House Made

Somehow or another I totally jacked up this post…suffice it to say I finished staining the pergola with the hateful oil-based stain and it looks good.

jeebus.

beth vs. the insinkerator
Originally uploaded by merideth.

So I called my dad to ask him if, when your garbage disposal goes enhhhhhhhhh and then stops, whether you should call someone to fix it or just go get a new one.

He said, go get a new one and “you can probably get Beth to get under there and install it.”

Oh, how right he was. After picking up our new Insinkerator Badger 444 from Home Depot, Beth said “I’m pretty excited about this project.” When we got home, she tore out the old one, installed the new one, and had the thing spinning its evil blades well before I’d unloaded all the groceries. Very impressive as always…and look how she’s getting a little tan from the yardwork.

P.S. Should you decide to install an Insinkerator yourself, the directions don’t tell you that you need to remove (by banging a hammer on the end of screwdriver), a plug that stops up the dishwasher connector. You’ll notice a problem when your dishwasher fails to drain and you open it with a “what the?!” Fortunately, this inability to guess that a plug exists has happened to many home diyers and simple instructions for the fix are available online (seriously, bang it out with a hammer and screwdriver). Lord love the internet.

Just so you know, we HAVE been working on the house. We just haven’t had anything photoworthy or really whole-entry worthy to put down. Dirt, plants, stain, spackle, sand, blah, blah, blah.

But, we did make a trip to the salvage yard this weekend. That place is just good fun. (Someone was buying these ridiculously cool corner built-ins that had spent their past lives in a 20s dining room when we were there and I got all nerdily happy at the thought of them being reinstalled.) Annnnyyywwayy, we were there because, as the entry title implies, shoes are heavy. Yes, as we were prepping for our dinner party on saturday, I found that the little bedroom’s closet door was hanging askew and opened it to find that our mighty shoe rack (mounted on the inside of the closet)had skinned the door. (Flayed the door?) The door skin of the hollow core door that somebody put there was skinned right off. Since we were already planning to replace the other hollow core bathroom door, we figured the time was ripe and went to the salvage yard.

We found one door that’s a perfect match for the others in the house and one that’s frankly close enough. Of course they’ll need to have…mmmmm…80ish years of paint stripped off them before we re-paint them (yes, we like our white trim), but they’re lovely, solid wood, and cost all of 127 bucks. As my mom would say, you can’t beat that with a stick.

Day one – seeds planted
Originally uploaded by erg1976.

We  haven’t had a grass lawn (shoulder-high weeds don’t count) in our back yard since we moved in a little over a year ago. We wanted a lawn — it’s so much nicer than a giant dirt patch — and spent much time analyzing different sods, and were they drought-tolerant, and was one softer?

And then we figured out how much sod costs, and what you have to do to prepare for the expensive sod. We also figured out just how mad we would be at one unnamed mutt who would dig up the sod as part of her daily routine. (It’s amazing how much we have to consider the one-year-old pup when planning the beautiful yard.) So instead, I turned over the dirt on the designated lawn portion of the back yard the other day, raked it out, spread some seed around, and got a timer for the hose so that it can water the dirt three times a day. The timer cost more than the seed.

We shall see, but I am optimistic that the little seeds will grow…and at least a balding, patchy lawn is better than no lawn at all. And the dog can destroy it a little if she needs to…I’ll just plant more.

my rosemary on my walls
Originally uploaded by erg1976.

Some of the e-card sites have taken to completely making up holidays. Wednesday, according to Yahoo!’s greeting cards site, was “Just Like Your Mom” day. I already have a head start on this as I already look just like my mom (not kidding — people have been known to gasp and then be confused about how she looks so young after 30 years). We’ve always shared common interests, but I thought I would never be just like my mom because I won’t be, well, a mom. I don’t speak in the “momisms” that have crept into my sisters’ vocabularies when speaking to their children. No “because I said so”s or “we’ll see”s have escaped my lips because I don’t commonly reason with toddlers or teenagers. When someone comments that he/she is bored, I don’t immediately find a task for him/her.

But since becoming a homeowner, “Just Like Your Mom” day is starting to be every day. I’ve been known to be excited about a short rain as it makes weeding so much easier. I love the washing machine to a mildly unreasonable degree. I find little piles of my house papers everywhere that no one can disturb or it might ruin my “system.” Mostly, I’m fond of referring to my garden as “Darwin’s Garden,” a term my mother uses to describe her lack of pampering for any particular plant as if it needs that much love, it will be usurped by the hardier, more independent neighboring plants.

Luckily for me, I do not fear turning into my mother, as she’s an amazing person, but find this progression amusing. I’m hoping my piano skills improve, although I have to admit I’m not looking forward to the loss of all computer skills.

I love you, Mom!

swing
Originally uploaded by merideth.

So this weekend we hung the porch swing that we put together a few weeks ago. Okay, but here’s why it’s so romantical: Beth got this porch swing for me as a Christmas present the first year we were together. On the back, she did this:

Could it be any cuter?!! No. No my friends. It could not. We’ve had it in storage since 2000 because, as we lived in San Francisco in a 1920s converted store, we had no place for a porch swing.

I spent yesterday staining (officially hate oil-based stain) the stand so that it matches the swing. It was just raw pine and this photo does not capture how way better it looks now. (I hadn’t yet trimmed the chains in this photo.)