New Blog and Thoughts…

I’m finding myself torn between two worlds right now.  I love high fashion and I love down and dirty housework.  Not everything I wanted to say could fit in the mould of this blog, so I started a new one this morning.  I’ll keep this one about crafts and life at home and things of that nature.  I’ll make the other one about living a high fashion life 0n a less than glamorous budget.  In case you’d like to see it, it’s just a click away. 

I’m feeling kinda home-y today, too.  I want to go home and nest a little and bake a cake and grocery shop and hit up some local produce stands that I’ve been eye-ing for awhile.  I want to work on my Halloween costume and bathe my dogs and smell clean laundry.  I want to paint my nails and put on a clay masque and chase the dogs around the house.  I want to brew a nice cup of tea and settle in and read a good book for a couple hours in the guest room.  I want to host a dinner party for my family or a few close friends.  Does anyone else get like this sometimes or is it just me?  I think I’m 24 going on 84.  haha…

Giving back…

to myself.  It’s been over a month without a glimpse of the gym or a thought about what I put in my face.  It’s time to start that back up again.  The house is settled and the housewarming is over.  All that’s left is to send “thank you” cards out and prepare for the holidays.  I started logging my information on a website and I’m ready to leap into that challenge.  You bet your sweet bippy that I’ll have some gift and costume info for you soon enough.  I just wanted to pop in and say hello!

Oh, how time does fly…

My BF and I have been working non-stop on the house to get it in order.  We’ve had the help of some lovely friends throughout the whole process.  Now, it’s crunch time and I’m sweating it.  Other than the floor, we’ve mainly done cleaning.  We painted the master bathroom (the one room that didn’t get any love from the previous owners), repaired the sink (what a mess…), and installed a new cooktop (the hole’s too big and it’s ugly right now).

We have our housewarming on Saturday and there is sooo much to do.  I just made a list and i’m a tad overwhelmed.  We still haven’t finished the move; basically, the entire kitchen is still at my old apartment.  What’s super not helpful is that we are practically broke right now.  Not the “I should probably only get a tall latte instead of a venti today” kind of broke.  The “hmm… maybe I can just put a couple gallons in my tank until my next paycheck and still eat lunch tomorrow” kind of broke.   It won’t be this way for long, but fixing up that house has just drained us both… physically and financially.

Oh, but I do have a smidge of good news.  The BF has officially dropped the “B.”  He’s just an “F” now… as in, FIANCEE!  He proposed on the 5th and I can’t stop looking at the ring.  We’ve set a date in the spring of 2011 so that his sister can save enough money to travel back to The States.  BUT… I’ve already picked out the dress and this means I’ll have all kinds of crafty projects to write about soon enough.

Well, I’ll TTYL! 

Removing Vinyl Flooring and Laying a New Floor – Part 3

The third night, we had just a little bit of the floor left to pull up.  I let my friend do that while I sprayed bleach-water all over the floor and cleaned up the strips of paper.  I took a putty knife and firm-bristled brush to stripped floor and picked off any of the particle board that wasn’t 100% commited to its brothers.  Then, I filled all of the dips with wood filler.  We laid a hair dryer on its side on the floor near the particularly heavy sections.  It had been our intention to lay the floor that evening, but I didn’t think that was wise since the wood filler hadn’t completely hardened in some places.  The package said that it can take 2 to 8 hours to fully dry.  With that knowledge, I went to bed.

I planned to get up early to do the floor before I went to work.  No dice.  We had a thunderstorm and my dog is a sissy.  He started barking and digging at his crate.  (Yes, we crate them overnight for now.  I don’t like it, but the house doesn’t have enough padding to keep their sounds from carrying and it’s hard to make a dog understand what it’s like to get up at 6, work all day, and not get home until 6.  They tend to think you’re rather silly and continue to scratch or bark or walk around or chew or snore or moan.)  So, I will have to finish the floor laying when I get home.  Luckily, I did start it before I left and realized that I was confused.  So, I called the help line and they walked me through it.  New floor tonight?!

Removing Vinyl Flooring and Laying a New Floor – Part 2

The next evening, I had given up on the whole idea of ironing the floor.  I decided that I would much rather deal with chemical strippers.  After putting the dogs outside, I tried a “green” floor stripper.  We let it sit for a little over an hour and realized that it didn’t do a thing.  It wet the paper backing pretty well, but it really didn’t touch the adhesive.  Back to the iron.  

After revealing the seam where they butted together the sheets of the subfloor, we realized that this floor was not solid wood.  They had used a particle board and the previous floor covering had done some serious damage.  There were huge sections where the top layer of board peeled off with the backing.  Particle board is literally just that.  It is a board made up of wood particles pressed together and held with an adhesive.  They chose to staple the flooring down in several locations and moisture had reached yet other sections.  Again, we had a cross-roads.  Should we stop and replace the subfloor or patch the existing subfloor?  We don’t have the money to replace the subfloor and we need to have a floor in the kitchen.  So, we decided to buy wood filler to patch the spots that had weakened.  I was concerned about mold growth, so we continued removing the backing until we couldn’t see straight anymore and I decided that I would give it one more night to air out before we patch and lay the floor.

Another almost midnight evening and we called it quits.  I did, however, leave the solution on a section of backing that we didn’t pull off  so that we could see what would happen overnight.  The next morning, there was absolutely no difference.

Removing Vinyl Flooring and Laying a New Floor – Part 1

This is a three parter… I thought it would be one night of intense work, but it ended up being almost 4 nights of up-till-midnight-back-breaking-labor.

The one thing in this house that we HAD to change was the flooring in the kitchen.  It was this horrible green sheet of vinyl flooring that was so poorly laid that dog chews, chapstick, vitamins, pencils, dead bugs, almonds, etc were hiding under the flaps that weren’t tucked down.  After we decided to replace it, we came to a crossroads.  We could either lay the new flooring directly on top of the old after triming and properly finishing the old flooring or we could remove the old flooring and lay the new flooring.  The BF and I had a convo and decided that we should remove the old flooring so that we can patch and care for the floor underneath.

For the second week in a row, he left on business.  With our anniversary coming up on Monday, I decided to make the new floor my anniversary gift to him.  Granted, we bought it together, but I knew it would be hard work and doing it for him would be that much less he had to worry about.  Okay… he doesn’t worry.  I worry.  But it would be one last thing for us to try to plan to do.

After much research, these are the events that transpired.

First, remove all thresholds or baseboards that you intend to put the new flooring under.  Score the flooring for easy removal.  I took a straight razor blade and ran it up the length of the room every 12 inches or so.  Using a plastic putty knife, I picked up the edge of the top layer and pulled.  Glorious.  Let me just tell you, it was sooo nice to see that ugly green go away.  I sat back and thought, “Gee!  That was easy!”

Boy was I wrong.

After the top layer comes up, you’re left with the backing.  Every site I looked at told me to use a hair dryer and it would come right up.  Lies.  I tried that on an edge and it did nothing.  About that time, one of my girlfriends came over.  She was going to help me this week so that I could get it done for sure.  Seeing my plight, she said “Well, why don’t you iron it?”  That made sense enough.  So, I got out my iron and a rag and steamed a small section of the floor.  It came right up!  (WARNING:  This will cause your iron to get a nasty funk all over it.  If you have a crafting iron, use that.  If not, you might want to go with a cheap model.  I happened to have a decently cheap model, but it also came off after a little work.  I ended up heating the iron to its highest setting and running it back and forth over a wet towel.)  The room is just under 100 square feet.  About 10 square feet took us almost 2 hours.  By 11 PM, I was EXHAUSTED!  We decided to wrap it up the next night….

Say What You Mean And Mean What You Say

With our new home, our lovely prior tenants decided to leave us with a few “friends” and a ton of trash. Through our agents, they asked if we wanted a storage shelf in the garage. Well, duh! haha… I’m a scavenger at heart and I’ll take just about anything I can get my hands on if I think it has any potential to be useful. I laughed and told my boyfriend to tell them that they can leave anything they don’t want to take with them. Apparently, Mr. Everything’s-A-Joke took me literally. AND so did our agent. We got the house with random stuff left all over. Ready for this?

10 gallons of paint – all partially used
about 20 pieces of fencing – some cut
a hurricane lamp
two large boxes of books
a bag of really large clothing
three boxes of honest-to-goodness trash
random 12″x12″ tile
several pieces of corningware
old coffee
a windchime
some dead plants in hanging planters
a broken lawn chair
a broken plastic table
a rusted candle holder
an unused faucet for the bathroom
TONS of toothbrushes that were obviously used
old makeup
contacts
roofing material including tar paper
tons of spiders
dead bugs in a sheet hanging from the garage ceiling
a dead baby bird that had definitely been there awhile
mold in the bathrooms
termites and black widows in the woodpile.

HA!  At least I have plenty of stuff to play with.    I’m sure that I’ll be able to upcycle just about everything they left (minus the dead critters).  Wish me luck!!!

If You Want Something Done Right, You Have To Do It Right

Ahh… moving.  Unless you move into a place specifically built for you and fresh as a daisy, you have NO idea what’s in store for you.  Sure, you go through all the right steps.  You get the appraisal.  You get the inspections.  You walk through it as many times as you have to be 100% that this is the home for you.  The truth is, though, until you get in there and start looking at every inch of the home in all its nakedness, you can’t possibly grasp what you have waiting for you.

So, I made sure to get my boyfriend and I in there EARLY to try to get this stuff cleaned up.  I’m a huge believer in starting with a clean canvas.  A house is only as good as the foundation.  If you take shortcuts to get things done, you wind up doing the work all over again to fix it.

After tackling the floors (pictures to come along with a how-to), we decided to attempt to find white grout in the bathrooms.  We both decided on the bleach and water method.  In an old spray bottle, we mixed bleach and water until it smelled like bleach and sprayed it all over the walls and floor in both bathrooms.  First of all… ouch.  We both walked away with a tad bit of a chemical burn in our sinus passages.  But that’s okay if we get white tiles, right?  Well, that would have been nice.  No dice.  We left the house for about 2 hours while we ate some brunch and shopped for additional supplies.  When we came home, the tile was just as black as it was before.  I bought some cleaning products before and decided to break out the Softscrub with bleach and a scrub brush I had bought ages ago but never used.  VOILA!  We tried it on the floor in the main bath and it was ridiculous how fast it cleaned up.  It just goes to show you that you can’t shortcut cleaning.  If you want something cleaned well, you have to get in there and do it.  We’re only half done with one bathroom, but I can’t wait to finish it.  We bought grout sealant so we can try to protect the grout when we’re all finished.  I PROMISE there will be pics.  The bf goes out of town tomorrow morning so I will have the house to myself… and actually be able to accomplish something.  I will take pictures of our current progress and update you on the surprises that I planned for this week!  Thanks for hanging in there with me!!!

The Most Basic Non-Basic Need

So, we have been in possession of the house for almost exactly 3 days at this point.  (2 days… 23 hours… and 40 minutes to be exact)  The first project was, of course, to replace the locks.  After all, a sense of security is pretty much the most basic of needs… aside from food, water, and air.

It took me two trips to the hardware store, but I managed to acquire enough locks of the same color and have them all keyed the same.  Thinking ahead, I stopped by the super-mega-ridiculous mart and bought a can of bug spray.  I should have just bough a nuclear weapon and we might have been able to call the battle between me and the bugs a fair game.  It was dark when I got to the house since it was already almost 8 and that is “morning calisthenics” time for little spidies.  Luckily, it seems that the creepy crawlies are isolated to the garage.

After unleashing and ENTIRE can of bug killer in a single corner of the garage and smiling at myself for buying dust masks (which are not ideal, but certainly prevent one from passing out from fumes…  I should know), I tackled the outside door to the garage.  We have four doors into the house.  One to the garage from the outside.  One to the house from the garage.  One from the back.  One from the front.  The only one without a deadbolt is the one to the garage from the outside.  I figured that starting simple was probably best.  Turns out that I was terribly wrong.  Someone got creative with the way strike plates are supposed to be attached to walls and decided that it would be best to NAIL it in… Ugh…  So, about 15 minutes of pulling on a nail wore this poor girl out.  I managed to get the knob all replaced and could not have been prouder.  By this point, my friend had shown up (out of curiosity of the house… not to help. haha…) and so had my boyfriend and my friend’s boyfriend.  Somehow, I still ended up replacing all but one door entirely by myself.  Hmm…

My boyfriend DID, however, save us about $50 on a new motor for the range hood in the kitchen by simple luck.  When you turn it on, it goes *whirrrrrr* but doesn’t move.  Being the boy that he is, he decided that he would just touch it and see.  Why does that always work for them and I always break things?!  One little push from his finger and whatever was stuck got unstuck in a hurry.  Voila!  Working exhaust fan and $50 I can spend on something much more fun.  Using the same skill, he also fixed most of the solar lights that they had along the sidewalk.  Turns out that the batteries were just loose.  HAHA.

I wish I had pictures of all of this, but I don’t.  I was so frustrated, hot and tired that the idea of picking up my camera didn’t even cross my mind.  Besides, new knobs and a moving exhaust fan just don’t strike me as interesting and artistic.  I PROMISE to have pics of all the demo and reno (renovation… it’s cute cuz it rhymes that way) as we progress.

Love and kisses, ya’ll!

Coffee at 7 PM + Closing Day jitters = Glorious Accomplishments

So, it’s the night before closing and I just keep going over and over it in my head.  As of tomorrow morning at about 10 AM, my boyfriend and I will be homeowners.  We will no longer be renting… ever.  We don’t have to ask permission to paint the kitchen cabinets purple with orange polkadots or beg maintenance to fix our screen door.  If it’s broken, we can fix it or hire someone who knows what they’re doing to fix it.  It’s a double-edged sword, though.  If we break it, there is noone else to blame.  My stomach has been tied in knots all day and I finally had to take it out on a project.

About a week ago, I went to the Goodwill near my office and found the most glorious lamp.

Unfortunately, as it is with most lamps at thrift stores, there was only one like it.  At least that’s what I thought…  Next to it was another lamp identical in shape.  It was black, though.

 

“Oh well,” I thought, “I can find a home for this one at least.”

Just like that, the pretty one was mine and I left the black one to live with someone else.  A couple days went by, though, and I kept thinking about my lamp’s cousin.  Surely I could find a home for it in my new house.  So, I went back… sure that all was lost and I would walk out empty-handed.  To my surprise, there was Lamp 1’s cousin still on the shelf!  I snatched him up and took it to check out.  Oh, but wait… there were paint flecks on it.    I guess I could touch that up with magic mar-… oh, no!  It was not Lamp 1’s cousin; it was Lamp 1’s long lost twin!!!  Fate had brought them together again.  It was my job to return this lamp to it’s original luster.

Starting with the very scratched part, I began to uncover the lamp beneath.

I gathered together cotton pads, non-acetone fingernail polish remover (because my artist friend came back with a resounding “I don’t know” when I asked her if acetone would damage glaze), cardboard to protect my floor, a nail brush to scrub off the yuckies, and sexy dish gloves (because one must protect her manicure at all times).

Now, if there is anything that I am, I’m lazy.  And, after about 5 minutes of scrubbing with fingernail polish remover with little success, I gave up.  I emptied a bottle of window cleaner that I had never much liked anyway and poured in one bottle of polish remover.

Miracle of miracles!  A little spray went a loooong way!  The paint began to bubble and peel.  See?  I have the most glorious hunk of paint in my hand ever.

Oh, and the results were worth all the paint peeling and wiping and a tad bit of scrubbing.

Whomever painted over the beauty of this lamp should be flogged with a wet noodle.  About ten nanoseconds after finishing the project, I called my friend and told her the great news.  With her toothbrush in her mouth, she seemed excited enough.  Haha… Well, anyway, I’m glad that my work paid off.  I can’t wait to post pics of how these look in the bedroom.   Any idea on shades?  I thought a nice cylinder shade would look good, but it has to be plain no matter what shape.  I worked too hard to not let the coolness of these lamps take centerstage!

Now, time to bake cookies (yes, it’s 1 AM), and head to bed.

EDIT: Do not leave fingernail polish remover in a plastic container overnight… you will end up with a very floppy container.  Thank goodness it was thick plastic to begin with!  haha…