Small purchases and a big find

I went to Community Forklift today to look at their selection of pedestal sinks. I wasn't too impressed with the sinks, but I did find two cute things for a cool $3.18 (including tax).


$2.00 for this lovely schoolhouse-style opal-finish shade. At Schoolhouse Electric, this shade would have cost 17 times as much. Now I just need to find a fixture for the shade.


$1.00 for this adorable vase with green rugby stripes. Love it.

On a completely different note: Last week we had a guy from Porcelain Tub Restorations come to look at the tub in our backyard. He said it could definitely be re-glazed, so I think we're going to go for it. We discovered while he was here that there were no feet on the tub anymore. It's not much of a clawfoot tub without feet, so I took a look in the garage and...there they were.


Ladies and gentlemen, we have a clawfoot tub.

I don't hate it, but...

I don't like the color of our living room walls. So, what now? I painted two expensive coats of Benjamin Moore paint on those walls. The color was supposed to have gray in it. It was supposed to be saturated. Instead it has no gray in it at all and it's sallow--in Keith's words, "It looks like the color of a doctor's office." It's boring.


But my solution for now is to live with it, see if I grow to like it. It's doubtful, but I might. And anything is better than what it used to be.


Besides, we've got enough to do right now without painting the same walls all over again.

Boring updates

Things like painting or buying new furniture are exciting. Things like caulking around window and door frames are not. But that's what I've been doing this week for the most part. No pictures of amazingly painted walls yet. Instead, I've discovered new hairline cracks in the walls, due, I'm sure, to the insane humidity and maybe also to the small earthquake we had the other morning.


I did get a caulk gun at Home Depot a couple of days ago. It's a workout to use, but I feel like a home improvement vigilante while I'm wielding it. I also learned a useful little trick for keeping the caulk fresh after it's been opened. I screwed a wire cap on the tip of the caulk dispenser. (We had extras from our short stint as electricians.) Genius. Thank you, Internet, once again.

Painting: Phase 2

We have finally started painting. 90% of painting is prep work, and, man, did we do a lot of prep work. The walls still aren't perfect, but it's an old house and it's not meant to be absolutely perfect anyway. The contrast between before and after is what makes it so satisfying. For example, the entryway...

Before (This picture does not do the dirty-ness of this wall justice.):

In progress:

In progress-er:

The last picture is just with primer on the walls, but what a difference. Removing the weird smoke alarm with the covered wire running up the wall was a vast improvement (and that was all Keith, by the way).

Now, the opposite wall...

Before:

In progress:


What was that doorbell about anyway? Weird, right?

Finally, as I said, I'm painting the dining room black. One wall is now actually black, and I'm loving it so far.

Kicking some backyard backside

Once upon a time, there was an enormous evergreen bush in our backyard. This bush was surrounded by junk, junk that bred mosquitoes, mosquitoes that bit me and bit me and bit me.
Together, Keith and I slayed the bush, chopping it into pieces.

And freed the bathtub underneath.

But before we can live happily ever after, we have to figure out what to do with all those pieces of bush. (This is, after all, the second one that has been chopped down. The first one attracted so many flies you could hardly walk out the back door at all.)


And what to do with our newly freed tub?

Be our guest

The guest bedroom now actually looks like a bedroom. It's nowhere near what I want it to look like, but it's semi-furnished, which is pretty exciting.

Reunited and it feels so...cluttered

When my family visited, they brought a few of my things with them. I left a lot of stuff at my mother's house because, with my yearly moving from one small apartment to another, I had no room to keep it and no strength to move it. Now that we are semi-settled, my stuff and I have been reunited. That means we have lots of boxes, mostly full of books and more books, because I am a book nerd. But the best delivery by far was my bookcase, a beautiful mission-style number with glass doors.

We still have to put the glass doors back on, and I have to wash all of my grandmother's crystal and china, which was also delivered to me and will soon live in the lovely bookcase.

Also delivered:

A plant in better health than any I have ever tried to grow


Lots of vases and a small piece of pottery made by my great-grandmother

The desk and chair from my childhood bedroom (will be painted and get new hardware)

A bookcase (which will one day sit upright)