Money well spent

Sometimes I do things that, if a girlfriend was describing them to me, I'd be like, "Girl, what are you thinking? Don't do that," but then I do them anyway.  Hiring my coworker's husband to do some work for me was one of those things.  The bathroom fan has gotten really REALLY noisy lately and I suspected that the duct in the attic had rattled off the motor body of the fan.  I made my boy go up in the attic with me because of the SPIDERS, OH MY GOD SPIDERS.

We found this.

They actually make clamps to hold ducts together and I believe they're quite inexpensive.  But why waste $.60 when you can just duct tape everything together?  When I had the vents put in the roof my coworker's husband, who works as a licensed contractor, set up the duct for the bathroom fan. He apparently decided this was the correct way to do it.

We pulled off the failing duct tape and put new duct tape in the same place. If it's good enough for a licensed contractor, it's good enough for us. What's the worst that could happen?

The big picture

I've never storyboarded (is that even what it's called?) before, but this is sort of the master plan for the living room.  Until, you know, I change my mind again.

And I think I agree with the majority below: the fireplace should be white, even if it will show smoke and soot.  Hey, my fireplace doesn't work anyway!

Help me pick a paint color.

I like to paint a large area when I'm waffling over color choices but I think the color swatches, combined with the 6 existing paint colors, skidded right past "helpful" and right into "confusing." The walls will be the olive green you see on the lower half of the wall.

It looks sort of awesome the way it is, no?  *Sigh.*

But seriously, which looks better? Dark gray or white? Or something completely different?

poll by twiigs.com

Update!

Rachel makes me realize that I haven't specified what the color scheme will be in this room.  This is the inspiration photo for the room:

The rug will get swapped out for a light blue one and there will be pops of red.  So I'd like the fireplace to have some drama  . . . but more of the black-white spectrum kind. And of course I'll put a bird on it. :)

Things are happening!

One of the things on my wishlist for my reveal was for the living room to be painted and the mirror above the fireplace be removed. When the house stager informed me that she'd have to hire painters and a contractor to remove the mirror, I told her to forget it and just focus on getting me furniture. 'Cause I paint and labor for free.

I had no idea what was behind the mirror--it could be water damage, an exposed fireplace, an envelope of money . . . who knows. I conned the boy into helping me remove the mirror this weekend.

The mirror was really heavy but it came down pretty easily.

Then we just had to remove the wood structure behind the mirror.

Next I just have to clean, patch, sand, and prime that area, and then I can get started on painting the living room.  New year's house resolutions, I WILL OWN YOU.

Great sadness!

The weather gods decreed that the sedum planter is yard trash.

At some time during the night that leaning bit of gate fell over, squished my mock orange and took out my little shabby chic drawer of sedums.  You'd think I'd learn and finally put that bit of gate (which I intend to turn into a compost bin) in the garage but, no, I just leaned it up against the fence again.

Ha ha, weather gods! I have another bathroom vanity drawer in the basement! And I never learn my lesson!

New year house resolutions

1.  Sew new curtains for the bedroom, using this fabric:

2.  Finally paint the living room.

3.  Replace the mortise box on the front door so we could actually use it.  Did I ever mention that we have to go in and out the kitchen door because no keys came with the front door and the locksmith declared it super expensive to fix?

4.  Replace the back porch steps.

5.  Replace the side fence.

6.  Paint the patio slab.

7.  Draw up a master plan for landscaping the front yard.
8.  Remove the rhododendrons and azalea from the front yard.

9.  Paint the exterior of the house.  Quit laughing.
10.  Put in baseboard and window trim in the basement.

Design on a Dime, eat your heart out.

Sometimes home improvement is really cheap.  To wit:

I finally got around to shimming the bathroom door.  It was really hard to get the lock to latch and you had to lean your body into the door to get it to close.  I used a cardboard box, cut to spec, as a shim:

A shoe box, to be specific.

Then I removed the door and installed the cardboard behind the hinge hardware.  Now it latches like a pro and I got to yell at myself for not taking the five minutes to do this a year ago.

The toilet was still rocking, even though Bill and I had changed the wax ring on it.  Aren't you glad I never documented that?

I bought toilet shims but they were so fricking huge that I couldn't use them.  All I needed was a single dime in the back. 

How good does that look?  I know, I should loosen the floor bolts and wedge that dime under the toilet all the way, but I can't get those stupid bolt caps off.  It's funny because that's precisely why I bought them.

But! The toilet doesn't rock.  FINALLY.

For my next trick I will update my kitchen using nine pennies!