January 28th, 2008
It’s day six of getting dressed in the kitchen. I am so ready for this to be over! Despite most of the furniture being covered in plastic, there is a fine layer of dust over absolutely everything — kind of like when you come home from the beach and you’re thinking, “Whoa, how did sand [...]
January 23rd, 2008
Phase II of the stripping project is well into its second week. As of yesterday the woodwork in the living room, dining room, foyer, hallway and two bedrooms have been stripped of all their paint. They waited as long as possible before starting on the master bedroom, but yesterday was the day. We moved all [...]
January 21st, 2008
Why I shouldn’t be left alone on a cold Saturday afternoon: I went to Home Depot to get a new doorbell (the current one is hideous) and found myself in the paint aisle. I ended up buying a 4-inch wall scraper (in addition to the doorbell).
First I tried the scraper out on the bedroom [...]
January 18th, 2008
Barely a week has gone by since I was pondering dining room table ideas. I said something about wanting to find “the perfect antique dining table”. Well, I must have put the Antique Dining Table Vibe out there, because not three days later we found it at an antique store in Michigan which specializes in [...]
January 17th, 2008
Remember when you were a sun-worshipper in your (foolish) younger days and you’d lie out in the sun way too long, slathered with baby oil, lemon juice in your hair trying so hard to be as blond as you were at age five? No? Oh wait, I guess that was me.
Nevertheless, I’m sure you’ve [...]
January 16th, 2008
After the nice job they did on our window restoration, we knew we would have the Stripp Joynt back sooner rather than later to finish the woodwork in our house. So they arrived Monday morning and got right to work on the living room and dining room baseboard and door frames.
I was filled with both [...]
January 12th, 2008
In case you haven’t noticed, I started a new, permanent Before-and-After section on the site to provide a synopsis of some of our major projects. It’s accessible via the Tabs at the top.
The first two projects highlighted are the Basement and the Windows. My definition of “after” may be a little loose. In some [...]
January 10th, 2008
I’ve been thinking about the dining room a bit and formulating some ideas. Our dining room set is really our old kitchen table set which I bought from friends (along with lots of other stuff that I still have) before they moved to Maui almost twenty years ago. I took over their apartment too (this [...]
January 8th, 2008
Guess what? My last post got me going and I made some phone calls: first to the village for general information about building codes and then to an architect. Woo hoo!
The village said that staircases should be three feet wide, but it sounded like they’d be somewhat lenient if it were a little smaller in [...]
January 4th, 2008
There are definitely some hurdles to overcome on our 2008 Project list, and some of our projects hinge on each other. What is frustrating to me is that I don’t know the answers to them, and I don’t know anyone personally who can help guide us (i.e. no architect or structural engineer in the family [...]
January 3rd, 2008
Okay, now that I’m all organized, it’s time to get down to The List for 2008. But first, let’s take a look at what we accomplished in 2007:
GENERAL
Bought bungalow
Sold previous house (woo hoo!)
Helped PO move out (no easy feat!)
Had hardwood floors refinished
Moved in
Unpacked
Had windows and molding stripped, restored and refinished
BASEMENT
Removed mold/demo’d bathroom
Eliminated cat pee smell
Painted [...]
January 2nd, 2008
Now that I have a project to-do list system set-up, I guess I need to actually put my 2008 Resolutions/To-Dos in writing. But before I get to that, there are a bunch of reference files that I needed to organize (pdfs, text files, jpegs, etc.). Instead of searching for them in (Mac’s OS X) Spotlight [...]
January 1st, 2008
Continuing with yesterday’s post, there are a couple of web-based project/to-do list applications that I have been trying out to help with our 2008 New Year Goals (namely, to whip this house into shape).
The first one I tried is Remember the Milk (RTM). Cute name, cute cow. But more importantly, does it work?
I found [...]
January 1st, 2008
We really don’t like to go out on New Year’s Eve, so we spent a nice, quiet evening at home: a little fondue, a little sparkling wine, a DVD (The Simpsons Movie), a blanket and a cat or two. And of course, the first new year in our house. Perfect.
So Happy New Year to you [...]