House Made

sprinkler

Do you like our new shower fixture? It delivers a lovely spray in a pin-prick rainbow array to our bathing-suited and soccer-shorted selves. I am not allowed to show the photo of Beth showering in the backyard sprinkler (We have to since the bathtub is in mid-resurface.), but just use your imagination when I say that the freezing cold water made for the cutest little shivvery dance.

Oh, and Dixie thought we were crazy, hilarious, and that bounding around us in the spray was THE MOST DOG-FUN EVER NEXT TO SWIMMING WAHOOOO!

front door interior side

Now you see us again! Like magic, we’re back. What? Didn’t notice the radio silence? Well, we were on vacation for a week, relaxing in a little cottage in the redwoods, slightly sheltered from the zillion degree heat of the Russian River valley. But now we’re back in the Hades-hot SF Bay area and there is no lovely cool creek in which to bask while scoffing at the heat. No. Now we have 109 degrees and no AC. Gah!

Before we left though, I had a week to work on various outstanding house projects. Among the to-do items was finish and stain the interior side of our front door. Yeah, I did the outside, what, a year and half ago? Okay, but that side HAD to be done to protect the wood from the elements. The inside only had to be done to make it look pretty. So you see how it took a back seat.

This was the ONE thing of all my projects for the week that Beth wanted done. Needless to say, she is now VERY happy. Frankly, so am I. Dont look at the cat fur stuck in the varnish on the bottom.

Oh and here’s Dixie dog loving her vacation:

modcottage

Laurie over at 1951 Ranch Redo has been in the know for awhile since I gave her a shout-out early on for that freakin’ AWESOME patio bench she found. But it’s time to let the rest of you in on my secret. I’ve started…dum dum DUM…another blog.

Modern Cottage is a collection of stuff I find/buy/make/use/serve/love that’s home- and lifestyle-related, but not specific to the renovation of the Casa Chunkita on House Made.

I hope you’ll stop by and check it out!

nook chair rail

Finally, I got the chair rail up in the breakfast nook. (Breakfast nook/ office; potato/potahto) I can’t believe we’ve lived without it for two years. When we first moved in, we painted the walls 2-tone with the intention of adding the chair rail to match the one in the kitchen. Then other things took precedence and the chair rail moved to the back-burner.

Two years later, when I finally got started on it, I kept running into severe slow-down problems: outlets in they way; wall patching; wall texture; and oh yes, some p.o. painted the window trim with latex over oil paint which meant that I had to peel/scrape all that off before I could paint it to match the chair rail.

But now, all that is behind me and it’s finally, beautifully done. It looks, sing it with me, awwesommmmee. And that’s even with the gloppy paint job that I intentionally did to try to make it look like the original rail that runs through the kitchen. It’s weird to TRY to do a janky job, but it just didn’t look right all crisp and clean. Now dig on the creative shot of the light in my photo.

still painting trim

that goes:

well it’s on n on n on on n on
the beat dont stop until the break of dawn

So replace the word “beat” with “trim” and that’s my mantra. Dear lord, the trim. And I’m just working on the trim for the windows that are already done. There are still four more windows that are have yet to be torn out and repaired. You just knoooww they’re gonna want trim too. “We want trim like the rest of the house.” Whiney windows.

Anyway. So that’s been going on. And I did something janky yesterday. We have a huge window on the side of our house that looks out our dining room. One pane of glass is four feet wide and it’s the original warbley glass. I know if we try to take it out, we run the risk of breaking it. So I decided to repair it in place (thank God for extension ladders). Rather than reglaze the whole window, I scraped out the glazing on the bottom which was the only stuff that was bad, and trimmed it with 1/4 round. It looks a little odd, but you’ll NEVER see that window up close as it’s above eye-level on the crappy-alley side of our house. So I’m happy to say I’ll live with it. Don’t judge me.

sanding tub

Beth is what you call a damn trooper. She took on what turned out to be a completely miserable project this weekend. Our tub enamel is flaking so we could see that some P.O. had covered it with a DIY enamel kit. Given that we aren’t ready to put a bunch of $ in a new tub yet, we decided to re-coat it ourselves. (The underlying tub is brown and chipped.)

Since we needed a smooth surface to start, B peeled off all she could with a scraper then hit it with the orbital sander (which she has declared is awesome and may be her new favorite tool). She was at this hot, dirty, cramped-on-her-knees job for hours. And when she got done she was completely coated, down to her eyelashes, in fine irridescent powder.

She did a fantastic job though! It’s all smooth and ready for coating. And I’m so, so glad that I’m not the one who did it. I did get to spray her off with the freezing cold hose afterward.

green living room
Originally uploaded by merideth.

So for those clammoring for a photo of the new green paint, here it is. Bright and refreshing. The sun hadn’t gotten around to this room when I took the picture so it’s still in shadow a bit, but you get the idea.

We had great plans to get tons done on the house over the long weekend. My project list runs from the top to the bottom of the freezer door where it’s magneted. I was going to make huge progress on that. You already know where this is going since you see that I wrote “had” in the first sentence and “was” in the third. Yeah. We went to parties.

Ok, we did get the living room painted. (Benjamin-Moore, “Dried Parsley.” It looks awesome and makes the room brighter by a magnitude of the sun.) B was going to do that by herself while I worked on my own projects but the day was winding down when I went to check on her, only to find her still cutting in with her first coat of primer. So I jumped on her bandwagon and we got that finished. And I finally put the chair rail up in the office/breakfast nook. That’s it. I cut the pieces and nailed them to the walls. Ok, I filled the holes. Then, parties.

Oh and Dixie hates fireworks. And she told them so. A. Lot. Also the cat has a weird love for, and refuses to be dissuaded from sleeping on, plastic tarp covered couch. This renders him wet, sticky, and with full-body bed-head. The cat is a hit with the ladies.