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Hurricane Irene

September 6, 2011 //
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Did you guys get hit by this hurricane? We did. So many trees fell down.


We lost electricity for three days, and internet for four or five. Luckily we were fully prepared, mostly.

My little sister was visiting, and she and I went to Goodwill to buy board games. We got Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit, and Pictionary. We played games all day long on Sunday during the hurricane, then played some more on Monday and then cleaned up the yard.


We had a lot of candles to keep us from being in the dark all night. Always be careful with candles, someone down the street from us burned down their house leaving candles unattended.

This tree was blocking the road for three days. We had a ton of leaves and sticks and things to clean up. While cleaning up we decided to build the fire pit. Yay!

Don’t worry, we are safe. I hope you all survived the hurricane safely!

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Fire Pit!

September 5, 2011 //
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Happy Labor Day! This weekend a bunch of friends came over and in about ten minutes Alex and my friend Tom constructed us a fire pit. We decided we needed a fire pit after assessing our hurricane damage (very little, sticks and branches and a torn down weather vane).

Originally we bought enough to make a little bit of a smaller circle but it turned out a little bigger than we planned, so we were three stones short. Later on we went and bought the missing pieces.

Here is what we did. First we decided we needed a fire pit. Then we picked a location, in the back of the yard near the back shed, not too close to the trees. Next we dug a little bit of a hole.

After digging up all the grass, the boys lay out the first circle. We used edging stones, thirteen to a level.

The boys alternated the rows to make the walls sturdier. After building up the walls, we dumped in two bags of large gravel in the bottom. I don’t know why but that seemed like the right thing to do.

That was it! This was a cheap project and really took the boys only a few minutes to make.

Later on we collected a lot of branches and twigs from around the yard and my sister Dana made us a fire. While wearing pearls! Dana is the fancy sister.

Then we roasted marshmallows and made s’mores! This was the best. Except that we got bitten all up by mosquitoes.

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Vanity project!

August 22, 2011 //
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Hi! A few weeks ago I bought this little desk-y thing at Goodwill for a few bucks, thinking I could save it or paint it and then use it for a vanity. It was pretty beat up. First Alex and I tried to sand some of the scratches off but that totally wasn’t going to work.

See how scratchy? Ugh. Trashed. Then we tried to rub it down a little with some wax, hoping it would fill in the scratches. Clearly we don’t know what we’re doing. Then we gave up for a while and it sat in the way in the dining room for two weeks. Then yesterday I decided enough was enough. I dug out the gross poison stripper gunk and slathered it on.

This stuff is magic! Twenty minutes later I scraped it off. I didn’t get all the gunk off, so I repeated with two more applications. Turns out this stuff is magic! All the scratches were just in the finish I guess, because they’re all gone! I only gunked up and fixed the top part because the sides were too intricate for me to deal with yesterday and I am lazy. Maybe someday, but for now it’s good enough! Nothing I own is perfect, I don’t think.

See? Check this out. The top is all smooth!! I could have restained it because the top is a little lighter now than the body (which I didn’t feel like fixing because it only has a few scratches and this stripper stuff is like poison). I chose not to because I am lazy! Plus you can barely tell the top is a different color.

Except in this picture. You can totally tell the top is a different color in this picture. Oh well! I replaced two of the knobs with pretty blue-green glass ones from Anthropologie (I don’t see them on the website) and we shined up the handles with some other poison stuff. I had planned to replace them with some prettier modern ones, but the handles are a weird little size. I also waxed the top twice to make it smooth and soft and lovely, which it is.

I set this guy up in the guest room in this little nook next to the window. I will probably sit there with my computer when I’m not busy watching tv.

This mirror isn’t the one that’s going to live there, but is perfect for right now. The mirror is the one that goes above my dresser. I will sit here and put on my makeup and girl things.

See? Hooray!!! Just what I wanted.

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Found box project

August 16, 2011 //
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Hi! I found this box in the garage, and finally got around to taking it out of the garage and cleaning it. It was full of spiders! Now it is bug free and clean (thanks, Clorox wipes!).

The box says some stuff on the top and sides. The internet tells me almost nothing really about this company, but it’s an old box.

After I cleaned it up, I rubbed it all over with this finishing wax. I only did one coat because my hand was tired, but I should have done two or maybe three coats. What you do is get a clean rag and rub some wax on it, then rub it all over the wood. Let it dry for 15 minutes, then rub off with another clean rag, or a non-waxy corner of your original rag. The finish will be smoother and soft and nice looking.

Now the finished little table and it’s currently living next to the leather couch in the living room. That won’t be the real home, but it’ll do for now! Also, sorry for bad night time pictures. My camera battery wasn’t charged when I was working on this project.

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Energy Audit!

July 31, 2011 //
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Hi! Connecticut is pretty cool. There is a program where you pay some nice people $75 and they come over and check out your house and do a bunch of improvements.

First they close all your windows, then set up this fan thing and red seal. When they turn it on, they get a reading of how sealed your house is. It’s cool, you walk around with them and feel all the air coming in from the outside – through the light switches, around the windows, under the doors, through the fireplace, etc. Once they’ve taken the reading and walked around and noticed where the leaks are, they go around and seal everything. They caulked all the cracks in the fireplace, around the windows, and everywhere they could. Then they put weather-stripping on the basement doors and the back door.

Once they’ve sealed all the doors and everything, they run their air machine and make sure everything is sealed up as much as they can. Our reading dropped in half from the initial reading.

They also went around and changed all our light bulbs and offered to change our shower head, which we said no to because we have a nice new one with a filter on it (hard water). We won’t know how much money this will save us, because we haven’t lived here a winter yet, but I think it was a good thing to have done. Plus we got a bunch of rebate info for in case we buy new appliances anytime soon.

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New living room addition!

July 25, 2011 //
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Anyone who knows me well knows that I love dead animals. I’m obsessed with trying to find a perfect taxidermy mount for above the fireplace, and Alex and I have spent quite a while looking for the perfect cowhide rug. Ikea sells them, but we haven’t been able to find a good one there that we love. We came close to buying an expensive one at Brimfield, but decided against it.

Then we gave up and decided to order one from the Internet. I love the Internet! It was a gamble because we picked a type from this company (the Raw Hide Company) but obviously didn’t get to pick out the exact one. It took about a week to arrive, and now the living room smells deliciously like leather.

The hide they sent us is perfect, just what we wanted. It’s beautiful and speckly and soft. And way bigger than we thought it would be. We are happy! Someday we will get those doors off of the hearth, fix the mantle, and find the perfect animal head. Someday!

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The kitchen

July 24, 2011 //
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At some point, we are going to redo the kitchen. The flow is weird, the counters are a bummer, and the wall cabinets are too low. We have low ceilings, so want to take down the cabinets and put in open shelving. I fiddled around with some measurements and did some thinking today, and realized that if I wanted to, I could move the kitchen island and the fridge and see how I felt about it.

This is the kitchen before we moved in. Notice the awful sunflower wallpaper that you may remember from my post about our half bathroom. That came down the first time we worked on the house. I didn’t paint after I took it down, I figure we’ll paint when we redo the whole kitchen.

All I did was swap the island and the fridge. Being the middle of a heat wave, this was obviously a great idea. Moving large appliances and heavy furniture? Bring it on.

This is hard to take a picture of so you guys really get the sense of the layout of the room, but trust me, it looks better. Now when you come in the side door (the one we use) you don’t see the side of the fridge, you can actually see into the room. Baby steps!

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Brimfield

July 23, 2011 //
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Last week? Or the week before? Jeez I don’t know, whenever it was, Alex and I went to the Brimfield Antique Show in Brimfield, MA. It was great. We got a little sunburned, saw a bunch of awesome things, and bought a few little things.

First we drove through the tornado path which was bananas. I’ve never seen anything like that, the destruction was insane. So sad. A month after the tornado, there are still things like upside down tractor trailers in the woods on top of buildings.

Once we got there, we walked around and saw awesome things. Like this lion.

1,000,000 chairs.

1,000,000 bottles.

Lots of milk bottles, of which I have a bunch so I didn’t buy any.

We ate pickles on sticks! They were surprisingly refreshing.

This is what we bought. A granny fork and two knives. We grew up using these forks, and I have one that I got from my mom, but everyone needs at least two.

We also got this sweet bear head bottle opener. I can’t wait to mount this on the doorway to the dining room. So awesome! We didn’t buy any furniture or anything, I drive a little Saturn that can’t fit anything in it.

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The living room, lived in

July 13, 2011 //
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Here is the living room, now that we’ve been using it for a while. I probably should have closed my computer and turned off the tv before taking this picture, but whatever. Now we have curtains! and have hung some pictures and put down a rug. Notice the unfinished doors to the dining room built-in on the fireplace.

I love curtains. They make me feel better about walking around in my underwear so much, since the windows look right out onto the street.

On the other side of the room, we put up the dvd bookcase and I made a curtain for it. Dvds aren’t super attractive, and I wanted to get doors for the bookcase but they were out last time we went to Ikea. Instead I made this curtain, and I like it.

See? Now we have an extra shelf on top for candles and plants, and can keep the dvds near the tv without having to see them. There is a reed diffuser behind the aloe plant, that’s why it looks like that.

To make the curtain, I sewed a hem around a piece of fabric I had, then put in a tension rod and hung a bunch of hooks from it.

See? Easy. I like the living room!

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Garden work!

July 11, 2011 //
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We have a stupid, jerk woodchuck living under the garage. It’s eating all my vegetables except my tomatoes. Once, I had little pea shoots. Now, I don’t. I had little broccoli plants, now I just have little sticks. I had squash, peppers…. Jerk. So we needed to build a fence before I didn’t have any vegetables left at all. This isn’t a permanent fence (obviously), because I want to expand the garden a lot next year and make a whole big chicken-garden thing. Hopefully it’ll be enough to deter the woodchuck, who can also eat things like raspberries and other things. Stupid woodchuck.

The window in the fence is actually the door, with hinges and a latch and everything. So fancy. That sideways door is because we ran out of fence. The cement brick is to cover up the hole caused by the bottom of the window door.

Alex rolled out the wire while I did important things like scavenge for more fence posts from the garbage woodpiles we have behind the garage and behind the shed.

I also found this ratty cart, which I used to drag bricks around to line the garden.

I found this spider too.

I sure hope this fence protects my vegetables!!!

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