm not a very good gardener without some technological help - I am just awful at remembering to water. So we've put in a soaker hose, and it's working really well - this picture was taken about a week and a half ago and everything is a LOT bigger now. Er, except for the cherry tomato plant, which is mostly dead. I'm clearly better at growing herbs than actual vegetables.


In case you're curious, what I've got in this bed is:

-cilantro
-dill
-flat-leaf parsley
-basil
-thyme
-oregano
-rosemary
-three kinds of bell pepper
-two kinds of cucumber
-two kinds of tomato

The bed itself is about five feet by eight feet, and it's constructed of pressure-treated 2x12s, which are offset top and bottom and bolted into upright 2x4s in the corners. We dug out the edges of the ground in the spot we planned to place it in so that it would be level. Once we put the frame in place we did a little more digging and filling to get it as level as we could, then lined it with landscape cloth. We had some high-quality fill dirt delivered (too much, in fact, which is why there is still a pile of dirt in my driveway...) and lo! garden.

because you need to know about her sleeping habits

The cat has finally deigned to sleep in the cat bed I bought her. After she ignored it for months, it had been tossed in a corner of an empty bedroom currently used as storage. Once I discovered she was actually sleeping in it, I moved it into our bedroom. She's very smug about it.

it's balticon weekend

This weekend I'll be selling Anapurna jewelry in the dealers' room at Balticon. If you're local, stop by! Balticon is geeky bliss.

why they make warranties

The window in our master bedroom is cracked. It appears to be some kind of stress fracture, probably from the house settling.


It's being replaced next week, no issues, no charges. A man from the window manufacturing company came out to measure the opening, and a new piece of glass was ordered and is ready to be installed. Always, always get a warranty.

conversation

Putting primer up on the walls of the guest room this weekend:

Him, muttering as he rolls: "1... 3... 5... 7..."

Me, baffled: "What are you doing?"

Him, as if it should be obvious: "Priming!"

Nerd.

a little break

We went to the beach for Don's birthday, a little mini-getaway that we both needed. I found a great hotel deal in Ocean City, and we lucked into amazing weather all weekend. We came back tanned and refreshed (the cat was delighted to see us), and we're looking forward to trying to fit in a few more weekend getaways this summer on the few weekends we're not working on the house.


The above photo was the view from our room on the first day, complete with surfers.

more projects

We keep saying to each other, "Look! We just have normal homeowner projects to do now!"

And it's mostly true. We walk into Home Depot like regular people now, buy the materials for one small project, go home and do it. It's still weird. That said, our house is far from done. We've been so busy enjoying the finished feeling of the downstairs that it's been easy to ignore that the upstairs doesn't really look like Joe and Suzy Homeowners' house yet.


That's our guest bathroom. It's full of stuff. People keep mistaking it for a storage closet.

I really, really want to get the upstairs bathrooms done - or even just one of them - before the end of the summer. In order to do that, we've got to get the stuff out of the guest bath. Which means we need to complete the projects that the stuff is there for - i.e., get the three upstairs bedrooms primed and painted. Once that's done, the painting stuff will get put away - at least for a while - and we can clear out our "storage closet" and start tiling.

This would be a lot easier if I didn't hate painting. And tiling.

how to make me happy

I would much rather be given bookshelves than jewelry. We've been planning to make one whole wall of our office into a giant wall of bookshelves for a long time, and I'm incredibly excited that we've finally gotten started. Originally, we had planned for floor-to-ceiling built-in bookshelves. We had hoped that Don and his dad could build them together. But we soon realized that if we waited for that to happen, our books would stay in boxes for a long, long time - and when I said we should move in to our house and start living in it, I definitely intended including the books. So we looked at other options. There are a couple of companies that custom build home libraries and bookshelf walls, but they are crazy expensive. So we downgraded our plan; we would get off-the-shelf (ha!) shelves, and just line the wall with them.

We discovered that IKEA's 'Billy' bookshelf system was the perfect solution. The system offers shelves in two widths, and has corner adapters to make the shelves fit into corners and continue along the wall. The shelves are seven feet tall, but they also sell extenders to make them taller. The system also has cute accessories, including various doors, lights, and even a ladder.

We bought our shelving system in two batches, to spread out the cost between paychecks (it wound up being about $650 total, if you're curious). The first batch was bought and assembled shortly after we moved in, and I gleefully unpacked all of our books, games, and little tchotchkes. Half is decidedly not enough - as you can see in the picture below, the books are stacked haphazardly wherever I could find room once I ran out of shelves. And there are still more books at my mom's house that belong here.


Fortunately, the second batch has been bought, and is awaiting assembly. Once all of the shelves have been assembled (the boxes below include a second corner set, another wide shelf to go along the main wall, and extender shelves for everything), Don's going to bolt the whole thing to the wall and to each other so that it's really secure and effectively built in.


And then I'll finally get to organize my books. I'm torn between organizing by genre, by fiction vs. non-fiction, or simply alphabetically. It's a good problem to have.

living room detail

The throw blanket on the couch was a wedding gift. It's beautiful. We were almost as excited to get it out of storage as we were the couch itself.

childhood memories, and making more of them

A couple of weeks ago, we finally got what Don has been waiting for: a piano.

Specifically, the piano of his childhood. It's been sitting in his parents' dining room, unused except for whenever one of the grandchildren comes over and plunks around on it noisily. We knew from the start that when we finished the house it would come to live with us - and his parents were eager to have more space in their dining room.

Don and his dad made one futile effort to move it themselves - it didn't work. At all. So we hired piano movers, and for a very reasonable price they hup-hup-hup'd it out of Don's parents' house and into their truck, drove it ten blocks over and brought it right in our front door and over to its new home tucked next to the stairs.


Don says he'll have learned how to play it by Christmas. He has visions of himself playing while we all sing carols. I have a deep suspicion that in his vision, he's wearing a sweater. With red knitted reindeer on it.

it's don's birthday today

I'm getting him golf lessons.