Painting and Crafting

Today I painted the deck. This is a project that has been on the house to-do list since the day we moved in. Maybe even BEFORE we moved in. It feels good to finally cross it off the list. It also felt good to just make this part of the house look so much better. Here are a couple of before shots of the steps and the deck:


And here it is, after. Actually, this is technically in the middle, since I haven't been able to reach the very top parts. Jake will finish this off on Friday.

We used Sikkens Cetol SRD in "Dark Oak." It got good ratings on Consumer Reports, and, perhaps more importantly, only required one coat. It's also supposed to be a good option for decks such as ours that may (or may not) contain arsenic. We don't know the details of when our deck was built, but apparently this sort of wood, if made before 2004, was probably treated with arsenic. And if that's the case, we don't really want to be sanding it, what with all that arsenic then being freed into our air and lungs. So we just did a very thorough washing with a homemade recipe of Oxy-Clean and Borax a couple days ago. Applying the stain took about 4 hours and used almost a gallon of the SRD. Since it's a stain, it won't peel like paint would, which means that the next time we have to treat it, we won't have to sand then, either. Oh, also in the "note to self" category, we only needed one gallon, not the two that I bought. We can return the un-opened can; I figured it was better to have extra than to have to run out halfway through the job (a regular occurrence during most of our home-improvement projects).

I got the stain at Harmon's Paint & Wallpaper, a very friendly place downtown. After I bought the deck stain, I asked if they had any discontinued wallpaper books they were looking to get rid of. A very kind lady took me to the back room and showed me just what I wanted -- a terrific book of children's wallpaper samples (happens to be Ralph Lauren). I know, you're wondering, what exactly am I planning to do with a book of wallpaper samples? Redecorating a room in 18X15-inch squares? (Actually, that might look pretty cool.) Nope, I'm doing some paper crafts, and I read a suggestion for recycling wallpaper scraps, so I figured a sample book would be perfect. And it is!

Last night I was playing with fabric, and staring at the new chicken print fabric I bought a while ago. I was compelled to make a stuffed chicken.

In the background there, you can see my first wallpaper project: I covered one of Lucy's formula cans, since the first one has been such a hit.

In other news updates, Lucy is officially crawling. I put her down in the pink room while I went to get her dinner ready, and by the time I came back, she had crawled over to Carter's box of toys. She can really move now. Time to invest in some baby-gates.

Lucy's New Car! (boy, she grew up fast!)

Today on one of our many walks, we discovered that someone on our block had thrown out a perfectly usable kid car. We rescued it from the trash, and I just finished washing it. Wow! It wasn't really our plan to get Lucy into car culture so soon, but it was too good of a deal (free!) to pass up. Plus, we saved it from a landfill, so I figure that's all for the good.

Garden Delights; Lucy Grows Up

We've been overrun with produce lately. Check out all the stuff that was in our farm share this week:

Amazing!

And these are the tomatoes we picked from our very own garden:

And here is the deliciousness that Jake made with the tomatoes:

It's getting totally out of control in our tomato plant patch. We also harvested a huge batch of tomatillos, and made some delicious green salsa with them. YUM!

In non-produce-related news, over the past week, Lucy has grown up a bit. Or maybe, more appropriately, we have finally acknowledged that she has grown a bit. First, we decided to retire the baby swing. While it didn't list a specific size or weight limit, it did say "discontinue use when baby becomes too active." The very squirmy Lucy definitely qualifies, and since she seems to try to grab the bars as she swings past, it seemed like this was the time to migrate the swing to the basement.

Yesterday, I finally put an end to the very very very much over-taxed bassinet. This lovely bassinet has served us well. In fact, it sets an age limit of 3 months and a weight limit of 15 pounds. Lucy has long since surpassed these markers, but we continued to use it for diaper changes and bath prep, because it made things easier. We never leave her in it unattended, so it seemed like it was a reasonable place to put her for a fresh diaper or to undress her for the bath. On Thursday night, however, she showed me a new trick. She's become very squirmy when she's being changed, and her favorite thing to do is to flip herself over onto her front just when you're trying to get the wet/dirty diaper off. Nice trick. Since the bassinet is small and confining, she not only flipped herself over, but got herself up on all fours and started rocking. Her rocking meant that the entire bassinet was shaking. This didn't seem like a good thing. So bye-bye bassinet. You have served us well.

I'm actually not that sad to see these two items move on, as they were really taking up a lot of room in the dining room. Nice to have that space back, just in time for Lucy to start crawling (any day now).

Some improvements

Today we did an overhaul of the living room. We moved all the audio equipment into the TV/video cabinet, and got rid of the ugly and mostly inaccessible corner shelf that previously held the stereo. It makes for a little more space in the room, and makes the stereo actually accessible, which is all for the good.

Also, this makes it so you can see the door, including the patch of dark red paint where we were testing a possible color for the room (the color failed). You can also see the very sorry state that the yellow chair is in; I think it's time to start shopping for a new chair or at the very least, to invest in a slipcover. You may also have noticed that mountain of Lucy toys that towers over our living room. The kid has a lot of stuff.

We also installed a new closer on the front screen door. Try dragging a stroller w/ kid, plus the dog and whatever else you need through the screen door that will not stay open, and you will realize what a HUGE improvement this little device is. When I realized that I wanted to replace our old closer, I wondered what that little thingy was called. I figured that there must be some sort of technical name for it, perhaps something involving the word "pneumatic." But to my delight, I discovered that it's simply called a "door closer" and in fact they're quite easy to find on the internet. I wanted a particular kind of closer though, one that would easily hold itself open, but also easily close after we'd entered or exited with our sundry parcels and creatures. The "Touch N Hold" door closer was exactly what we needed.



Their website claims that the touch n hold is a "revolution in door closers," and, I have to say, though I laughed at that claim initially, it is a huge help. OK, my product endorsement time is over, and I hope we get nice fat check from the touch n hold folks for that.

One other big improvement was the addition of a medicine cabinet to the downstairs bathroom. We were keeping medicines and the like in the vanity drawers by the sink, but it was ill suited to the purpose (the bottles fell over and leaked; the drawer is also too accessible to a certain soon-to-be exploring little one), so we searched for a cabinet. We actually bought a couple at Home Depot, but returned them because they were terrible looking. I found this one on Amazon -- it's made of bamboo, with recycled glass for the doors.



Hooray! I think we might have to get a second one for the upstairs bathroom, which has the same problem.

Uncluttering

Here at 83 Durant, we've collected a lot of stuff.  This is the sort of behavior to which we are both prone; whether Lucy will be a similar keeper of things remains to be seen, but so far, her ability to squirrel away cheerios and peas in her high chair seems to point to a similar behavior.  Having a house with a giant basement serves to enable our pack-rat-ish tendencies.  Lately, we've been trying to limit our intake of stuff, and increase our releasing of stuff we don't need/want/use.  Here's what we've accomplished so far:

I did an enormous purge of books.  Enormous in this case means about 10 shopping bags.  I think this is enormous, but I should also point out that there are still many, many books filling our shelves.  Those books will go off to library book sales, where no doubt someone just like me will eagerly buy them by the bagful, excited about what a deal they are, and then line their shelves with them for many years without opening them.  I certainly hope for better for these poor books, but from experience, I know that I buy far far far too many books that I never get around to reading, especially at those fill-a-bag library used books sales.  

We've also purged a lot of old media.  We've been carrying around a box of VHS tapes for the past 5 years, despite the fact that we do not own a VCR.  What's the point?  If we haven't watched them in the last 5 years, chances are we don't need them.  So I freecycled those to a very happy family.  I've also let go of a box of cassette tapes.  This purge was a bit more difficult, and not as successful.  With the VHS tapes, I gave away the "real" tapes and just chucked the home-made tapes.  By home-made tapes, I mean, things I taped off of television, not home-movies or anything like that.  Surely here in this age of television on DVD and YouTube, there is no need for me to keep copies of episodes of Absolutely Fabulous, the Simpsons, South Park, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer that I taped off television with a VCR of suspect quality.  That decision was easy.  Not so with the cassette tapes.  I gave away most of the "real" music tapes, with the exception of a few that I'm keeping for our car (which only has a tape player), but when I hit the mixed tapes, I didn't know what to do.  Granted, they're a step above the taped-from-TV VHS tapes (although some of them do include stuff I taped off the radio), but really, do I need those tapes?   Aside from the tape deck in the car, we don't own a cassette player.  So they haven't been played for years and years.  But I can't quite bring myself to toss that box filled with 90-minute Memorexes with hand-printed playlists filled with exotic titles.  The mixed tape was once an art form for those of us of a certain age and persuasion.  I know my 14 to 24-year-old self would be horrified and outraged at the very thought of getting rid of such archives of music, such labors of love and hitting "play and record" at just the right moment.  The year after I graduated from college, someone broke into my car and stole a box of tapes -- it held 24 home-made mixes from various friends from various places and stages of my life to that point.  I was devastated.  They were never recovered.  I sometimes wondered if the thief just threw them out once he/she realized they were worthless (to him/her), although priceless to me.  Remembering this loss, I just couldn't bring myself to toss the mixed tapes yet.  So back into a (smaller) box they go, and back into the cabinet where they once lived with other defunct media, until a day when I'm a bit more vicious in my need to jettison the flotsam.

That's all for now.  Time to get Lucy at daycare.  It has been pointed out to me that although we've posted lots of pictures, the blogging has been lagging, so I'm going to try to get back into it.  Comments from our esteemed readers always make me smile, so please feel welcome to use that comment button, those of you who are lurking silently, and let me know you're there.

August Update

So the blog has kinda fallen by the wayside lately. Hopefully the Flickr pictures are providing sufficient info as to why we're not constantly working on the house or blogging

But we have managed to get some small projects done around the house. While Jake's parents were visiting back in July, they helped us out with a bunch of things. Rose did a ton of weeding and mulching, which greatly improved the garden situation. Rose also tested out a pink room paint color for us. She used a sample jar to test out whether we could do the pink room over in a dark red. Too dark. Hmmmm....We still need a solution to the PINK of the pink room.

John installed a new faucet in the downstairs bathroom. This project was not without its frustrations. After John completely installed the faucet we bought, Rose heard a slight leak. Upon further investigation, it turned out that the faucet itself had a leak in it. Argh! So a complete dis-assembly, and a second trip to the hardware store. But who's counting. Actually, it may have ended up being five trips to the hardware store on that one. But we have a lovely new leak-free faucet.

But because the world has an equilibrium of leaky faucets, we just discovered this week that the basement utility sink faucet is leaking. Ah, leakage equilibrium attained.

In other small improvements for the summer:

*We put carpet on the floor of the under-stair nook, where Carter has a bed, and where we park Jake's folding bike and Lucy's stroller.

*We installed a new toilet seat in the upstairs bathroom. While doing this, we discovered that there are two slightly different colors -- there's "almond" and there's "biscuit," and they're not the same. Also, toilet seat technology has evolved. We have a seat with "quiet-close" and "quick-release" functionality. Wow. We opted NOT to get the self-heating one. Ew.

*We got rid of a TON of random metal (fence posts and downspouts and the like) through freecycle. Awesome! We love freecycle.

*Jake (with the help of our fabulous next door neighbor, Lisa) got our gutters cleaned out. They were so full of tree muck that they were starting to bow out and pull out of the fascia boards.

*We got a dehumidifier for the basement. I can't believe how much water this thing takes out of the air! It makes the basement a more pleasant place for working on bikes and working out. This is good. And we've had such a wet summer, that I think it's also good for keeping the fieldstone walls a bit drier than they might be otherwise.

The garden is now giving us tomatoes, and the herb area is full of basil and sage (and others, too, but those are the big ones). We also have an apple on the apple tree!

I've been trying to fit in some crafting time when I get the chance. I've managed to make some little things for Lucy, like a tag blanket (I think this appears on Flickr a while back). I've also cut up some scraps of pretty fabric that she likes; we hide toys underneath them and she's thrilled to find them.

Today I made a few items that please me very much. The first is a simple can o' toys. I noticed that Lucy loved getting into the containers on the counter where I keep her baby products and hair stuff and whatnot, so I figured I should make her one of her very own. I just decorated an empty formula canister and filled it with fabric and some of her legos and other toys. She LOVES digging through it and dumping the can.

I splurged on some fancy fabric last week, and I've been looking for just the right thing to do with it. This evening I decided that the beautiful Mary Flanagan hand-dyed wool felt would make really lovely soft blocks. You can see the prototype (the purple one in the background) that I made from scrap fabric, and then the real one that I made with the six colors in the "Aqua" series: Mason Jar, Spring Rain, Deep Sea, Juniperberry, Evergreen, and Emerald Bay.

I'm very pleased with it. Soft and wooly. I may make more with another color set, too.

That's all I can think of for now. No promises as to when the next post will be, but we'll keep putting up Lucy photos so you can see how she grows. She'll be nine months old tomorrow! Wow!