Back to Regularly Scheduled Programming

4929 has had quite an unscheduled hiatus. With a now-four-year-old to raise, a new baby on the way, and a new blog to maintain, the original got left behind for a while. But I have updates. Quick ones for now with more details later.

Refinished floors upstairs

A new rug in the living room

A new, bigger dresser for Jack's room

A newish rug for the nursery, which will soon have a baby in it, too

Good-bye to you

Blogspot and I are parting ways. Irreconcilable differences. The new blog is here:

4929.tumblr.com

New stove dance

I am so happy. So very happy. We've said good-bye to the old stove.


I find it hard to describe how awful and disgusting our stove was. (The above picture does not capture the wretchedness.) The previous owners left us with a mouse problem that then left us with lots of mouse...excrement, especially in the stove area. A mouse would sometimes pop out of or into one of the old gas burners. No amount of cleaning with bleach could really make us feel good about using that stove. (I am gagging right now just thinking about it.) And, aside from it being a mouse toilet, the oven door took a bodybuilder to open, the oven knob was screwed up so we couldn't tell what temperature the oven was on, and the burners didn't work very well. It had to go. And I literally clapped my hands in celebration when the delivery men took it out of the house.

And replaced it with this bad boy.


Okay, "bad boy" might be pushing it. The stove is not fancy at all. It was on sale at Home Depot for $300. But it's new, it's clean, and Consumer Reports says Hotpoint ranges are reliable. That's all I need right now. Maybe someday we'll have a fancier range with lots of bells and whistles. For now, I'm just thankful that it's mouse free (and hopefully will stay that way since I stuffed all the holes behind the stove with steel wool) and it works the way it's supposed to. Hooray!

Most wanted

Music balloon

Almoco Black Flatware

Star Wars cookie cutters

Demo complete

The eyesore closets are gone. All three of them. Now only the debris remains--and there's lots of it. (And some of it fell on me as I was tearing the last closet down. Oh, also, I hit the light bulb with the big piece of wood pictured below...oops.) But it is amazing how much bigger the rooms seem now, even with all the pieces of closet scattered around.


Though I'm happy the closets are gone, removing them has revealed all kinds of new work for us to do. For instance, there are many holes in the walls from the unnecessary number of nails and screws used to build the stupid closets. Seriously, who needs to put this many screws this close together?

Then, there's the mystery pipe in the corner. What is/was it for? Where does it go? I have no idea, and I have no idea. But it's there, along with a hole in the floor, a hole in the ceiling (that I imagine bats might fly out of), and some lovely water damage to add to the unending list of water-damaged areas.


Still, the closets are gone! Right now, nothing else matters.

Like a rainbow

This is a windowsill in the guest bedroom. Lots of shades of paint have lived on this sucker. It was once tan, then teal, then reddish pink--and that was all under the top layer of off-white that Keith scraped off. But when all the scraping is done, the painting begins. And when the painting is finished, it will look beautiful. Like this:



The baseboards in the guest bedroom are complete, and they look so shiny and new. Can you believe that not long ago they looked like that windowsill?

Say hello to my little friend

Meet the reciprocating saw. Good for demolition. For instance...

The crazy former owners (CFOs) built two closets on either side of a small room in the back of the house. While all their other DIY attempts were low quality, something about the closets inspired them. Maybe they really valued their clothes, but for whatever reason, they built these closets so sturdy that we were starting to wonder if they kept people locked in them. Needless to say, it's been some work tearing them down. Keith spent a day dismantling one, and I spent Veteran's Day trying to tear down the one pictured above, which was even more sturdily built than the other one.

I realized, sadly, that I didn't have any before pictures of these monstrosities. But luckily, there's yet another one in another room that I do have a picture of.

Imagine two more of these, except they were faced with fake bead board, painted white, and had mirrored sliding doors. The CFOs even covered up half a window to build one of these things. I seriously don't understand those people. But at least they gave me a reason to use my awesome new saw.