Paint Chips, Field Trip to Finch's Farm

Painting the mudroom reminded me that I wanted to organize my paint chips. At this point, most of the colors I used have been discontinued, so I'm including the codes, too, which (I hope) will still be in the computer at Lowe's if we need more. I scanned in the paint chips and used Photoshop's color dropper to paint each room. Worked well except for the whites, which didn't scan correctly at all.

Elgin House: The Color Scheme. Click for bigness.

In other news, it's hot. Gah. Hot, steamy, and sticky.

Field Trip to Finch's Farm
Also, Matt & I took a field trip to a little nursery on FM 1660 between Coupland and Rice's Crossing called Finch's Farm. We've passed it any number of times on the way to Hutto, but we never had time to drop in, and they're closed on Sundays.

Anyway, we finally made it over there, and it was actually much nicer than I had anticipated. It's bigger than it looks from the road, and it's the sort of small starter nursery in which the owner is happy to hang out and chat as long as you like. Since this kind of operation always makes me very curious, I take advantage of the opportunity to ask questions. I always want to know how business is, how long they've been open, how much of their own propagating they do...

This one has been open since 2001, I think, and has been growing gradually over the years. What I thought was really neat about Finch's is that he has a number of acres to play with, and he's using them to test his plants, especially trees. It's sort of like an extension agent's test garden. At the moment, most of his trees are smallish (maybe 4" in diameter?), but I love the idea. In addition to oaks and similar landscape trees, he has a few apples, peaches, walnuts, citruses, and, interestingly, olives in the ground.

Another reason I like visiting with small nursery owners is that you learn such interesting and random things. He gets his olives from an olive farmer south of San Antonio--who knew such a thing existed? He also knows of someone in Manor who has acres of olives, although he's only harvested 10 lbs so far. Again, who'd've thought? He also told us that he's had great luck with companionate planting of garlic amongst his peaches. Apparently, it's done a great job for him of keeping the insects off the fruit.

As a side note, he also raises bees, though he's not planning to harvest honey again till 2010--last year was apparently tough on the bees, and he wants to give them a break.

All in all, it seemed absolutely idyllic--acres to play with as your giant horticultural laboratory; room to dabble in other hobbies, like bees or chickens or goats or or quail; and (as he's a retired dude who is presumably doing this as supplemental income) the leisure to work as hard or as little as he likes. Since he inherited the land and got the greenhouses free, his financial risk is limited. And 1660 is really a very pretty road--farms, old houses, and hedges of trees. All in all, an enviable existence.

Awfully far from Central Market, though.

Bought an unlabeled plum-colored perennial from Finch's--must go plant it and my eggplants in the blue-and-purple garden (by the kitchen patio). It shall be a tranquil pool of indigo loveliness. Eventually.

PS--I hear thunder--perhaps we'll get some rain! I LOVE rain!

Operation "Whoa, That's a Lot of Purple" Completed

Matt hauls off the Late Lamented. Shower remnants visible on the right.

Phew. Busy day. Tackled the mudroom renovation. Matt capped off the plumbing (which, lucky for us, came through the water heater closet, so he was able to do his plumbing in there) to the old shower and then pulled out what was left of the stall. Then he cleaned what appeared to be years of grime, dryer fluff, dust, and a recent overlayment of cat hair. Not going to dwell on all that. Makes me feel kind of queasy.

I was in charge of removing everything from the walls, spackling, and painting. Just like back in the early days of Elgin House, every, every surface had to be coated, from the air vent in the ceiling on down. While I was at it, I also painted the inside and out of the exterior door, which had been a lovely combination of taupe and pale mustard (WTF?) And once you paint the door, you really need to paint the trim around the door or you'll end up with clashing shades of white, or, in this case, clashing shades of "Betsy's Linen" and grimy, moldy, filthy off-white. So I was at it all day.

Nine rooms after I first raised a brush in this house, and I've finally learned some things about painting.

(1) Use thick coats on the ceiling. Doesn't really matter if it takes ages to dry, after all. Much preferable to applying multiple coats.
(2) Should have bought paint from Ace's from the start. The Lowe's stuff I used for everything else took 2 or often 3 coats to cover the white underneath. Ace's brand takes 1 coat, and the cost is fairly close.
(3) Give up on all the stupid little gimmicks and tools for painting straight lines--none of them work; they all end up seeping and blobbing. Get a good quality chisel-tip brush and freehand it as best you can. Faster and less heart-breaking. Press the brush forcefully against the wall near the line you need to paint. The brush should fan out slightly. Carefully move into place, always tracking the location of the outermost set of bristles as those are the ones that will form the edge. Don't breathe.

Matt, somewhat to my surprise, didn't make any protest when I informed him I'd be painting the laudry room "Globe Thistle." Other than a slightly sardonic expression around the eyebrows, anyway. It's a really lovely color--a sort of lilac with a touch of grey. But zowie, it's powerful in large quantities. Something a little more tame might have been a better choice, but we've got two cans of the stuff--we're sticking with "Globe Thistle," dammit.

New "Globe Thistle" walls

So there it is. It's improved in terms of grime, but it's hardly white-glove clean, largely because the disintegrating linoleum is so foul. Also, I need to put a second coat on the trim and do some more work behind the dryer *shudder*.

However, as you can see, there is now space for the washer where the shower used to be. Will order tomorrow--very exciting.

Future plans:
(1) Replace nasty linoleum
(2) Buy dryer to match front-loading washer and stack the two units over by the window.
(3) Get Javier to build a laundry station to the right of the machines. Will have cabinets going all the way up to the ceiling, a pull-out counter for folding, a bar for hanging clothes while drying, and a space at the bottom for tucking away the Beasts' litterbox nicely out of sight.
(4) Buy and install chandelier (with little dangly crystal bits!) to replace grotty, half-shorted-out old "brass" fixture.

For the moment, I've had all the fun with laundry renovation I can stand, though. Going to be aggressively lazy for the next few days. Other than catching up on a bunch of laundry, anyway.

Bookshelves Installed!

Our exceedingly speedy carpenter, Javier Diaz, finished our bookshelves in a week and installed them last night. They look terrific, and they're very sturdy. I'm writing this from my lovely new window seat as we speak. The style is very square and simple, which is exactly what we wanted and what I think suits the house best. He made it of plywood with a maple (or birch?) veneer, which turned out really pretty--it has rather a rather subtle, light grain. Chuck & Ladonna are coming up next Tue for a quick visit, so I'm looking forward to showing the unit off, since the Vests are essentially the Patron Saints of the Bookcase.

Next week we'll pick up some stain and varnish and hopefully get the whole thing ready to use by Sunday so we can finish unpacking our books and get that monstrous metal file cabinet out of the way.

Lovely new shelves (minus the actual shelves, which we'll install post-staining)

You may have observed, though, that the window and shelves aren't entirely square (noticeable at the top and bottom of the frame). That's because the windows themselves aren't square, which rather gave Javier fits, I think. The shelves and window seat are nice and level--the window, not so much. I'm hoping to camouflage this particular problem with curtains, a bench cushion, and throw pillows. Eventually.

Anyway, we were very happy with Javier's work, and we'll almost certainly use him a few months down the line, when the antique doors will all be ready for re-sizing and hanging. I'm so glad to have found a reliable, reasonable carpenter--such a useful person to have in one's contacts!

Meanwhile, we've also lurched forward another step towards resuscitating the porch glider. Matt scrubbed the frame with a wire brush, and then we rustoleumed the heck out of it. (If I'd had my druthers, I'd have gone with a softer shade of white, but there aren't a lot of options in rustoleum--it's pretty much Hospital White or beige.)

It's another gorgeous Saturday (probably about 71F, sun is shining, birds are twittering, really beautiful), so I felt the urgent burning need for a functional porch swing the whole time. However, we still have to
1) varnish all the wood
2) paint the underside of the frame
3) buy, cut, bend, and drill a pipe into three pieces for the swing's supports.

So we better have a few more nice weekends this year, cos the swing's got a bit more work before it'll be ready.

Rusty swing

Freshly painted swing, glowing rather aggressively in the sunlight

Evolution of a Bathroom

I'd like to take a moment to rest on our laurels.

It's not that the bathroom's done, but it's so much doner than it has been. Compare, if you will, where we were and where we now are.

March 29 vs. Oct 10

Fresh paint, nice tile, new countertop, new light fixture, new cabinet knobs, painted shutters, new faucet, new mirror and frame...

It's so gratifying. Just so I can really glory in the transformation, I've recapped the evolution of the bathroom over the past 6 months in pictures.

Step 1: paint anything that stands still

Step 2: Replace hideous old tile counter and rotten grout.

Step 3: Replace depressing "Hollywood-style" light bar with shiny new brushed nickel fixture

Step 4: Add new framed mirror

Of course, we're not through. We still need to have the grey backsplash and tub surround re-finished to match the trim, we need to install a light/vent combo by the tub, I need to make the valance for the window, and we need to put in a modest crown molding.

Still, it's finally beginning to gesture towards what it will look like when it's complete, and it no longer has that makeshift, construction-project feel to it.

Coming soon: The Doors, live.

Prettifying

This weekend we squeezed in some long-awaited prettification.

We bought some baseboards for the master bedroom. Unlike the front rooms of the house, with their 9" plank baseboards, the back rooms don't require freakishly tall moldings. Since planks-as-moldings have some significant problems (they're hard to cut straight and they're weirdly thick), we wanted to go with more traditional baseboards here.


As you can see, thanks to some holes and other imperfections in the walls, we did still need some height. And the fact that the ceilings are so high means that we need baseboards that are in scale. Below are the boards we ended up with. I think Matt's right that they're a little too elaborate for the style of our house, but there weren't any other >4 1/2" options.


We ran into difficulties cutting these boards, too--they're too tall for our miter saw, and, we realized, we're going to have to bite the bullet and replace a crunched piece of wallboard before trying to install baseboards there. As a result, we got exactly 2 pieces of baseboard nailed in; the rest to be added later after corrections and modifications have been made.

Death to Preval
I found the two missing air vents (master bed and study), so I decided to spray them to match the ceiling, as I had done with our other 5 vents. I got out my trusty Preval paint sprayer and... nothing came out. Change canister, repeat... nothing. Thin paint further, change canister, repeat... nothing. Blow out the plastic straw, disassemble the cartridge, and scrape out all orifices with a twig, repeat... nothing.

I know I've said it before, but this time the iron has entered my soul. No more Preval today, no more Preval tomorrow, no more Preval forever. The product is a menace. I ended up painting the vents with a brush, which of course means a thicker and more texturey finish than a metal air vent ought to have. Next time I need to convert a paint to spray, I'm going the whole hog and buying a sprayer and air compressor.

(Note: for the benefit of any Feds who may be trolling the backwaters of the internet in search of potential domestic terrorists, I meant "Death to Preval" in the rhetorical-flight-of-fancy sense, not in the stockpiling-fertilizers-and-disassembled-cell-phones sense. Peace, out.)

Bit... by... bit...

Matt installed our new fixture in the bathroom. It's brushed nickel--so nice! And it matches our new facet, our stylish drawer pulls, and the frame we bought empty that will someday hold a mirror (picture to come later).

We still need to buy glass shades for the fixture, a mirror for the frame, a vent/light combo, and to refinish the tub. I'm kind of amazed at the quantity of work we've lavished on the bathroom. How, after this much money, energy, and love, the thing has the nerve to not be finished, I'll never know.


Here Matt is after having moved the electrical box. You can see the white strip where the hideous old wooden bar of "Hollywood-style" lights used to be. (By "old," I mean from 1985. Not "old" in the sense of charming, quaint, or delightful.)

Weed barrier!
While he was wrestling with that (and an intransigent project it turned out to be--apparently, the colors of the wires are all wrong, making hooking them up a real challenge) I worked on putting down more weed barrier. Our gazebo is ultimately going to have an herb & wildflower bed around it. For the moment, it's mostly just got the ratty leftovers of the rest of the garden--the sickly Will Flemings we brought from Wolverton, a pitiful convalescent Climbing Peace (we don't even like hybrid teas) and a miscellaneous collection of sulky rosemary and reject peppermints and lemon balms from Matt's old nursery.

Hopefully, the weed barrier will give a little assistance to some of our weaker plants. If nothing else, it will keep the area a little tidier until we can begin to work it properly. Next spring: larkspur, poppies, basil, and oregano!


We also have a half-hearted little bed with a few roses by the light pole. I weed-barriered that, too, just to tide it over until we can really kick it into shape.


Finally, here's Matt's little hobby greenhouse, built right on top of our horrible oubliette.

Tub, Shelves, Groundcloth, &c. &c.

We have been very energetic lately.

I touched up all the scuffs and smudges (that I could find) on our walls and doors, stripped and varnished a book shelf, and painted the outside of the pedestal tub. Also, Matt & I installed more metal edging and put down weed barrier.

Painting & Varnishing

The first two were pretty straightforward. Here's what's worth mentioning:

1) I impulse-bought a little bucket from Sherwin-Williams that is made for touch-ups. It has a special little lip so that you can scrape the excess paint off your brush without it going down the outside of the bucket; it has a magnet to hold your brush in place when you aren't using it; and it has a rubber handle that fits snugly over your hand.

The result is that you can carry it all over the house to make touch-ups without every dripping or spilling--it's a miracle! I was actually annoyed at the time of purchase--I had wanted just a cheap-o plain bucket for the task, not this fancy-pants professional-grade bucket with all the special features. However, there were no cheap-o buckets available, and as it turns out, the special features are killer. Love this bucket.

2) I bought a stain/varnish combo for the book shelf (which is an attractive but chintzy item that we got second-hand and originally came from Target). I didn't think it merited the complications of first staining, then varnishing. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give the varnish something like a 7.8. It's easy to use, but in the miserable sauna that is our metal garage in August, the varnish tended to a slight gloppiness.

Also, in order to get a somewhat even finish, you have to apply 3 coats, which is annoying. And finally, it instructed me to use steel wool between the 1st and 2nd coats. But steel wool leaves little steel fuzzies which apparently hang suspended in the air until you put down your next coat of varnish, at which point they materialize out of nowhere and leap on the wet lacquer all at once. Most aggravating. Still, for refinishing second-hand bookshelves from Target, it's all right. And if I'd used sand paper instead of steel wool, I'd have given the product an 8.6

Chintzy but attractive bookcase. Original finish was chipping off. Sanded & refinished.

The Tub Rebels

The tub is... more difficult.

Stuff I learned about tub epoxy:
1) Really, really, really don't put it on too thick. If you do, it may never, ever dry.
2) If you have glops or imperfections, rub at them with a xylene-soaked rag sometime before they're 100% dry--xylene dissolves partially dried epoxy.
3) Buy the air canisters in bulk if (like us) you idiotically opted not to buy a power sprayer.

I ended up rubbing off the bits that kept not drying; hopefully by now (2 days after the xylene and about 2 weeks after initial application) the tub's first coat will be dry, if very uneven.

I painted the outside of the tub a darker shade of the wall color, although Matt (presciently) implored me not to. It isn't that it looks bad--it just doesn't look at all exciting. I had thought it would be really zingy. Alas. The color wasn't as pretty as I expected, and it has surprising nautical connotations--if the Navy had pedestal tubs, they would probably paint them this color. It's not terrible, just... meh.

Oddly institutional grey-blue of our pedestal tub. Oh well.

I dunno--maybe when I install a new shelf and cabinet, and add the bathmath, and so on, it will all pop into place. Maybe.

Taming the Front Bed

I'm quite happy about the week barrier. The roundup worked a treat on the burmudagrass, so now we're covering their browning corpses to prevent them from ever returning again. Later, we'll mulch on top of the weed barrier. Hot work, though. Not hard work, per se, just hot--I absolutely rained sweat.

The brown bits are the dead bermudagrass--Mwahahaha!

But the steamy outdoor work gives me a proper appreciation for our front porch, which is nice and shady and even catches the odd breeze. It's surprising how much a variance of a few degrees matters--you would think everything over 95F would just be bad, but actually, when you go from our oven of a garage out into the yard, you'd swear the outdoors was cool and delicious. And when you go from working in the yard to our shady porch, that 98-degrees-in-the-shade is remarkably refreshing.

In Which I Finally Face Down the Baseboards

And Other Minor Domestic Catastrophes

We got off to a slow start this weekend, but we got a fair amount of outstanding chores done. We tentatively nailed the first pieces of baseboard to the wall in the dining room, put another coat of paint on the master bathroom door, painted and reinstalled the AC vents, and did some much-needed organizing in the study.

The AC Vents
That doesn't actually sound like that much, but as ever, the Quest was beset by complications and setbacks. The triumph is in the rising above, not so much in the actual achievement. The painting of the AC ceiling vents, for example, was made difficult several times over.

1) We had uninstalled 7 vents back in March during the wild flurry of painting, 5 of which I tracked to 3 different locations; the remaining two are still AWOL.
2) Only 1 of those vents had any screws with it.
3) I decided to use this inexpensive little product that turns your normal paint into spray paint, hoping to avoid a repeat of the shutter-painting nightmare that so traumatized me back in May. So of course, the trauma just took a different form. I bought two cartridges--one for the tub epoxy and one for the vents. First the one didn't work, then the other didn't work. Then I tried the first one again and it still didn't work. So I played around with the second one, pulling out the plastic pipe, twisting the nozzle, twisting the base, and it still didn't work. Finally, I put the first one back on with the pipe from the second one--and it worked! Why? I don't know!

Evil paint sprayer by Preval

Naturally, when I went back to apply a second coat, both cartridges utterly refused to play. I tried all the tricks from the first go round to no avail. So our air vents only have 1 coat of paint--so sue us. From the ground, they look fine. Before I try to epoxy the tubs, I'm going to look for another brand of sprayer. This is much too complex to mess with when trapped in a tiny room with wickedly toxic brain cell-killing fumes.

Interestingly, the struggled didn't end with the painting. Screwing the darn things back in was equally vexing. I ran to Ace (fortunately, only about 5 blocks from our house--we've saved a lot of money in gas thanks to that Ace) to get some replacement screws (FYI, air vents require "sheet metal screws." Word to the wise, should you ever find yourself in a similar situation). I guess they were either fractionally fatter or slightly longer than the originals, because I actually couldn't get the little beasts in, and it took Matt a good 45 minutes to handle the 4 vents he ended up working on. (I did do the master bath all by myself--go Melanie! That was the one with the original screws, and they twirled right into place, easy as pie.) He kept trying different screwdrivers, a drill, a ratchet with a screwdriver attachment (which he later threw out in a fit of fury--apparently, it was nowhere near capable of the project with which it found itself tasked). The tools mostly let him down--I think it was his sheer determination, liberally greased with sweat, that ultimately forced the screws to submit.

So that was fun.

The Baseboards
Then we turned our attentions to the baseboards, which had just this morning received their final coat of paint. Okay. This is slightly complex. We were putting down baseboards to span the junction of our kitchen and our dining room. Now, the kitchen has old-style baseboards, like the living room. About 9 inches tall, nailed directly to the studs, with the wallboards resting on top of the baseboards, which makes the ~3/4" baseboards appear to be about 1/4" thick.

The dining room, on the other hand, has wallboard (almost) all the way down to the floor. It had cheap, modern plywood baseboards that were only 5" tall. We needed to replace the kitchen baseboard because we had torn it up when we attempted to remove it for the benefit of the tile guys. And because of the gaping hole, we needed to go with something that was at least 9" tall. We wanted the dining room to match the kitchen, since they're joined, but the dining room is ~1" lower than the kitchen and has walls all the way down.

Are you with me so far? Solid and lower in the dining room; big gaping hole and 1" higher in the kitchen.

So we wanted to stick the new baseboards below the level of the kitchen tile so that it would have an unbroken profile from the kitchen to the dining room, despite the 1" step. However, we had ended up leaving the baseboard in place during the tiling once we saw that there was nothing but a void behind it--we knew it would be a long time before we'd get to the baseboards, and we didn't want varmints strolling into the kitchen through the hole. Consequently, the tile guys tiled in the baseboards.

So in order to have level baseboards, we had to dig out the pieces of baseboards from below the level of the tile.


We weren't really sure what the approved tool is for this kind of work, so we approached the job with an enthusiastic eclecticism: we had two hammers, a crowbar, a chisel, a stout flathead screwdriver (the same that we used for prying up the ugly tiles in the bathroom), a power screwdriver/drill, and a crowbar.

I can now conclusively report that none of these was the right tool for the job. I drilled little holes in lines to try to weaken the board; Matt chipped into it with the screwdriver, I nibbled away at tiny sections with the crowbar... Progress was glacial. We hacked and banged and pried for about 45 minutes on a 7-foot section before we finally prised the last bit of baseboard out of the floor.

And, of course, crowning irony, when we dropped the board into our painstakingly carved-out trench, it was too short to cover all of the hole.

So we're going to have a drop-off in baseboard height after all at the junction of the kitchen and dining room. We also need to buy a different kind of nails--the ones we have that are long enough have great big honking heads. In addition, the wall flexes in slightly at the juncture, which means that the dining room baseboard is both lower and more protuberant than the kitchen baseboard. We want to ease that transition with some quarter round or similar. Uf. Always with the complications.

Everything Else
On a happier side, we roundup'd the bermudagrass in our flower beds (that environmentally friendly approach that we tried with the plastic didn't work for crap. There were a couple of patches of very lightly scalded leaf tips, and that's it. It was time to bring in the chemicals.) Mulch didn't work, plastic didn't work, hoeing didn't work--but I know roundup will take the little stinkers out, and that's wonderfully satisfying.

We also staked several of our baby trees, which have been listing drunkenly for the past month and a half. Matt thinks they would have righted themselves with time, but I was afraid they'd just harden in a depressed slouch.

And I touched up the "Nurtria" paint in the kitchen and dining room. Looks much better now that all the scratches and scuffs from swirling the furniture around for the past two months have been covered.

So, no project really completed, but at least measurable progress on several fronts. And I don't think I'll be afraid of baseboards again. Compared to the misery of slowly chipping tiny shard of baseboards out of my floor, nothing else the house can come up with in the way of baseboards can be much of a challenge.

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.

No Pix Today

So it's been a while, not because we haven't been working hard (oh, we have!), but because I lost my camera's battery charger in Louisiana, and replacing it hasn't been as high a priority as procuring various doo-dads for the house. I kept thinking it would turn up and waiting to post till I could provide pix. I've finally recognized the inevitable and will be getting a new charger for my faithful and hard-working camera soon.

Meanwhile, here's a text update.

Most exciting (for me): I learned how to drive a riding lawn mower! The Vests very benevolently gave us one of their spare riding lawn mowers, which has been something of a salvation for us. After all, when you own a substantial spread like we do, a push mower just doesn't make the grade! (I speak jestingly, but it's actually the sober truth. Even on the riding mower, it takes well over an hour to mow our little almost-half-acre. With a push mower, it takes the better part of a day.) It was actually rather fun--the wind in my hair, the smell of cut grass, and when you're done, a real sense of accomplishment. Come next weekend, however, when the heat index is in the 100s, I'll probably be singing a different tune.

Also in the garden: We've begun a mulching and edging project that we will complete in installments over the next month or so, a few bags of mulch and pieces of edging at a time. We've had, due to time and budgetary constraints, to throw a lot of plants in the ground without prepping any beds for them, and the bermudagrass has been throwing a fiesta amongst our shrubberies. Now that most of the big projects are out of the way, we have begun to turn our attention to the Burmudagrass Problem. We've cleared and mulched and edged a little corner chunk so far. Modest but satisfying.

Our roses are mostly chipper and bloomy, especially The Fairy, Cramoisi Superieur, Wild Blue Yonder (warning: highly doctored photo--is nowhere near that blue), and Comtesse du Cayla. Our ginkgo, on the other hand, just sulks and mopes and looks chlorotic. And this even though we haven't had a summer this cool and wet since the Cretaceous, when Texas was covered by the Tethys Sea. Ingrate.

On the arboreal front: we've planted 2 lacey oaks (Quercus laceyi/glaucoides), 1 red oak (Q. texana or Q. shumardii?), 1 bur oak (Q. macrocarpa), and 1 white oak (Q. alba), as well as a pear and 5 desert willows. We still have a couple of palms to place (Matt got all of these super-cheap at the nursery), and we need to acquire a baldcypress and a 'Little Gem' Magnolia. And at that point, there will definitively be No More Room at the Inn.

Matt's big project: He's begun tearing down shed #2, the one that covers the hideous oubliette. I particularly regret our lack of a camera for this project because seeing the shed half-stripped is kind of impressive. Especially as he's only given it 6 or so hours of him time. Man vs. shed: one man, one crowbar, one victor.

On the inside: I caulked the bejeezus out of our clapboard hall closet (two tubes of caulking, and there were some spots that I never got to) and finally painted that sucker. This was two weekends ago; I still have specks of latex in my hair. Having a place to put our sheets, paper towels, and light bulbs really made a difference in terms of organizing the rest of the house.

In the bathroom: Matt wrestled with our leaky master bath toilet, not with complete success. He has now replaced a valve, the wax ring (twice), and added a "superflange" (sounds a bit like a blaxploitation movie, no? You'd think it would fix our leak and come with its own matching Cadillac). To no avail. We may have to call in a plumber and/or replace the dratted thing.

(Camera is back in order, so I'm adding in pix--MU 30 Aug 07)
Hall closet with copiously caulked gaps

The baseboards: We bought a couple of 10 x 1 planks to use as baseboards in the kitchen and living room, though we haven't yet worked ourselves up to installing them. One of the complicating factors is that we are trying to match the original baseboards in the kitchen and living room. The problem is that the original baseboards are 1-1/2" thick planks nailed directly to the studs with the wallboard resting on top of the baseboards. The thickness of the wallboards makes the baseboards appear to be only 1/2" thick. For a variety of reasons, we won't be able to replicate this unusual relationship between baseboards and wallboards in the dining room, nor will we be able to find planks that are 10" tall and only 1/2" thick. What this means is that we're going to have very weirdly thick planks as baseboards at the bottom of our walls. So you can see why we've been procrastinating.

Upcoming projects: Next week I plan to order faux (i.e., plastic) plantation blinds for the living room and master bed. No more tissue paper curtains! Maybe a few more of our neighbors will drop by once our home has adopted a more reassuringly middle class appearance. If we don't need a plumber, we may also spring for some new (brushed nickel!) drawer pulls in the master bath and a spray bottle that I can put our ceiling paint into to aerosol-ize it and spray our (disgustingly dingy) AC vents. If only I'd known about this product when I painstakingly hand painted the bathroom shutters with a weency plastic brush with split ends!

When the camera is back in operation, I'll work on the promised Manor/Elgin profile.

Onward and upward!

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.

Tile!

This part was easy (except writing the check at the end. And making 4 trips to Lowe's for tile, grout, and hardibacker. And loading and unloading the 70 tons of tile we'd bought. Yeah. Except for those things, it was easy.) It's nice paying someone else to do your work for you. I briefly toyed with taking on the tile myself, but the time, the need for expensive power tools, the wasted money if you screw up... just seemed like false economy, in the end. Also, it seemed like an insuperable pain in the fundament. We've served our DIY time with the paint and the bamboo, I think.

So we go these nice tiles--big ones in the kitchen and hall; little ones in the bathroom (they're porcelain, Mom & Dad, not ceramic. You convinced me.) The kitchen looks SO much more inhabitable now that that nasty old linoleum is no longer visible.
See how much prettier it looks? (Aunt Pauline, if you're reading this, you'll see I took your advice about newsprint in the windows. Only in this case it's tissue paper, as Ladonna had given us a stack for packing purposes. Might have looked a little more polished if I hadn't fastened them with painter's tape. Eh well.) Tomorrow we'll move the island back in, as well as the china cabinet and rocking chair. One step closer to being really, truly, properly moved in! With each step, the house looks better and more... I don't know... satisfying, pretty, pulled together, nice. Anyway, it's gratifying to see the thing I wanted emerge from the thing that was neglected and scuffed and unhappy looking.

Meanwhile, we're still sleeping on the sofabed in the living room.

And we're actually using that weird bathroom/laundry room/mudroom--we're waiting for the grout to set in the other bathrooms, and this is the only one that wasn't tiled. So I shouldn't have made fun of it for being a misbegotten freak of a room--it's actually coming in handy.

I'm sure you'll all feel sad for me when I tell you that this weekend I'll have to finally turn my attention back to... painting. We never finished the master bath, and I have to do the insides of the cabinets there and the insides of the hall closet before we can unpack the things that belong in them.

Ug.

The painting NEVER ENDS

It's hard to believe, but 2 weeks after purchasing the house, we are STILL PAINTING. Closet in the study, baseboards in the living room, trim in the kitchen, doors in the study and master bath...



As we have to move out of our rental by the 20th, it's a pretty safe bet that we'll be moving in before the floors are done. Especially as the floor guys won't be able to install that Berber carpet for another 2 weeks(!). So all our furniture will be clumped in a huddled mass in one room while we frantically finish the rest of the house.

The less grumpy news is that the Ks told us we can get cheap Pergo at Costco. In fact, when we investigated we found that they had a style of laminate we didn't care for, but better still, they had real bamboo for less than half the Lowe's price of Pergo. Yay bamboo!

It's so cheap that it's actually only slightly more than our cheap carpet, plus (unlike the carpet) it comes with a 25-year warranty. So instead of floating Pergo, we'll be nail-gunning bamboo. Yup, we're intimidated. Never used a nail gun before. But necessity is the mother of competence, right? Or something like that? And, hey, we've sure learned how to paint these past two weeks. How much harder can flooring be?

On the subject of painting, the yellow closets were such a resounding success that I decided duplicate it in the study with leftover Window Box (not Flower Bucket--I keep getting the name confused.) The picture below gives you some idea of just why Matt objected to this color so strenuously.



Incidentally, Blogger struck a deal with Picasa to compile pix from our blogs into photo albums, so if you'd like to see all my house pix in one place, check out the collected house pix on Picasa.

Yeah, about those hardwoods...

Bad news.

We got a flooring guy out this morning to take a look, and he said that the most we could get out of the floors would be 5-10 years. They're antique longleaf pine subfloors, and because they're a softer wood, and old, and in pretty bad shape, he's worried that the top part of the grooves would begin to crack off if he sanded them, as is in fact already happening in the dining room.

So Matt & I conferred and considered and researched, and we've decided to go Pergo instead. Cheap carpet was also an option, but for the public areas we really, really, really want the warmth of something that looks like wood. And the nicer grade of Pergo is actually topped with real wood, so hopefully it will be a convincing facsimile.

So we're going to install it ourselves in the living room and dining room. (The adventure never ends--it just takes a different path. Did Confucius say that? Indiana Jones? Albus Dumbledore?)

The rest of the house, sadly, will get cheap carpet. If we stay there 5 or so years, we'll upgrade to something a little nicer, but for now we're going with uber-functional Berber. (This is the ugly side of Pergo--the shady compromises required to fund the stuff. Ah, well. Appearances must be maintained.)

Meanwhile, the painting continues!

The Ks came out today. Nice friends! I worked their tails off and they brought lunch, too (tasty antipasti sort of thing with meats and cheese and crackers and spreads and tomatoes and olives and salad mix).

Clever Keith installed our new GSDI-whatsits--the plugs that keep you from getting electrocuted in the kitchen or bath--as well as our schmancy new computerized thermostat. He also figured out which outlets/lights were wired to which breakers, with predictably unpredicatable results.

Keith, Being Electrical

We recycled the reject yellow paint from the dining room in the master bedroom closets, which I think was wonderfully frugal of us. And who doesn't want a bright yellow closet? Or two? Kate would like you to believe that she painted the entire built-in and closets with nothing but the weency little brush pictured below.

"I painted this whole thing with just this itty bitty brush!"

Meanwhile, progress was made in the master bath, which used to look like that (below left), but now looks like this (below right).

Our New Master Bath: Decadently Chic or Just Psychosis-inducing?

When Matt first saw it, he started muttering "REDRUM! REDRUM!" and wiggling his index finger at me. I think it will ultimately be tres elegante, but he thinks it looks like I slaughtered a cow in there. Which is silly. A cow wouldn't fit in that bathroom. A miniature horse, maybe, but not a cow.

I don't think I've posted any guest room pix, somehow, though I've been steadily working away at it. Here's the room itself--you may not be able to tell, but it's painted "Churchill Hotel Ecru" with a "Dune Breeze" ceiling.

Guest bedtroom with lovely (if currently obscured) view of great big cottonwood

The bath has "Shadow" walls to match the little desaturated aqua flowers on the valance Ladonna & I are going to make for the bedroom window (above).

Guest bath

And finally, Cathy came out (again--thanks Cathy!) Friday and helped me trim the living room and dining room. (Just a faintly lemony shade of white in lieu of the original dingy white, but what a difference it made. SO much more stylish and coordinated.)

Anyway, she vehemently hated my attempt to control the burnt orange walls with cherry red trim, which made me lose faith in the whole concept, too. So we're going with good old "Golden Beam," which is what's in the rest of the house. If the study wants to be burnt orange, I don't have the energy left to resist it. Will paint door to match tomorrow, though am concerned about paint's ability to stick to a metal surface.

Feral Burnt Orange Study

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.

More Painting

Here's our latest progress report. What's not on there is that Matt finished caulking the gaps in the laths of our kitchen ceiling last night. I think it was rather tedious, fiddly work and kind of made him antsy because when he was done he celebrated by ripping the carpet out of the master bed.


Here he is, rolling up the carpet. We still haven't gotten down to the hardwoods--under the carpet is a layer of plywood.

Matt rolling back carpet

He also investigated that weird kitchen subfloor.

Weird kitchen subfloor

Because it is higher than the adjacent floor, we assumed that it was lying on top of some (probably damaged) original wood floor. In fact, no. It's lying on top of nothing at all. Not sure why it's popped up like that. But in a way, that simplifies things. We'll trim it, replace any pieces that are screwed up, and tile or linoleum over it. No fuss about trying to pull the darn thing up without damaging the cabinets, no need to hire a handyman. Much simpler.

Short post today. Have to get back out there and paint! (some more. again. for the 6th day in a row. how can it take this long to paint one tiny little house?!?)

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