Deck the Halls

Oh hi, blog readers! Fancy meetin' you here. And now, so that you don't notice that I haven't posted since ever, I shall distract you with shiny lights!

Christmas! Yay!

So, Christmas lights are hard. I feel just the slightest bit of empathy for the people whose Christmas lights I make fun of. And I make fun of EVERYONE'S Christmas lights, so a little empathy for each person is really a lot, all together.

Right?

It is, I admit, really hard to get them straight. Gutter clips are not the magic that the box claims, and you have to move the ladder a bajillion times. We didn't try too hard, really. This was only our first try at Christmas lights, and we didn't want to set the bar too high.

Christmas happened inside, too! This is our little tree, a dwarf Alberta Spruce. We're planning to keep it outside in a container and bring it in each year to decorate. The guy at the nursery said we could definitely get 5 or so years out of it this way. After that we'll plant it and pick a new Christmas tree strategy. For now, though, it's doofy and I like it. And it even has presents under it!

Here's a closer look.

Those are some sea turtles from our trip to Barbados, just there to keep things from getting too Christmasy.

I also hung up all of the beautiful Christmas cards we've gotten.

It's a little hard to tell, but they're hanging in the entryway. Many thanks to internet and real life friends for the cards!

Happy Holidays everyone!

Pop Quiz!

Oh, hi there, loyal readers! We have not fallen off of the planet, but we did fall off of the home improvement bandwagon for a little while. Mostly because we were busy showing off our house to our families and a house full of awesome housewarming party guests!

We're back with a vengeance, and we have another installment of Quiz time!

What's wrong with THIS picture?

Hint: It has nothing at all to do with my off brand duster. 

Old Furniture, Clean House

I thinking cleaning might be the one area where we're not really interested in overdoing it. When it comes to tidying and cleaning, we're more in the "do a little as possible" camp. That said, we did finally give in and clean the house up after weeks of chaos and bathroom renovations and half-unpacked rooms. Now we've isolated the chaos to the garage and the still-packed-ness to half of one room. 

Pictures or it didn't happen:

I'm loving our loud rug and red living room accents. The walls are sadly bare, but that's a project for another weekend. I do have a whole pile of pictures and art next to the tv stand waiting for said weekend. 

Oops, Devon's jacket is annoyingly reflective in these photos. Anyway, the dining room has a dining room table in it now! How novel! This is the table we made when we were living in Mountain View. We need to make or acquire chairs at some point. 

The kitchen is still on the chopping block when we have the time and money to redo it, but for now it's in a pretty usable state. 

This would be that still-packed bit I mentioned. We set up Devon's desk, but my desk still needs some sanding and another coat of finish. All of my sewing stuff and yarn is still boxed up, for the most part. The closet in this room is still a mess. We'll get there, though!

The bedroom. I love the headboard and rug and I love the quilt my sister made me, but they don't quite go together, huh? A new quilt made from the wedding table runners is on the list of things to make someday. 

And, chaos. We ran out of time to clean the garage. We need shelving and a bigger work bench. We need to do something about the cavernous crack in the floor. We need a garage door that works. We need a better way to access the loft. Really, we need several months to work on the garage alone! 

This brings me to the photos I didn't include above. What? You're sick of looking at boring photos of our house? Too bad!

New (old) dressers! While we fully admit to being big Ikea fans, we are not fans of their dressers. We decided that since we didn't like the Ikea fare and didn't feel like spending a lot of money on boring furniture store stuff, we'd look for antique or second-hand dressers.

I went to Oakland to visit the Habitat for Humanity ReStore back when we still needed lots of things for the bathroom. I didn't find a single thing in the ReStore, but I did find the dresser on the right in the St. Vincent de Paul attached to the ReStore. Jackpot! After sending pictures to Devon, measuring the dresser and the car several times, and making sure the mirror would come off for travel, I bought it. I found a nice guy from the salvage store next door to help me load it. A rent-a-cop also helped. He took one look and bet me $20 that the dresser wouldn't fit. I agreed and was very pleased with myself when it slid right into the car. It was an oversight on my part to not have a counter bet in place! I did have to take the mirror apart to get it in the car, and I couldn't see a single thing out the back of the car all the way home from Oakland. Still, I love the dresser!

We had a less dramatic journey to pick up the dresser on the left, which we found on Craigslist. We got it from a very talkative guy who was moving to a smaller place. He regaled us with the virtues of the dresser, but really most of the handles are a little bit broken. It's still very cool overall, so we're keeping an eye out for new handles. 

Here's one more photo of the living room (looking towards the dining room) which shows our very favorite furniture purchase - a mid century hutch. At least, I guess it's a hutch. I'm not really sure what to call it. This was a lucky or stupid Craigslist find, depending on how you look at it. I saw it listed for $100. If you've ever tried to buy a mid century anything, you know that's a steal! These sorts of things go for at least $800 around here. The catch was that it was in San Rafael, which is at least an hour drive north. And it's all one piece, so there is obviously no way it would fit in our little hatchback. 

We hatched our genius (stupid) plan and set out the next day. On a Saturday morning, we rented a U-Haul van at something like 7am and drove up to San Rafael. The woman we bought it from was moving, so she had  couple of movers there. Luckily, they carried it downstairs for us. It's quite heavy! We loaded it in the van and strapped it in with tie-downs. We got a late breakfast and headed home, and the whole ordeal was over before noon. The U-Haul rental was more than the price of the hutch itself, but we still think we got a deal. 

That's it for today! I'm off to do anything that isn't cleaning or driving too far to buy furniture. 

Spice Addiction

It seemed like such a simple little project... famous last words. After some really rather embarrassing screw-ups, I've finally managed to convert an old ironing board cabinet into a spice rack.

I was clearly not organized enough to frame the photos the same way.

To start with, the cabinet was full of little hooks in illogical places, all of them painted over about a million times. Kind of like everything else around here. I yanked them all out with pliers and ended up with this pile of yuck. 

We bought some wood of the perfect width and even found a quart of the blue paint from the kitchen in the shed. I don't like the blue paint, but repainting the kitchen is for another day. The quart of paint, by the way, was $0.89 at K-Mart when purchased. I broke out my favorite little roller and painted the shelves. 

Next I did what seemed logical at the time. I did some math to see where the shelves needed to go, I measured each shelf up from the bottom of the cabinet, and I drilled the 1/4" holes for the shelf supports. 

Then I attempted to put the shelves in. First of all, they didn't fit because of the thickness of the brackets. Once we trimmed them to fit, they didn't sit flat. At all. Not even close enough to fake it. I thought I had just done an awful job drilling the holes, possibly cried about it (houses are stressful), then pulled out all of the supports and filled the holes with joint compound. Le sigh. 

Okay, next idea! I tried making a jig out of some scrap 1x2. I thought if I made a little c-shaped thingy with the holes in it, I could level the jig and drill the holes through it. But then I couldn't even get the holes straight on the jig. Blarg. 

New idea - just use the edge of the level to draw lines on the shelf. Actually drill pilot holes in an attempt to make the 1/4" holes more precise. Ah-ha! This is about when I made my big discovery: the shelf itself is completely out of square. I guess the house has survived an earthquake or two, and it's just plain wonky. I decided that my shelves would be level and the cabinet could do whatever it wanted to. I finally, after much painstaking pilot-hole drilling, managed to install reasonably flat and level shelves. 

Then I went into the next room. Turns out I was a little over-zealous and drilled four of the holes clear through the wall. Oops. I guess I just love patching drywall SO MUCH that I wanted to make myself another little project. 

Okay, less talking, more pictures. 

Here are the shelves, finally installed! If you look closely, you can see that the shelves are not the same sort of level as the cabinet. 

Then, chock full of spices! They are about 99% Penzeys, of course. I believe there are about 106 different spices, herbs, or spice blends in this photo. The sad thing is, that isn't even my entire collection. 

These are refills for the things I have in jars. They live above the fridge.

These live in the cabinets with the food. For these I don't have jars or the jars are too big for the spice rack.

These are just mustard and mustard seed. I planned to give homemade mustard at Christmas and it didn't pan out. Maybe this year!

Spices, ideally, should not be stored out in the open. The random assortment of paper towels, back-up spices, and little-used kitchen appliances we have above the fridge should also really not be stored out in the open! To solve both problems, I ordered some cute vintage fabric from Etsy and made curtains. 

Of course, the little cheap slidey curtain rods don't come in 17" lengths for the skinny spice rack. (I was annoyed to later find 18", but I didn't find them the day I was shopping.) I bought the shortest one available at the time, which I think was 24". When we bought our drywall saw, it came in a little kit which is basically a handle that accepts sawzall blades. It has come in quite handy, even though the blade wobbles no matter what you do. 

This was a pleasantly easy fix. I used a metal sawzall blade with lots of teeth and cut off both pieces of the curtain rod. It came with a little plastic cover, so you can't even see the less-than-perfect edges. 

The vintage fabric was very narrow and only available in one 2-yard chunk, so I supplemented with wide orange hems. 

At the end of it all, I'm quite pleased with the spice rack and the curtains. But man, why was that so difficult?

Pop Quiz!

Quiz time: What's wrong with this picture?

Hint: Both laughter and swearing ensued. 

This also serves as a sneak peak of the bathroom renovations, which are ongoing. I promise they will be blogged about in excruciating detail!

The Fair!

Once in awhile, we stop working on the house and try to have some fun. (By the way, much house work is happening, despite the fact that I'm not posting about it. I'm saving up all the bathroom stuff until I have a dramatic reveal photo!) Last weekend, we got up rather early (that part was not fun) and drove to Sacramento for the state fair. Fairs are fun! But Sacramento is hot. 107° to be precise.  


The main reason for going was so that I could visit my 3rd-prize winning shawl and collect my ribbon. I'm a little sad I didn't place higher, but it was still fun to enter. In case I haven't forced you all to look at wedding photos often enough, here's the shawl in action at our wedding last June:

the shawl with lots of pretty shoes

it's giant

pattern detail

and a photo where you can tell that we were there, too!

Mildly relevant statistics: It took me about a year to knit (though there was a 4 or 5 month break in there somewhere), and I used 1.41 miles of yarn. 

The fairground has some (air-conditioned!) exhibition halls, and my shawl was displayed with other Creative Arts entries. 

There were lots of really beautiful things! One of my favorites was this poppy quilt. At the bottom of the photo you can see the heads of the knitted presidents collection. Yup, you read it correctly. 

We made a point to see some critters while at the fair. That's what you're supposed to do, right? Besides eat weird fried food?

First we saw some of those happy cows from the California dairy commercials. They did look contented. 

good looking dairy cows

At some point we discovered a barn run by the UC Davis vet school. It was full of super adorable baby critters!

a day-old lamb

2-day old piglets

There was also a 20-minute old calf, but we didn't get a good photo. 

During our fair visit, we ate a deep fried Snickers bar (actually good, even though we didn't quite want to admit it) and deep fried artichoke hearts (our house is 75 miles north of the Artichoke Capital of the World). Our only regret is that we got some mediocre tacos instead of a Twister dog. 

On Appliances and 30" Doors

So, did you know that you can order appliances online? Not just from stores like Sears and such, but from slightly dodgy websites based in anonymous midwest towns and dedicated to shipping appliances to tax evaders like us. How convenient! We shopped for appliances locally but were underwhelmed by both the big box stores and by the local stores full of ex used car salesmen. We did eventually find a fridge we liked at the local place and a washer and dryer we liked at Home Depot, but buying appliances from two different places is silly. A quick search online turned up a sketchy site selling all three items at a savings of roughly $400 beyond Home Depot's memorial day sale prices. 

Excited by this new found corner of the internet, we placed our order. Then we waited. For WEEKS. It turns out the price for cheap and tax-free appliances is that they take for bloody ever to get to you. 

For about a week after we moved in, we kept some food in a cooler in the garage. Then we picked up a mini-fridge from some friends and used that for another week. (It will eventually be a brew fridge.) It doesn't have a latch - that's where the bungy cords come in. It also doesn't have a built-in temperature control - that's the box on top and the reason there are wires all over the place. 

Classy, right? 

Anyway, we're moving rapidly towards the point of this post. 

The more we tell the following story to other homeowners, the more I'm convinced that EVERY homeowner has a story like it. It's still rather embarrassing, but at least we're not alone!

I was working one last Saturday, so Devon was home alone for the appliance delivery. We paid extra to have the delivery company put the appliances in roughly the right places and take away the packing material. The washer and dryer were moved into the garage with relatively little trouble. We are irrationally excited about our new on-site laundry facilities! 

The fridge made it all the way to the front step before Devon and the delivery dudes ran into trouble. Luckily, Devon was able to take the screen door off and the delivery dudes moved the fridge as far as the dining room. 

Problem solved? Of course not!

The fridge is 33" wide - actually the smaller size available. It's standard depth, though, because someone decided that counter-depth fridges should cost more. Anyway, the door between the dining room and the kitchen is 30". 30" is, unfortunately, less than 33". 

Devon proceeded to spend a lovely weekend afternoon taking apart the house and the brand new fridge, then putting one of them back together. 

Honestly, we didn't like those bi-fold doors anyway. We'll just think of it as a chore we were going to have to do at some other point! 

Soon refrigerator parts were strewn about the dining room:

After Devon took both doors and the drawer off the fridge, it fit perfectly!

See? Plenty of room! Devon had to cut little ramps out of wood so that he could push the fridge over the threshold between the rooms. Apparently refrigerators are heavy, but I wouldn't know.  

All in all, 3 doors in the house were removed and 1 was replaced, 3 refrigerator doors were removed and replaced, one (crappy particle board) cupboard was removed and replaced, and one bit of shelving was cut off with the sawzall. 

Devon did a good day's work, don't you think?

We still can't quite believe that it never occurred to us to measure the doorways. I mean, people buy fridges all the time, right? And they all have doors in their houses, I assume. 

I don't have a picture of the lovely washer and dryer, but you can use your imagination. They are white, because white ones are cheaper. They also play songs when you turn them on and when the cycle is finished. I guess buzzers are out of style. 

Bunnyproofing

Last week we finished a project that will help with (eventually!) letting the bunnies have the run of the place. They're super excited, naturally.

First, to back up a bit - when we set up our apartment in Mountain View, we wanted to organize the cords behind the tv. Partly to keep them away from nibbly bunnies, partly just so they wouldn't be a total mess. I devised a system of velcro strips to attach all of the cords and chargers to the back of the tv stand. At the time, I thought I was pretty clever, but the system didn't hold up well. The first time we had to move something, it was a mess again.

The old cable management attempt

Before we tackled the cord situation this time around, I repainted the red insides of the cabinet. I spray-painted it last time, and the surface was always rough. It attracted bunny fur and was then a pain to dust. It was pretty much just dusty all the time as a result. 

That little roller is the BEST THING. I love it more than any person should love a flimsy plastic tray. And it was $1.97. Be still my beating heart. 

Anyway.... once the tv stand had its legs repaired after some slight damage in the move and its insides repainted, we implemented Devon's really clever idea for managing cord/rabbit relations. 

First, we painted some 1x4's with my favoritest toy:

Then we attached them to the back of the tv stand:

Then we shoved the whole thing against the wall:

And ta-da! A little cubby for all of the cords and chargers and nonsense to live. I don't even feel like we have all that many electronic gizmos on the tv stand, but they certainly generate a big pile of cables. 

The idea behind painting the wood was that it would look like we did this whole thing on purpose. Since real wood will never look like Ikea laminate, we went with the red.

I haven't gotten around to taking a picture of the whole set-up truly finished, but you get the idea. The best part is that there's nothing at all on the floor. Except dust...