New Chandelier

Forgot to mention last night that we picked up a new chandelier for the dining room. I was at Lowe's (dear Lowe's!) looking for a replacement light fixture for this anomalous--and broken--little fixture we've got sort of slapped up at random on the kitchen ceiling.

They were apparently switching out their inventory, because they had very little in the way of oil-rubbed-bronze-trimmed dome lights, much to my disappointment. However, they did have this tasty little number:

Rust-finished 5-light chandelier with amber crushed glass shades

Stylish, no? You can't tell from the picture, but the shades contain little chips of different-colored glass--mostly browns and tans, but also little flecks of red! So appropriate!

Matt & I had tentatively mooted about the idea of replacing the fan in the dining room with a nice chandelier to make the whole thing a little more dining-roomish, but we hadn't come to any firm decision. However, the chandelier (normally $140) was on sale: guess the price!

$20!
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(Okay, you have to highlight the empty space above to see the price. It was so ridiculously low, I felt it deserved a kind of dramatic reveal.)

Yowza. That's monumentally cheap.

So even though it wasn't in our (tightly regulated) budget, and Matt and I hadn't had the chance to discuss it, I felt morally obliged to purchase it. If we can't use it, someone or other among our friends and family might be able to.

I think it is going to work out though. Here's what I like about it: It combines a clean-lined but antique look with a hint of contemporary urban sophistication. In this way, I think, it harmonizes with our bamboo floors, high ceilings, wavery-glassed windows, and Ikea furniture. It's a combination of old and new. Also, I like the little red flecks.

Pre-Parental Frenetic Burst of Activity

So Mom & Dad were coming into town to check out our progress on the house. Seemed wise to actually have some progress to show them.

So for the past months, we've really moved into high gear around the place. The initial goal was to have achieved a state of doneishness wherein all essentials would have been completed, and only fluffy stuff--like replacing ugly light fixtures or installing a ceiling fan on our porch--would be left to accomplish at our leisure.

To be specific, this was my initial goal. Matt, who is able to learn from history and thereby avoid repeating his mistakes, was well aware that I was cosmically, wildly, ludicrously delusional to think we had the time or money to accomplished everything by late August.

Consequently, instead of installing all of the needed baseboards (in the master bed, study, and hall), we contented ourselves with the baseboards in the dining room. Instead of installing the rest of the flagstones for our patio and weeding, mulching, and edging all of our beds, we were pretty darn proud of ourselves for having (mostly) completed the front-side bed, a long, L-shaped number that encloses what I like to think of as the Croquet Lawn. Instead of refinishing both the tubs, I half-finished the guest tub, leaving it in a state of sticky incompletion. (That darn epoxy still hasn't dried in some places.)

Still, we worked our little tails off to get this much done, and what we did really does make a difference, especially in the dining room. (Making baseboards out of planks, by the way, is not for the wimpy, especially when both the walls and floor waver wildly all over the place. 10 x 1s don't exactly accommodate themselves to the vagaries of turn-of-the-century construction.)

Nekkid walls. Note the handful of turquoise spacers, leftover from our bambooing days.

Ooooo! Lovely new baseboards! They currently look one stage better than this pic: all the gaps have been filled in with wood putty, and they've received a new coat of paint.

Mom & Dad were very sweetly complimentary about everything, in spite of its half-finished state. They kept saying that they were amazed by how much we had achieved, which was very gratifying. Apparently, The Family at large (whom they have been visiting recently), were also surprised and impressed by the quantity of work I've been doing, particularly work involving power tools. I'm not sure that their amazement entirely redounds to my credit, actually. I admit, yes, I am kind of bone lazy, and yes, I'd twenty times rather ply a book or a computer mouse than a shovel, but that doesn't mean I'm incapable, particularly when properly motivated (as when a gun is pointed at my head or I am confronted with hideous mint-green paint day after day). Harumph. They should have seen me with that nail gun...

In any event, a good time was had by all, lunch came up beautifully, to be frank, if immodest (grilled chicken and polenta with blackberry-nectarine salsa, tomato gratin, and Spanish potatoes. Tasty!) and we had a very nice time showing everything off and visiting.

Now we need to schedule some more visits quickly before we run out of steam.

Ah, the Invigorating Fragrance of Latex

You may recall that our bedroom walls were two colors: a sort of deep moss and, to my despair, mint green. It was supposed to be fern green, but the lummoxes (lummoxi?) at Lowe's apparently mis-mixed it. At the time, there was carpet to install, furniture to shuffle, and no budget for repainting. So all this time, I've been waking up in the morning and rolling out of bad to get a faceful of winter-fresh circa-1986 mint green. Yech.

As part of my new push to get the house tamed (I like to think of it as a surge, the end result of which will be shock and awe. In a good way. I hope.), I decided to take back the wall. So we got a new shade of paint (I don't even trust them to attempt "Soft Reflections" anymore. We're now going with "Martinique Morn" instead), put down drop cloths, put up painters' tape, and moved the furniture. The new color is MUCH better (a sort of deep fern), and we plan to get the second coat down tomorrow night. Huzzah!

A rough approximation of Spring Eve (L) and Martinique Morn (R)

I also put a second coat on the three pieces of baseboards and on the bathroom door. That means that by tomorrow evening, if all goes well, the baseboards will be ready to install. I'm still feeling a bit inhibited and reluctant, but at least I've got a little momentum going.

Oh, and I installed our first batch of cabinet knobs in the master bath. They're from Restoration Hardware. They're so very chi-chi that I had to buy them in installations--half this week, half the next. But darn it, they're just so suitable. They match our one original door knob, and they look so adorably fin de siècle. See?

Stylin' but costly new cabinet knobs for the master bath

And finally, we're trying to kill off the burmudagrass (which is threatening to choke our shrubs) by covering it with clear plastic and letting the sun braise it. With astonishingly good timing, the weather has actually been sunny all week for the first time since May, so there is some hope of success.

Continued Gussying

Master bedroom

We haven't done anything really big lately, just shuffled our possessions around from one room to the next. Oh, and we've hung most of our pictures, which marks a definite commitment toward a permanent arrangement. Matt's been attacking the chinaberry corpse with a chainsaw. It's a shame it's nearly summer--we now have tons of firewood for our little metal fire pit.

It's interesting how our furniture fits in some rooms and not in others. Although the master bed and study are nowhere near finished, you can tell that in the long run, they'll make sense. I mean, none of the furniture matches any other pieces of furniture, but in a slapdash kind of way those rooms looks like they will hang together. Or that's what I think anyway.

Study--the bigger part. The study is shaped like an "L"--this bit is the long downstroke.

I'm not so sure about the living room. We have so much more wall now than we've ever had. Even after we've put up pictures, there are still these vast deserts of emptiness. I do have some boxes of small framed photographs--I'm hoping clusters of those will help somewhat. And then at a later date I'll be putting in long curtains, which may help to tie the top and bottom of the rooms together a little better. A potted tree here and there might make a differnce. But at the moment the room remains a bit of a question mark. The furniture looks sort of lost and forlorn. So much so, that I never sit in there any more. Now I do all my living in the master bed--it feels so much cozier.

Giant empty expanses

Sad little huddle of furniture in the living room

I don't know--what do you think? Do I need a rug? An armoire? A whole bunch more framed pictures? Whatever it is, it can wait a bit--we have everything we need for our day-to-day living, and when we entertain--which is rarely--we can probably just use the dining room.

The dining room is in an intermediate state--it had previously been colonized as a sort of makeshift study, but now that is being dismantled and the whole thing is getting a new personality--half sitting area, half dedicated dining area (something we've never had before). I'm not sure how it's all going to work out, but as there is a squishy chair in the mix, I think it will all be okay.

We've also been working on procuring the necessaries to re-work the obstreperous master bath. We were planning to tear out the beat-up old tub and replace it with a bigger, newer tub (extra deep for our bubble-bathing pleasure!). But when we started tapping on the tubs in our price range at Lowe's, they were all dinky and plasticky sounding. And when we told the tub guy that we were planning to replace it ourselves, he started talking about soldering pipes and setting the tub in sand, and other intimidating things. So now we've rather lost confidence. We're not sure whether to replace the tub with... something or just coat it in epoxy.

So we're shelving that problem for a while, and are focusing instead on replacing the countertop and sink. Naturally, our vanity is an abnormal length, so we're going to have to special order the rotten thing. Finding a person at either L's or HD who has the authority to help us with this problem has been surprisingly difficult--either they're busy, absent, or too snitty to give intelligent help. Aggravating.

So the poor bathroom is in hiatus. Which it's probably grown accustomed to, by now.

Update on the hideous Buick (or whatever it is) in our yard: Matt waited till the car was gone and piled little rock cairns in a row where the Buick used to park (leaving, I might add, huge permanent ruts). For a day or two, it looked like the message had been received. But then he just moved further up our yard (nearer to the intersection with Ave F), where he is no doubt wearing a brand new set of ruts. I ask you--who does this sort of thing? Would you take up permanent residence in someone else's yard without so much as a by your leave? If he stays there much longer, he's going to have squatter's rights to the outer 6 feet of our property, the brazen hussy. The Battle of the Buick continues...

Bamboo!

words later.

for now just pix.
(words added--04/30)
The house ate my husband!
Okay, metaphorically, there's some truth to that...

I started the dining room by myself. The picture above represents three hours of backache-inducing, fiddly, exhausting labor. You'll be happy to know, however, that the first three hours are definitely the worst. After that, you get a lot more proficient. Here's what I learned:

1) The boards absolutely must be laid in a perfectly straight line. Doesn't matter if your walls bulge in and out like a pregnant elephant--boards must be straight. This requires much creativity with spacers (little plastic wedges that preserve a small gap between the floor and the walls).

2) It's better to hit the nails in too hard than too lightly. If the nail is almost but not quite in, it's impossible to fit the next board over the tongue-plus-nail-head. In addition, if it's almost all the way in, there is nothing for a crowbar or hammer to grab on to in order to pull the nail out. Also, the nails are serrated, so they really don't want to come out.

3) If you can't get the nail out, you may have to rip up the entire board. This is almost always fatal to the board, and imperils the adjacent boards, as well.

4) Breakthrough! Instead of breaking your heart trying to pull out the nail or ripping up the board, use a really huge drill bit to enlarge the groove of the next board where it will have to fit over the nail head. This is much, much simpler.

This is the nail gun. It's huge. And very heavy. And whoever designed it should be smacked upside the head. Here's what's wrong with it:

1) It's very poorly balanced. When you set it down, it usually falls over, which seems unsafe and would really bang up your floor if it happened to fall in that direction.

2) It's only functional when the air compressor has adequate pressure, but the gun doesn't have an air pressure meter. To figure out if the gun is ready to go, you have to go check on the body of the compressor, which is tethered to the wall on a 3-foot cord. Meanwhile, your stupid nail gun falls over. Again.

3) It's designed to fit onto the groove of the board it's nailing, but as the fit isn't very precise, it pops out of alignment at the least excuse, scuffing your board as it goes.

4) It's HEAVY. For god's sake man, lift with your knees, not your back!

However, for all the pain it causes, look how pretty it is when done. So stylish!

I got about 2/5 of the room done myself, then Matt & I worked as a team (way faster, by the way--one of you saws while the other nails, then one of you lays the next row while the other measures the end boards--much more efficient).

Then Matt finished the room himself the next day. Here he is, drill in hand, master of the manor.

In continuation (the good, the bad, & the ugly)

Gentle reader, we have hardwoods!

Matt peeled back the carpet in the living room to reveal this--functional, attractive hardwoods. (That stuff running down the right is ancient linoleum. Why just on the one wall? Answer comes there none.)

That's the good news.

The bad news is that he kept peeling:

Not all of the floor is in pristine shape, to put it mildly. There are several boards that are rotten, and some have been replaced with elegant and stylish plywood. So we'll definitely have to get a flooring person out to help us replace the funky boards. I think the project may be complicated by the fact that in both the rooms we've looked at, the boards run the entire length of the room. In other words, if the room is 15 feet long, each floorboard is also 15 feet long. I wonder how hard (read "expensive") it will be to find boards of the right wood and thickness that are 15 feet in length.

...And then there's the dining room:


AAAIIIGH!!!

Archeologically, it's quite interesting. At the bottom right, you can see the outline of a wrench that was lying on the floor when some painters came in and did their stuff. You can see the where their buckets were, and Matt thinks he has identified the ring from a beer bottle.

It's a little like Pompeii--the afterimage of an afternoon, captured for eternity. Or at least until we get our paws on it.

I don't know that it will really be any harder to sand a floor that has paint spatters on it than to sand one that is varnished, but it sure makes the amount of work involved really obvious. Which was not information I needed as WE STILL AREN'T DONE WITH THE PAINTING.