Just a girl with a hammer

  • Me and curtain panel sewing are breaking up.

    Me and curtain panel sewing are breaking up.

    Our dining room has always been a design nightmare with half wood floors and half ugly carpeting and a mishmash of furniture. It’s such a fucking nightmare that of the 40,000 pictures I have taken of the house, there are about four of the dining room.

    Shortly after I moved in.
    Dirty, broken, plastic blinds

    Now it’s a fucking nightmare WITH DRAPES! And Ikea Enje shades.

    The Enje blinds let in a ton more light during the day, while allowing us to keep our privacy. Ask me about the time I wandered out to the kitchen in my underwear and spotted Greg’s step-dad outside my kitchen window, hefting a rocking chair over his head. It’s not as weird as it sounds but it was super embarrassing.

    I’ve been searching craigslist for three years, trying to find a large scale table (preferably something in the farmhouse family) to fill this room. This one woman has been listing her Restoration Hardware table, which currently sells for $2395, for $1900.

    She’s had the listing up for two months. That makes me crazy. Why would I buy your used table that I can’t return to RH if it ever develops a defect or doesn’t look right in the space? Why not save an extra $500 toward a brand new one that comes with delivery to my house? I don’t believe that you should ever ask more than half the cost of a brand new item that is available online, especially from a mass producer like Restoration Hardware. The table isn’t special or unique or an antique. I tried to negotiate her down but she wouldn’t go for it. So I guess she’ll just keep listing her table that no one will buy and we’ll keep watching for sales.

    This kills me because I hate consumer culture and I always prefer to buy used, preferably older stuff that wasn’t produced in a factory in China where the employees are treated terribly. Someone recently remarked that we are horrified when we hear about slavery in the south. How could people do that? We would never do that! But we buy cheap consumer goods knowing full-well that the factory workers are operating under inhumane conditions. Future generations will frown on us.

    But that lady on craigslist really makes me dig in my heels. I don’t want to buy from her and I don’t want to buy new because it will get assembled by underpaid workers, shipped from somewhere very far away, and jammed full of chemicals that will off-gas in my house. And whoa Heather, why don’t you talk about feline AIDS as long you’re bumming everyone out?

    But yeah, curtains! I finished the curtains. They took days to make and I never want to make another panel again.

    I think they make the room look closer to finished and I’m pleased that I can finally cross them off the list. Now we just have to find a table and chairs that don’t fall apart when you sit on them. Chairs are so pricey, you guys! When did it get so expensive to sit?

    Sorry about that shame spiral detour in the middle there. Sometimes I feel embarrassed by the abundance of riches in my life. Then I have a glass of wine and I make fun of The Bachelor and everything is okay again.

  • Garden bloggers’ bloom day January 2013

    Garden bloggers’ bloom day January 2013

    It finally got really cold here in Portland. As a result, I finished all seven seasons of Gilmore Girls (spoiler alert: everything turned out okay) but I’m still working on my knitting project. I find my mind wandering to the garden and I’m starting to obsess over problem spots in the yard again. I missed that.

    And things are blooming! Aren’t winter blooming plants the best?

    Helleborus x ballardiae ‘HGC Cinnamon Rose’

    NOID Penstemon

    Mahonia x media ‘Arthur Menzies’

    Salvia ‘Black and Blue’

    My daphne is budding and my crocuses are poking out of the ground, so I’m hoping the next bloom day should be a good one. Check out May Dreams Gardens to see what else people have blooming this month.

  • Baseboard. Finally.

    Baseboard. Finally.

    Hey! I can finally tell you about my kitchen baseboard. I was sponsored by Tinkernation to install it and write about it but I had to wait to post it here. It happened so long ago that I don’t really remember all that happened except that it took a lot longer than we thought it would and I was really sore from crawling around on the floor. I’m fairly certain Greg and I got very testy with each other setting up the miter saw. What I’m saying is, I’m kinda phoning this one in.

    So yeah, no baseboard in the kitchen. When we redid our closet we pulled out the trim and kept it so we could use it here.

    Way back when they turned our dining room from two rooms into one, they built out this wall four inches and did this bullshit with the baseboard. We were like, “What the hell are we supposed to do with this bit of franken-trim?”

    So we removed everything from this wall and used a longer piece of trim from the closet here. Then we cut up the franken-piece that was here and used it in the kitchen.

    The long piece from the closet covered this wall perfectly.

    This was a tricky corner because they totally botched the corner angle when they built out the wall. This corner had a 50-ish degree angle, which made all the cuts bizarre. And we’d never installed baseboard before, so we didn’t know what we were doing.

    But thank goodness for caulk and spackle and paint. Because we went from this . . .

    To this . . .

    I still need to install quarterround/toe board but baseboard took three years, what’s another three for quarterround? Also, I’m still missing a toe kick under the dishwasher. I’m giving an over/under of five years for that one.

  • I need to get more of these

    I need to get more of these

    I planted Festuca glauca ‘Golden Toupee’ last spring and it didn’t do much. It didn’t grow at all and it faded to an unremarkable white/blue.

    At planting

    In August

    But now?

    In a sea of dead things this little guy is a cheery blast of chartreuse.

    I think I’d like to buy 40 more of these. And I’d like to make it grow. Does anyone have this grass? Is it ever going to stretch its legs?

  • Cutting the fat

    Cutting the fat

    There’s nothing like visiting people who have lived in the same house for 30 years to make you want to declutter. I came back from visiting family in December and I felt overwhelmed by the amount of stuff we have.

    Right around the first of the year we had a rare day of sunshine and I was like, “I’m going to weed the front yard!” except I had to put something away in the craft closet first. I still don’t really know what happened but all of a sudden I had pulled everything out of the closet. Everything. And then I was bagging up things for the Goodwill (Greg hates garage sales and won’t help if I have one). The decorative vases from my reveal. Old curtains I sewed for the bedroom and will never use. Gone. My friend Joy took all my extra yarn for an after school program she runs.

    Then I hit the front hall closet. Can you believe I had more throw pillows in there? We have six million throw pillows in our living room (I think they reproduce while we sleep). I don’t even need extras to recover or repurpose, we have so many.

    Next I was raiding my closet, getting rid of all the shoes I never wear. I have a hard time getting rid of clothes and shoes because I buy new ones so infrequently. I’ll stop wearing an item then put it back in rotation two years later. But I think three years without a single wear means I can purge them. Gone.

    Next up, books:

    I used to buy around 50 books a year. Then I started working in a library and realized that I could get any book in the whole world for free and I never bought a print book again (I still buy books for my Kindle). It was liberating. And now I’ve realized that I don’t need to hang on to all of them. Just the good ones that I might loan out or reread. All those galleys from library conferences have been weeded.

    When I first moved into the house I arranged my books by color because that’s what everyone on the Internet was doing. This is a great system if you don’t read your books. If your books are not decorative it’s awful. I swear they almost revoked my librarian rights over this.

    Everything is ordered the way I like it now, a combination of author/gender/genre. Anais Nin sits on the shelf with Henry Miller and Proust, the way god intended.

    Next on my decluttering list is the garage, but that will need to wait until it warms up. Anybody else purging? I think I might be addicted.

  • A happy new year to you

    A happy new year to you

    Whew you guys, we made it through the holidays. I have no excuse to dislike the holidays but I always have a hard time enjoying them. They end up so busy, so expensive, and so jammed with things like work parties (seriously, we see each other every day, why so many work parties?). It didn’t help that 2012 was a really bad year for a lot of people. I can’t remember a year where I knew more people who lost loved ones or jobs or their health. Greg and I have been hiding out for a week, working on jigsaw puzzles and staying in our pajamas all day.

    I also painted more black doors.

    I’ve been reading everyone’s “What we accomplished last year” lists on their blogs and I was feeling so lazy but then I realized that we painted the house and landscaped the front yard plus I painted a whole bunch of stuff, so that made me feel better. I still have no quarter round on the floors upstairs but the year of little things was fairly successful. We have curtains in the living room! We have a real light fixture over the kitchen sink!

    Our biggies on the list for 2013 largely involve the basement. I got a gift certificate to Mr. Plywood for Christmas so we’re finally going to install baseboard and window trim in Greg’s movie lair.

    And on the laundry side we’re going to demo a useless built-in and install shelving. Greg thinks if we do this I’ll stop leaving the tape measure in a different place every time I use it, which makes me laugh and laugh. Variety is the spice of life! Where is the fun in home improvement if you don’t spend the first half hour looking for the hammer that your girlfriend inexplicably left in the bedroom closet?

    From me to you, I wish you good health, happiness, and peace. I’ll be over here poring over all the gardening catalogs I’m getting in the mail. Spring is coming!

  • Garden bloggers’ bloom day December 2012, Should I be worried? edition

    Garden bloggers’ bloom day December 2012, Should I be worried? edition

    And one day late, to boot. I’ve been preoccupied with being cold, hiding out under blankets, knitting, and rewatching the entire run of Gilmore Girls. I am so good at doing winter.

    My salvia ‘Black and Blue’ is still going strong, though the weather isn’t always kind to the blooms.

    My Mahonia x media ‘Arthur Menzies’ is gorgeous right now, though it’s being overshadowed by an increasingly gnarly looking castor bean plant. I’m waiting for the castor bean to turn to mush so I can get that humongous stalk out of the ground.

    Salvia pulchella x involucrata looks like it might finally bloom.

    My Knautia macedonica is still pushing out blooms.

    Fatsia japonica!

    In slightly troubling news, my hellebores are already blooming, which didn’t happen until February last year.

    My Allium schubertii are poking out of the ground. A lot.

    Am I worrying over nothing? Am I going to lose these alliums once the really cold weather gets here? Will Luke and Lorelei ever figure out that they’re in love with each other? So many questions.

    Please visit our host Carol at May Dreams Gardens for a look at what’s blooming in everyone else’s gardens.

  • Surprise!

    Surprise!

    I’ve been painting again.

    Greg and I always joke that whenever he goes away on business he comes back to find that I’ve painted a room. I try and wait until he’s gone so he doesn’t have to deal with paint fumes. Also, I like to sing while I paint and Eternal Flame is still such a good song you guys, but Greg doesn’t need to hear that.

    Hang on to your hats, this is dramatic (we’re looking at the spot above the door).

    Before:

    After:

    I KNOW. I know! It’s crazy. The old color was the off-white from Metro Paint, which smells terrible and is made from recycled paint, so the colors were totally different from batch to batch. The new color is White Chocolate by Benjamin Moore, a color that looks exactly like white chocolate. Why would I bother? For starters, there was a spot over the door where I started to paint three years ago, then realized it needed to be patched, so I painted around it, then spackled it, then never painted. And I guess I got rid of the paint can at some point? So I was never going to find a match for that spot.

    Then we installed baseboard in the kitchen, which I still can’t show you pictures of because Tinkernation has neglected to publish my final post. I am contractually obligated to keep it under wraps until they do. But I had to patch the wall, which means the kitchen really needed to be repainted.

    I bought a quart of White Chocolate and put up a swatch above the door, since Greg was away for the night. Then I was having so much fun I decided to paint a little further. Then I realized I was just painting the kitchen that night. I almost had enough paint to finish, too. Instead I had to pop over to Benjamin Moore the next day after work and hustle to get it finished before Greg got home.

    It didn’t work. He walked in and I was behind the stove with a roller and I weakly yelled, “Surprise!” and he was like, “I see the roller and the paint can but everything looks the same,” and I had to explain the minute difference between the two colors.

    All of the paint fumes with none of the dramatic impact! You’re welcome, baby.

    The good news is I really love the color and we have no visible patches. And it turns out I still know all the words to Eternal Flame and Walk Like an Egyptian.

  • Little improvements

    Little improvements

    When I decided to make curtains for the front rooms of the house I bought the entire bolt of fabric, or 20 yards. If I’m going to go to the trouble of making curtains that I’m just “meh” about, well I’m going to make 600 of them, damn it. You don’t change course mid-stream or something.

    I finally got around to making panels for the big window in the dining room and hanging an Ikea Enje blind. I ordered more hardware from JC Penny but screwed up and ordered one fewer than I needed. I also ran out of fabric, so this corner still has ugly, broken, dirty blinds.

    Even though the room looks a little silly with just one set of curtains, the amount of extra light that pours through the Enje blind is dramatic. Our house is south-facing and having extra sunshine during the winter (when we can get it) is fantastic.

    I think I might actually dye the curtains in this room, even if just to an off-white. I know, exciting times ’round here.

  • A mystery

    A mystery

    Do you watch Ask This Old House? They have a section where they pull out a random tool or gadget and ask “What is it?” and the guys go around thinking up ridiculous ideas for what it could be (“It’s a lazy susan for Tommy’s sandwiches.”). It’s super cheesy and I LOVE it.

    I could use them right about now.

    We have a bolt on our basement floor. It just sticks out of the floor, right in the pathway between the door and the washing machine. It has some sort of electromagnetic force field that draws your foot to it, which means there’s a lot of swearing coming from the basement because I always step on it.

    It didn’t correlate to any parts on the old furnace, though it had been retrofitted for gas at some point, so maybe the original configuration used it?

    Original furnace

    Greg tried to unscrew it but the thing wouldn’t move. It’s all of one piece, which makes me think it was put there when the slab was poured.

    See how it’s right where you want to walk when you’re carrying a load of laundry from the dryer?

    Anybody seen anything like this is an old house? Is this a portal to hell? An important bolt for an underground natural gas line? Does it involve the post right there? Any ideas? My foot is bruised and sore and I’m ready to take a jackhammer to it.