Ug. Cameraphone.

(Note: Now that my camera is back in operation, I've added better photos to this entry. But I kept the original cameraphone pix for their quaint appeal.--MU)

So I'm waiting on my battery charger, but in the interim I couldn't stand not doing a little documenting, which meant that I had to rely on my camera phone. The results, though they have a kind of numinous, almost mystical appeal, lack a certain je ne se quoi as far as detail and realism are concerned. I had to jimmy with the one below in Photoshop for the blinds to show up at all. What this is meant to convey is that we just bought our first shipment of plantation blinds and installed them in the living room. Eventually, we'll buy three more sets for the master bed, as well.


For the dining room, my current ambition (pipe dream?) is custom shutters. The kitchen (thanks again Ladonna!) is fixed up with a valance/blind combo. And Mom doesn't know it yet (hi Mom!), but I'm hoping to draft her into the effort of making Roman shades for the study. But that's a ways down the road. For now, we're just excited about the living room.

This is our manky old shed. Matt totally kicked its booty. Some locals with a truck are coming by today to drag off the refuse. Note the half a chinaberry. That's on the project list as well, poor doomed thing.

The shed was on a concrete pad, and Matt's going to use that as the foundation for a small greenhouse (or orangery, as I like to think of it. We do have several small citrus trees that will need to shelter there in the winter, so it isn't completely pretentious of me).

Memorial Day Weekend

Matt & I had a busy Memorial Day weekend. We finally tackled some of those tiresome, awkward sorts of tasks we've been putting off for a while. We rolled the master bath walls for the third (and final) time, primed the trim, and painted it. We painted the interior of that cabinet I had forgotten to paint. And we also opted to paint the miserable wall linoleum to match the trim. Not sure if it's a viable long-term solution, but it'll do for now.

Freshly painted master bath

In the living room, we (mostly Matt) finished off the edges of the bamboo floors and installed quarter round. On a purely cosmetic level, we brought in a palm and hung the Mexican star Matt gave me years ago when we were living in that weency little apartment in South Austin. Those small changes really make a difference in pulling the scale of the room together, I think.

The living room, embellished

Needless to say, much remains to be done. We ordered a countertop for the bathroom, which should arrive in 3 weeks' time--we'll have to uninstall the old and put in the new, along with its new sink and a faucet. Matt needs to reinstall the toilet, left off by the tile guys. We need to paint the tub and surround with that epoxy finish. We need to buy a new mirror and a new light fixture. And, of course, I need to make the valance, with Ladonna's help. In the long run, a new shower curtain may be in order, as well. However, the paint and the tile were a huge step, and we're able to go back to using the tub qua tub. ("Qua"?!? I must be feeling nostalgic for academia. "Qua" is one of those pointlessly jargony words I once promised myself never to use. Eh well. Perhaps if I apply a metric I could leverage my vocabulary using measurable benchmarks to maximize productivity. Yech. I'm in a whole new world of jargon in the private sector.)

In the living room, we need to do substantial touch-ups to the baseboards and quarter-round and finish hanging the chain for the Mexican star (we ran into difficulties with an insufficiently manly ceiling hook). And, of course, procure some window treatments not held on with tape. The remaining projects in there are long term: make some drapes, re-cover the ottoman with the drapes from the old house, frame some prints, and either buy a sofa cover or a new sofa altogether, budget allowing.

New baseboards for the kitchen and dining room are probably our next big weekend project. Since our walls aren't actually attached to the floor, the absence of baseboards means that any and all creepy crawlies can stroll into our house at will. Mr. Gorbachev, build up that wall! Doing so will almost certainly compel us to get the furniture into a stable configuration, a project with a whole list of sub-tasks unto itself (move Matt's computer, drill a hole through the wall to route the phone connection from the dining room into the study, clean out the wetbar cabinet, move the unhinged study door that's been sheltering inexplicably in the dining room for weeks, &c., &c...). Anyway, I'm looking forward to getting that room somewhat tamed.

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...

1 Step Forward, 2 Steps Back

Everyone Do the Furniture Shuffle...

Matt & I pulled everything out of the master bed, study, and guest room today to clutter up the living room, kitchen, master bath, and dining room. Just when we were starting to get things in the front of the house sort of under control. But we accomplished our moving in only about 2 hours, to my own amazement. I think this is probably attributable to Matt, who is very good at gritting his teeth and just doing unpleasant tasks, while I malinger and muck about.



I'll let you know how the carpet goes tomorrow. We are approaching completion! (Sort of.)

Little Updates

I've been out of touch, but the big dramatic improvements (except the long-awaited carpet) are pretty much over, and the small, incremental changes we've been making just haven't seemed blog-worthy.

For instance: last night we installed a paper towel holder, partially fixed the kitchen fluorescent light, installed the kitchen clock, and broke that weird little over-the-door fixture. (Oops. Apparently, I didn't do a very good job screwing the globe back on. In my defense, it's hard to do when the fixture is over your head and you can't see what you're doing. Was ugly anyway. Now have an incontrovertible excuse for replacing it.)

See paper towel holder to the far left and clock in center, admire general cleanliness of counter-top, and note freshly mopped floor. Will be adding another mug rack tonight!

This morning I cleaned and installed our old kitchen garbage can, put another coat of paint on the bathroom shutters, and put away some more kitchen clutter. The worst of it is, in a photograph it doesn't really look much different from the photo I posted 2 weeks ago. You'll have to trust me when I say that in person it looks much more spacious, organized, and attractive.

In the living room, we finally upgraded to an actual bed instead of the sofa bed. Yay real mattress! As you can see, we also moved in my dresser. I'm so comfortable living in the den, I'm not really sure why we should bother moving all of our chattel into the master bed once the carpet arrives. Perhaps because our bedspread clashes with the sofa? On the other hand, the blue accents on the headboard do match the tape on my "window treatments."


Here's the view of our front porch from the living room. Nice, no? Funnily enough, the driveway and sidewalks are arranged in such a way that no one ever uses our front door, however attractive it may be. The previous tenants were so comfortable with this arrangement, that when they installed the house's 1 doorbell, they chose to put it on the kitchen door instead of the front door.

Front porch as seen from living room

Front porch as seen from the street.

Matt put about half of our potted plants on the front porch, which I think makes it look wonderfully lush and verdant. I have been resisting major painting projects (like finishing the master bath), but here you can see evidence of one of my smaller jobs, painting the bathroom's interior shutters. A job, by the way, that the vengeful gods could have easily bestowed as a fitting punishment on Tantalus or Sisyphus. It's a painstaking, slow, sort of a task, and the end result looks depressingly glumpy and amateurish. They're such tight, crowded surfaces that every brushstroke leaves blobs and drops all over adjacent pieces, and when you clean those pieces up, you scrape the paint you just applied to the first surface or spread more blobs elsewhere. It's the sort of time-consuming, fiddly work only a bonsai cultivator or rubix-cube protegy could stomach.

The much-hyped carpet is to be installed Monday, by the way. Huzzah! Carpet!

Main Street: a Photo Essay

Well, okay, that's a little pretentious. I'm not sure it's an "essay" so much as "a bunch of pictures." In any event, here's a little tour of the wonderful old houses in the residential section of Main Street in my new town. (That is, a few blocks from our house.)


Lovely old Greek Revival-style house in sad disrepair. Those stumps in the front yard are the peculiar & inexplicable remnant of an avenue of crepe myrtles.

What do you call this style? There are a number of houses with this look in Elgin--brick, compact, lots of arches. I really like the red arched front door.

Same general idea--next door to the previous.

At one time, we were really considering buying this one. It's a lovely old thing from 1920, but it's SO not perpendicular, and it was pushing on the absolute outer limits of what we could afford. It just needed more work than we could really manage. No matter--somebody else snarfed it up double-quick.


This is one of a number of what I think are Craftsman-style houses on Main St. Main St. was clearly where all of Elgin's muckty-mucks used to live (probably still do, for that matter)--it has the biggest, snazziest houses in town. Since several of these big fancy houses are in (what I take to be) Craftsman style, I assume Elgin had its big boom in the 1930s. Which, come to think of it, seems rather unlikely. Nobody was having a boom in the 30s. Must have been in the 20s, then?

Right next to the big Craftsman grandiosities is this bungalowish cuteness. What a ducky little cottage!

I don't know what this style is, and I have no idea of the time period either--they still build homes that look very much like it. "Traditional Southern Cottage" or some such thing. Charming, though, isn't it? Nice use of ferns.

Here's another in that unknown style--compact, squarish, and brick. No arches on this one, though. Is this from the 30s or the 40s, do you think? For some reason, this style of houses always looks to me like it should have professors living in it.

The cupola (is that what you call it when it's only 1 story? I usually think of cupolas as having 2 stories) says to me "Victorian" but the fat pillars and deep porch say "Craftsman." (I need to get a book on this history of residential architecture in America.) Either way, it must be lovely inside. And what a marvelous, cool porch for having breakfast or dinner.

A cupola and a dormer window! What bliss! This house, unusually, is stuccoed.

For some reason, this house always looks rather British to me. Look at the details in the woodwork between the windows.

Another handsome old Craftsman (I assume) house. It wears April well--the bright spring green of all the new foliage certainly becomes it.

...and another really big old house. The more I look at it, the less I think I know its date of origin. Bottom line is, it's big and interesting. (Not exactly as pretty as some of the others, I think--that brown's a bit austere. But it's interesting.)

And that's it. Isn't my town cool?


On my specific house, we've planted a few odds and ends that really needed to get into the ground ASAP (a rose here, a crinum there), and begun the first round of the Furniture Shuffle. Now that we have floors in the front of the house, we're extracting all the furniture that goes in those rooms and filling them. Hopefully, this will make it easier to empty out the master and study when the carpet guys come (which should be right around the Crack of Doom). Even though chaos reigns in the kitchen, it's amazing how much better it looks now that the oven has been reinstalled and the island and china cabinet were brought in. Let me take that out of passive voice: after Matt & I half killed ourselves, pulled our muscles, and pinched our fingers wrestling in three monstrous leviathans of furniture. After much tribulation, the kitchen is already looking nicer (I scrubbed the island from breakfast till lunch yesterday--much ingrained grease and unidentifiable nastiness--eww.)
As our most inhabitable room, the living room has become our base of operations. A bed and an internet connection: the fundamentals of life.

Moved In

First, a quick update on the bamboo.

Matt installed the bamboo in the living (except for a little strip at the edges), so both rooms are more or less done. We'll need to put in quarter round shoe molding at some later date, but more pressing needs have overtaken us, and piddly little details like finishing off the flooring have been deprioritized.

The floors, I think, look terrific. They definitively assign the house a remodeled--as opposed to renovated--aesthetic, but given that the bulk of our furniture is semi-disposable Danish modern from Ikea, that was probably inevitable. And simpler. I toyed with trying to make the decor more antiquey and traditional, but that would have been difficult, expensive, and maybe not really in character anyway.


We spent Wednesday night, Thurs, and today moving everything from the old place.

We. Have. Too. Much. Stuff.

I'm not moving again until we can afford to pay someone else to do the moving for us. And Matt's really done the lion's share of the heavy moving--after a while I wimp out and do the sissy tasks, like putting down shelf paper and unpacking the DVDs.

The really grim thing is that since the tile and carpet aren't down yet, we're going to be shuffling our belongings from room to room while the installers come in to do their thing over the next few weeks. We're starting to finalize the living room and kitchen, but pretty soon we'll be using them as temporary storage for the towers of boxes and furniture currently stacked in the master bed and study. The thought of all of that extended moving makes me cringe.


We've been sleeping on the sofabed in the living room, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. If you squint, it almost looks a like a residence, rather than a war zone. The paint, which caused us so much trouble, is finally starting to look as I had intended--cozy, warm, fresh, stylish (I hope). The furniture and the bamboo really make it all make sense. That, and removing the blue painter's tape.

That's in the public rooms of the house--the master bed and study are big question marks--I still can't tell how they'll turn out.

In the meantime, I'm getting my daily supplement of homeliness from the living room, where we have a bed of sorts, a clock, and an internet connection.

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.

The Amazing Technicolor Dreamhouse

Much progress was made yesterday with MattU & Bianca's help. All of the major downstairs rooms have their first coat of paint, except for half of the kitchen.

We tweaked our color scheme (the Nutria/Mellow Sage Snafu turned out to be a blessing in disguise. MattV did not at all care for the look of Flower Bucket in the living room, and even I had my reservations--it looked awfully aggressive. Matt went even further and said it looked like avocado--gasp! So we ended up putting Nutria in the kitchen and the real Mellow Sage in the living room. Still can't figure out why something called "nutria" would be green, let alone why anyone would name a paint after a nutria in the first place. But that's neither here nor there.)

Mellow Sage in the living room

The result is that instead of having a yellow house, we now have a green house. I meant to be a little more diverse, but at least gobs of green is better than gobs of yellow.


MattU very obligingly clamored up and down the ladder all day taping the ceiling and edging the walls. Bianca, interestingly, had never used a paint roller before, but she ended up wielding it like a pro. She got a lot of practice in the course of the day.

Here they are, recreating half of American Gothic (half because Bianca never quite managed to look properly dour. We kept telling her "look grim! look depressed!" but this just made her giggle, which wasn't quite the effect I was going for. MattU, who had been climbing ladders all day, was able to summon the appropriate bleakness effortlessly.)

Elginian Gothic

Today was really a footnote to yesterday--I spent it edging and applying second coats to the walls that Cathy, MattU, & Bianca had already painted.

The one exception to the general greenness is the study, which has one coat of (oddly gloppy) paint--it's meant to be a sort of leathery tan, but at the moment it's intimidatingly orange. I think a second coat will bring it a little closer to the intended look.

Note the objectionable Buick outside of the window. One of our neighbors apparently considers our yard to be his parking space. We're working on how to enlighten him as to his misapprehension. MattV has suggested planting a hedge there, but I'm thinking that might not be entirely neighborly. Ditto slashing his tires.

A risqué tan