We're in Hot Water

And thank goodness! Jake did some research and made some calls, and we were lucky enough to be able to get Mr. Plumber to come and install a new hot water heater for us. Here it is, in its water-warming glory:



Here's all the fancy specs on it:

Please note that it is an "EverKleen" -- self-cleaning! I think all appliances should have this feature. In fact, I would like our whole house to be outfitted with this technology.

In other small updates, we've started preparing for winter. We've taken out and put away our air conditioners, and we've taken out the screens and put the storm windows in the storm doors.

We've also made plans with our mason (the guy who rebuilt our chimney) to do some repointing both inside and outside the house. All this should have us in good shape when the real New England fall hits.

Cold Shower

This morning, we woke to find that our "water heater" can no longer be called by that name; it is now demoted to "large, useless tank of cold water."  The water heater has been at the top of the appliance failure-watch list for quite some time, but did it have to go today?  I guess it's as good (or bad) as any other day, eh?

Blogging away my Saturday Night

Sometimes we like to dream of the renovations we might do if we had unlimited time and money and didn't care about living in a construction zone. One of the rather obvious focal points of our remodeling desires is the kitchen. It's not so much that the kitchen is particularly bad, but more that we use it a lot, and we can imagine ways in which it could be better. For instance, if we had a Viking range and a fancy-pants fridge. Those things aren't going to happen. But something we do consider doing is getting a real working hood. There is a hood over the stove, but it doesn't actually vent outside, despite the fact that it is situated on a chimney. It actually vents the exhaust right back into the kitchen, which isn't exactly ideal. It's clear that up high on the walls and on the ceiling, that the grease and other stove-top and oven particulate is creating quite the coating. But do we really want to cut a whole in the chimney? Is it even possible? Is it safe?

But today, we did a very slight upgrade: a $10 upgrade. I found and installed a new filter in the exhaust fan. There wasn't one there at all before, but now we have a brand spanking new one. Note to future self, it's Replacement Filter number WA65F from NuTone, part nuber 99010317 and the only place we could find them was www.rangehoodsupply.com . Whatever would we do without the internet?

Our other upgrade was another new medicine cabinet. Jake put it together and installed it in the upstairs bathroom. If you find yourself visiting us at 83 Durant, you can now find the medicines, band-aids, nail clippers and such in our medicine cabinets, rather than stuffed into drawers.

I recently finished making my first set of placemats. You may be wondering why I would make placemats when we have at least half a dozen tablecloths. Well, we discovered the need for placemats the other day when Miss Lucy was crawling around on the floor in the dining room and nearly pulled everything from the table down upon herself by tugging on the oh-so-tempting dangling corner of the table cloth. So there you have it, we are in the market for placemats for at least the next few months. I had recently purchased some awesome fabric at Purl Soho, and I was looking for just the right project for the hedgehog print. I only had a quarter of a yard, so a dress for myself was out of the question, and a dress for Lucy would be cutting it close. Not to mention the fact even if we ignore the fabric allowance, my seamstress skills are still at a fairly basic level, and I've yet to work on any sewing project with an actual pattern. Placemats are perfect, since they're small, are all straight lines, and we'll actually use them daily. I'm very pleased with how they turned out!

They have a hedgehog print on the front and plain navy fabric on the back; many thanks to Jess B. for the navy fabric, which she included in the fabulous stash she passed along to me before her departure for Oxford.

And for those of you who have stuck it out through this long and meandering post, I have a very special, late-breaking news item: Today we discovered that Lucy has her first tooth! She was acting all cranky this morning, and my mom suggested I should check her mouth to see if any teeth had popped up. I ignored the suggestion, as we've been sure Lucy was teething for about four months now, with nothing to show for it. But sure enough, we were sitting in the car late this afternoon, and I caught a glint of something on her bottom gum, and wow, it's the top of a tooth! We'll try to get a picture to post tomorrow, but that's the news from Durant Street.

Fixes and Baby-Proofing

Lucy's newfound mobility and increasing speed are making us jump to the long put-off babyproofing of 83 Durant. I'm installing outlet covers on the outlets in the pink room, dining room, and her room. We also bought a couple of baby gates. They're pretty much useless at the moment, as none of the doorways in our house are square, thus making the "pressure mount" fixtures useless. We're going to have to do some modding to make them work. Fingers crossed.

We had to replace the deadbolt lock on the basement door. It unfortunately broke in the "locked" position, so we couldn't open the door. We use our friend Bob at Mill City Lock. He came and took out the old one, and then showed Jake how to install a new, double-keyed one. The term "double key lock" might have you thinking it some kind of release-the-missiles thing, but it just means that there's a key on both the outside and the inside (unlike a typical key on the outside and knob on the inside). This is good, since the basement door has a window.

Other than that, we've taken on a half-bushel of peaches and half-bushel of tomatoes (that's a bushel o' produce for those of you counting along at home). We've made salsa, soup, and sauce from the tomatoes, and done some yummy things with the peaches (such as eating them just as they are, and saucing them, and cutting them in half, filling them with nuts and brown sugar, and baking them). Jake is working on canning the sauces right now. Right now, while it is 85 degrees out with 99% humidity. Nice.

Lucy is eating more and more table foods. Apparently at day care, she demands to have the same food as the other kids, and has so far enjoyed pasta shells with butter and parmesan cheese, grilled cheese sandwiches, graham crackers, and ravioli. Right now she's chowing down on some peas and tofu. Yum!

Also, I made some barrettes for Lucy:

They're pretty easy. I used a few online tutorials:

Hair Clip Tutorial

Making Cute Hair Clips Tutorial

And of course, as with all things good and crafty in my life these days, the original source of the inspiration and further link-finding was Whip-up