A few pictures

I once again have the writer's block. When in bed at night, my mind is FILLED with subjects I want to write about. But as soon as I drift off to slumberland, the blog imp comes and steals them all away from me. So, I manage to write pretty much nothing. Thankfully the camera still works, and each picture is worth a thousand words, so I'm gonna have a slide show.

First, the boy's 5th birthday was at the end of August (so sue me, I'm a slacker). I had a modest goal of serving him a cake not purchased from a grocery store's bakery. He wanted a Transformers-themed party, so I had my work cut out for me. Jumping to my aid was my friend Kaia, who owns a car-shaped pan, so I embarked on my first cake decoration attempt: The Autobot named Bumblebee. I used to think that I'd like to decorate cakes as a hobby. It turns out, I do not. (There's a chance that I would have enjoyed it more if my pastry bag and bag tips hadn't been MIA, forcing me to use only a Ziploc freezer bag and my gumption to frost the cake)

It's completely lopsided, but the boy was happy with it, and it tasted pretty good.

Next, I owe you a picture of my kitchen. There's still a soffit to be built around the sink's vent pipe, but the wallpaper is up and the painting is basically done. Even in its unfinished state, it's a 382% improvement over how it had looked since we moved in. If only I could afford to have the floor and counters replaced....


Lastly for today, I owe you a picture of knitting. However, the knitting I've been doing is too boring to bother turning on the camera. I've recently been knitting neck gaiters (the pattern spells it "gator" but I don't think that's right), one being an exact replica of one I knit in the spring, for Citizen Sam. I don't think I ever posted about this before, so I'll show you a picture of its older twin. (You can see that I made a hat in the spring too. I haven't made another hat yet, but I have more yarn, so it's probably just a matter of time).

If one 9" knitted tube weren't boring enough of a summer knit, I've cast on another one, this one navy blue, for keeping in the family. I think all this k2p2 ribbing is finally giving me the motivation to get back to more challenging projects. So that's good.

I really hope to keep up with the posting, and not put writing off enough for another month. But we'll see. My slacker-fu is very strong.

Uh, that was weird...

I just went into my upstairs bathroom, flipped on the light, and was promptly greeted with an explosion. The light bulb on the sconce by the mirror blew up. I have never known that to happen before. Anyone of you, my faithful reader(s), who can allay my fear that our home's wiring is irreparably dodgy? Please someone tell me that sometimes light bulbs in normal, safe homes shoot holes in themselves? Or was this just a warning shot? Should I be moving all my valuables to a secure location?


P.S. I find it funny that Firefox's spellcheck recognizes "dodgy" and "wonky", but not "bockety"

Kitchen pictures

I'm in a knitting slump. I made a sock, it got set aside, I finally picked it back up and made it too short. I pulled out the toe and re-knit it, made it longer, and it's still too short. It's just par for the course lately. A while before that I crocheted a granny square. As I rounded the last corner of the second round, I realized that I had made a granny triangle. I also have a sweater that I started, and I keep thinking that I'll never be able to finish it, so why bother working on it at all. See? I have lost my mojo.

The upside to failing at the yarny arts is that I have been working on the long-suffering kitchen. (By the way, I do mean to say that it has been doing the suffering. The poor room has been terribly embarrassed at its state for more than three months now.)

This last weekend, I finally primed the walls (with a miracle product called Gardz) and then painted the ceiling. Of course I dislike painting ceilings on a good day, but painting over a mushroom-colored glossy ceiling is a special brand of Hell (should that be capitalized? I assume it's a proper noun, right?). After about three coats of ceiling paint, I was left with this (see what I mean about a sad kitchen?):


Yesterday, I decided to tackle the wallpaper. I was a little intimidated because A) it's only my second wallpapering project, the first one being the dining room a couple of years ago, and B)this random-looking wallpaper has a repeat which I really thought I was unable to find. But I pressed on, found the three tiny dots that signaled the pattern's matching point, and dove in. I was left with this.



It's the only wall that is done so far. I hope to get wall #2 done today. It's slow going because it's all windows and cabinets and doors everywhere, but I have hope for the future of my kitchen. Now if I could only happen upon a spare thousand dollars to have the floor replaced...

Too humid to paint, so I'll show you some progress pics instead,

I need to paint another coat on the wainscot. (This is a fancy misnomer. It's really beadboard-shaped paneling installed by previous owners. It was a very dark wood color before I got paint-happy with it.) Unfortunately, we're having an excessively wet spring and once again it's too humid to paint. That means that the refrigerator sits in the middle of the kitchen for at least one more day. *sigh*

But that does free me up to do some house cleaning. The work in the kitchen has caused a cessation of regular tidying in other parts of the house, although I wasn't exactly a fastidious housekeeper before. I need to reclaim my front room. It's become the wooden train set/Barbie spa room for a week now and it's bothering me. It is the only room that I really love, so it pays to keep it that clean. Also, I've been slacking in the laundry and dishes departments. Ugh. There's always a lot of those.

Anyway, back to pictures:
In February, Mr Deplume had had enough of the ugly kitchen, and started to strip the lower cabinets so we could repaint them.


There they sat, mostly stripped, for almost two months. Finally, last week, I started priming and painting, and also ripped out the soffits above the upper cabinets-- that amount of wasted space makes me twitchy. I did find that I really love the original wallpaper from when the kitchen was installed (early 60's maybe?)


Under the soffit I found a lovely copper sink vent, and some rather dodgy wiring for the over-sink light.


Here's the north side of the kitchen, before I started to paint the "wainscot." Please don't judge me by the mess inside that cupboard. It's where I cram all the stuff that doesn't fit neatly anywhere else.


The other end of the sink vent. And the 3" of window trim that was removed for the soffit. Ugh.


Bye Bye, ugly wallpapers!


So that's where we were the other day. I started to put the doors back on the lowers, but the hinges I bought were too thick (or maybe just poorly made), and I had to buy new ones. Of course the new hinges' mounting holes don't match up on the door side, so I need to break out the drill and make some adjustments. Nothing is ever easy peasy in this house.

And now I'm going to get the boy dressed and head to Menards to return the 10 pairs of hinges that I cannot use. We're all very excited about that. whoopdedoo!

Can't talk now

Too busy ripping apart the kitchen. And as always, every little job ends up ballooning to thrice its original size. But finally I'm seeing progress. We've repainted the lower cabinets and wainscoting, and after several days of humidity finally were able to put the new pulls on the drawers and re-install them.

Unfortunately, we've hinge replacement issues, so the doors remain on the front porch floor. Actually, there is one door that couldn't go back on its cabinet yet anyway, thanks to the boy who "accidentally" got his dirty foot on the wet paint.


what do you think?

Something to report!

Sorry folks, for being absent so long. I just had nothing all that interesting to write, so I didn't bother. But this weekend saw something done to the house, so I took pictures. On Saturday I got all twitchy about the 40+ feet of yew bushes along the south side of my house and started sawing them down. With my neighbor's trusty hand saw, I deleted three of the overgrown buggers with my bare hands. I unfortunately have no photographic evidence of said bushes-- I neglected to take 'before' pictures.

On Sunday, Mr. Deplume borrowed a friend's chainsaw (we really do have tools of our own, just not the correct ones for this particular job) and went to work on the rest of them. Within an hour or so we went from this (the bush-free part of the house to the left of the screen is where the bushes I removed had stood):

From House

to this:

From House

I count it as an improvement, although removing the one very large eyesore revealed many little ones. There is a water meter, electric meter, air conditioning unit, furnace vents, a few miscellaneous wires and boxes for phone and electricity, a defunt cable hookup and chunk of broken veneer on the foundation we hadn't noticed before. Of course there are still 40-year-old yew stumps that need to be dealt with, as well. I foresee a bunch of my summer being involved in installing trellises and fences and camouflage plants. 'Tis the fun of home ownership, I suppose.

Thanks to yesterday's comments

I'm now faced with a real hankering for blueberries. I even woke in the middle of the night and thought about where I could put a couple of blueberry bushes. It didn't help that it was 46 and sunny yesterday, so I was outside feeling like spring is around the corner. Last night the temperature dropped 30 degrees and it is winter again. Blargh.

Speaking of yesterday, I spent the afternoon doing cleanup work. It was lovely. It's funny how something that is so objectionable in July is an absolute joy in December. I picked up all the limbs that had fallen during the ice storm of a couple of weeks ago, raked the pile of leftover leaves to where the garden will be in the spring (I plan to choke out the grass with them, newspaper, and a healthy layer of compost. Don't laugh! I read right here on the internet that it totally works!), swept the garage, and I climbed out on the roof and cleaned the gutters. The gutter cleaning was cut short, though, because the metal roof on the garage was a little slippery. Not to mention that I wasn't wearing waterproof gloves and my fingers were getting cold.

Anyway, the dose of vitamin D I got out there was much needed. I hope it's enough to get me through the next few weeks, until the next sunny and "warm" day.

The front room is nearly done!

Before (this is the day we moved in):

From front room

After:

From front room

Obviously I need to recover those chairs to make them match, and I also need more furniture for the other end of the room (it's a really big room), not to mention art for the walls, but it's basically done. I cannot believe that we finally tackled it. Three years of hating that 300 square feet of house, and now I just plain like it.
Pictures of the rest of the progress are here.

I love caulk

More specifically, I like caulk's ability to make my rickety house look less bockety. What pushes me into the realm of gushy squishy disgusting love is this, my newest toy:

From front room

I bought him yesterday morning, and I'm in love. He's maybe the most instantly satisfying home improvement purchase I've ever made. I have weak hands and perpetually sore wrists, and installing the molding around the bottom of the baseboards just about killed me. So to be able to effortlessly lay a bead of painter's caulk around said trim in about twenty minutes is a true blessing.

Unfortunately, my little battery powered caulk gun just isn't strong enough for DAP "Better than the Nail" Moulding Adhesive. So today, when Mr. Deplume and I installed the crown molding, he had to work the old-fashioned caulk gun. Luckily, the man is strong as an ox, and had no trouble rising to the occasion. We ran out of the specialty adhesive 4/5 of the way through the project and found in a spectacular manner that liquid nails is just not a good idea. I'm sure it's fine for people hanging trim in a drywalled room equipped with an pneumatic nailer, but that is not the case here, and we had an 8-ft piece of trim fall on our heads, leaving an unsightly blob of brown liquid nails on the floor. oops.

So back to Menards I went, and came back with the right tools for the job. And some wine and crusty Italian bread (not from Menards, of course). By 4:30 PM, we had 72 linear feet of polystyrene crown molding hanging securely along the perimeter of our front room. If you are planning on diving into the dangerous world of compound miter cuts, I suggest this video. After each watching it, we only made one cut wrong, but it was actually fine for a different corner in the room. We don't have a saw like theirs, but the miter box and hand saw essentially does the same thing.


I promise pictures of the finished molding tomorrow afternoon, once I get done with the paint touch ups. (At least my plan is to finish the paint tomorrow-- you just never know how things will turn out, though, in the Deplume house.)

I also finished a 4th and started work on my 5th sock yesterday. The 4th sock I started was the first ever completed, and Number 5 is its mate. I'll post about that soon, too. This room project is stealing my knit time away.


Addendum: Mr. Deplume and I are not responsible for the ladder being that messy. It is a hand-me-down and looked like a paint store blew up on it before it came into our possession 10 years ago. It has served us well, regardless of outer appearances, bless its vertical heart.

Blogstalking is back!

I found out that the folks over at Knittyboard started up Blogstalking again. For those of you not in the know, it's just a fun deal in which we all post on the same topic once a week. I missed week one (serves me right for not checking the board often), but week two's topic is:

"I love ________ because ___________"

So here it goes. I love high density foam paint rollers because they kick ass. It's true. If you have trim to paint in your house, invest in these. They are fast, don't leave stupid brush marks in the paint, and the rounded ends will even paint in the curvy bits of the molding. You only have to use a brush for the inside corner-y bits.

Last time I was at the home improvement store, I bought the jumbo economy size pack of the roller heads, and when the front room project is done, they'll also be the tool of choice for repainting the kitchen cabinets.

brrrrr!

Last night I went to bed, knowing that we were in the midst of a wind storm, and that the first bone fide frost was on its way. I awoke a couple of times in the night thinking, "it sure is cold in here." I woke up this morning, went to the thermostat, and it's 55 degrees in here (for you metric people, that's 12!).

I am now swilling hot coffee, and awaiting the moment when I can call the furnace magicians to come and wave their magic wand over it, and restore my castle to its regular level of toastiness. I'm a tad worried about my luck though, because when the air conditioner failed this summer, it only 11 wire connectors and a service call to fix it. A few years ago when I awoke to this sort of temp, if was the fault of a toddler in charge of setting the thermostat (that fix was free, of course). Surely I cannot keep up this charmed HVAC life I've been living.

Must now stop typing, as my fingers are stiffening up from the cold, so I'm off to hug my coffee and retreat under a blanket. I'll end up a frosty Normcicle if the heater won't cooperate soon.

Ceiling Cat Hates Me

The ceiling in the front room has turned into quite an affair, which is odd, as I really thought that it would be the easiest thing in the whole project. There was a large discolored spot in the center of the room, presumably from old water damage. I figured it wasn't too bad, so I skipped the primer step. That was mistake number one. So then I started a second coat (mistake number 2), and it was obvious that I was going to have to go back and prime the center of the room.

By this time, I was low on paint-- it's a 300 sqft. room, and the ceiling has that sand texture on it, so a gallon is just barely enough for one coat. I went to a basement and pulled out another can of ceiling paint. Same brand of paint, and this was supposedly "bright white" and the other "brilliant white", so I figured that if mixed them together, we'd have enough paint for the third pass at the center part of the ceiling (to cover the primer) and I could put this to bed.

Here's where mistake number four comes in: the basement paint had apparently been tinted off white. I don't know why it wasn't labeled. So now I have 3/4 of a ceiling that is off white, and a few patches of brillirant white around the edges.

I have now whined enough that Mr. Deplume will paint the ceiling with the brand new gallon of "casual white" paint that I bought at Ace today, while I continue cleaning and priming trim. I swear I'll get this done by Thanksgiving when a zillion people will be coming over for turkey and pie. If you are a religious sort, and have a spot on your prayin' schedule, would you mind throwing my front room on there for me?

Here are pictures of what I've managed so far (click on the picture to see the whole album):

front room

How cool is this?

I never would have thought of making a bird house out of an old porch light. I don't think I have a right to be surprised, though, since this spring a small family of birds nested in ours. Funny how sometimes the brain just refuses to take those tiny steps. But now that I know, I'll be trolling the thrift store for old sconces to make little birdies' homes.

I hope that there will be real, photographable progress on the living room this week. I plan on painting the walls today, leaving "only" the trim and floor to do. I decided the other day that home remodeling is rather like liver: it seems like a good idea, and the grilled onions smell so good, but you take that first little bite, and it starts growing in your mouth. You keep chewing and chewing, yet it never seems to be time to swallow. Unfortunately, I can't spit the living room out in my napkin and skip straight to dessert.

UPDATE:

Still nothing exciting going on. But the blog feels sad when I don't post for weeks at a time, so I'm giving it a little attention this morning as I sip my coffee.

We did have a fun time last night when Mr Deplume's brother and family came over for dinner and lego tower-building (that was mostly a kid activity, though). I'm now kicking myself for getting not one photo of the event. They are from a far away state and it will likely be the only time they come over this year. Oh well.

Now I need to go pack a lunch for the girl and get dressed. Later today, I go back to the front room for more plastery adventure. Wish me luck, my faithful reader!

Just move along, nothing to see here

I mean it. I have very little to show for my days lately. I ripped down some wallpaper in the front room, and started patching holes, but then I realized that I needed to tape the corners in the room before I can go any further. I went to the hardware store and bought the tape, but they didn't have one of those nifty inside-corner-putty-knife-dealies. So no progress there, until I have a chance to get to a home improvement warehouse.

I have still been working on my "doable" shawl, but now each row takes like 15 minutes to complete. Have I mentioned that there are vast expanses of stockinette stitch on this? That's a whole lotta purling, folks. I thought a mostly stockinette lace weight project would be good, as it's mindless. A little too mindless, it turns out. It's rather like a woolen lobotomy.

But I've gotten all the dishes done three days in a row! Super boring factoid there, but it really is nice to wake up to a clean sink. Thanks, Marla Cilley! SOme day I'll even follow the rest of the tidy-house steps, but for now I'll be happy with my dishes progress.

And now for something fun: My four-year-old boy refers to the legs of pajama pants and sweatpants as bottom sleeves or foot sleeves. As in "My bottom sleeves are stuck on my knees!" IT cracks me up every time he says it. And I fear that soon he'll learn the right words, never uttering footsleeves again. The thought makes me sad. I don't want them to grow up quite yet. Waahhhh!

Tonight, we'll go to a local fair and ride rides and eat carnie food. Good times. Good times.

That's all for now!

So close...

I had a setback yesterday-- The third and final can of trim paint got pulled from the basement yesterday, to do the finish coat. I pried off the lid and started stirring it. I suddenly realized that it was flat paint! I thought I had bought three cans of trim paint way back when, but only two of them were semi-gloss. At first I was wondering how the home improvement warehouse could have screwed up so badly, but thinking about it now, I believe I bought it for the ceiling in the dining room. Oops. Now I have to buy another can of trim paint before I can finish. I might try to work on that this afternoon. I really really want this room done. I have a hankering to start on the kitchen and don't want too many projects going on at once. I'm bad about having too WIPs at once, whether they be knitting or home renos.

Speaking of WIPs, I started my Ravelympic socks again yesterday. I started doing two socks on two circulars, from the Knitpicks sock blank that I dyed on Friday. But it's just too many challenges at once for me, and since I had to rip the two socks out once already (too small, they never would have fit over my heels), I just cast on for one sock the second time, and am winding the second strand of yarn into a ball as I go.

My son is not happy that I'm using one of his cylinder-shaped blocks as the makeshift nostepinde. He seemed satisfied when I promised to give it back to him. However, I came back to my knitting after having gone to the kitchen, and found a little wound-up pile of yarn next to the sock. Hmmm. Apparently, when I promised to give the block back, I hadn't impressed upon him that I'd give it back when I was DONE. He just figured that he'd take it back right away. Little stinker is always looking for an angle. Luckily, the yarn slipped back onto the block with a little finessing, and we're back in business. If I get a chance, I'll take pics later.

It's a raver! It's a terrorist! No...

it's painting day at the Deplume household.


I finally tackled the railing/banisters of the stairway today. This stupid project has taken more than a year now, but it's so very close to completion. After a frustrating false start with a primer that claimed to adhere even to glossy surfaces, but was clearly lying, I went back to my favorite old standby, shellac. This time, the shellac came in the form of BIN Shellac Based Primer. I love this stuff. It covers well, blocks stains and odors well, and dries lightning fast. The only drawback to it is that there are some fumes involved. First, you use mineral spirits to remove any waxy or oily buildup. Then you use ammonia to prep the surfaces for painting. And the primer itself has a fair amount of denatured alcohol in it. So of course, to avoid brain damage and/or blindness, I use a respirator. I look cute, eh?

Anyway, if you don't remember what I started with, here's a little reminder. In the above self-portrait, you can see the pre-painting banister/baluster (I can never get those words straight) as well as the odd little discolored plastic mirror on the newel post, which is also now covered up. The trim in this house was all painted a dingy cream color, of course being covered with bright white paint. Here's where we are now.


I still need to apply a finish coat, and probably some sort of protectant to the railing, but we are definitely in the home stretch. Next stop: kitchen!

Ack! roof repairs in the rain.

After dinner, we were milling about, waiting for the big rain to stop and a particular TV show to begin when dh announced, "we have a leak." He went and got a bucket, and I started to see dollar signs.
It's raining cats and dogs and we just replaced the thingamajig and the watchamacallit, meanwhile, the doohickey and doodad are higher on my to-do list than the roof.

I took a deep breath, figured out that it was obviously near the edge of the low roof outside our bedroom window, and went off to look at it. I opened up my bedroom window, removed the screen, and launched myself over the dresser. That area is a section of rubber sheeting, as opposed to standard shingles (historically, most everything in my house was done in the most "frugal" way possible), so I looked around for a hole. Sure enough, there was a wrinkle at a seam about 10" from my window. The seam's adhesive had failed, and the hole was large enough I could stick a finger in it. crap. Once again, the Peter principle has kicked in-- home ownership is the ultimate example of having risen to the level of my incompetence. I have no earthly idea about how to fix a roof of any kind.

BUT, I didn't want to have any more leak, and I especially didn't want to have to leave a bucket in the family room until it stops raining, so I went downstairs, found an old vinyl tablecloth, chopped off a hunk with the kitchen scissors, and plopped it over the hole. I put some heavy stuff on top to keep it from blowing away right away and woohoo! it worked. The drip stopped in spite of another hour of steady rain.

Tomorrow's to-do list has just added "learn how to fix hole in roof." It's always something when you own a old house, eh?

Nom Nom Nom. Doves are yummy

or so say the owls in my back yard this morning.


I've been watching them for an hour now, and they are still eating. There are two kids and one grown up. I wonder if this is the same owl I got a shot of last spring. Either way, I love their hoo hoo, ho hoooo sounds at twilight. I love that I have enough trees that they call this place home. I don't even mind that I'm going to have to clean up dead bird bones later today. I am blessed to live in an area that hasn't managed to wipe out all of the native species that belong here.


Update: I emailed the Illinois Raptor Center, and they very quickly responded to my query. Those are Eastern Screech Owls. I had been thrown off because my birds didn't have big ear tufts, but as it turns out, they can flatten them down sometimes, too. As an aside, I learned that the screech owls who live at the Center are named Mulder and Sculley. Their names match their mysterious nature, I suppose. :)

Sometimes even end-of-February snow is pretty

I'm not a fan of snow. It does cover up the dead landscape, but it is hard to truck the kids around in, tracks snow and general dampness into the family room, and is a general pain in the ass. But this morning, I woke up to a few inches of snow, and it was beautiful. As much as it was going to be a PITA to walk the girlie to school in it, it was pretty. The snow followed a few days of thaw and rain, so the back yard had been more like Lake Deplume. And last night's snow stuck to the branches, which allowed my eye to see beautiful white trees and not the gray sky, waiting to drop more snow on us.

I was so taken by the beauty of this meteorological event, I took my camera along on the walk to school. And as it turns out, a red brick library really stands out on a snowy morning. And that red gives me a warm fuzzy feeling. The fact that our local librarians know mine and my kids' names, and is less than two blocks from my house might have something to do with that, though, as well.

Once we got back from the school walk, Nige decided that he wanted to play in the back yard. It had begun snowing again by this point, and his three-year-old self was in seventh heaven. I let him, of course, and kept the camera at the ready. A few minutes later, he was sitting atop the slide, with 4 inches of snow obscuring his descent. He sat up there for a few minutes, telling me that he was a little scared. I explained that it was just fluffy snow, and it isn't scary. Luckily he believed me, and slid on down. It was quite a ride, shoving all that snow off the plastic slide with his butt.

He had a fun time, but bore a striking resemblance to the abominable snowman by the time I convinced him to come inside. It was a good day.