What I Bought At Ingersoll's Today

Technically, last week:

1 24 inch bamboo rake
2 sets of lawn bags (5 in each pack)

What I'll Buy At Ingersoll's Tomorrow

2 packs of lawn bags, at least.

Stove For Sale

So, the January 2007 Domino is all "vintage stoves! hot, hot, hot!" But does anyone want to buy my vintage stove? Noooooo! What a disappointment.

What I Bought At Ingersoll's Today

Because this needs to be tracked:

1 jar of silver foam for polishing my silver fork and compact
1 wrench

Progress, of Sorts

Here at Feckless, Lazy & Cheerful* we have fallen a bit behind due to nice weather and general anxiety.

However, knowledge of the fact that Patrick & Genevieve will be coming to visit next Friday has spurred some progress. A couple of weeks ago I bought curtains for my bedroom. They are the thermal kind, to cut down on the heat loss. Then I had to buy curtain rods and hardware. And yesterday? I finally put them up. It was nerve-wracking, the whole figuring out the drill and tunnelling into the wall. But they're up, and they look nice, although they also make the room 100 times darker. Which will soon lead me to some home electricity experiments (the outlet by the bed does not work, which is frustrating), but not today.

No pictures, because I want it to be a surprise.

Also curtains impede the daily Squirrel Patrol! Squirrel Patrol! watch, in which the cats all sit on window sills and the bed waiting for the squirrel to jump from the top of the roof. Then they promise that it's only a matter of short time before they get out and rumble. After morning nappy, you know.

Also, this week Paul addressed the leaking bathtub faucet. Which was an adventure that lead us to Ingersoll's, where the hardware guy admitted that even he did not know quite what was up with the innards of my tub's water supply. Plus, we touched other items in the water supply and disturbed the ecosystem.

So now I have a leaking hot water valve in the basement. Again. However, having been rooked to the tune of $140 last year to replace a washer--there, I admit it!--I feel confident that I can fix this myself. Even if the screw is so rusted from corrosion that I needed to buy a new wrench because we are going to have to bypass that and take off the whole handle.

And when I saw "we", I mean me, at least until the point I start crying in frustration.




*A Kerry Enterprises subsidiary

REStore Cleveland

This morning I went on a home renovation related field trip. I went to REStore Cleveland. This is Habitat for Humanity's retail store operation, located on Union Ave. It's open 9am-1pm on Saturdays. I had been meaning to go for a while, but had never carved out the time.

The selection wasn't as extensive as I had been lead to believe, but they had a totally cool set of vintage beige metal cabinets with shiny metal drawer pulls. They had a upper corner mount set, two wide cabinets that set on the floor, and a four stack narrow cabinet set (about 6 feet high). I wish I had had the camera to take a picture. They were so sweet!

Aside from the cabinets, they had a nice selection of doors, but everything else was just odds n' ends--some vintage, some overstock donations from business, some wallpaper and lighting, the cabinets, some windows.

In Which Kerry & Paul Take Down A Wall

Home repair took an interesting turn on Friday. I cleaned off 6! layers of paint from the heating grate, bringing it down to the metal. And it wasn't evenly done--there's still bits where I have to get at it more with the CitriStrip and a scraper/brush. Nice tone to the metal though. I am undecided about whether to repaint it--the many paint layers obscured the detail of the grate, but I am not fundamentally against painted grates. I then spackled this huge crack in the wall and also went at the area around the heating vent where I took off plaster.

I was taking a break when Paul called. Those of you who read my other blog will know him as The Romance Heroine's boyfriend. When they came over for dinner last week, he offered to come and help me with any of my projects. And he followed it up with a phone call, proving that he is a nice guy! With tons of experience and ideas! He came dressed for painting (and agreed that the Lime Rickey was a bit vibrant but grows on you), but the first thing he tackled was the overhead ceiling fan. "Whoa! You know this isn't properly mounted, right?" Um, yes I had long suspected that.....

Not only did he get the broken lightbulb bit out, he also remounted the fan. Then he looked at my spackle job and pointed out that it's never going to be level--maybe we could cut out part of the wall and drywall it. It turns out Paul really likes to drywall. And he makes it seem so easy, even though we had to go to Ingersolls and two Home Depots to get the correct thickness of drywall and our other supplies. I also had to talk him out of buying extra drywall and a crazy plan of driving it back to my house with it balanced on the top of the car, but he was very reasonable about it.

It is quite fun to take a crowbar to a wall and take it down to the lathe. Super dusty, though. Scared the kitters too.

Behold the evidence!







We picked the Romance Heroine up after her tough day at wok and went out to dinner to toast the Marine Corps. We all went back to the house and RH really liked the green, and my bedroom (painted SW Chinese Red). Paul's coming back on Monday to finish up. He also like to peel wallpaper, agreed The Tuscan Nitemare Room is a huge mistake, and had some thoughts on my roof and the bathroom....I might have found myself a house guru.

Head's Up! Paint Sale

The Lakewood Sherwin Williams store is having a 40% off sale on paint and stains this Saturday.

They are super nice over there. A fellow gave me 20% off on my dropcloth Monday. I am quite cute and was wearing lipstick, but still, I wasn't expecting that.

Project 1: Old Bedroom

Project 1 is to finish up my old bedroom, move my desk and craft stuff into it, and have a logical and useful arrangement of those items.

As of this week, I had done bits and pieces of getting this ready. I had painted the closet, ceiling and upper trim, and primed the walls. Previously, the walls had been painted a SW color called "Wheat Grass" and the ceiling was "Butter Up." Perfectly fine colors, just please don't put them together or you'll be completely drained every time you enter the rooml. The closet was originally painted "Quiver Tan." This was not my doing, only my compromise.

What I have left:

repair crack on wall
repaint trim and windows, touch up ceiling
strip the heating grate
repair plaster around where I was able to pry the grate off the wall, after applying the miracle product CitriStrip in a spray can
put another coat of "Lime Rickey" on the walls (first coat went on a little unevenly)


Pictures!

Originally:





Now:



The "Lime Rickey" is a little...intense, but I like it. It looks like parakeets. It makes me smile involuntarily. It looks very minty in the can, and when I put it on the walls it looked lighter, sometimes like a soft olive.

No, I never try out a color on the wall before painting it. That just invites mindfucking.

I was stymied by today's fog and the fact that the light bulb burned out in the overhead fan. And it turns out it broke off too. I tried the potato trick, but it hasn't worked. So I investigated Home Depot's selection of wall patch stuff. I'll post on how it works out, since I'll need a ton of it.

How It All Starts

I've lived in my house 5 years. It's still not pretty. It is a house of shambles, I'll confess. I doubt I'm meant for homeownership, especially as a single woman.

At the moment I am unemployed. Since one of the big things standing in my way of doing much to the house has been my lack of energy and the brain sucking of working full-time and part-time graduate school, it's time to tackle the house along with the whole finding a new job thing. Since I know I'll never get anything done unless I have an audience, it's time to start a new blog.

Look for updates on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays as I fix the place up. I can do it, right?