Just a girl with a hammer

Tag: DIY

Just a girl with a nail gun

This spring I actually experienced spring fever for the first time in many years. I felt itchy to get in the garden and I purchased prolific amounts of plants via mail order and local nurseries. Our dog and her friends ran roughshod over the garden and I didn’t even care because the seal was broken and I! was! buying! everything!

I grew sweet peas (‘April in Paris’) for the first time and, holy shit, people, those smell as good as everyone says they do. I got my new plant babies in the ground in a timely fashion! I kept thinking, “This is my year. I’m going to stay on top of weeds and for once I won’t be embarrassed to have people over.”

Then I had to travel to California a bunch of times and then the weather turned hot and my brain and body lost all of their go-go. Oxalis covered everything and Greg would helpfully ask, “Do you think you should do something about that?” and I would glare at him and return to melting in front of the garden mister.

This was not my year. I didn’t stay up on weeding. That said, I did achieve a couple of things. I replaced the rotting fence between us and our newest neighbors. They are delightful but they smoke constantly and they have a clear view of our yard from the raised deck off the back of their house. So we asked if we could replace the fence and foot the bill. I disassembled the old fence and built the new one in three hours one Sunday morning while Greg was gone because NAIL GUNS ARE AWESOME.

Before

After

Weirdos from Craigslist took the old boards for reuse and I drank two cocktails at a tiki bar and took an epic four hour nap. The fence is now seven feet tall, which should also help block the view of our backyard from the three-story condos that were recently built at the end of our block.

I also reorganized our garage, which looked like the touchdown site of a tornado. Our garage is long and skinny and full of junk. It looks like the inside of my purse but dirtier and with more things that draw blood. The previous owner, a paranoid mess who wrapped every heat register in the house in tin foil (so the government can’t listen in on you), installed a useless shelf with a gigantic mirror tilted back.

See, I don’t need safety measures like mirrors to know if someone is sneaking up on me because I left 900 nursery pots at the entrance of the garage. There’s a pile of styrofoam you can fall on, too.

We finally took the mirror down, demoed the shelf, and removed a weird cabinet in the corner that we used to store spiders.

We moved our metal shelves to the back and I built a potting table, modified from this video I found on YouTube. Men have largely convinced women that we’ll kill ourselves if we use power tools but it turns out building stuff isn’t that hard and its super fun.

Then I added hanging storage to the walls and now sometimes I just stand in my garage and coo in this general direction. As my mother always says, “Simple minds = simple pleasures.”

Next up we’re having the yellow bamboo that came with the house removed. It has been terribly behaved, sending rhizomes through the root balls of neighboring plants, at a shocking speed. It leaves culm litter everywhere and it sucks. WHY IS THIS THE BAMBOO HOME DEPOT SELLS EVERYONE? In its place I’m planting Chusqea culeou, which is a true clumper that shouldn’t be quite so messy.

Next year is going to be my year, I can just feel it. I’m going to stay on top of weeds and for once I won’t be embarrassed to have people over. And I will buy a lot of plants, that I know is true.

November 15, 2018
More gravel. More grasses. More sleeping.

I’ve been an insomniac my whole life. Last fall everything got way worse and I basically stopped sleeping. Things are a lot better now, thanks to a light box, melatonin, and what they refer to as “sleep hygiene.” At night I cut out blue light which means for the last two hours of my day I live in a world without the internet or TV. I have to read books or work on projects that don’t require the Internet. This means I mostly read books because every project leads back to the Internet.

I was reading Beth Chatto’s Gravel Garden the other night and I wanted to look up some plants she described . . . but I couldn’t. I just had to jot down a note to research it later. It’s probably for the best, since I’d just end up on Plant Lust, then I’d fall down the rabbit hole of Google Images and various garden blogs. How did people garden before the Internet? And how much more productive could I be without an iPad?

In our own gravel garden things are chugging along. We’ve figured out where we want the deck and now we just have to figure out how to build it. The original plan was to wait on the deck until next summer but as I had rock being delivered, Greg said, “Maybe we should just do it this summer,” hence my mad scrambling and panic a few weeks back. All of the sudden that vague rectangle on the paper plan needed to be finalized.

We’ve marked out the spot for the new deck with yellow spikes that I WILL trip over at some point. We’re still deciding whether we want to build the deck before or after the wedding in June.

The parabola-shaped rock wall was changed to an even curve. Greg thinks this is a downgrade but my brain likes it better.

I need to retool some of the planting because I totally planted on a grid and I didn’t overlap my plants enough, so I have big blobs of the same plants that don’t meld nicely into the other blobs. Anyway.

What did I plant?

The centerpiece of this bed is Arctostaphylos ‘St. Helena.’ I went to Xera and pumped Paul and Greg for their opinions on the very best manzanitas. I originally wanted A. viscida ‘Sweet Adinah’ but they warned me that it’s prone to randomly losing branches and it’s incredibly picky about soil, location, and drainage. St. Helena has those big beautiful leaves and will handle being in a northern aspect (though it’s still getting 6-8 hours of sun a day) better than others. I also like how blue the leaves are.

Arctostaphylos manzanita ‘St. Helena’

I wanted this bed to be low water and I wanted a lot of grasses. We’ve got a whole bunch of Schizachyrium ‘The Blues’, Pennisetum spatheolatum, Anemanthele lessoniana, and Festuca roemeri.

Schizachyrium scoparium ‘The Blues’ in the garden of Greg Shepherd

Pennisetum spatheolatum send up hundreds of little exclamation points

Anemanthele lessoniana in my side yard

Festuca roemeri Photo source: The Evergreen State College

I have a bunch of Achnatherum calamagrostis on order, which will also get squeezed in here.

I also shoehorned in smaller shrubs like Baptisia ‘Purple Smoke’ and Hypericum ‘Albury Purple.’ I also rescued a crapload of Salvia ‘May Night’ from the front garden so something in this bed wouldn’t be tiny. Can you tell I love purple?

I also bought one of those stupid Digiplexis annuals on a whim, which I now regret. I do not like that pink.

Baptisia ‘Purple Smoke’

In other parts of the garden, I tore out the flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum) that used to live in between the two clumps of bamboo. I hated the color of the blooms and it’s a pretty boring shrub. I vacillated for years about ripping out this one. It’s drought tolerant and low maintenance but it wasn’t sparking joy, so out it went. I planted a new Ribes in the front garden and it blooms a nice hot pink that plays nicer with all of my orange flowers.

In its place I planted Tetrapanax papyifera ‘Steroidal Giant’ (which is hiding behind the clump of Acanthus spinosus), Miscanthus purpurescens, a cananna (Canna musafolia), and three Calamagrostis foliosa that I rescued from another part of the garden where they didn’t get enough sun to color up like they should.

The back rain garden finally got edged too. It’s always had a soil berm edging it, which just petered out into cedar chips.

We’re not missing a stone, that’s the overflow notch.

It looks pretty silly right now because I’m still futzing with the stone placement. Then all the cedar chips in the pathway will get scraped up and replaced with gravel. I still have so much work to do but I’m pleased with how everything is coming along.

We tested happy hour in the garden this weekend and it still worked! Whew.

May 5, 2015
Toiling in the basement. Again.

Back when we had our earthquake retrofit, they had to cut into the drywall in our basement. That happened almost two years ago and yet I haven’t wanted to patch this area because I hate drywall repair.

At some point in 2014 Greg screwed the old pieces back into place and I threw one compulsory layer of joint compound on top. It sat like that for a very long time, and every time we watched a movie down there I’d say, “I should really do something about that,” and then I would ignore it. Because patching is the pits.

Because we did a shitty job getting the drywall pieces back in place, I had to do one billion layers of joint compound, with all the sanding that comes between coats. Of all the projects in the house, I really wish I had hired the drywall mudding and cornering out. I hate it and I’m not good at it. I’ve spent months of my life working on the walls in this room and they still look like shit.

Anyway! It became very clear that the entire room was in need of repainting and since I am trying to be a little less of a dictator around the house, I relented to Greg’s one constant request: to paint the basement dark.

As I’ve covered before, Greg hasn’t always felt like this was OUR house. I bought it, I picked out all the decor, and I just let him live here. We have this frequent push-pull where he complains, “You never let me choose anything in the house!” and then I run through the house pointing out all the things we’ve purchased together, and then he says, “I want to paint the basement black,” and I screech “NO!” and then he’s proven his point. And you know what? He doesn’t really want a black basement but we’re both stubborn enough to go through with painting it that way, just to spite each other.

If this isn’t clear, I’m so excited to marry Greg. I’m crazy about him and I can’t wait to be his wife.

When it became clear that the whole basement needed to be repainted, I suggested painting it navy blue. We tried a number of different colors that looked great in other people’s rooms but didn’t work for us. We finally settled on Blue Note by Benjamin Moore. If I wasn’t already marrying Greg I would marry this color. It’s so delicious and it’s perfect for a room where we watch movies. It’s so much darker than I’d ever choose normally, so Greg gets a gold star for this one.

But first I had to deal with the windows, which had never been painted or trimmed out.

And we needed to deal with Hall and Oates/Beavis and Butthead over the fireplace (free artwork left by the previous owners).

I haven’t replaced the window hardware because I’m afraid it will disintegrate into rusty pieces and I’ll never find a replacement.

I think, for never having done this before, I did a pretty good job. We then spent a Saturday installing baseboard and window trim.

And Hall and Oates got replaced with a new cover. I want to repaint it black because I feel like it needs to be darker. We’re toying with the idea of building a teak mantel over the fireplace, which will fix that whole missing brick issue.

And we hung a sweet bamboo curtain to obscure the storage area and provide some texture. Now we’d like to stash a bar in there.

We spent another Saturday hauling the old couch up the stairs, and boy, was that fun! The pleather was peeling and splitting or we would’ve just kept it down there. Instead we bought the comfiest (though not the most attractive) couch we could find at Ikea: the Kivik. This room is for watching movies, so function trumped form.

I also mounted and hung the tiki masks we bought in Hawaii. I glued lights inside so their mouths light up.

We still need sconces over the TV, a skirt board along the staircase, new stair carpeting, a new area rug, a perfect mid-century modern credenza under the tiki masks, window treatments . . . there’s still so much to do. I also kind of want to drywall over the wood paneling in the stairwell even though I really don’t want to mud any more drywall seams. And it would be a total bitch to drywall around the stair risers. And yet . . .

Maybe I’ll just wait for a super nice weekend to do that.

To recap, when I moved in:

After the first go-around with redoing the room:

And now:

We’re getting there.

April 3, 2015
Snug as a bug, slub as a mustard

Since spending an ungodly amount of money on having the house insulated, we’ve noticed a drop in our heating costs. The house is less drafty than before, which really helped when the temperature dropped to 6 degrees. The one exception has been the bedroom, where we have sliding glass doors with a broken thermal seal. The old curtains had thermal liners but they weren’t big enough to cover the whole expanse of glass, and as a result this room was freezing.

I wanted new drapes anyway and I wanted to try something I’d seen on various blogs: curtains made from dropcloths. I bought the heavier weight canvas cloth in the largest size I could find.

I had to wash them three times and then air them out for about a month because they smelled awful. I wanted to do pinch pleats on my drapes but, due to a poorly situated seam in the dropcloth, I didn’t have enough fabric. I had picked up a roll of 54″ thermal blackout fabric this summer on clearance, so I used that as a guide for making sure the curtains were square. I have a terrible time making things square, which is why most of the baby blankets I’ve made have been trapezoids. But I think these turned out pretty well!

They are fully lined, so they’re HEAVY. As you can see, “sewing a straight line” is not in my grab bag of skills.

Wonky seams aside, these things really work. Our bedroom is a black pit when they are closed and the room is about 15 degrees warmer. And since they cost me less than $100 to make, I bought a new duvet cover.

Ignore the uneven artwork, I was just experimenting.

I’ve had my heart set on mustard since before I painted the room. I saw an image on Pinterest of a dark moody room with a tufted mustard armchair. I loved the image so much I didn’t even pin it and now I can’t find it. It was that good.

Greg really doesn’t like this color and I am deeply in love with it. I get it, it’s a divisive color. I look at it and see curry and goldenrod and deliciousness. Greg looks at it and sees baby poop and old mustard. Tomato, tomahto.

We both agree that this duvet is incredibly soft. It’s Coyuchi organic cotton and it’s the first time I’ve opened a package of bedding and smelled . . . nothing. It’s dreamy. I recommend it, if you’re in the market for a new duvet (and they come in lots of colors if you hate the mustard).

ALL THE SNUGGLIES.

The last step before I declare this room “done” is to replace the bedside lamps with better task lighting. Those lamps suck for reading or drawing or anything detailed. And since I do everything from bed (I’d cook dinner from there if it was possible) I need good light.

On the upside, Greg really like the colorful pillow I sewed! It has a zipper in it and it’s pretty square and I’m pretty darn proud of it. So, are you with Greg or with me? Help me convince him it’s good. How can you hate on a color called “slub mustard?”

December 20, 2013
The bedroom! An outward manifestation of my capriciousness!

While Greg was gone and I was painting the dining room, I also painted the bedroom. For anyone keeping track (me, Greg, psychiatrist), this is the third time I’ve painted it. I picked this color out myself so I can’t even blame Anna if people don’t like it. It’s Stained Glass by Benjamin Moore.

I promise it’s not the same color as the dining room. It’s darker and bluer (and very hard to photograph).

I think whoever prepped this house to sell was worried that they would run out of paint, so they decided to paint two walls in each room one color, and the other two walls a different one. The paint colors were all mis-tints bought from the clearance bin at Home Depot. I know this because they left me the cans in the basement. This bedroom had two pale green walls and two French blue walls.

I initially painted it Cilantro Cream by Behr and it was okay.

Then Greg was going to move in and I decided I had to repaint the bedroom. So I tried to get a color match to the spare bedroom color, which was a Metro Paint color. Because Metro Paint is made from recycled paint, there’s no consistency to their colors. The color match wasn’t very good, but again the color was fine. Pale blue. Like the dining room.

Mid-painting

But now it is dark and delicious and I love it. Why are interiors so hard to photograph?

I really want brass swing-arm sconces instead of those dinky bedside lamps. I don’t care if I’m blindly following fads, I think they’re pretty:

I used to read books but then I discovered TV, which is like reading except it’s less effort and you can surf the web while you do it! This TV is old and weighs over 60 pounds, so I had to con my friend Bill into helping me get it off the wall before I could paint.

I love the color of Dracaena ‘Limelight’ against the walls

I have something in the works for new drapes, which will hopefully be less labor intensive than when I sewed the living and dining room drapes. The sweater rug at West Elm went on sale recently so we got an 8×10′ rug for $350 but now I’m wishing I’d gone with the darker colored rug. And not just because I’ll probably spill wine on it.

At the very least we need a new duvet cover, no? I think this one deserves to be replaced after all the wine it’s put up with. What color would you go with?

I’d like to incorporate more plants in the room as well, but being so accident prone = no plants on the bedside table. Two things recently made me laugh until I almost peed: an article from The Onion “Man Puts Glass of Water on Bedside Table in Case He Needs to Make Huge Mess in Middle of Night” (thanks Scott) and this photo on Pinterest:

Everything was fine until I got up to pee in the middle of the night, tripped over the stack of books, and impaled myself on the antlers hanging on the wall.

If you’re wondering what Greg thought, he likes it! In fact, he’s digging the more saturated colors so much that he thinks we should repaint the spare bedroom.

I’m thinking I should let him have the fun this time and I’ll just watch. Painting is a lot of work and I have so many things to spill on the new rug.

October 3, 2013
And then I painted everything

Greg recently went to a trade show in Europe and was gone for two weeks. Two weeks! I have a habit of painting while he’s gone (proof here, here, and here) and this time was no different.

Except that he was gone for so long that I had to paint multiple rooms.

First up was the dining room. For anyone keeping track (so far that’s me, Greg, and my psychiatrist), this is the third time I’ve painted this room. The first color was a disaster, so I painted it again two days later.

The color(s) when I moved in

First disastrous paint color, minty fresh

Two days later, second alright color

The second color, that washed out blue, was never something I was in love with. It just didn’t make me shudder the way that minty green did, so it stayed. Also, I was sick of painting by that point.

But! Now I had holes in the ceiling to repair and a ginormous hole in the wall to fix. When you’re very lucky, your house comes with TWO fuse boxes.

This fuse box confounded three different electricians, who couldn’t figure out WHY there would be two boxes in one house, one upstairs, one down. It powered a very strange set of things, like: the refrigerator, the outlets in the bedroom, one switch in the living room, and, somewhere in Mongolia, a single lamp that an ancient man cooked by. The main box in the basement powered everything else.

One reason that our electrical upgrade took so long is that our electrician removed this and properly rerouted our wires to one single box in the basement, which he then balanced and upgraded. This is all fancy talk for saying that we had a huge hole in the wall now, and the lights no longer dim when you run the microwave. Huzzah!

Blah blah blah, patchy patchy patchy . . .

I finally got smart and got professional help on the paint color. Anna Kulgren is a gardening friend who I came to learn also has degrees in architecture, interior design, horticulture, and loads of other things. She’s also a brilliant color specialist and runs a small design-build studio in Portland called Optic Verve. She came over with her suitcases full of color swatch decks and got down to business.

In no time she found the perfect color for the dining room. You guys, she’s SO GOOD.

But first I also had to patch the ceiling where the old light fixtures were. I think I did a pretty okay job.

We chose Benjamin Moore’s Caribbean Teal and I’m head over heels for it.

I cannot recommend Anna enough. If you are struggling with finding the right colors for your home, call her. She also figured out colors for our crazy blue entryway and our bathroom. I can’t wait to get painting again. That’s really saying something, considering I spent two weeks prepping and painting. I’ll show you the bedroom next!

September 26, 2013
And lo, there was hyperbole!

Guys, these lights almost killed us.

I came home from the gym last week after attending one of those classes with an oily bohunk who makes you lunge and lift and squat, all the while yelling, “faster! faster!” while he flexes his enormous, hairless muscles at you. It felt like I was part of a movie montage where the nerds try to get in shape but they’re hopelessly flabby.

Anyway. I got home from the gym and the electrician had wired up the receptacles we installed and Greg was like, “Should we hang up the lights now?”

I was like, “Um, of COURSE we should hang those right now. But let me go throw up first and then I think I’m supposed to drink a glass of egg yolks.”

There were a series of errors, beginning with the fact that the sun was going down, so we were working by headlamp. Next: Greg was hangry. He’s a very sweet man until he gets hungry and then he gets mean. Third: At some point I dropped one of the nuts that attaches the fixture to the ceiling and it rolled away to parts unknown, laughing most likely. Remember how Greg was hangry? This was not our best moment. And we couldn’t install the last light fixture.

Also: at some point I misplaced one of the Edison bulbs that came with the light fixture and we didn’t have a replacement. We spent 20 minutes tearing the house apart looking for it.

I went and took a shower, during which time Greg located the missing nut! I came out from the shower and we finished the last light installation. Thank freaking goodness.

Nine hours after we started this project I flipped the breaker back on and hit the brand new dimmer switch . . . and nothing happened. Sonofabitch.

There was nothing to be done except go to dinner (at 9:30! so European!) and bemoan our lack of a proper reveal. We assumed the problem was in the dimmer switch, since our electrician seems to know what he’s doing. After dinner Greg decided to swap out the new dimmer switch with the old one and voila! it freaking worked. FINALLY.

We were missing a bulb but it was still pretty glorious. To celebrate I promptly got a migraine that lasted four days.

But I’m fine now! And lights! Such pretty lights! Such pretty holes in the ceiling that need to be patched! Boy, I don’t feel like doing that at all!

But if I’ve learned anything from movie montages it’s that my muscles will soon be huge, I will get the girl, and you will find me either yelling Adwian!Adwian!* or singing We Are the Champions with my buddies** at the end of all this.

I love movie references. I love lamp***. The end.

*see: Rocky.
**see: Revenge of the Nerds.
***see: Anchorman.

September 4, 2013
I made you a gravel wasteland

Sod removal happened this weekend, which is how our side yard went from this . . .

. . . to this.

We used YardRents again, who are great. The YardRents guys showed up promptly and showed us how to use the sod cutter. They knew it wasn’t going to take us very long, so they didn’t even bother to leave. One of the guys snapped photos of the garden (he was so fired up, which was wonderful) and chatted with me about the evils of Round Up while Greg zipped through removing the sod. It took 30 minutes to remove the area along the driveway and the side yard where we bumped out the fence.

Sod cutters are the best.

The YardRents guys packed up and were on their way and we got work rolling up the sod and transferring it to a pile in the driveway.

Then Greg leveled and regraded the soil so water will hopefully move away from the house, instead of toward it. We also removed the plastic that had been layed down years ago. A previous owner must have tried to keep water away from the house by laying down plastic sheeting and planting sod on top of it. I don’t know why this seemed like a good idea but I’m sure a future homeowner will wonder why I put all this gravel in. Ugh, gravel?! Why not some nice lawn?

I headed down to Oregon Decorative Rock and picked up some gravel. I love gravel pathways. I love the sound they make and their persistence. I love the way your wheelbarrow sinks into the gravel, making it impossible to move, pissing off your boyfriend. (I didn’t believe Greg when he warned me that would happen.) I really wanted gravel in this part of the yard but I wasn’t sure how to handle the transition from the cedar chip pathway that will run through the front yard, and the transition to lawn in the backyard.

Neither of us are happy with the state of the side yard right now because it’s a wasteland of gravel. Grey house, grey A/C unit, an eight feet wide expanse of grey gravel. Ultimately we’re going to set up the rain barrel and a stock tank for tomatoes against the house, so it should only feel like five feet of gravel instead of eight. I popped some colorful pots over here (and that stupid wheelbarrow) so we’ll have some color. I’m hoping to train a vine along this fence and Greg has plans for a trellis of some sort atop our fence. I’m hoping to find something vigorous enough to cover the fence but restrained enough not to pull it down. Any suggestions?

Currently gravel gives way unceremoniously to lawn. My thought right now is to ease the transitions with rock. I was so tired and sunburned by the end of the day that I couldn’t handle a third trip to Oregon Decorative Rock. So I plopped it down and called it good.

But I’m fuzzily thinking something like this. Behold, my amazing MS Paint skills!

Eh, I don’t know. Next I need to dig down the soil here (it will go in the bottom of the new stock tank), edge the plants with rock, then put down cedar chips.

And then we still have a fair amount of sod to remove by hand, underneath the dogwood’s drip line where I was too nervous to use the sod cutter. But I can see the finish line with sod removal!

June 11, 2013
Good fences make angry neighbors

It was really hot this weekend, so rather than enjoy our deliciously cool house, we decided it would be a good time to put in the fence posts on the west side. There’s nothing like digging really deep holes and struggling with bags of concrete when you’re concerned about heat stroke.

We’re bringing the fence forward just enough to hide the air conditioning unit from the street. We’re also going to install a gate so we can enter and exit through either side of the yard.

We found the buried property line pin at the sidewalk and ran a line back to the fence post in the very back of our yard. There was a lot of measuring and remeasuring and debating about how to deal with the fact that our existing fence practically meanders, it’s so crooked.

You know how there’s always telling you, “Call before you dig!”? If you call as a normal civilian they will mark where your lines are in your hell strip but they won’t tell you where they are on the main part of your property, which is pretty useless. We know our gas line runs somewhere through this area, just not exactly where.

We got two post hole diggers from the Tool Library because we’re only digging six holes. Also, I’m scared of puncturing our gas main with an auger. It really wasn’t bad at all; it took us about an hour and a half to dig five of them. And I found our gas line! Thank goodness I was working on pulling out small rocks but hand when I did, so I didn’t puncture it.

THANK YOU, UNIVERSE. Not blowing up is the best!

I don’t have any progress photos but we dug our holes 24″ down, put in six inches of dry quickcrete, then filled the rest of the cavity with wet quickcrete. It’s what the bag said to do and I always listen to bags. We got everything all level but some of them settled so they’re a little bit off. Have I mentioned that Greg is an engineer? These little booboos didn’t bother him at all.

Just kidding, I thought he was going to have a stroke. Those little errors reallllly bother him.

I was like, look, our fence meanders anyway, and there’s a huge cedar tree in the middle of it. Let’s drink a beer and not think about it! This is why I’m not an engineer and why I’ll never design bridges or spaceships or heart valves.

We ran out of concrete when we had one post to go, so we took a little break. At this point our next-door neighbor came by and he seemed . . . concerned. I had talked to him last summer about the fence and he was like, “Whatever! Do whatever you want, I don’t care!” We stopped by that morning to talk to him but he was out. I figured he didn’t care, which was not very neighborly of me. I wish I had waited long enough to talk to him again because I feel terrible now.

We have some hard decisions to make now, like whether to bring banana bread or pie when we go back to apologize again for not talking to him first, again.

May 13, 2013
Bursting with failure

When I moved into my house all the doors had padlocks on them, which was . . . disconcerting. Padlocks on the bedroom doors and a padlock on the door leading to the basement were the creepiest. And all of the doors has long scratches covering them.

If you know me at all you can guess that my mind went to absolutely terrible places with this. Some half-goblin/half-human monster was locked in the basement . . . her goblin mother would scratch at the door, trying to get in . . . This is why I don’t watch American Horror Story anymore.

So I looked online for some reasonable explanation and found documentation that the fire department requires banks to padlock all the doors in foreclosed homes. That’s the story we’re going to go with, for my sanity.

The scratches on the doors weren’t so noticeable until I painted the doors glossy black. My theory is that a previous owner had a dog that would scratch at the doors, causing these marks. That seems more likely than a human scratching, right?

Right?

When I painted the bathroom door I took the time to fill the gouges with wood filler and sand everything smooth. It looks great! The weekend before our dinner party I decided that I should re-paint this door (which leads to the basement), as well as the rest of the bedroom and hallway closet doors. Greg had just bought a new tube of wood filler but it wasn’t the soft stuff I’d used before. It was seemingly made of concrete. But I didn’t know this, so I overfilled all my gouges so I could sand it down level after.

And then I started sanding. And sanding. And sanding. And ALL OF THE SWEAR WORDS. Sanding.

I spent an entire Sunday trying to sand these down, working with the vacuum and the air purifier and still there was dust everywhere. And you know what? My door now looks like this.

With the contrast upped. It’s very obvious in real life.

Like someone flung blood all over the door and we painted over it (I might be watching too much Walking Dead?). So the plan is to take it get dipped-and-stripped and to start over. With the nice soft wood filler and an electric sander. Outside.

March 11, 2013