worldly goods

I finally brought the rest of my books back from Washington. For the first time in ten years, all my books are in the same place! Looking forward to shelving the last of them as soon as the office is put back together from window trim work.

pocket doors redux

We've been working on these doors for months. They still aren't done. But, in a fit of realism, we decided that we needed to shift our priorities a bit. Finishing the antique doors we're retrofitting into pocket doors from the dining room into the office isn't the most urgent thing on our plate. Right now it's far more important that we get the stairwell banister refinished and rehung, so that the people who come to our house are safe and so that we can have overnight guests. So we elected to get the doors out of our work space (i.e. the guest room) and store them out of the way until we can get back to them to finally sand and paint them.

And where better to store them than in the 'pockets' they are intended for?


Yes, we hung the doors! Aren't they fantastic? They're really old, and really heavy, but we got hardware rated for doors even heavier, so it all works incredibly smoothly. Just imagine that the glass is clean and they're painted white!

personal triumph

I've stopped biting my fingernails. It's kind of a big deal. I've been biting them pretty much my entire life, to the degree that the nail tip was generally over half an inch below the tip of my finger. Now they look like this.

finishing touches

Little bits and pieces of the house are starting to really look finished, like normal people live here who don't rip down walls and have dumpsters in the driveway for months on end.

Don's parents have been breathlessly awaiting the chance to give us The Plant, which has been residing in their dining room for several years. The Plant originally belonged to Don's older brother, who is in the Navy and away from home for long periods of time. After one such stint, he came home to see that The Plant had gotten rather dusty. Being a logical sort of fellow, he did what he did with most things that got dusty in his home: he vacuumed it. It didn't work out so well. Eventually he asked my mother-in-law if she could resuscitate it, and the somewhat worse for wear plant relocated to my in-laws' house.

When Don and I moved in together, into a small apartment with a friend of ours, we took The Plant. Don liked it, it seemed decorative and homey, and it looked lovely in our living room. Then we got a cat. The cat was convinced that The Plant was eminently scratchable, and we came home eventually to discover that a large percentage of its leaves had been turned into fringe. The cat stayed - even though she also ate a bamboo plant down to the roots and had many other misadventures, some chronicled right here in this blog - and The Plant went back to my mother-in-law, to nurse its wounds. In the seven years since, the cat has become a little more sedate (not much), but more importantly, The Plant has grown at least a foot, putting even its bottom leaves out of reach of certain members of this household. So it has finally moved to its new home:


Welcome home, Plant. Thanks for making our house feel a little more finished.

new furniture

It's very strange to not feel guilty about walking into a furniture store or art gallery, knowing that there's no way you can buy anything because you haven't got any place to put it. We're still getting used to not walking straight past places full of beautiful things, somehow unable to shake the feeling that this whole 'finished house' thing is just temporary, and soon enough we'll be back to no walls, no floors, and certainly no furniture.

Our most recent purchase is a set of living room accessory tables. We ordered the Madison set from Costco.com (whose customer service, by the way, is excellent - I like the website as much as I like the warehouse store). They are assembled and in place - the sofa table and one end table in the appropriate places by the couch in the living room, and the other end table put to use as a phone-holding station tucked into a corner of the office. I'm very happy with them.


Worth noting: the dish on the table is a piece by Charlton Glassworks in Washington, fused glass with a copper penguin inside. It was a gift to us years ago when you could only find Charlton's work at shows and galleries in Washington State - these days you can find it all over the country!

a new hobby

Don has picked up an awesome new hobby - he is turning into a serious breakfast chef.

Every weekend morning lately I've been treated to something delicious. Pictured above is a tomato and goat cheese omelet (with herbs from our overgrown garden). Since then he's moved on to more complex things - this most recent weekend I got crepes with fresh strawberries and nutella.

This is his best hobby yet.

welcome home indeed

I went out to Washington for a week, to help my mom out while she had eye surgery. I thought that while I was gone, Don would eat fast food, go to baseball games, and play Starcraft 2 (PS: Starcraft LAN party, our house, later this year. It's happening!).

Instead, I came home to a total surprise: he had spent the entire week working on window trim, even going so far as to get his dad to come over on the weekend and help him. The result: every single downstairs window has trim!


As it turns out, it's really hard to get pictures of window trim in daylight. At some point I'll remember to get out the camera at night and take some pictures.

As of this writing, the two windows in the living room are completely finished except for a second coat of paint. The dining room bay window needs a final sanding and its two coats of paint, and the window in the office is missing one piece of trim, then needs to be puttied, sanded, and painted.

We are well on our way to the next step, which is getting blinds - something anybody who has sat at our dining room table at four in the afternoon will deeply, deeply appreciate.

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.