Last call!

Here we are, late in the evening of the last night of my thirties.  When I wake up (hopefully not before 6am like I have the past several days), I'll be 40.  Egads.  I wish I could come up with something pithy or reflective or remotely meaningful to share.  I mean, I spent a bit of time reflecting on the past decade as I went about my errands and housework today.  There certainly were some big highlights - becoming a mom; becoming an aunt (several times over); milestone wedding anniversaries (10th and 15th); the passing of my last remaining living grandparent; selling our first house, buying our second and moving; rejoining the workforce after spending most of the decade as a stay-at-home mom; heck, even being on Jeopardy - but right now?  There's just one thing that is on my mind, and it is this:


I am fairly certain that we have a yeti living in our basement.  I have proof.  Proof in the vast expanses of greyish fur that amass in the collection canister of my vacuum cleaner every time I use it, like earlier this afternoon.  I mean, it just seems obvious that such insane amounts of what is clearly animal fur would come from a gigantic, highly hirsute source like this:

than from something that's smaller than a breadbox (though admittedly pretty fuzzy) like this:

Yep, that's all I've got for this evening, my yeti-in-the-cellar theory.  Clearly, old age has already begun fading away what few brain cells I have left.  (Also, it's 10pm and I spiked my milk with mudslide mix at dinner, so there's that.  Living la vida loca, for sure.)  Before I toddle off to bed, I'd like to make one last plea:


Won't you please, pretty please, with sugar and sprinkles and a cherry on top, please help me make my fortieth birthday wish come true?  You can read about it here.  (I know I've been asking with every post lately, but the good news is that tomorrow is the last day I can bug you about it...)  If you would please join me in doing 40 Good Things and leave me a comment letting me know what you did, I'll be the happiest 40 year old birthday girl ever tomorrow!  Thanks!

In which the kid breaks the house

Kiddo has been fortunate enough to have her own bathroom since we moved to this house.  We've been fortunate in that regard as well; it is really, really nice to not have to share a shower/tub with eighty zillion dinosaurs, Barbies, rubber duckies and other assorted tub toys, especially given the issues such tub toys and my nearsightedness have had in the past.

Anyhow, in Kiddo's bathroom (which is also the one used by any overnighting guests), there are three towel bars.  Two of them are on the walls in front of and next to the toilet and the third is in the tub area itself.  All three towel bars are set fairly high on the walls - she has to reach up to touch them.


Kiddo decided, shortly after moving in and beginning to use her bathroom, that it would be a most brilliant plan indeed to hang on the towel bars and/or the end pieces between which the bar itself is held.  Hubby and I both explained to her, on the several occasions in which we caught her in the act, that not only was this as far from a brilliant plan as possible, but it could cause serious damage to herself and the walls and she was (obviously) Strictly Forbidden from doing it, EVER.

Within the first year of living here, she managed to snap one towel bar - after several of the above warnings - and a second towel bar is now dangling loosely (of course she claimed no knowledge of how that happened) on the wall.  Clearly, our Strict Forbidding was only working for those moments when we were actually, physically in the bathroom with her to glare admonishingly while she was reaching up for the bars.  Hubby replaced the one bar and the second continues to dangle a bit precariously, while the third - the one in the tub itself - remained whole.


Around 5:45 yesterday evening (afternoon?), Kiddo went up to take a shower.  I started it for her, made sure the liner part of the curtain was inside the tub and then came downstairs.  Not one full minute later, there was a most tremendous crashing and clattering sound, followed immediately by  "MOOOOOOOOOOM!  I DIDN'T MEAN TO BUT I BROKE THE *incoherent sobbing*" that had Hubby and me racing upstairs.


Now, Hubby and I are lacking in the CSI type equipment with which to reconstruct the crime scene.  We have none of the fancy lasers or the fingerprint dusting kits or the swabs and chemicals to test with, but I'm sure if we did they'd have been positive for shenanigans, along with second grader-sized fingerprints and DNA all over the place.  Even without Grissom and his crew, we were able to deduce what had happened within the first few seconds.  Kiddo had apparently decided (once again!) to hang off the towel bar in the tub.  The towel bar that is made of the same substance as the tiles on the wall.  The towel bar that was one, molded piece.  The towel bar that was not just affixed to the wall, but actually into the wall.  We were able to deduce this because we found Kiddo standing in the tub, covered in bits of broken tile, grout and drywall, screaming and crying her head off, the shower still on full blast with the liner now out of the tub so that water was spraying onto the floor, the towel bar in pieces on the tub floor and bathroom floor and several shattered tiles in the tub and on the floor as well.  (Her living daylights, wits and bejezus, however, were nowhere to be found, because clearly she'd scared them completely out.)  Where the towel bar once hung there was naught but a gaping hole, minus several of the goldenrod tiles that had been there mere moments before.


I immediately turned the shower off, grabbed a towel and picked Kiddo up out of the disaster area, carrying her into our bathroom while Hubby dealt with the disaster area itself.  As I carefully picked bits of broken tile and drywall out of her hair and checked her over for injuries (none, thankfully), she began her Ultra-Super-Duper Symphony of Remorse, key of B♭ minor.  Sample lyrics include

"I am so, so, so, so, so, so, soooo ashamed" 
and its counterpoint
"I am so, so, so, so, so, so, soooo sorry" (repeat ad nauseum)

"I didn't mean to do it."


It was the "I didn't mean to do it" that helped me most to not just melt into a puddle of goo in the face of the full-on Remorse Symphony (complete with tear-filled, big brown eyes and quivering lower lip, not to mention an expression of abject sorry).  Because, as Hubby and I both tried to explain to her, it wasn't so much that she didn't mean to do it, but rather that she didn't mean to get caught.  She wasn't accidentally playing Nadia Comaneci using the towel bar while mid-shower.  She wasn't standing under the spray, industriously shampooing when all of a sudden an unseen being propelled her hands up and onto the towel bar.  She wasn't suddenly surrounded by prehistoric piranhas who came shooting out of the showerhead, forcing her to jump up and cling to the bar as her only means of escape.

Nope, she decided to disregard not only the many Strict Forbiddings and the historical precedent of Kiddo Swings/Flexed-Arm Hangs from Towel Bar, Towel Bar Breaks.  She was hanging from the towel bar because she darn well wanted to, and the 45 year old towel bar decided it had had quite enough of *that* thankyouverymuch and came flying off the wall, shattering as it went.


By the time I'd gotten Kiddo taken care of and deposited her, sniffling and weeping and still singing the Remorse Symphony, into her bedroom, Hubby had cleaned up the mess in her bathroom, which included at least an inch of water on the floor.  I fixed dinner for Kiddo and then put her to bed.  I also levied the consequence of her actions upon her: No puppy next year.  (Now, please note we hadn't actually ever said with 100% certainty that we were getting a puppy next year.  All we'd said in the Puppy Quest matter - Kiddo's nearest and dearest, most fervent and passionate wish is to get a puppy and another kitten, but really, she'd make do with our current cat so long as there was a puppy on the scene - was that we wouldn't be getting one this year.  Kiddo extrapolated in her extremely optimistic way that this meant we'd be getting the puppy next year for sure.  We hadn't specifically disabused her of that notion, though in the back of the grown-ups' minds, a puppy was far from a sure thing next summer.  Now, however, there is no doubt - there will be no puppy in 2011.  This is by far the most serious and dire punishment we could give to Kiddo.)  We had a talk about listening to one's parents and how Daddy and Mommy don't just arbitrarily make up rules because we can, but because we do, in fact, know what is best in terms of keeping Kiddo safe, sound, healthy and happy.  (Okay, yeah, I know, sometimes we do just make up rules because we can, but hey, isn't that one of the hard-won perks of being a parent, to enact the Because I Said So! rule?)


Hubby did some research on the repair job our new hole in the wall is going to require.  Now, the bathroom is on the (exhaustingly lengthy) list of Rooms to Be Renovated.  However, it isn't next or even next-to-next on the list.  So, we don't really have the energy, enthusiasm or budget for tackling a full-on renovation in there right now, which would include removing all the heinous, goldenrod tile and retiling both the tub/shower area and the floor, along with stripping the hideous, 60s-butterfly-n-sunflower wallpaper, replacing fixtures (which will likely involve a lot of rewiring as well) and replacing the faux-marble-with-gold-veins countertop with an actual vanity.  We don't even have the energy or enthusiasm to just tackle the tub/shower portion of that project right now.  So, Hubby is going to try to patch the hole in the wall (we can see clear through to the studs - yowza) and then put in replacement tiles (which won't actually match the goldenrod ones, but such is life - the new tiles will serve as a reminder to Kiddo of What She Did, I suppose) and regrout everything.  It isn't like we could really make that bathroom any uglier, anyhow, and that way it will be functional (albeit minus one towel bar) again.


So, thus concludes the saga of how we became a real life Hole in the Wall Gang, courtesy of one relatively small seven year old breaking the house.  I was heartened by the comments on my previous post, especially the one in which someone else's child broke their house.  It's good to know that I'm not alone.  I just hope this is the last time we are faced with a hole in the house that isn't one of our own, purposeful making!

Wipe Out!

Hubby and I took a break from Paintathon 2010 this afternoon to go outside with Kiddo and do a little bike ride practicing.

I present to you Before...

and After...

 

Yep, Kiddo got going good and fast heading down our street (she's still a little wobbly, so until she's mastered a more steady balance as well as the whole concept of "braking" so she's not doing a Fred Flintstone and stopping by dragging her feet on the ground, she's limited to biking in our driveway and on our street only) and she experienced her first major Wipe Out.  (For the record, she was totally Meryl Streeping up that pout up there, and it took four separate tries before she could maintain the "sad" face long enough for me to capture it.  Still, though, ouch to the large, skinned and bruised area on her forearm.)

I'm a little nervous because Kiddo has swimming lessons tomorrow after school, and in the past, boo-boos of any significance + pool water = MAJOR freak outs.  And this?  Definitely qualifies as a boo-boo of significance.  We've had freak outs over microscopic paper cuts in the past, so there's a precedent here.  I spoke to Kiddo about this tonight, because frankly, if she's going to get to the side of the pool and lose her shizzle, I'd rather not even go.  We decided that I will buy some large, waterproof bandaids tomorrow and she'll go to swimming.  We'll see how that works out........

Speaking of Paintathon 2010, here's a summary of what we've done in the past 10 days:

2 coats of primer for the downstairs bathroom
2 coats of primer for the living room
2 coats of primer for the front hall closet
3 coats of primer for the foyer
2 coats of primer for the dining room
2 coats of primer for the upstairs hall and downstairs stairwell
2 coats of primer for the trim for all the above rooms
2 coats of primer for the railings
1 coat of ceiling paint for the living room
1 coat of ceiling paint for the dining room
1 coat of ceiling paint for the upstairs hall and downstairs stairwell

1 coat of ceiling paint for the foyer
1 coat of ceiling paint for the front hall closet
1 coat of ceiling paint for the downstairs bathroom
1 coat of ceiling paint for the dining room and 3/4 of the living room
replace the light fixture in the dining room

As of the end of today, Hubby's got a Perma Claw thing going on with his right hand from so many hours wielding the paint brush, while I am a solid three inches shorter from multiple neck vertebrae getting compressed from rolling out the ceilings.  Also, we're tired!  The good news is we are pretty much right on schedule with our rather ambitious To Do list for this round of home renovations.  We've got two more weekends to get everything else done before the big Secret Agent themed birthday party (aka "Operation 7 Candles") and I'm thinking we'll get there.  The day *after* Operation 7 Candles?  We will be napping.  Majorly, majorly napping.

Hope your weekend was full of sunshine and paint- and boo-boo free!

Mostly Wordless Wednesday... reaching for the jumbo-sized ibuprofen bottle

The object: to master our newly attained wallpaper steamer to strip this -

(Isn't it hideous?!?  It was the pattern on the living room, foyer, stairway and hallway walls!)

The implements of destruction tools culprits who conspired to take me down -

(Actually, not the palm leaf.  It was merely a witness to the atrocity.  I just couldn't be bothered to move it out of the shot.)
  
The height from which I fell, while holding the scraper thingy in my right hand and the steamer thingy (the white, rectangular bit attached to the hose) in my left -

The result -

(Also banged up: my left wrist, elbow and hip and my lower back which had already been sore from yard work done earlier in the week.  Sadly, I don't have that many ice packs with cool, hands-free wraps.)

Ow.  Hubby has now promised me he'll bring the stepladder inside for me when I try to tackle the wallpaper stripping in the living room again tomorrow.

Yes, I am the Queen of grace and dexterity.  How could you tell?

The Pink Safari: Before and Almost After...

Kiddo's room as it looked the day we made the offer on the house:








Kiddo's room as of last Thursday, when we began stripping the Wallpaper From Hell:





Kiddo's room as of last Saturday:





Kiddo's room as of this afternoon, two coats of primer, one coat of ceiling paint, two coats of Kiddo-selected pink paint and three coats of bright white trim later:








Yet to be done: moving all Kiddo's stuff in and unpacking it, painting the louvered doors for the closet bright white and reinstalling them, finishing the trim on the windows (only have the sills done thus far), purchasing and installing new shades, hanging curtains, putting up the safari animal photo decals once the paint has cured and purchasing some sort of area rug(s) for the room. (Someday, sometime, we'll refinish the floor, but it's good enough for now.) Then the Pink Safari Bedroom of Kiddo's dreams will be complete, but at least we're most of the way there now. Kiddo will be able to move back in to her room tomorrow, hooray! (I'll just be glad to have her dresser out of the hallway and back in her room, so I no longer have to squeeze past it and reinjure the nasty bruise on my side that's developed by repeatedly slamming into the dresser's pointy corner over the past week!)


Now I just have to convince Hubby that we really do need to go to the Country Curtains store this weekend... he's about as excited at the prospect of doing that as I would be by the prospect of scrubbing out the kitty litter pan with my toothbrush...

Happy Fourth of July!

We're spending the Fourth indoors, prepping Kiddo's room for painting. Kiddo and I picked up 3 gallons of Princess Pink paint this morning while Hubby was busily patching a squillion and three holes in the drywall (nail holes, not gigantic holes, but holes that needed patching nonetheless). I attempted to help Hubby with the sanding project - all the walls and trim and basically everything except the ceiling and floor in her room need to be sanded before we can paint - but even with glasses and breathing mask on, I was a wreck after less than half an hour of sanding. My eyelids did NOT like it one bit and promptly got all swollen and painful. Yikes. I hung up my sandpaper and resigned, and shall paint my heart out extra-hard to make up for quitting this afternoon's project. *blink blink cough sneeze blink blink*

In the meantime, the sun is shining outside and I hope everyone else is enjoying the holiday, despite the cooler-than-normal temperatures in our area. (Hoping it's sunny and warm wherever you might be!) I'm pondering grilling in honor of the holiday, but leaning towards making pierogies as those are easier and less work than dealing with the grill.

I shall leave you to the rest of your holiday celebrations (well, my fellow Americans, anyhow - the rest of you I shall leave merely to your weekends!) with the musical work of that awesome group of patriots, The Muppets:

Paging the Knights who say "Ni!"

So, we're doing some yard work today. Lots of yard work. Yard work that has been utterly neglected since we've moved in, actually. Yes, I've gone out and mowed the jungle a few times (and now dream of a riding mower the way I once dreamed of George Clooney...) but there were other tasks that we just hadn't gotten to until today. Namely, weed whacking and hedge trimming.

It is the hedge trimming that is killing us. Well, technically, it is killing Hubby, not me. I'm just planting my forlorn little tomato seedlings in the barrel planter that appears to have housed annuals and a thriving ant colony in years past and mowing again, in between wrangling Kiddo with her various levels of "assistance" in the yard work tasks. Hubby is trimming the hedgerows and shrubs with our brand-spankin'-new, gas powered hedge trimmer. It is sucking the life force right out of him, mostly because we have Way the Heck Too Many Dang Evergreen Shrubs and also because no one had tended to them in a Very Long Time.

I'm investigating various options now, as Hubby heads back outside to tackle more shrub pruning. (I dare not point out how lumpy and lopsided the "after" shrubs are, for fear of him either quitting altogether or coming after me with the brand-spankin-new, gas powered hedge trimmer.) Ideally, someone would want to come and dig out the shrubs for free and recycle them to some yard elsewhere. Or, a professional landscaping company would want to charge a ridiculously small amount to rid us of the evergreen nightmare. I'm pondering putting up a post on Freecycle and Craigslist saying "Evergreen shrubs and pachysandra - you dig and they're yours!" I've seen it done for pachysandra before, but not shrubs. Hmmmm.

My last option is finding a bunch of Knights who say "Ni!" as I have a wonderful offering in my yard for them...........................

Mostly Wordless Wednesday: Before and After(ish)

The office, before we moved in:





The office, 3 weeks after we moved in:





The family room before we moved in:





The family room, 3 weeks after we moved in:





Yay progress!!

Just like Lewis and Clark, only with slightly less scenery and a lot more wallpaper

So, renovating our new old house has turned out to be quite the voyage of discovery, and not in a good way, most of the time. I keep waiting for the "wow, look at this Antiques Roadshow type ancient vase full of gold bullion that was hidden in the eaves for decades" type discovery, but ours have been more of the "oh crap, that's going to cost a lot more money and time to renovate than we'd thought" variety.

For example, the other night, I was having a grand old time stripping in the downstairs bathroom. Stripping wallpaper, that is, ahem. I hunched down to remove the last of the How Did This Seem Like a Good Decorative Idea Even in the Mid-60s?!?!? purple, floral print from under the sink and had discovery #1: the drain pipe under the sink was little more than a collection of rust molecules, held together with a bit of corrosion. Egads. I promptly summoned Hubby to corroborate my find, and he made discovery #2: there is no water shut-off valve on the sink. Double egads. This led to discovery #3 the next morning, when Hubby called me from work because it had occurred to him that perhaps that wasn't the only sink without a water shut-off valve and had me run around the house and check all the sinks: yep, there are no shut-off valves on any of the five sinks in the house. Quintuple egads! This meant that as soon as Kiddo had brushed her teeth and was headed off to bed last night, Hubby had to shut off all the water to the whole house in order to replace the corroded, rusted drain pipe and install a shut-off valve.

Now, I must digress for a moment here and give some major props to my husband. He has already done way more house-repair type things than any one person who isn't a professional plumber, electrician or contractor should ever have to even know how to do, from running wires from the basement up to all the rooms of the house to plumbing to replacing outlets to installing linoleum flooring to cutting humongous holes in the ceiling to allow duct repair work and then repairing the ceiling so you can't even tell there was a hole there. Hubby is not, for the record, a professional handyman or construction worker or anything of the sort - he's a financial advisor, for Pete's sake. Seriously, he is amazing. Thank heavens, too, because if he were "game to try but generally clueless and inept" like I am, we'd be totally screwed.

Back to the tales of discovery... Of course, within five seconds of Hubby announcing he'd shut off the water, I was overtaken with the simultaneous need to get a drink of water, pee, wash my hands, run a load of laundry and run the garbage disposal. (Which, by the way, I manage to turn on at least three times a day thinking it is the switch for the over-the-sink light. Which it isn't, no matter how many times I flip it on. How long do you think we'll live here before I remember that the first time I reach for the switch, rather than the fourth?) And here Hubby thought he was being smart waiting until after Kiddo was in bed.... he should've waited until I was sound asleep, too. Fortunately, he managed to get everything fixed and the water back on in short order.

Other discoveries we've made include the fact that 99% of the painted surfaces in the house (trim, crown molding, baseboards, wainscoting) are oil-based paint which requires a LOT more preparation to paint over than latex-based paint, and the above-mentioned duct repairs, which we realized we needed when we had our HVAC dude over to give us an estimate on sucking 44 years' worth of Oldster Dust-n-Such out of the air ducts and he quickly noticed that the air return ducts didn't actually connect to anything. Apparently the previous owners lived in this house for 44 years without having any air actually drawn back out of any rooms, but rather were getting their "fresh" air drawn from the spaces between the joists in the ceilings/floors (um, depending on whether you're talking about the upstairs or the downstairs rooms).

Another digression: yes, yes I am very impressed with my newfound ability to bandy about words like "joists" and "spackle" and "GFCI outlet" and "Shop Vac" with assurance and ease. This does not actually translate to any real-world expertise, as evidenced by my complete inability to relay the two things the HVAC dude told me to tell Hubby to him accurately, clearly or in a way that made any sense. (Me: "Um, so Rob said that we have to shave off 3/4 of an inch from the basement door when they put the carpeting down in the family room unless they do that automatically, and then he can cut a hole in the floor since the registers in the family room now don't go to anything." Hubby: "Huh?!?!" Me: "*big dramatic sigh* Rob said the door has to be taller and we can put the grill back on the register or cover it up but he can cut another hole to make a register that goes somewhere....?" Hubby: "Um, that makes no sense." Me: "Rob says call him.") I do love saying the words, though, especially spackle. It's a great word to say, you really should try it. Seriously - say it now, a few times, so you see what I mean. Spackle. Spackle. Spaaaaaackle. Isn't that great? And if anyone says "Um, why are you repeating 'spackle' over and over to your computer screen?" you can just say "Oh, I'm reading Heather's blog." No further explanation necessary.

Back to the list of discoveries (hey, did Sacagawea just walk by my window? - or maybe Norm Abrams?) we've made in the past three weeks... The bathroom sinks and Kiddo's bathtub are all cast iron. For Kiddo, this means she can't take any of her patented 45-minute-to-an-hour-long baths without needing me to run up to the bathroom and reheat the water twelve times because the cast iron sucks the warm right out of the H2O molecules. For Hubby, this means that when he is trying to remove the sink from the downstairs bathroom in order to put down the new linoleum floor, the sink will simply fall through the hole and go crashing to the ground, where it will sit as though made of gravity* until he has practically ripped his back and arm muscles out in order to move it out of the bathroom. Also, we appear to have a family of chipmunks living inside the walls of the house. Well, hopefully just the walls, and not the attic as well, especially with all the holes Hubby has to keep cutting into the ceilings - we may wind up with some new pets for Kiddo, and not of the canine variety she so desperately desires. I discovered the Chip and Dale invasion while standing on the back patio the other morning, and seeing Chip - or was it Dale? I never can tell those two apart - scamper across the patio, pause at the back of the house, and then shimmy his little chipmunk butt and tail right up into the teensiest, tiniest of holes above the basement window and disappear underneath the siding. This last discovery we are pretending we haven't found yet, as we won't have time to freak out about wild rodents dwelling in our walls for at least another week.

One other potentially devastating discovery has been the humidity problem in the family room. This is the room with the wood paneling that we've painstakingly painted over in Garden Moss Green with Bright White (yes, there are in fact eleventy million shades of "white" by the way) trim. Well, last week we were painting away - I believe this was the shellac primer layer necessary to get the wood paneling surface ready for actual paint primer (remember, I have no idea what the hey I'm talking about most of the time here) - and it was rather fumetastic, so we opened the windows to the family room. The same windows that appeared not have been opened since they were installed, judging from both what the previous owners told us ("we kept the windows closed - we're more AC than fresh breeze people") and from the archeological nature of the layers of cobwebs, dust and dead bugs found within the stuck-closed storm windows and stuck-open screens. Well, it was a relatively hot and humid afternoon and within a matter of two hours, instead of fresh air in the family room, we had puddles of condensation soaking the icky, asbestos tile floor. This resulted in the constant running of fans for over a week, various other "get the musty smell" out strategies being employed (Hubby's strategy: buy a volcanic rock/negative ionizer thingy at the hardware store, my strategy: buy an electric oil air freshener from Yankee Candle) and the purchase of a new, super-quiet, high-efficiency room dehumidifier that has been running constantly (and thankfully really *is* super-quiet, as we're going to be living with it in the family room for the foreseeable future). Can't exactly carpet over damp tile, you know...

So, yep, that's us, Hubby and Me aka Lewis and Clark. (Though I'd rather be Sacagawea - she was a veritable babe!) I'll leave you with one, final discovery, made by Hubby and photographed by me earlier this morning as we stood on the lanai (oh, and by the way, I find it utterly hilarious that Kiddo now uses the word "lanai" when speaking of the back porch. Cracks me up every, single time!) and gazed at the back yard:



Sorry about the maximized zoom = grainy, pixelated photography. That was the best my camera could do from inside the house. Yep, that's a woodpecker perched on the back fence (which actually belongs to the neighbor behind us, as do the lovely, flowering bushes you see and the neatly manicured lawn. Our yard is a mass of green: green hedgerows, green shrubs, green grass, green pachysandra - nary a colorfully flowering speck to be seen, except for my pansies and petunias on the front porch.) With our luck, he's gearing up for a summerlong feast upon bright yellow, cedar shingles...

So, what discoveries have you made recently in your neck of the woods?

* I wish I could take credit for the "sink made of gravity" line, but alas, I merely read it in a posting on Craigslist a week or two ago. It was a listing for a utility sink in someone's basement and the owner described it as being "made of gravity, I think, because I cannot lift it" or something to that effect. It cracked me up, so I had to borrow the phrase when the opportunity presented itself!

Heather = Little Miss Muffet?!

I totally am Little Miss Muffet! Well, except that she was sitting on a tuffet, and I was standing two rungs up on a stepladder, and she was eating a lovely bowl of curds and whey, whereas I was holding a container of primer in one hand and a paint brush in the other, and she just ran off (presumably) when the spider sat alongside her and frightened her away, while I shrieked like Ned Flanders upon seeing the velvet drapes in the Murder House episode and then flung myself backwards off the stepladder and onto the floor. Ass first, so at least there was ample padding.

So, yeah, totally Miss Muffet. Except for those few, small details.

Suicidal spiders (dime sized, black and hairy - FREAKY) plunging into primer aside, I made excellent progress in the family room, which is no small feat. Actually it is many feet - 23 by 15 square feet's worth. After I took Kiddo to school, I busied myself doing trim work that I couldn't do with the roller last night - the baseboards, mantel, doorways and crown molding, which is what I was working on when that dang spider dropped in and scared the bejeebus out of me. Then tonight, while Hubby got Kiddo bathed and to bed, I rolled out the ceiling. It was wicked hot and humid in the family room, even after I was able to open the windows (we had a bit of a torrential downpour earlier on this evening) and thus, I was "glistening" heavily (since we women don't actually sweat now, do we?) by the time I was done.

But I am done. DONE with the primer, DONE with the prepping, and tomorrow there will be GARDEN MOSS green going up on the walls. (Technically, it's on the walls a bit already as Hubby just started cutting in the edges in the office so I can roll it out tomorrow).

Herewith, a photo recap. I pondered the idea of reenacting Heather's Great Fall, but decided against it. I already am thinking I'll have a bruise the size of Antarctica on my rear by the morning - no need to add another continent to the mix!



With apologies to Lionel Richie:
Oh, what a feeling! Rolling paint across the ceiling!
Oh, and now I'm reeling - my arms and neck have lost all feeling!




Am I really *that* happy to be painting the ceiling, or am I just high on paint fumes? You be the judge! (Also - I managed to not get a single drip of paint on/in my face, so keep your comments about standing directly underneath the roller with my mouth open to yourself. Heh.)




Ta-da!!! All ready for Garden Moss! Yes, I *know* I look fantabulous. You're jealous, I'm sorry. We can't all look so flippin' hot - and I *was* hot! - while slaving away at the home renovations. I'm just special. Right? Right. Special.

Now for some carrot cake (and yes, it was from Cheesy Eddie's!) and then back to work. Tomorrow the electrician comes to install ceiling fans in our room and Kiddo's room, and I need to tackle the mountain of boxes and tubs holding all my clothes. They're towering about the room and I just keep rooting through them instead of, you know, unpacking them into the dresser and closet. It is getting a bit tiring running down to the garage in search of the necessary undergarments - have to remember to bring that tub upstairs with me when I go! Also must remember to take a few handfuls of Advil, so I have a fighting chance at raising my arms above my head tomorrow morning.

As much as I enjoy the Talking Heads,

I do not particularly want to live the words of their songs.

Specifically, this song.

And yet, this was a very real possibility, as we discovered last night. Hubby and I had been merrily priming away in the lower level of the house, and were listening to the radio via Kiddo's boom box, which we'd plugged in to an outlet in the downstairs bathroom and set up in the hall so we could hear it without tripping over it as we were already frequently tripping over and/or jabbing each other with roller poles in the office as it was. Later on in the evening, I stopped painting after finishing up the rolling work, threw Kiddo into her bathtub and started attacking the mountain of laundry that was threatening to avalanche and bury the floor of our bedroom. All of a sudden, Kiddo yelled "HEY MOM, WHY'D YOU TURN OUT THE LIGHTS ON ME??" I was a little bit "huh?" as I hadn't, in fact, turned out the lights, but I glanced up the stairs and sure enough, the hallway and bathroom lights were out and Kiddo was bathing in the dark. Further investigation showed that the lights were out in the master bedroom and bath as well. I called down to Hubby to see whether he had just turned off a circuit, as he was busy doing things in the basement and it seemed plausible. He had not.

This was the point at which we both became mildly concerned. Hubby had been pulling wires in the basement, but only the old phone lines that were no longer being used. We went over all the lines he had pulled and thought that maybe, just maybe, he'd jostled something loose, but it didn't seem to be the case.

We got Kiddo out of her bath and into bed, with her boom box restored to her room (she sleeps to a white noise CD) and then investigated further. Hubby had also removed the lighting fixture temporarily in the office while getting ready to paint the ceiling in there, but none of the wires seemed loose/shorted out in the fixture. The rooms that were missing power were not any one circuit. It was part of two different circuits, which was odd. We couldn't trace the mystery power outage to any one thing we had done. We were perplexed, and I was wondering aloud whether our electrician would make emergency house calls on a holiday weekend and how much that would cost, and Hubby was responding that we could surely live without power in half the upstairs "for a few days" (ummm, NO) and then he found the cause of the problem.

Specifically, this:



That'd be the outlet from the downstairs bathroom. The same outlet that our house inspector had noted (he tested every, single outlet in the house) had a reversed polarity and had suggested we correct, you know, eventually. Turns out it was more than just reversed polarity (which, for those of you who are like me and for whom even the vaguest of "technical" talk makes you say "whaaaa?" means that wires were not connected to the right thingies in the outlet, you know, like white to white and black to black). The outlet's ground wire was also not connected at all. Again, I'm not some sort of home repair and/or electrician-type wizard, but I'm pretty sure that whenever one is discussing "ground" connections in relation to electricity, that the whole "grounding" concept is pretty important. That the "ground" bit is what keeps lines from shorting out or starting fires or what have you. You know, stuff like that.

Hubby promptly killed the power and removed the outlet. (That's how we got the picture he took above...) We had already picked up a new outlet to replace the old one with anyhow, so he installed it, and then this morning he picked up a new switch and installed that too. Hubby reported that before he removed that outlet, he stuck the little outlet tester thingy (that I didn't even realize we owned) into both openings of that outlet and that the lower openings sparked when he did that. Yipes.

So, our final conclusion was that plugging the boom box into and then removing the boom box from that outlet triggered the problem that triggered the short that caused the power to fail in part of the house (whatever was "upstream" of that outlet). The problem would likely have been discovered eventually, probably by the house catching fire and burning down.

Whew. Close one.

Hubby is confident now that none of the other outlets will cause this same problem and that we have corrected the one thing that could cause the house to burn down.

I'm buying some more smoke detectors today and putting like three in every room. Just in case.

The joys of buying an older home........

Phriday Photo Phun - The object of my obsession

No, by "obsession" I don't mean George Clooney or Hugh Jackman or Alan Rickman, either. I mean the house. The site of Paintathon '09. The obsession with getting ready to list. Hopefully by this time next week, the For Sale sign will be up and maybe the house even will've been shown once or thrice...

Here's what we've been doing with practically every waking hour for the past three weeks. I don't really have before pictures, but here are some almost-completely-done afters for you:

This is our front entryway. I took this sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, looking pretty much straight up. Yes, it is that high. Hubby used a 17 foot tall ladder to get up there to take down the blind we'd had on that window and to paint (which still required an extension pole for the roller) as I spotted him, heart in my throat and praying the whole time that he wouldn't fall. Even Kiddo begged him to get down - little does she know he has to go back up there this weekend to install some kind of window treatment to that window (if anyone has brilliant ideas on that subject that could utilize a tension rod - Hubby doesn't want to install any hardware up there but wants something other than a bare window and I'm without any good ideas) and to clean the light and change the lightbulbs. Good times.



These are the freshly professionally steam-cleaned stairs to the second floor. I took this picture *before* the cat decided to start barfing up hairballs this morning all over the vast acreage of newly-cleaned carpeting. Yes, the cat is still alive, but only because I'm a pacifist at heart, as well as an animal lover.



The upstairs bathroom. This is the one color I wasn't thrilled with. It is "Hydrangea Frost" and looked more like a really, really lightly green tinted off-white in the can/on the chip, but came out much more yellowy green on the walls. I'm used to it now though (that's a new shower curtain and bathmat, and I have matching towels to hang up just for showing purposes as well).



The downstairs bathroom. Now this color - Tear Drop - I love. It too came out much bluer than a blue-tinted off-white, but it works, I think. Love it. Also painted the laundry room (right next door to the bathroom) Tear Drop.





The back hallway. That door to the right there is the door leading out to the garage. Up until two weeks ago, a little, wooden keyrack thingamabob was hung right above the alarm keypad. The furthest left peg is where I would always, always, always hang my keys upon entering the house and from where I would grab them upon exiting. Every time I came in the house for the past nine years, I'd shut off the alarm and hang up my keys in one, continuous motion. I cannot even tell you how many times in the past two weeks I've gone to hang my keys up on a bare wall (fortunately I haven't scratched the new paint at all by doing this), only to have them clatter to the floor as I round the corner into the kitchen. Apparently habits? Hard to break! (Cue Chicago here.....)



This is about where I'm standing as I realize that keyrack thingamabob isn't there and my keys are now on the floor.... Please notice the lack of cereal boxes and chip bags piled atop the fridge and the extraneous kitchen items stashed above the cabinets. Please do not notice the fuzz on the bottom of the fridge grill as I haven't cleaned the fridge yet (though I did de-art-gallery-ify it). Also, please note the pristine, gorgeous toaster oven. That came into my life just 24 hours ago, after Hubby finally admitted that we'd never, ever find a toaster like our 12 year old, been on its last legs for years now model and I should just go get a new one. It was beyond bad - it had unpredictable hot spots and cold spots and the occasional burst of flame. So, so glad to see that nice, new one in its place.



The great room, aka the living room. You have no idea how much furniture is gone - bookcases, Kiddo's art tepee and cubbies... also, many, many, many pictures and even more books have been packed up (another two bookcases' worth, plus 75% of the books that were crammed into the remaining bookcase) in the name of "decluttering" and making the space neutral. These were the walls I was rolling out during the Oscars on Sunday. To reach the peak of the cathedral-ceilinged wall, I had to jump as high as I could while extending the pole up as far as possible. Then Hubby had to come through with the stepladder and go over the top 2-3 feet. What can I say, Hugh was quite distracting...



The front door, newly painted "Garnet" which replaced a slightly purpler Mulberry that the builders painted it back in the day. We chose the color of our siding and then there were assigned shutter/door colors to match; in our case, navy shutters and the mulberry door. I wanted to paint the door a more definitive red this time around, but Hubby wanted to stick close to the original color, for ease of covering it without priming etc. Since the gallon of paint we bought for the door was our 19th gallon by my reckoning and primer for such a dark color would've had to have been tinted and therefore meant a 20th gallon, I acquiesced.



This is one of three outdoor light fixtures we replaced. We paid for this one, but for the other two (a pair of motion-sensitive security lights on either side of the garage), we had an amazing thing happen. See, we bought those two lights at Lowe's about eight years ago. Over time, the little plastic bits that covered the sensor area cracked and broke. They still worked, they just didn't look as pretty. Since the lights still worked, we didn't really want to replace them (to the tune of $45 a pop) so Hubby inquired at Lowe's about the possibility of buying just some replacement plastic thingies. Turns out they don't sell them, though the manager of the lighting department made many calls to try to find out if he could obtain some for us. Mind you, this is eight years later and it isn't like we had the original boxes or receipt or anything. Plus, this is pretty much due to ordinary wear and tear, I mean those lights have been up for the entire time. Anyhow, the manager apologized for not being able to get us just those two parts and said we could bring the lights back in for an exchange. !!! So, Hubby took them down, brought them in and voila, Lowe's exchanged them for us for two brand-spanking-new replacements at no cost to us. How's that for good customer service? Yay Lowe's!!



And thus concludes the photo tour of the object of my obsession of the moment. Now I'm heading back down to the kitchen to clean the fridge and the rest of the cabinets, then finish cleaning the hutch and entertainment center in the living room. Tomorrow it is all about the windows. I'm glad I saved that project for after the cold front came through, since it is now down in the 20s and supposed to start snowing. Though, it was raining pretty hard all day today, so I couldn't really have the windows open today either...

Happy weekend, everyone! Oh, and if anyone has a good, cheap idea about window treatments for the Above the Front Door Window to Nowhere, I'd appreciate hearing them. Hubby's thinking just a valance, which I think will look odd. I bought a sheer panel for it but it is too long so I have to take that back tomorrow. I am voting for leaving it bare but Hubby doesn't like that. Le sigh. Oh - I should also point out that if you are out on the street and you look up at the Window to Nowhere, you can see (from the right angle) directly into the upstairs bathroom. So, for folks who like to walk around the upstairs in a state of undress and/or shower with the front bathroom door open, this becomes an inadvertent peep show opportunity. That was the reason we put a blind up in that window in the first place. I still say let's just be careful with our bathroom-door-closing and not worry about it. Hmmmm.