Back to Blogging

Now that the crazy pumpkin nonsense is gone, I'm going to get back to blogging on a semi regular basis. 

I'm so glad that I took a break from blogging over the summer.  It was our busiest summer yet.  Blockette went to two different summer camps, and I chaperoned at one of them. (I think I'm still recovering from the excessive singing of the Frozen soundtrack.)  We also had summer dollar movies, vacation bible school, a trip to visit my mom, and Blockette was in a musical.  It felt like we were go go go all the time.

 

Once school started back up, I didn't much feel like blogging either.  

Mid August, one of our cats, Basil, began to get very sick.  

Two days before school started we found out he had colon cancer, and we had to put him to sleep. 

I always thought Basil was more of Mrblocko's cat, than mine. 

 I didn't realize how much of a role he played in my day to day life at home until he was gone. 

 It's taken me a few months to just stop looking for him when I pass his usual hiding spots. 

 That silly little furball left a pretty big hole in my heart.  

In order to keep my mind off missing the little guy, I decided to take on some big projects.  The first one being re-doing our spare/computer room.

Here's a bit of a before picture:

The room was this horrible green that was somewhere between lime and pea soup.  Why I chose that color, I have no idea.  It gave everything in the room this yellow hue.  BLECK!

And lets not get started on the computer hutch.  It was about 12 years old.  You know, from the days when monitors were so huge two cats could sit on top of it with no problem.  The hutch took up nearly half that room. 

Blockette had also outgrown her small little brown table.  While she has a desk in her own room, there are times where she wants to work next to me while I'm on the computer.

Finally, the biggest reason for redoing this room was for my mom.  When she would come to visit she'd have to sleep on a air mattress on the floor.  We actually WANT her to come see us so I thought it was high time she had an actual bed.

And here are the afters:

I picked out a purple for the walls that has a bit of grey in it.  Then I painted all the trim and the closet doors white so the grey in the paint wouldn't overwhelm the room.  The closet doors were essentially the same color as the door to the room and the floor. 

The desks, shelves and chairs were from IKEA.  I put the desks together all by my onsies.  Mrblocko helped with the shelves though.

Then I went through my stack of unframed cross stitches, bought some inexpensive frames, and hung them up on the wall.  The framing isn't the best job ever, but it's much more satisfying having the cross stitches up on the wall than lamenting in a drawer. The walls still look a little bit bare.  I have every confidence that I'll find more things to hang up as time goes on.

I also had some fun with spray paint.  That crate, in the picture above, next to the bed...it used to be bright spring green.  I sprayed it with a gray paint that's supposed to give it a hammered look.  Eventually, I want to get a piece of plywood cut to fit the top so it functions more like a nightstand.

Also, if you look at the first picture, there's a mirror.  We had it hanging up at our previous house, and I hadn't been able to find a home for it since we moved into this one 8 years ago.  I spray painted it black and dry brushed white paint once the black paint had dried.  It has this mottled gray look that ALMOST looks like stone...if you squint.  It also makes me happy to see it hanging on the wall.

The room looks so much bigger, and brighter too!  While it's not magazine perfect, it works so much better for our family's needs.  I can't help but pat myself on the back for the results of my hard work!

Before and After: House

So we just got our siding replaced.  Here is a before and after picture.

Silly me took the before picture with the garage door open so you can't get the full effect of the maroon-i-ness.  For some reason the garage now looks more brown than red.  And the new siding has an almost gray look to it in the front.  It is more of a sand color.  I wonder if the red from the door is making the siding look a different color.

We still have to do something about the front door.  We'll probably just get a new storm door.  I can't see painting the front door.  It's wood and has these stylized pineapple carvings that I think would look weird painted.  Although the color of the door seems out of place.  I guess it does sort of match the color of our fence though, so there is that.

My issue is that I can't decide if we should paint the garage door or not.  If so, what color?

The most drastic change from redoing the siding is in the back.  We tore down the walls of the 3 season room.  The windows had been hung up side down so whenever it rained the weep holes allowed rain to drain into the room.  I could never be in this room because of the must and mold.  So far the new patio has gotten more use than the 3 season room ever did in the 7 years we've lived here.

Turns out we had some freeloaders living in our 3 season room...A Whole Colony of carpenter ants!!!!  I was not sad to see them go.  Apparently they were eating away the wet wood in the walls.  Who knows how long the walls would have stayed up before they ate them away to the point of being structurally unsound.  The new wood posts are made from treated wood, which apparently is unappetizing to carpenter ants.  YAY!

The back yard seems huge now that the patio is open.  I'm so happy with it.  I actually want to spend time in the backyard.  Now I suppose we have to work on getting the grass to look semi decent.  I know you can't tell in the photo, but it's very patchy and weedy.  I think that is a project for the fall though.

We're So Picky!

I hate my bathroom.  It's sooo UGLY.  Although, it is an improvement from when we moved in 7 years ago.  It had fake plastic tile sheeting on all the walls.  Like the stuff you might line a shower with.  Over all the walls. 

And when we took that down...Pepto Bismal pink walls.

Did I mention the cabinet and floor were green?

Yeah.

We repainted the walls but the cabinets and floors were a project that got moved to the bottom of the list.  They are still at the bottom of the list.  And I still hate them.

Blockette didn't quite understand how I could not like the bathroom when my favorite color is green.  I like green, just not that shade of green, and not in my bathroom.

Now when I say the cabinets are green, I mean they are mostly green.  Whoever painted them, just took the cabinets that were there for God knows how long and painted them.  They did not sand them first.  How do I know this?  The paint is peeling off the cabinets.

I got sick of looking at the peeling paint and in 15 min Blockette and I did this:

Here's a close up:

And of the other side:

We did this with our fingers.  The paint came off in great big sheets.  There is something so satisfying about peeling off great big sheets of ugly paint.  Sort of like peeling a sunburn, without the pain of getting burned in the sun!

Blockette is hooked on paint peeling.  Every time we are in there at the same time she asks when we can do it again.  I think a few more steamy showers and we'll have another go at a peel-o-rama.  I figure by the end of the summer we'll have the entire cabinet stripped of all it's paint!

The sky isn't falling...anymore.

 When we bought the house we are living in now, the stairwell by the dinning room and kitchen had a nasty crack.  We had the crack repaired, but 7 years later, it came back.  Back with a vengeance.  It brought a few friends with it too.

The ceiling is actually worse than the picture shows.  You can't see the small cracks connecting up to the larger one.  The larger one looks darker because the dry wall is actually sagging.  If you stomped up the stairs little bits of dry wall would fall on your head.  Not good times.

Here's what it looks like now:

The part where the dry wall was sagging wasn't attached to anything!  Not so good. 

However, now the hallway needs to be painted.  Bleck.  The up side is the ceiling in the kitchen and dining room are repainted.  The stain from the green yogurt Blockette flicked onto the ceiling as a toddler are no more!  Yay!

Of course, now that the ceiling isn't going to cave in on us the kitchen sink has started leaking and an outlet stopped working.  Isn't that how it goes? When you cross one thing off the to-do list, two more things get added.

En Garde

Get it? En garde. Fencing. And this post is about our fence.

Good one. Right?

I'll give you a moment to collect yourself from that knee slapper.

So our fence is now officially finished. It's nothing fancy, but it's not going to fall over if you sneeze or even think about looking at it.

Before: Left side

You'll notice half the fence has rotted away.  Very classy looking.

After: Left side

Ta DA! Now we have a big almost 6ft wide gate on this side.  This gate is so big I can barely open and close it.  It's nice to have a wide gate.  You never know when you might need it. 

 Too bad half the giant lilies got trampled on.  If they come up next year,  I'll have to find a place to transplant them. 

Before: Right side

This side wasn't nearly as bad as the other one.  But the gate was just awful.  The door was too low to the ground, so in the winter the door would freeze itself into the mud.  It also had no latch.  And no handle.  The wood was so rotted that it would fall off after a few uses.  Last year I got tired of reattaching it so I just left it off.

After: Right side

The new gate opens the other way, I'm not sure why. Builder's choice I guess. Now it has a handle, and here's the cool part, the gates can only be locked and unlocked from the inside. Seems more secure this way to me.

I didn't take a picture of the back because the guys who put it up came over and had it down before I realized I should snap some pics.  You'll have to take my word that it was pretty rotten, visually and literally.  I mean one of our neighbor's tree's had grown into the fence.  That doesn't do much for the structural integrity of the fence.

It's nice to actually have privacy.  Before you could totally see the neighbors through the rotted gaps in the fence.

The fence is far from perfect, and a few people asked if we were going to paint it.  I like it the natural light color.  Sealing it only darkened it minimally.   I'm sure it will get darker with age, but I'm going to enjoy it the way it is for now.  The backyard seems so much brighter than it did before.  I guess getting rid of a huge grey run down mess will do that!

Bunny Free Ceiling Fan Cleaning

Ok, here is another one of those, "Duh, why didn't I think of that" tips I saw over on Lifehacker.  You can clean the blades of your ceiling fan with a pillow case!!!  You just stick a fan blade inside the pillowcase and wipe.  All the fuzz bunnies land inside the pillow case. 

This is particularly useful to me as the ceiling fan in our bedroom is directly over the bed.  There's nothing like cleaning the fan and then having to vacuum your bed because all the crud from your fan has deposited itself all over where you sleep.  I hate making more work for myself.

I've used those swiffer things and various microfiber cloths that are supposed to catch the dust with static.  Those things never quite catch all the gunk and I still wind up with grey fuzz all over my bed. 

In addition to the extra cleaning, I get a major case of the sneezes.  I cleaned both our ceiling fans without even a tickle in my nose.  Can I get a woot woot?  Yeah, I'm probably more excited about this than I should be.  I don't get out much.

Kitchen Reveal

I heard that there is a 2nd annual "Kitchen Reveal" where people post pictures on their blog of their kitchen being hosted by Lake Lure Cottage Kitchen. I'm nosey and love to see how other people live so I think this is pretty cool. Instead of just being a voyeur, I thought I should post some pics of my own little kitchen.

First, I feel like I need to show what the kitchen looked like before we moved in:

That was all the counter space I had. Just out of frame on the left side of the picture was a sliding glass door that took up the entire wall. Oh, and the dishwasher and oven were used by the previous owner as dish and cookware storage. Neither of them were in working order.
This picture is of what was supposed to be an eat in kitchen area. The picture was taken while standing at the sink. You can see a tiny bit of the sliding glass door at the bottom right of the picture.

We have one of the smallest houses in our neighborhood so making the kitchen into a bigger usable space was a bit of a challenge. I really wanted a pantry, but that meant losing the eat in kitchen. We solved that problem by changing the front room, which was supposed to be a family room, into a dining room, and the basement "den" into the family room.

This picture is taken standing in roughly the same spot as the first before picture. We added a little pass through window where the fridge used to be to add a bit more light and so that it is easier to talk to someone in the dining room when you are in the kitchen. Less shouting is a good thing.

We also added the peninsula. This is my second favorite change to this kitchen. It makes cooking with Blockette so much easier. Aside from the peninsula giving me an actual food prep area, Blockette can sit at the end and help mix, eat a snack, draw, do school work, etc. while I'm cooking.

Here's another view from the entry into the kitchen. You can see that the wall where the sliding glass door used to be is where the fridge is now.

This area hardly seems big enough to have held an eat in kitchen. Without the pictures I don't think I would have believed it myself. The pantry is my favorite part of the kitchen. Here's why: Where would I put all this stuff if I didn't have a pantry? The pantry allows me to save money on our grocery bill. I can buy the jumbo package of paper towels and 10 cans of peaches when they go on sale. I've found that little stuff like that really adds up!

So that's my kitchen in a nutshell. It's not the fanciest kitchen ever. There are a few things I would do differently if I had the chance to do it all over again. But the kitchen turned out quite nice considering our limited budget.