Sprinkle On

Here's our sprinkler control system:

See all those sliders? Each represents a zone on our property. One of the reasons we don't use our sprinklers often is because I'm not good with numbers. As in, I don't deal with them if possible. See those numbers all over the sliders? Yeah.

So this is how I can actually deal:

I made a chart to show which numbers are which zones. It's probably an accurate way of seeing how my brain thinks - in colors and shapes.

Do you have the same dilemma?

Window Opportunity - Before and After

We woke up bright and early on Black Friday to spend the most on a project on our house to date. And we did it from the comfort of home. Sans internet. By now you've probably guessed from the post title, that it was new windows for the entire house.

Before:

After:

And we got them just in time. They are awesome and we couldn't be happier. So glad we didn't DIY this project...

Clearing Up the Air

I have a dirty secret. Literally. And it involves this:

(my furnace)

I have never changed the air filter in this thing since I've lived here. I have no excuse because I have pets. And eczema.

So that's where this comes in:

I ordered a 6 pack from Amazon. Not that kind of 6 pack. Or that kind either. Although I would be happy with either. Or both!

First take out 1 filter, and put away the rest. Then cut along the top to access the filter, but don't remove the plastic case completely (you'll soon see why).

Then head to your nasty old air filter located under your furnace:

Remove the old air filter*. And brace yourself:

How gah-rows is that? Big time yuck.

This is when you finally remove the plastic sleeve off the new filter, and carefully slide it over the old one:

Mark your new filter with the date you installed it:

Now slide the clean new one where you pulled the gross old one out.

Now toss the old filter and try to forget you let that happen. And then sit back and take a deep breath.

But before you forget the horror, here's one last look at how nasty mine was. *You saw right, it said '30 Day' on the old filter (and indeed it's been a year and half since we've lived here). Are you horrified? Did we beat the world record for air filter procrastination/ignorance?

Have you any similar horrors? Obviously, I won't judge...

Grout Out

I scrubbed the grout in the powder room. It was not fun. It pretty much sucked. And I didn't see a huge difference, but enough.

Before

After

Have you done this before? If you know of a less sucky way, please let me know!

House Decency - part 6

Since we had some electrical items on our to-do list, we had to turn off the electricity to the house. So we figured we might as well do all the electrical things at once (and during daylight hours for heat and light reasons) so that we only had to deal with the lack of power once. We rely on our modem for internet for music and entertainment. And to power our landline (cordless phones). And to power our coffeemaker.

1. The bathrooms were the only rooms left that did not have rocker switches and screwless outlet faceplates installed to match those throughout the house.

Before

After

2. The outlet in the kitchen in the granite was white. It was supposed to be temporary but we hadn't gotten around to purchasing the black GFCi outlet, even though we special ordered the ebony screwless faceplate. I don't have a before pic but here's the after:

That was supposed to be it on our list of electrical things to do. However in doing the guest bath upstairs we rewired wrong and it ended up controlling the garage's electrical work. And then in fixing that, we blew a circuit. We left our house in a very vulnerable state in search of replacement - with the garage door wide open, new motorcycle exposed, dog with broken leg at home uncrated, but we did leave the main breakers off.

Luckily the hardware store is only a few miles away and our favorite staff member (Jason) was working that day. And he knew electrical. And us. And the dogs. And the dogs love him. And I like to think we get special treatment. So we replaced the breaker and after a couple unplanned additional hours, we finally were able to scratch electrical off our list. BTW, circuit breakers are expensive! Those are the things they keep locked up in cases.


Plus it's annoying to reset all the clocks on the microwave, range, and clock radio, and coffeemaker*.

*Have you noticed that we are a household run by coffee? More specifically caffeine, because we use our electric kettle for tea as well. We are equal opportunity caffeine addicts.

House Decency - part 5

After sanding the joint compound, and then painting, another item on the list was caulking the gaps in various places. Here is the gap underneath the stairway banister:


Here it is now after a bead of caulking:


And around the corbels supporting the bar counter (see previous post for before picture):


I used the finishing tool that came with the removing tool. I don't bother with painter's tape. Very little effort and polished results. You just have to deal with having to say caulking.

House Decency - part 3

One of the first items on our list to tackle, was the hole in the wall behind the doorknob. The previous owners patched the area up a couple times, and even added a plastic stop there, but we decided we could do better than that (IOW, the right way):

First, we cut out the patched up area completely. Then we kept cutting until we reached 2 studs.


Look at all the patch gunk we discovered!




Then we cut out a a piece of new drywall to insert into the hole. We screwed errr nailed* the new piece into the studs.

We then went over the seams with joint compound and sanded after it was dry.



Then primed, and 3 coats of paint, and problem solved!

*Our battery to the cordless drill is dead. This is making life around the house really difficult. We could use a sympathy drill...

Stool Sample

This post has nothing to do with excrement. Although it shares the same color. Are you disappointed? It does however document my first time completely refinishing a piece of wood furniture. Actually any furniture.

These were given to me by a friend who had given up on them. I took this as a challenge and also felt too guilty to send them to a landfill. And knew that throwing them in the firepit would result in all kinds of colorful stinky fumes. And they were structurally sound and were solid wood (can you say NOT laminate? I guess I've been at Ikea too much?).

Before

After removing the gray paint, and the red paint beneath that

This was the worst laborious process, using chemicals, power tools, and elbow grease to strip. Multiply all those said processes by a jillion and enough cursing that made me wonder what I was in a past life. And then giving up for a few weeks.

After first coat of stain

After second coat of stain

The end result
(After two coats of polyurethane, new upholstery, and reattached seat)

Now the only question is, what to do with them? They're too short for our bar counter, and too high for our dining table (this was also a reason for lots of cursing). Does anyone need this? Want this? Have something to trade? Did I waste countless hours of my life on this? What is wrong with me?

Light Years Away

A while back we installed new outdoor light fixtures on our back patio. Here is the before* which were original to the house which was built in 1973 (that's 36 years ago!):


And here is the after:

We also installed dimmer switches for some nice ambient control. We picked these lamps up from Home Depot for a steal, and it looks way more modern than the previous ones. They're easy to install, just like any other light fixture.

Does it take at least 30 years off our home's age?

*These are actually our neighbor's light fixtures. I never snapped a pic of our old ones but they were exactly identical. You can tell that these are our neighbor's by the creeping fig remains.

For the Books

What I miss about apartment living, is finding discarded items from residents moving out. (Sidenote: this sounds like an opportunity for a list here. Perhaps that will be a future post.)

One of the items was a shabby chic-country-whitewash folding bookcase. Not exactly my style but my belief on storage is that you can never have enough, so of course I snatched it.


Here it is after a coat of primer:


And after 2 coats of paint and a coat of oil-based polyurethane:


I've had this for a couple years but wasn't inspired to paint it until I found a quart of "oops" paint at Home Depot for $1 in a sea foam green that I couldn't pass up. Lucky for the guest bath that I didn't have a gallon of it...

Have you transformed a free, discarded item? Any other suggestions on what to do with the rest of the paint, I still have most of the quart left. Do you have a sea foam green bathroom? Is sea foam green tacky or awesome? Does it work on a bookcase? Curious if the bookcase still folds (the answer is, not really)? Where should I put this bookcase? Bueller?

Red Door Treatment

A couple weekends ago, we spiced up our front door. It was a boring, just-like-the-rest-of-the-street white:

After 1 coat of paint it was sort of pinkish:

Finally, after 4 coats, it is now a bright and charming red (Valspar's Romantic Attachment):

The significance of a red front door:

• In early America, a red front door was used in the under ground railroad as a sign for the slaves traveling north that that house was a safe house.
• In China, it's tradition to paint the front door red before the new year, to invite good luck and happiness.
• In Catholocism, the red door on a chapel symbolized the blood of Christ, and other martyrs, to signify that the ground beyond the door was holy, and a sanctuary from physical and spiritual evils.
• In Ireland, front doors are painted red to ward-off ghosts and evil spirits.
• In Scotland when you paid off your mortgage you painted your door red.

Clearly none of these reasons were our motives. So why red?

Well there's plenty of red accents throughout our home with the brick columns, brick patio, fireplace, mailbox flag, fuzzy slippers, rubber spatula, Charles Shaw, border collie... so it was the obvious choice.

And I like it.

Purely aesthetic, no significant meaning - sometimes we're just plain shallow. So there.

But if you knock on our door, in need of a place to spend the night, we will happily oblige. But no guarantees this house is a safe house. We do keep dogs and booze here afterall.

The Dark Side

This week I turned this:

To this:

Bright red was fun for a while. Especially in the loft apartment. And as much as I love Christmas, I hated seeing it next to the green couches. Do y'all like red or black better?

Tier Up

Last week I bought this for $5:

And then I did this to it:

But what to do with it now? I'm not even sure what it is. Send me your ideas please.