Conditioner is Not Just for Your Hair

Turkey-day in t-minus 2 days! I know, none of you people are even reading blogs right now - you're probably going crazy prepping and buying and what-not. Me, I'm "lucky" enough to have work start getting hectic in the last week or so. Not that it's bad to have stuff to do (hey, I'd rather be busy than not busy - we've had enough layoffs for one year, thank you. Even my BIL's girlfriend got laid off last month).

Anyway, lest you think I've let my home improvement projects go by the wayside, I am here to tell you "fear not!" I have been trying to get stuff done here and there. On Saturday, we hit up Lowes, since I had an almost expired coupon from Discover Card for $10 of $50 and on top of that they are giving me 10% cashback on Lowe's purchases through the 30th. Seriously - don't they understand home improvement stores are my kryptonite? Sneaky bastards. Anyway, so we dropped about $200 on baseboard and one more pack of door casing, wood for the fireplace mantel (exciting!), stain for the mantel, and some awesomeness called Floetrol.

Behold:


Now, if you've ever dealt with latex paint on wood trim or furniture, you know about the whole brush marks and never getting a smooth finish. No Floetrol is not paying me to sound like a commercial. Trust me, with a readership of 16, sponsors are not knocking down my door. Anyway, after reading a post the Nester linked to about this blogger that painted her dining room furniture black and insisted that you should only use oil paint for this type of job, I remembered that oil paint is getting phased out across the country due to the fact that it's kind of nasty and caustic with the fumes, and it only cleans up with equally smelly stuff like paint thinner and mineral spirits (how can something with such a nice name like "mineral spirits" smell like such ass?). I thought: how could the EPA ban something like oil paint if there is no other viable alternative? This led to getting sucked into the Google Vortex searching for information about paint. I found out that you can add paint conditioner to latex paint that will help it lay flat! Holy Smokes! Where was this information when I attempted to paint my stools with high gloss paint only to end up frustrated with brush stroke marks all over it?

Here is a close up of a section of casing I did with the Floetrol. Maybe not the easiest to tell - but the finish is quite smooth.


One thing to note is if you use this stuff, it does make the paint a little more viscous - meaning, loading up the brush can sometimes lead to paint dripping everywhere. But it's a small price to pay for nice flat finish.

Hump Day Update

Quite honestly, I don't know what to say anymore about all these blogger ladies* I follow popping out the babies (not to mention non-blog friends). Seriously. Lots of pregnant-ness going on. Starting to make me all atsy like I'm going to miss the train or something. Y'all are making me nervous! But, again, quite honestly, I don't know that I want munchkins yet. I am the only butt-head in my household working (yes, I know the argument of "there is never a good time to have a baby" but this is very much not even remotely close to a "good time"; it's not even a "just ok" time). I will not give into the baby peer-pressure yet.

* Katie, Tooj, Sherry, WI, Dooce

Speaking of peer pressure, I did get pressured to join the good cause of donating my cheek skin particles to the bone marrow donation registry at the beer festival we went to this past weekend. Nothing like getting accosted by do-gooders at the beer garden entrance and told sad stories about children with leukemia when all you really want to do is get in there and get some tasty brews and instead are kinda bummed out for the next half-hour. But it is a good thing to do, so I said, "why not?" and signed up. Is it wrong to now hope that my good karmic gesture get returned to me in some form, like, maybe a job for The Husband? I know, (a) it's very un-karmic/disingenuous of me for that to think of that way, and (7) I've likely just repaid some previous karmic bad-debt I had. Feh.

The house stuff is moving along, slowly. We installed casing on the doors and I've been caulking up the gaps and such over the past two weeks. The plan is to buy baseboards and fireplace mantel wood this weekend so maybe we'll have that stuff done before year end.

Alright, good folks of the interwebbings, I had a little too much Diet Coke, and pee fairy is calling.

A Post With Lots 'O Pictures

In case you were just sitting on the edge of your seat, wondering where I am in my fireplace revamp, I am here to assuage your anxiety. Right. Yes, I am sure you were just writhing in agony from the unknown.

Well, I am here to tell you: it ain't done yet. It's a really fiddly update. Everything is taking forever and requires a patient hand. A reminder of what this bad boy looked like, pre-destruction.

After I installed the stone veneer, notice the scratched up area near the stone courtesy of the brick mortar that was removed, and the drywall mess on the sides:


First step was to get me a can of black high heat paint. Spray paint was not really an option - it would be damn near impossible to tape off and cover all the stone and still reach all the nooks and crannies. So paint and little brushes (cheapo brush kit from the Depot) were the plan of attack.


I removed the doors and, holy living cripe, they were filthy. Gave 'em a good cleaning and two coats of that paint (before reading the instructions that said additional coats were not recommended. Oops. Whatever, looked like dog terd with only one coat).


I also replaced the old, partially broken, handles with rustic pulls from Lowes, $3.97 each. Better than a poke in the eye with a stick.


Then came patching up the drywall. I am not sure that was better than a poke in the eye with a stick. That part took 3 days, with all the coats and waiting to dry and such. After sanding:


As for the texture, again, the spray can orange peel stuff would have been hard to apply without spraying the stone and we already talked about taping off jaggedy edged stone. Good luck with that, because I'm not doing it. I still have half a 40 pound bucket of drywall mud left over from the kitchen reno so I watered it down in my mud pan:


Then took an old kitchen sponge and applied it randomly to the wall:



Hey, it's not a perfect match but it's close enough. I also caulked (with the clear, paintable variety) any gaps where I wasn't able to get the drywall mud into.

Then I got to painting (which, by the way, friggin' Glidden changed their formulations midway through the painting of this room, so this area was the old formulation and then I got a new can of the same color and it is just different enough that it's kinda noticeable. In the dining area, I basically have to repaint two walls so that it's not all splotchy. Meanwhile the Depot paint people were like "Glidden has said it will look the same". Right.).




And here is where I'm at today. Notice the dusty floor. Fabulous. We still have a mantle to create and stain (matching the floor), molding around the hearth to hide the flooring expansion gap, and baseboards. And also new blinds. It never ends.

Medicine Cabinets?

Like many 80's tract houses, we have these bo-ring medicine cabinets implanted into the wall, on the side by the sink. So, not directly in front of you as you wash your hands, but on the side with yet another mirror, which to me seems odd.


Sorry for the flash - I didn't have the time to figure out how to take the picture without potentially blinding anyone who looks at it.

It provides some storage (not a huge amount) and it doesn't necessarily look bad, but it just seems weird to me that there is yet another mirror that is not really usable unless you contort your body to the side and if you stay in that position too long you end up with a charlie horse.

This bathroom, and the rest of them really, are going to get an overhaul at some point in the next 6 months or so, starting with the downstairs. I'm going to rip out the ginourmous mirror and replace with a smaller framed one, switch out the countertop for something tiled (that doesn't extend over the toilet), and get new cabinet doors with recessed hinges. I'll keep the cabinet frame, sink, and faucet, to reduce costs.


The other thing coming out is the horrendous 80's fluorescent light box.


Hello, Demo-With-a-Reciprocating-Saw! That has got to go - we have these light boxes in all three bathrooms. The Jack-and-Jill one upstairs has a light bulb (really, it's a tube) that is on its last legs and when you turn it on it's all psychedelic flashy. I should have a warning sign for any epileptics who might use that bathroom to exercise caution. Maybe not turn on the light when washing their hands. Seriously, these fluorescent light box fixtures suck and it's even worse that they are built-in with 2x4's and drywall. Makes replacing them that much more involved.

Anyway, what I'm wondering now is what should I do with the medicin cabinet? Leave it? Drywall over it and just have a wall with no medicine cabinet? Some kind of recessed storage? And is building out and trimming up recessed storage really worth the effort for the amount of storage it buys? I can't go any deeper into the wall there - the other side is the hallway into the garage...

I Have Been Known to Be a Ham...

Sooooo. I have the house to myself this evening and I went a little silly with the sound recorder on my laptop (since I would likely catch a lot of slack from the Husband for making a bunch of noise and also for recording myself). Girly Stuff mentioned something about not knowing if I sounded like Michael Stipe playing some obscure song (I can't remember what she wrote in her comment a while back), and I decided to subject you fine folks to my vocal prowess. Ha! Well, actually, it's an attempt at playing guitar and singing. Now, in all seriousness, I have only been playing guitar for about 2 months so cut me some slack on that part.

I had to put a random picture of something in order to create a video file since Blogger does not allow upload of sound files and after much research, I decided this here work-around would do fine.

Anyway, it's Angel From Montgomery, the Susan Tedeschi version. It's fairly easy to play though when you combine singing and then being aware of the fact that you are recording it and you would rather not screw up, it adds a bit more difficulty. At least for me.



Enjoy. Or stab your eardrums out with number 2 pencils.

What's Shakin' Bacon

Well, really, I have become boring. At least that's how it feels with this blog - I have nothing interesting to tell you good folks of the internets. But rather than leave you to listen to crickets here, I'm going to post about what mundane activities I have partaken in since the Great Craigslist Toilet Acquisition.

In answer to Girly Stuff, I haven't used a black toilet, but I actually saw one for sale on Craigslist and I was like "Now why would you ever get totally black bathroom pieces?" I don't like the idea of "hiding dirt" on a toilet. Picking darker flooring or darker fabrics for chairs to hide dirt is one thing, but a toilet needs to be a light shade so we know when to clean it, damn it. There. My two cents on dark toilets. I grew up with an avocado green one which was bad enough - luckily, one fine day it broke and my father replaced it with a bisque-colored one but kept the green seat!! Seriously, I'm all for reusing but there is no way I would have reused the avocado green toilet seat with a new bisque toilet.

One of the toilets has been installed as of yesterday - and, as always, it didn't not go 100% smoothly. The upstairs toilet used an old valve where the line to the tank was fused to the actual valve. And with our very hard water, when the Husband attempted to remove it, it broke from the corrosion. So that extended the install another 2 days (researching problem, buying the new valve, shutting off the water to the house, replacing, etc, etc). It works well and looks more spiffy than the other new one downstairs, though the seat is chair height which some people (you tall folks) like but when I sit on it, my feet dangle. Such is the life of the vertically challenged. I can't even catch a break on the john. Iffin' we have little ones, they'll need a stool to use the potty. I'm already making their life difficult.

In the kitchen, I have been dutifully installing the toe kicks on the cabinets. It really is a fiddly process - I have only one little bit left to finish, so, hopefully this weekend, the toekicks will be done and all that will remain is baseboards and then I can say the kitchen is completely done! More than one year in the making.

In which I Talk Yet More About The Potty

I know, you are like: "Enough already, woman, we are done hearing about the bathroom" or if you are a New Yorker if may sound more like "bat-room". Also, it involves Craigslist and you know I haven't talked much about Craigslist here on this here blog. Right.

Seeing as my house is 22 years old, things in it tend to go tits up right around now (plumbing, dishwasher, master closet railings, etc). Note to anyone looking at 80s houses - expect stuff to stop working on somewhat of a frequent basis. The latest is the guest bathroom upstairs. The in-laws were here and used said bathroom on a daily basis. Around day 2, the toilet sprung a leak where the tank and the bowl connect. I was reassured that it only leaked when flushed as if this was no big deal. So as long as we don't plan to use the toilet, it's fine. Considering we seem to have an overnight guest at least once a month, it didn't seem like a viable route to just not flush it. Rather than fix an old-ass toilet that likely uses more than 3 gallons per flush, we figured might as well replace her with a water-efficient model. They run about $100 for a 1.28 gpf model, so, not a huge deal.

Here is where Craigslist comes in. I really had no expectation of finding a toilet on Craigslist, I mean, seriously, even if it was water conserving, the idea of buying someone else's USED toilet crossed my boundaries of frugality. Though, when you buy a house that isn't new, you are technically buying the seller's used toilets. Just a thought. Anyway, back to Craigslist. For shits and giggles, I searched "toilet" in the "materials" section and up popped a posting about new 1.28 gpf toilets for $50. New-in-box, complete toilets. It's like the Craigslist Magic Fairies decided I needed a good deal on poopers. Turns out, this woman was stuck with boxes and boxes (at one point 226 of them) of new toilets in her front-yard that had essentially been abandoned. Her story was that as a favor she agreed to store them (I guess it was someone she knew or some company of someone she knew, I didn't quite understand the situation entirely) since the job wasn't ready to install them yet. It sounded like it may have been a retrofit scenario when the state was giving away high efficiency toilets to certain building owners/administrators (like multi-family apartment buildings) so the old hogs could be swapped out, thus saving the owners water-bill money and also helping out our drought situation. 226 toilets in her front yard. That must have been a sight. Anyway, after she tried to contact the owners of the toilets for several months without response, she sent a final letter informing them she is considering it abandoned property and started selling them. Because how long can you live with that many boxes of toilets hanging out in your front yard.

So, for the price of one new toilet at the home improvement store, I got two. I figured, grab 'em now and just replace the master bath toilet as well. She was down to about 8 boxes when I got them so I guess I timed it pretty well. Still haven't found a weedwacker, though. I like how Girly Stuff referenced her husband as her weedwacker. Mine is too, except, we have a big slope in our yard - not sure how far back it goes but it's at least 20 feet high at the top. It's full of dead overgrown (2+ feet high) weeds from winter rains. It's damn near impossible to manually pull them up so he needs to use a power garden tool. Our old one decided to stop turning on about half-way through the job of clearing out the whole slope. I guess it had enough wacking.