Diamonds: not a girl's best friend

Before everyone goes out holiday shopping, I wanted to point out this statistic published in this month's This Old House magazine: 85% of women would rather get $5,000 in home renovations than a set of equally valuable diamond earrings. I'm definitely in that majority!

So guys, if you buy your girl some jewels, don't be surprised if she hawks them to get a new deck, or have the floors refinished, or start a kitchen re-do. That is, unless you bought her a diamond-encrusted tile saw so she can do her tile project...

Our first bungalow DIY

All right, in between raking leaves all weekend, here's an entry to another contest (we could really use the $ for upcoming bedroom renovation slated for this winter).

The question is, what is the first thing we did as soon as we got the keys to our house? Well, after we had the lawyer kick out the grown son of the previous owner (who had broken in because his plane got in late and he didn't have keys, and needed to get a few last things from the house! Surprise! as he came up freshly showered from the basement bathroom when we arrived for our pre-closing walk-through!), we lugged over our sleeping bags, some champagne, and some snacks and we all planned to sack out in front of the fireplace - our favorite pigpile with cats & dog seemed in order.

Settling in by the fireplace with a desk lamp and extension cord (there were no lights in the living room), I realized there was no way I could sleep in front of the hideous 1970's-era brass fireplace screen. Ugh, I can hardly even look at this photo:

"Can we just rip this off right now?" Ken knew that it was kind of a rhetorical question. So, off it came (with all the wrong tools and a lot of swearing). Then we sat in the fireplace like Cinderella, scrubbing ages of crummy soot off until it looked reasonable. Here it is now, after lots more work:

Then, sleep. It's amazing we were able to wait another 48 hours before we tore the horrible green brain carpet off the stairs!

This post was written for Houseblogs.net as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by True Value.

I want this vacuum!

In our city, they come by and vacuum up the leaves in the fall & spring. Such service! Actually, it happens quite a lot in this neighborhood; when we lived in the ghetto section of town, I don't remember it at all. Hmmm. Maybe it was just that no one bothered to pile up their leaves.

At any rate, we got a bunch of leaves down to the curb in time for one of their passes, and I snapped a photo of the most awesome vacuum ever. Yes, that hose is big enough to engulf that guy. Can you imagine the dust bunnies you could suck up with this thing?


If the weekend's not a total washout, we hope to get the rest of the leaves to the curb for the next pass. This year they're paying special attention to the leaf removal because trees in our area had leaf Tar Spot, a fungus that was widespread because of our wet summer. Apparently if we compost the leaves or keep them around, it's more likely we'll get it again next year. So, removal it is this time.

Turn up the heat!

Apparently it's time to crank up the pellet stove, or so say these two heat-seekers:

Tomorrow is supposed to be pretty warm (in the 50s!), and it's a day we have to hike for work. Even though we really should be raking the yard, etc. instead. Hopefully we'll get that pesky raking done before it snows - again!

Getting ready for winter

The storm windows are in, the stove is fired up, and it's getting cold.

This guy feasted on all Ken's remaining sunflower heads. While doing amazing acrobatics. Who'd have thought that he could perch atop sunflowers taller than us, hopping around like he was walking on clouds. With a full belly, hopefully he's ready for winter.

Hey, Moe!

If you've read this one before - sorry you have to look at my legs again. (Ick). The story's back for a contest - and we could use some financial help now! So, bear with us! More (new) material soon.

This post was written for Houseblogs.net as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by True Value. http://www.startrightstarthere.com/

A friend recently commented that the projects we post on the blog are all so nice and inspirational. But behind the scenes, our projects are much more like a Three Stooges episode.

Take tonight for example.

I spent all day finishing sanding all the little annoying cracks and crevices on a dresser I recently bought for Ken's birthday (it's not a surprise, obviously). After dinner, I did the final sand and began staining it.

As I walked around from one side to another, the stain can slipped from my hand and splattered all over the garage floor, several tools, a big tool box, the chop saw, and me.

At that very moment, Ken came walking out of the house - he had answered the phone and was bringing it out to me. Barefoot. As I hollered about having a stain emergency and I couldn't talk, and he began trying to explain it to my mom on the phone, he stepped on a weirdly-shaped wood scrap in the driveway (leftover from the other day's fence-capade) and shouted as he hurt his foot.

He hustled my mom off the phone (I called back), and came over to laugh at my leopard-print self (and grump about the tools, which I later cleaned).

Of course, I was in the middle of staining the dresser so I couldn't stop - so I threw an old pair of pajama pants on the mess (they were in the rag pile) and kept going. I ran out of stain - it being all over the floor - and had to use the stain-soaked pajama-pants rag from the floor to squeeze out the last little bit of coverage. Happy Freakin' Birthday, honey.

Once I finished, I wiped off all the tools off and went in to shower. Yuck. After ruining a loofah, a nail brush, and giving up, I stepped out of the shower only to have a huge moth fly right into my wet hair. Superb.

So, here I sit in my pajamas, ready for bed at 8:10, as soon as I finish this margarita while keeping my stainy feet off anything important.

Tomorrow we'll start over in a (hopefully) less Stooge-y way, and attempt to finish the back fence. That is, if we can keep from clunking our heads together long enough.

Good night!

Privacy, please!

Every time we have guests over, we remember that the guest room door doesn't close all the way, and we add it to the list of things to do. Somehow, it never actually gets written down on the actual list of things to do - and we forget. Then, guests are over again, and doh! we forgot to fix the door. So they have limited privacy, and run the risk of having cats but in & wake them up, or the dog breaking into the room while we're out and eating their belongings (e.g., a clean (thankfully) baby diaper - sorry Daniel!).

We've had guests the last couple of weekends - the last of the summer season before we button up the house - and somehow I remembered to fix the door before they arrived (ok, so it was like 3 hours before they arrived, but still before!

I did a bad, bad thing and planed the top down until it fit. I always feel guilty doing that after swearing about other people doing it - but we had tried everything else in this case. So I planed and made a huge mess (in the room I'd just cleaned) for about 45 minutes. The door closed!

But it didn't latch. It was going to be one of those projects. Ugh. I noticed that the little latch was not going into the strikeplate - a common problem, and it usually is rectified by shimming out the strikeplate. After we removed about 8 metric tons of paint from the trim, things tend be a bit slimmer. So I got to try out an idea we had.

Last year, we were thinking about shimming out strikeplates, and we thought it might be a clever thing to use a piece of leather as the shim - it's easier to cut, we could get brown (and not have to stain it), and you could easily add multiple thicknesses. Plus, if you make a mistake, you can easily trim it or make a new one.

So we bought this hideous (leather) purse at the thrift store for like 25 cents*. And then it sat around in the closet for a long time (carefully stashed lest someone think I would own this thing). Here was the opportunity to try it out. I cut a piece out of the flap, traced the strikeplate, and reinstalled it with the leather shim behind it - which worked out perfectly.

Unfortunately, though I think the shim was necessary in the end, it turned out that the strikeplate was too low on the jamb and the latch still wouldn't grab! So, back to the garage for the chisels, I re-cut the mortise, then reinstalled the strikeplate and leather shim - and it stayed shut! Finally, some privacy for guests. And it only took about 2 hours - 1:55 more than I estimated. As per usual.

* There's no cents sign on a keyboard? Huh.