don't stop til you get enough

So here's the funny thing about this alleged home improvement blog: among the pictures and videos of our antics since my last legitimate post, I can not seem to track down the only ones that were actually about home improvement, aka the Half Ginger Drywall Party, in which Snapp, Daniel, Brian and I took a stab at hanging drywall in my craft room.  Incidentally, the craft room now has drywall (most of it) but is not much more finished than it was. this leaves me time to take new pictures (or find the existing ones?), but they will never replace the photographic evidence of Snapp using a hammer and not wounding himself or anyone else in a heretofore unexpected fit of mechanical inclination!

in the meantime, pictures of antics and my cats.

further down

i'm resigning myself to the fact that nearly every other post in this blog will be an apologetic acknowledgement of how much i neglect this blog. but you see what happened was...


...holidays working in retail
...family visitors from out of town, and the need to establish a guest room
...hockey season (sorta. i'm not sure anyone told the devils)
...i bought a tattoo shop
...i made my first turkey, and fed approximately a dozen people
...many, many food fights (we are regressing?)
...apple festivals, costume contests, home crafting, and sundry seasonal surprises
...you can stream netflix on your iphone now. and by you, i mean me.
...heat is expensive, the house is cold, the bed is warm, and leads to napping
...adventures in philadelphia with and without Bear Ambulance, also much karaoke
...another National Novel Writing Month (win)

SO. tomorrow is my day off from work. maybe (maybe) i will do something other than lounge in the tub reading sci-fi fantasy novels and curling up in bed watching bollywood movies. like resize some pictures and blog.

excusions (excuses, excursions, exclusions)

Well here goes.  September is nearly over and with exception to some small cleaning, shuffling, and the half demolition of a wall, we have done virtually nothing on the house since my last post.  Why?  Apparently my social life decided to explode, and Red Dead Redemption (Affectionately referred to as Grand Theft Horse) came out for the PS3, instantly rendering both Brian and I almost entirely useless.

If you have ever wondered what your room might look like with no plaster, it somewhat resembles an asylum. It does not stop here, though, no no. No matter how many passes you make with the shop vac, the entire rest of your home will be coated in a fine veneer of white powder for weeks after, making it amazingly obvious when your cats get up to some naughtiness because their pawprints will be the only clean spots on a given surface (like the lid of the turtle tank, or kitchen counters).

I would love to have my craft room by halloween.  All we need to do is tear down the lath, perhaps have an electrician out to run some new wiring since we already have the walls open, and have Daddo out for a drywall hanging party.  Doable? Perhaps.  Likely? Doubtful. But I can hope, and stranger things have happened.

You see what happened was

I have been neglectful. I will attempt to remedy that in the coming week. Dear blog, will you ever forgive me for living well?

gardening dependence

Some friends came over to help me with gardening stuff today. As i am 80% inept at things involving plants but not involving a stove, it was more like I sat there making question mark faces and pointing out things with fancy leaves and pretty petals and got a bit of dirt under my nails while the more knowledgeable types did all the actual work.


Cameron showed up just in time to do the heavy lifting.


I may not be terrible at gardening; my giant pot of basil and parsley has survived for several weeks since re-potting, and that was even before we had a hose to water.


My herbs are no longer in individual pots sitting in a giant tupperware storage box, either! I opted for strawberry jars because they are adorable, compact, easy to shift inside for the winter, and allow me to put multiple things in one pot but still keep track of what is what (see the 5 varieties of thyme in the one? amazing!).



We also tackled hanging baskets for my front porch; this was a bit more of an adventure due to the shoddy construction of the hanging chains that snapped almost instantly when we picked the first one up, comically spilling plant matter and dirt all over the steps of my deck. It was really too funny to even get pissy about--the plants seemed only moderately battered so we shoved them back in, fixed the chain, and crossed our fingers as we hung them up.


all of this was apparently too much excitement for Cameron. After generous helpings of leftover pomegranate iced tea, homemade potato salad, and awesome 6 layer dip (we couldn't think of anything to use for the seventh and final)from yesterday's BBQ he just rocked the fuck out on my couch. I took the hour of peace and quiet to wash the rest of the party dishes and meticulously clean my stove's glass cooktop. Now if you will excuse me, there are leftovers, beer, and Gerard Butler movies whose siren song is entirely too strong to resist.

leisure pursuits

Tattoo by Tom Taylor of Deep Six Laboratories. The hair is this fabulous shade of orange because I lost a bet on the Devils-Flyers series. This is my penance.

I took a day off from housework and work work on Thursday and hit the tattoo shop, (Sitting #2 for color). Feeling refreshed (and a little bit like I had been hit with a meat tenderizer, you should see the amazing yellow bruise that has sprouted around the edges), Friday I decided to dig in and begin work on my sewing room. This room had previously been used as an office and was covered in shades of brown and yellow striped wallpaper that might have been entertaining if the warp of the walls did not make me think I was absolutely insane every time I looked at it.



Additional features of this room include red paint on a wood floor! Between the floor and the walls I figured it would be a large project. I like to do things in a logical fashion when I'm not too busy being whimsical and flying off half-cocked, so before I ran to the HD to pick up a paper tiger (love the name) i tested out how sturdily the wallpaper was adhered. I grabbed at a corner of a strip, held my breath, and tugged. Amazingly, the entire strip came off perfectly, left to right and top to bottom. I repeated around the room, and to my great surprise, all three entire walls peeled right off. The project I had planned to spend several hours steaming, sweating, and swearing over took less than five minutes!



The walls revealed now that the wallpaper was down did not look to be quite the quick fix; rather, they looked as though someone had already done quite a few quick fixes to them. The large spots of patch were not as alarming as the spots where the walls were entirely warped to the point of moving from the pressure of a hand, and when I tapped on them with a scraper, the plaster began to crumble away.




I am a compulsive picker. Ragged nails, scabs, rough spots on a surface--if my fingers can find it, there is a pretty good chance I will fuss with it. Brian has scolded me for this on several occasions--"Don't start that unless you're going to finish it," or even a simple "stop that!" So I usually save this sort of thing for when he is not around or looking.





the texting conversation to explain this unexpected development went something like this:

Cassie: Craft room is going to be a very large undertaking...
Brian: You rip the walls down?
Cassie: That is remarkably close to the truth.
Brian: That sounds good.
Cassie: Let's just say patching did not work... aggressively.

So my house has punished me for taking a day off to have some "me time," and now instead of spending 5-10 hours steaming wallpaper then god knows how much time sanding, patching, and priming walls for their new life covered in paint I get to dive in feet first and learn the ropes of tearing down plaster and lath and hanging drywall! The only real upshot of this is that once we have the walls open, nothing is to stop us from upgrading electric and adding outlets in both the sewing room and the adjoining bathroom! I am trying to be optimistic; it chokes back the panic of having absolutely no goddamned idea what the hell I am doing.

Also, apparently the previous occupants were old school big time Phillies fans, and left us two of this lovely window sticker featuring the old team logo.



Yesterday I came home from work just in time to witness the bottling of Brian's first batch of homebrew. It has a week or two to set up in bottles now, then he will begin the process of trying it out and taking detailed notes in his beer journal. The kitchen took remarkably little damage during the whole project; I think the only casualty was his hydrometer, which fell from his hands into a bucket as he was warning me of its fragility.

Today's adventure took us to the King of Prussia mall to visit the Apple store; my iphone, the good old 2G I have been rolling with for over a year, and that my mom had for at least a year prior to that, finally seems to be giving up the ghost of functionality. It is almost as though as soon as the Iphone 4 came out, Steve Jobs sent out a covert magnetic pulse designed to put all older models into an instantaneous planned obsolescence. I now have the 4 on order, and I am hoping my phone will kick it just long enough to last me until I can get that one activated. I am utterly hopeless in my tech addiction, and being without it would be like missing a very entertaining limb.

We found an awesome orange leather arm chair and ottoman combo at Williams Sonoma that we loved until we looked at the price tag--for people who have furnished the majority of their dwellings with a hodge podge of thrift finds and cast-offs, the notion of spending four thousand dollars on one chair and its accompanying footstool was entirely beyond something we were willing to even entertain.

In general, the KOP mall is a spectacle of designer shopping, brands I do not care about, and people I can not relate to. With exception of sale bins filled with underwear and a very friendly Teavana, there is little for that mall to offer me at prices I am willing to pay. I did score some awesome designer knock off sunglasses for 10 bucks, though. It is never worthwhile for me to spend much more than that, as sunglasses are one of those things that seem to phase in and out of my existence via wormhole or complete absentmindedness.

I am going to eat some leftover chipotle black bean chicken chili and wash some laundry. For good measure, here is a glamour shot of my cat.

Orange peels, pumpkins, and eggplants

Every time I think Kate Beaton's Hark, A Vagrant can't get any better, it somehow does. AMAZING. But Benny Franks is also a personal favorite, so perhaps it just hits close to home. I want it on a t-shirt!

In other news, I finally dug out my other lens and took some pictures of the new kitchen paint! Of course, by the time I get home from work the light in that part of the house is fading so they're a mite dark, but the paint colors are fairly accurate.

Before:

I am so in love with all the built-ins it is not even funny. The glass cabinets, however, are only going to encourage my purchasing of useless clutter that glitters like so much magpie treasure.


The previous owners had slightly more sedate taste in paint and such; these photos were from our home inspection.

I have never outgrown the Crayola bold marker set. Things with names like marigold, eggplant, or in this case Orange Peel, make me squeal like a childlike joy.

When I began cutting in the room I started to get nervous over the general loudness of the yellow-orange paint, glanced out my kitchen window and beheld the construction equipment parked in my neighbor's yard. I had half a panic attack that Orange Peel was also known in more outdoorsy circles as Caterpillar yellow, and that I might very well be on my way to Bob the Builder territory.

We hit the Home Depot and picked up the eggplant color to soften the blow, and while I love the combination all my worrying was for nothing; as soon as the color was up on a full wall instead of just ragged stripes around the edges of the room, I was madly in love with it again. I do think having the darker color near the stove will help hide some of that unavoidable stove grease spatter (god knows it showed very well on the pale yellow I painted over, but thank you Behr Primer and paint in one! The nice gentleman at the HD did the cost-benefit analysis with us and it works out cheaper than buying separate primer and paint and I was well satistied with the coverage in two coats. It went on evenly over old paint, new patch, stove grease, and also our linoleum floors--they are in crappy condition anyway, so we did not bother being careful).

While I am advocating on behalf of paint, here are a few things I have learned so far that might be of assistance to people trying to remodel on a budget:

--Testers, testers, testers! The HD offers mini-jars mixed to any color you wish; you can buy a few ounces, enough to cover a fair-sized section of wall and think on it for only like $3 apiece (This also applies to many wood stains!). They do only come in a flat finish, so take that into account when evaluating your color choices.

--Ooops paint! Essentially, these are 'bad mixes' or things that someone decided they did not want. There is typically a shelf or rack in the paint section with an assortment of cans and it takes some diligence, but chances are good that if you're remodeling a house you are already making frequent trips to the store so why not stop to look? Kelly and I hit Lowes to get duct tape for a DIY tailor's dummy project and I found two small cans of oops paint; one was fifty cents and the other $3, but around the same size as HD's tester jars. The colors looked close to what I am thinking of painting my craft room so I picked them up.

My father informs me that HD 'can match just about any color, so just bring in a swatch of color and they will turn it into paint,' and while I have not tested it just yet, it seems sound in theory. Assuming this is accurate information, one could conceivably get additional paint to match for an entire room, or just use what you find for an appropriate sized room. I personally have a small bathroom I am planning to use one of my testers to redo; there is so little wall space in there that a few ounces should be just enough.

--Buy what you need. Color mixing is down to such a science that the paint guy persuaded me not to buy two gallons of paint because I could always go back and get more if I needed it, but they will not accept returns on custom-mixed colors. It turns out that a gallon would have been exactly enough if my painter's tape had not pulled a few chunks of paint off with it, so I'm going to get the smallest unit of paint just for touch-ups.


That is my learning on paint so far. I'm going to go break down cardboard recycling, putter with my gardening and listen to 80s new wave some more! My pie pumpkin seedlings are getting mutinous!


Once I figure out what room is next on the list I will take some awesome before pictures to share.