Homeowner fatigue

I've been suffering from a bit of Homeowner Fatigue lately.  Now that the basement flooring is in (and subsequently off my mind) other things in the house are clamoring for attention. It's never ending. 

The kitchen counters desperately need regrouting.  My roommate has a bad habit of leaving dishes to dry, not in the dishrack, but on the countertop.  Where the grout has cracked water gets down and has begun to rot it.  Regrouting the tile would take all weekend, if not more. It's something I've always thought I'd do when I was in between roommates, since it renders the kitchen kind of unusable. 

Then last Thursday my dryer broke.  It just wouldn't start.  It came with the house, it's very old, and the whole front lifts off the front of the machine.  I'm shocked it lasted as long as it did, and yet it felt like a betrayal when it finally died.  I could have called a repairman but I really suspect I'm better off with a new one.  I think, because the front was no longer connected to the front of the machine, a lot of extra hot air was escaping the dryer and heating the laundry room.  That's a whole lot of waste.

So the money I had saved for building a new fence, a fence I desperately need, was spent on a new dryer.  My beautiful friend T came over to talk about backyard landscaping and I got so overwhelmed by the magnitude of what she was planning that I had to interrupt her and tell her that all I can handle right now is her telling me, "Plant your daphne bush here." 

Blueberry bushes are finally in the ground after being in pots for three years!

The problem here is not so much the house (which I still love) but my brain and the fact that I have a hard time not trying to give myself projects.  Before I started grad school I gave myself the task of reading as much as possible, since I knew I wouldn't have time once I was school.  That was a great project, particularly since you can do it in bed.  I think everyone seeks projects in degrees but a house will *always* give you something to do. And I think it would still be the case, though less so, if I had bought a new house.

So I need to develop some sort of blinder for home repair once the fence is in so I don't feel bad when I just putter in the yard all summer.  Oh wait . . . that's a project.  I'm terrible at this.

Decorating the basement

I was doing some spring cleaning and I decided to finally move the armchair down into the basement.  I had to take the legs (and the basement door) off and I *might* have dinged the paint a bit coming down.

I think the room needs a pop of color, don't you?  I decided to move my red tables into the basement.  They were from my reveal:

And then they got moved to the laundry room.  Even laundry rooms need color.  And a lot of junk, apparently.

My coworker has a Murphy bed she no longer needs. I'm going to put it on the wall where the yellow table currently resides.  Then when I have house guests they can fold down the bed and have their own suite down here.

I was so excited about starting to get this going that I dragged my roommate down to see it.  And I saw another centipede.  And I screamed.  And I squeezed the car keys in my hands and set off my car alarm.  And then the dog went nuts.

We're VERY excited about the basement over here.

First buds of spring

I really thought the dried out ferns I planted last fall weren't going to make it, but look!  Tiny fiddleheads, waiting to unfurl.

 

Daffodils popped up in the front yard, too.  Once those wither the tulip bulbs I planted should take their place.

 

The weeds are thriving, of course.  Luckily I love weeding, especially when the ground is soft and the sun is shining.  I like to throw them over my shoulder onto the sidewalk so they can cook in the sun.  You know, teach them a lesson.

My bloodgood maples have small buds on them and I'm really excited to see what kind of foliage they'll produce.  I think I'm also going to order some Rosalie tulip bulbs.  Rosalie is my Grandma's name (Hi, Grandma! I love you!) and she raised prize-winning African violets for as long as I can remember.  I'm bad at house plants but I can do bulbs.

Aren't they so lovely?

Hall and Oates

We're in stereo!

Crawly things

The night after we completed the basement laminate install Bill picked me up for dinner and I dragged him down to look at the finished product.  We were oohing and ahhing over the floor until I started screaming because there was a CENTIPEDE on the fireplace.

Have you ever seen one in real life?  They are disgusting and they move FAST.  Bill rolled his eyes and killed it for me.  [Someone later asked me if we took it outside and I was like, "Why would I let something from the 7th level of hell live?  Huh?"]

Afterward I had a tender moment because Bill's been rescuing me from bugs for eight years!  Thank the heavens for him!  The funny thing is that, in the last nine months, I have been in just about every crevice in my house with the exception of the crawl spaces.  I was actually at the point where I was feeling like maybe I was brave enough to don one of those white suits and go in there.  But now?  Now that I know there are centipedes?  Nuh uh.  No way.

Should the spiders of the world decide to work on their PR, I think a good slogan would be: "Spiders: we're not centipedes!"  I like them better already.

My kingdom for a yardboy!

I've been scouting hardware store sales and craigslist for a lawnmower all winter.  Even used lawnmowers are expensive and how do you tell if a mower is "good" or not?  Can you even kick those tiny tires?

 Image source: Stories of Wisdom

Somewhere along the way I arbitrarily decided I didn't want to pay more than $40 for a used one.  It costs $30 to have a landscaper cut the lawn so if I ended up with a lemon at least it wouldn't be that much more than hiring someone to cut the lawn.

It made sense in my head.

I found a listing for a mower for $40 that was magically still available, so I headed out to Wilsonville yesterday to look at it.  When I got there the man explained how he started it up that morning and the starter cord snapped off.  Because I'd have to pay someone to install another cord, he wanted to give me the mower for free.  I was pretty sure I could fix it myself so I tried to get him to accept my money.  We bickered back and forth and he finally agreed to take $10, but "I had to give it to his son" who was standing right there.

Okeydoke. 

They loaded the mower into the trunk of my Honda and even gave me an extra bungee cord to keep it in there.  These guys were so genuinely nice.

I bought a replacement cord at Home Depot for $3.98, bringing the total cost of the mower to $13.98.  I started to unscrew things that didn't need to be unscrewed.  Then I realized that and put them back together.

I almost gave up.  I couldn't see a way to get the housing off the top and fiddling with spring-loaded parts that can remove fingers makes me nervous.  Then I found this video and it seemed more manageable.

I actually didn't have to remove the housing at all.  I'm assuming I did it correctly because it works!  GO ME.

To reward myself for my thriftiness I mowed the lawn, cleaned my gutters, and did some weeding.  Seriously though, the surface of the moon has fewer craters than my back lawn.  In addition to replacing the fence I really need to rototill the backyard and even it out.  And then I think I'd like to get a yard boy.  Someone nice to look at who takes care of this stuff for me.  I'll make lemonade! 

I'm sort of overwhelmed by my yard right now, but I'm still floating from the knowledge that for every jerk on craigslist who wants to rip you off, there's a nice guy who cuts a broke girl a deal.  Thanks, Terry in Wilsonville.  You rock.

Hallelujah!

I have no words.  I never knew I could be so in love with a fake wood product.

 

  

Do you remember what my basement used to look like?

Skanky carpeting over mildewed foam over glued-down foam over vinyl tile.  I chose something called an "insulayment" which combines padding with a vapor barrier to go under the laminate flooring.  It's pretty easy to roll out and tape together.

But that's upside down, dumbass.  This is better:

Doesn't it look like a swimming pool?

I bribed Scott and Keith, they of the gigantic muscles, with breakfast and pizza to help me install the laminate.  They wouldn't even drink the beer I bought them because, apparently, it's unsafe to operate electric saws while drinking.  

We started in the alcove. The alcove I still need to paint.  Pick carefully when you start laying down flooring!  It guides the rest of the installation and EVERYTHING will have to originate from that side of the room henceforth.

 

You'll want to gather as many tape measures as you can.  You'll spend the rest of the day fetching them from the yard because Keith accidentally takes the measuring tape upstairs every time he measures, even though there's one right next to the chop saw, but that's okay.

They call these "special cuts."  Keith is masterfully accurate on a chop saw.

Once we got past the weird areas it was just glorious feet and feet of installing whole boards.  It went super fast.  Bill showed up to help and we were so in a groove that he was relegated to documenting our progress.

 

I'm totally tempted to buy a mirror and barre and turn this into a dance studio.  Couldn't you just pirouette for hours? It took us five hours, start to finish, which I think is pretty damn impressive.  I'm so pleased I want to start asking strangers off the street to come down to my basement.  But that might be weird.