House Made

new sofa
Originally uploaded by merideth.

The sofa of Beth’s dreams arrived and filled her heart with happiness. Beth is not good with waiting for suprises, so you can imagine the antsyness when we ordered the sofa and were given the delivery date 7 weeks out. Oh we knew it would take that long. But knowing didn’t help lessen the antsyness.

Fortune smiled upon B. The sofa was ready 2 weeks early. And then the delivery guys hauled it up our 2 flights of stairs 2 minutes in to the 2-hour delivery window. That’s a good day right there.

And what perfectly complements the new modern sofa? The coffee table with its fresh, modern, java, no-longer-hated-by-beth finish. Beth finished it just in time and it looks great!

And if that didn’t make things awesome enough, Gladys the kick-ass truck proved her worth by hauling the old sofa over to the consignment shop. Now, I forgot to take a photo of that, so I had to fashion something. It’s not perfect as I did it in like 2 minutes, but it looked pretty much exactly like this. I’m not sure which part of this day rocked the most.

me-relaxing
Originally uploaded by merideth.

That’s what we accomplished on the house this weekend. We’ve been crazy productive for the past few weeks and that means that this week was characterized by a complete lack of motivation. Oh and it was Pride. There is no working for Pride.

So we sat outside, and I thinned out my back issues of Cottage Living, This Old House, Sunset and Family Handyman, and we ate pizza, and we had the last of the homemade ice cream, and Beth moved all of our digital music onto a new gigantic MAX-TOR drive (you have to say it like that: MAX-TOR…like it’s an anime villian), and she started ripping all of our cds that aren’t already digital to mp3 and a lot of stuff like that. It was excellent.

And good practice for our ever-nearing vacation during which we will do nothing that contributes to our property value. (Dog + River + BBQ = Relaxation)

 
50s School Grammar
Originally uploaded by merideth.

I’m a graphic designer and artist. Beth is an artist. We both have a love for words (though Beth MAY one-up me on that one) and writing. So when Beth spotted these 1950s school-room placards at the fleamarket, they were so clearly a pot of gold that I wanted to shout “They’re always after me lucky charms!” and run away with them.

The cards show pairs of synonyms or homonyms with illustrative sentences beneath each word. They are cleanly printed in black, beautiful, crisp sans serif faces. The featured word in each sentence is printed in red.

They are so freakin awesome that we just want to sit in the bedroom and stare at them while discussing their awesomeness. Once again we throw a dash of modern into our craftsman interior. Mmmm. Delicious.

porch from right
Originally uploaded by merideth.

Lordy!! I cant believe how long this ended up taking me but I can finally say that you can stick a fork in the porch cuz it’s DONE. Well, the first part is anyway. I got the posts stained and sealed. Pretty! I got the various pieces of trim around the ceiling all nailed in and installed. Pretty! And I got the porch ceiling primed (3 coats) and painted (2 coats). Pretty! Oh and you know what sucks? Doing anything over your head, especially cleaning, scraping, sanding and painting 5 coats of stuff off the ceiling. I spent the whole time I was working on it being really, really sad for Michaelangelo.

I’ve been anxious to get the white up on the porch ceiling because I thought it would help the white garage door make more sense. I’m calling this success.

You will now look at many photos. And I didnt touch these pics with photoshop. The sky really was that blue!

Here it is all close up.

Here’s me “painting” with stucco. I decided to try touching up with a really thin mix of stucco (since the color would be a perfect match for the house) and it worked like butter.

And here’s a pic of the house from another angle.

Oh and Greg just reminded me. Here’s the “before” photo:

They both hate me but want my money.

Family Handyman, however, sucks specifically in that they won’t cash my checks, but they WILL keep sending me “Account Past Due” notices. Um WTF?!!

You know the magazine right? It’s one I frequently grab if I’m in Home Depot because it has lots of great tips and projects and I like that the person photographed doing the work in a few segments of each issue is a woman. Since I like it, I figured I should subscribe.

Okay. So I subscribe. They send my “welcome” bill which I pay by check in the return envelope they supply. About a month later I get the “you better pay or we’ll suspend your subscription” notice with a new invoice. So I check my bank statement and no, the last check to them wasn’t cashed. Fine. I send them a new check in the supplied return envelope with a note to destroy the other check if it turns up. So here it is a month later and I got the snotty “SUSPEND NOTICE, ACCOUNT PAST DUE.” So I look up my bank statement and, once again, they haven’t cashed the check. Both times I paid them using their supplied envelope and mailed the envelopes from the post office.

So what the hell, stupid Family Handyman? I’d love to subscribe to your magazine but I won’t just keep mailing you checks that disappear. I’d love to talk to you about it but there’s no phone no. anywhere and my email complaint has gone unanswered. It all makes you look like a small-time amateur operation. So that’s it for FH.

cottage living idea house
Originally uploaded by merideth.

For any of you in the area, “Cottage Living” will open its Idea House on July 13 in historic Evanston. It’s new construction, yes, but it seems to have a finger on the pulse of the past…in all the good ways.

If anyone checks it out, report back for those of us outside the area!

A little more info here: Cottage Living Idea House 2006

stained post
Originally uploaded by merideth.

I cant wait for “Weeds” to start. But that’s beside the point. (The title to this post is my homage to the song used as its theme fyi.)

Anyway, so the Front Porch Project Phase 1 is coming right along. I stained and varnished the posts and I’m pretty pleased with them. Even with wood conditioner they stained unevenly, but I think it adds to the rustic appearance of the whole arrangement which was actually what I was shooting for.

I got the last of the ceiling trim up and 3 coats of primer on the ugly light green beadboard. I can ALMOST see how it’ll look. So the closeup post shot here is to keep from ruining the suprise finish. And as an added bonus, you can see my picutresque coffee cup in the background.

Oh and you know what you have to use to cut in wood that butts up against stucco? Duct tape. One more use. Though we’ll see if if actually worked once I tear it off.

Next stop: white ceiling!

beth moving outlets
Originally uploaded by merideth.

EVERYTHING. Yeah. You already suspected that was the answer.

I’d planned to spend about an hour putting up the chair rail in the breakfast nook (which serves as the office as two people do not need four different places to eat) this weekend. I got the wood, spent a few minutes easing the edges so it wouldn’t look too new when installed, sanded the faces, and got all ready to install. Then I went into the nook/office and looked at the wall and remembered that the whole reason we’ve had our ghetto looking 2-tone wall for past two years is that there are two outlets right in the path of where the chair rail needs to go. (Grumble.)

So I asked Beth if she could put her projects on hold (She’s in the middle of refinishing our coffee table whose existing finish has suddenly become abhorrent to her.) and move the outlets for me. As a refresher, Beth took the electrician course at the homebuilder’s workshop and is now a rockstar at dealing with electrics.

So she got into the wall and, of course, found all manner of jankyness, weird threading, and random pieces of wood blocking all possible routes for relocating the outlets. With some problem-solving, creative use of tools and only ONE extra trip to the hardware store, she combined three messy (and might I note NOT aligned) outlets and switches into one neatly boxed arrangement that clears the chair rail. How I’ve lived without a regular light switch all this time I’ll never know. Beth rocks the most.

But that’s not even what took so long! What took so long was patching the aforementioned NOT aligned holes left vacant by the old receptacles. Siiiiigggghhh. So the end of this project has to wait until next weekend. Dammit.

You know who’s breaking into our house? Nobody. Our little neighborhood has progressed enough from its days as full-on ghetto to no longer require a cast iron safety set-up. So one of the first things we did was remove the ugly security bars from our windows and doors. (Actually I JUST finished the last portion over the weekend when I used a grinder to saw off one stubborn bolt that wouldn’t give up.)

Now, I realize some owners of old homes still require security bars. But what do you do when they dog-ugly up the house you’re trying to beautify? I stumbled across an answer today on another blog. Custom iron work from places like this.

I mean look at this. Tell me this isn’t a compromise you could live with:

back window trim
Originally uploaded by merideth.

I had visions of myself in a Rosie-the-Riveter style pose, standing, at the end of the weekend, in exultant triumph at having completed the Front Porch Phase I along with various other smaller projects. It sooo was not to be.

We’ve been working a lot on the backyard because, what with all our money going to the 1920s house and NOT to a 1920s Hearst-style luxury holiday, the yard is our vacation destination. So we’ve been tackling the projects that help make the back of the house cuter and more welcoming and fun.

With that in mind, I thought I’d get the trim up on the back windows before I took on the porch. It would help put the finishing touches on the back wall which, at that point, featured what I like to call “stucco spew” spattered up and down the existing trim. Pretty.

One million hours later as the great time-suck that is sanding, filling, painting and installing trim drew to a close, I’d accomplished what you see in the photo there AND NOT ONE OTHER BLEEDING THING.

I have to admit it looks pretty damned great. It helped cuten (it’s a word…see also “nicen” and “crapen”) up the back porch way more than I anticipated. Next week, the FRONT porch for reals!