Removing doors and patching holes

We have two doorways that lead to the back hallway and bedrooms: one from the living room and one from the kitchen. Only one of them had a door actually hanging from the hinges. Even if we had doors on both, we'd never use them. We just don't have the same sense of propriety that they did in 1938 when they built my house. Realizing that we never close the door off the living room, I asked Greg if he'd care if I just got rid of it. He responded that he'd never been sure why I hadn't removed it already.

But that means we had this situation going on when I removed the hinges. Sorry about the bad photography--this hallway gets zero light.

Bad pictures, ahoy!

My friend Sarah told me about using those free paint stirrer sticks to patch these holes. They fit perfectly.

You just trim them to fit (we used craft scissors), attach them with finishing nails (drill a pilot hole or the wood will split), hit them with some wood putty, sand them, prime them, and paint them.

It's like there was never a door here!

Oh wait, except for on the other side. We haven't figured out the best way to patch this hole yet. It's too shallow to accommodate a paint stick. So we could chisel out a deeper hole or try to find a thinner piece of wood to patch it. We'll probably go with the latter.

In case anybody is worried, we are keeping the door we removed in storage. Future owners may want to be able to close off areas of the house and you don't give away original solid-wood doors.

Where I continue to pay for my mistakes

Remember how I poured boiling water down my bathroom sink and cracked it? And then how Home Depot sent me a replacement one for free because I wrote the CEO?

That replacement sink sat in our living room for a couple of months in its humongous box because I didn't want to install it. To put in the new sink I'd need to remove the old faucet from the old sink and then reinstall it. Installing faucets is the worst: you have to get three separate parts aligned while tightening bolts from two different sides and it just totally sucks. I did it myself when I first installed the sink and it's a miracle that it was even close to normal looking.

I started by unwrapping the box in the smallest area possible. Does anyone else do this? Inevitably I decide to build a huge Ikea desk in the hallway, only to discover that I've wedged myself into a corner and it requires an act of god to get it and me out.

Last time I put the sink together I used a jigsaw to inelegantly cut out an area for the P-trap.

When my parents remodeled their bathrooms the contractor used a hole saw to create a tidy hole for the pipes. This time we were going to do it right! So I went to Home Depot, bought a hole saw and the auger/pilot hole bit for it to attach to my drill.

Except I bought a bit that's too big for my drill. So we connected it to a socket wrench and did it by hand. That's how we roll.

And that mostly worked.

Then I started to dismantle the faucet from the old sink, only to find that the plastic snaps underneath that connect the water supply tubes to the faucets are designed to be installed once. I couldn't figure out a way to get them off without just breaking them. I'm sure they sell replacement kits online but they didn't have them at the Home Depot, which meant purchasing another faucet kit. I don't know about you but I can think of about a thousand things I'd rather spend my money on than a new faucet. Like curtains. Or scotch. Or new trees for the yard. Toilet paper. Anything, really.

So Greg and I installed them and got really, really pissy with each other. I hate that part of home improvement. But it got easier from there! We had lunch! I installed the plumbing! Oh my god it was leaking underneath! Then Greg and I bickered about what was leaking (I was right, just saying), reinstalled the plunger kit again (still leaking), then tried the old plunger kit (it leaked too), then discovered that the porcelain has a tiny chip where the sink terminates and meets the gasket in the drain stem.

Fuck. Me.

It was really discouraging. Finally, with a magical combination of plumbers putty (which I kept calling "plutters pumby" even though I had NOT been drinking), wrenching, and swear words, it stopped leaking. Usually when I finish a project like that I feel exuberant afterward. This time I just felt like weeping because I have no confidence that this will continue to be watertight.

The best part of this whole story? Our bathroom looks exactly the same as it did before I lost an entire Saturday to it. Okay, we no longer have a line of caulk through the middle of our sink basin, but other than that it's the same. Do they make fifty year sinks? Next time I'm buying one of those, having it professionally installed, then never touching it again.

Before

After

Have you told someone you love recently not to pour boiling water down their bathroom sink? Maybe you should go do that right now.

Painting! So much painting!

Sometimes I like painting swatches better than I like painting entire rooms or walls. But then sometimes I paint too many swatches in random places and our house starts to look like an outward manifestation of my mind and it. is. not. pretty. So I have to repaint. All of this is to say, I painted the hallway!

The original yellow, which wasn't so buttery looking IRL.

Because I am a terrible girlfriend, I removed the one paint color that Greg really likes in the house: the yellow in the hallway. (I know you're thinking it looks pretty but it was a high-sheen paint that made me feel queasy in artificial light.) When asked why I would want to repaint it, I told him, "It doesn't fit with our color story."

"I don't even know what that means."
"Just trust me."
"I like the yellow."
"I hate it. It's too shiny, too matchy with the bathroom floor."
"How about orange?"
"With a pink, yellow, and purple bathroom adjacent? No way. Any other requests?"
"Black?"
"Go to hell."

See? Terrible girlfriend! Instead I chose the same off-white from the kitchen. It's clean, it's neutral, and we can easily paint over it later when we find a color we both like. It we're being honest, it barely looks different but it makes me happy. It helps that I painted with an eggshell finish.

I saw a very pale blue (Benjamin Moore Whirlpool) on Making It Lovely that I wanted to use in the alcove between the kitchen and the hallway. I'm still on the fence about it--I think it makes the floor tiles look yellow. The upshot was that we realized how much more light reflected in this space with a lighter paint on the wall. It could have a little to do with the fact that we finally washed our kitchen windows, but I think the paint is helping. Before it was a french blue color that was actually very pretty.

Before

After

In certain lights this color reads white but in the bright morning sunlight that streams through the kitchen window it's a very pale blue. I picked it up from Kaleidoscope Paint and I think I paid more for my first car than I did for this paint. It's low VOC but, shitballs, was it ever expensive. I'm not sure it was worth it. The trim paint I used was Benjamin Moore Aura (Snowfall White with a satin finish) and I would sell my first born for this stuff. It's dreamy to paint with. I want to bathe in it (not really. but sorta.). I'll definitely use it again.

And then we're going to put in some baseboard. Really.

Sludgestorm!

Our rain garden is like a giant slurpee right now.

 

My poor Cryptomeria japonica was bent over with snow, like someone was pulling its ponytail from behind. We're going to have to restake it and give it some TLC this spring. Stupid snow isn't even sticking around. Hrmph.

Little things: the kitchen window

I painted the kitchen well over two years ago but I never finished painting around the window. I wanted to do a thin stripe of orange or some other funky color . . . but I couldn't find the right shade. So I ignored it and we endured this view for two years.

It didn't help that a former owner had sloppily glopped paint on the outside of the windows, obscuring the view inside.

I finally just said, "fuck it," painted the inside white and the outside trim with the color from the basement and called it good. Greg took it to the next level by scraping the outside paint from the windows and Windexing the glass.

Oh my god, it's like looking outdoors in HD, you guys. The amount of extra light that comes in to the kitchen now is staggering. We were both conflicted about cleaning the windows because we don't want birds flying into them, but then we realized that we have a bird feeder that has yet to be visited by a single bird and that we're probably okay. I have tried so hard to be the crazy lady with all the bird feeders but the birds aren't playing along.

Next up: replacing that awful light fixture (the installers did something VERY weird with the wiring or this would be done already), escutcheons on the faucet, and repainting the kitchen door. And maybe washing the rest of our windows.

On Battlestar Galactica

A lot of people make fun of my Battlestar Galactica posters in the living room but I never listen to them. I hope those people are ready to eat crow. Frakking crow.

If you have the fancy cable look for our house this weekend on Portlandia. The full episode they shot in our house doesn't have an air date that I can find (the sketch they shot here was called "Adult Babysitter") but our exterior is used in this weekend's skit about a couple obsessively watching Battlestar Galactica.

The interior shots are of someone else's house. Can we all agree now that BSG is awesome and there's nothing not-awesome about having posters of the show in our living room?

So say we all,
Heather

I think I'm going to have to declare this a garden oops

Planting a Mexican Orange here seemed like such a good idea. It's evergreen, pretty, and full of good-smelling flowers. But sadly, the color is all wrong for this area.

Screaming yellow Choisya ternata 'Sundance' in late November

Neon yellow just isn't playing nicely with the rust and orange here. I need a small, evergreen shrub that will play nicely with this warm color palate. I'd love to put in a Fothergilla 'Mt. Airy' but it's deciduous. But look how pretty. So pretty!

Image yanked from here.

I kind of want to plant it anyway. But I need evergreen elements! Maybe another daphne? Or maybe an Osmanthus delavayi? I was hipped to it by Loree and made sure to pay attention to it when I visited the Chinese Garden with my parents. Or maybe I should finally give in to Oregon grape. This is the corner that we look at from our bed, so whatever goes here needs to be beautiful in every season.

The Choisya is going to move to the other side of the yard where it will get morning sun and a reprieve from the hottest part of the day. This supposedly leaves them less screaming yellow. And you know what? I KNEW that it would turn that color in full sun and I planted it anyway, thinking that it would magically behave differently. Like if I loved it enough it would just caramelize or something? It's this same kind of thinking that makes me plant all of my shrubs too closely together.

And I think the Lonicera nitida 'Baggensen's Gold' is gonna have to go somewhere else, too. It's just not the right color even though it's going to be a pretty little shrub.

One of you knows the perfect plant to put here. Come on, give it up already. Lend a fledgling gardener a hand.