Sunday, December 23, 2012

Gifting a la Our Feet May Leave

Hello all, please pardon the spotty posting of late-- we've been traveling cross-country on our annual Oh-Hey-That's-What-My-Loved-Ones-Look-Like-I-Almost-Forgot Transcontinental Tour.  And like Thanksgiving's meatless post, this one's not a house one (tough to post about house projects when you haven't done any).  So if you don't want to read about my solution to the annual gifting dilemma, skip away!  We'll be back in January with an update about the slate fireplace (we laid it before we left, and like everything else we've done, it was a learning experience).  But for now, Homemade Gifting 101: 

Homemade gifts are great for so many reasons.  First, making something is cheaper and easier than buying something.  Second, you're not saddling your loved ones with gifts they'll never use.  And from my end, our little house doesn't have unlimited storage space, and you all know my occasional tables are always chockablock full of crap-- there's just no place to put thirty-seven scented candles and jars of body lotion and coffee-table books and all the other stuff you give people when you don't have much money to burn.  But we always, always have room for dessert, so homemade gifts are great.  I've experimented over the years, often in collaboration with my culinarily-gifted sister.  Generally it's peppermint bark, but a few years back it was jalapeƱo pepper jelly (not sure my Michigan in-laws quite knew what to do with that one, but we Southerners love it over cream cheese), and once we produced a batch of chocolate-covered pretzels that turned out looking a little odd but tasted great.  

Last year I made dog cookies.  Yep.  You see, my dad's whole side of the family is composed of Dog People.  Not freaky human-canine hybrids, mind you, but people who really, really love their dogs.  So  instead of making candy for my grandmother and my aunts and uncles and cousins, I decided to bake treats for two dachshunds, a cocker spaniel, a lab/chow-chow mix, a corgi mix, a Parsons Russell terrier, a couple of golden retrievers, and assorted labradors.

Homemade gifting is a two-part process up in here.  First, the baking, which is totally boring, and the only good part about it is that it usually involves having a glass of wine with my sister (and if you haven't done that, I recommend it, because she's totally awesome).  

Second, the packaging design.  Now, I should mention that I'm slightly obsessed with aesthetics.  Right now you're talking to a girl who spent eight months designing her own wedding invitations and sweating every detail (and had them letterpressed very affordably and beautifully by Mercurio Brothers) and then promptly stopped caring about all other elements of the event planning.  I love fonts and little bits of clip-art.  I mean, I LOVE them.  It's probably not healthy.

So anyhow I usually put the finished treats into some sort of kraft-paper box and then tie on a cool ribbon and attach a tag.  Here's the tag design from last year's dog biscuits, which also included a recipe-- making dog cookies is super easy and I thought the families with little kids might enjoy it as a Mommy (or Daddy, we're very progressive here at Our Feet May Leave) and Me type of activity-- and a little dog-bone-shaped cookie cutter:


At press time I'm currently putting the finishing touches on some lovely three-layer peppermint bark and a little Rocky Road bark (that one turned out really ugly-- it LITERALLY looks like dog poop-- but it tastes pretty divine) and I'm tossing around some ideas for my tags.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a tasty holiday!


Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Once More Into the Bathroom

Okay, so my awesome DIY bathroom-soffit-removal-and-wall-repair project kind of went awry at the last second.  

I'd taped and mudded and mudded and mudded and mudded and mudded and sanded and mudded and blah blah blah you get it.  It was looking pretty damned good: 


And then I started celebrating prematurely, which is always foolish.  

It was time for the last super-easy steps: spraying some orange-peel texture and painting my beautiful handwork.  I was barely even paying attention-- honestly, I was probably daydreaming about what a home-improvement badass I am and how much everyone totally envies my skillz.  What could possibly go wrong?  So I didn't even flinch when I ran out of orange-peel spray.  Back at the Home Depot (kind of like the Bat Cave for a girl who's mid-reno), I picked up a can of orange-peel spray identical to the one I'd been using.  No sweat.

So then I got the can home and I followed the instructions and did EXACTLY what I'd done with the previous can.  Except instead of a nice manageable stream of little texture-bits, I got enormous crazy chunks of orange-peel shooting out in every direction.  Not kidding-- it somehow managed to get ALL OVER EVERY SURFACE in the bathroom, including my face, which was behind the can.  How exactly does that work?  Then it coughed politely and the chunks just started running down the can.  

Like they say, pride comes before a fall.  I was heartbroken, and I also needed a break from the bathroom.  I decided to let it dry and just paint it.  I'll fix it later.  And honestly, it's really not THAT unbelievably horrible:   

 Obviously the ceiling isn't painted and the paint is drying in this photo, which leaves a weird light-dark impression that makes the whole thing look worse than it really is.  

And just for the record, yet another first-day shot (after we'd removed the shower door and the blinds that were about 4in too wide for the window on either side)-- this with a just-took-it-yesterday-and-forgot-to-zhuzh-the-hand-towel-and-straighten-the-blinds-but-I-think-you-get-the-idea shot for comparative purposes:






Sunday, December 16, 2012

Something Like Before and During, Part 2 of [INFINITY]

We've been in our house for just over four months now, and we've come a really long way.  In fact, we frequently talk about how the place doesn't look like the same filthy rental we bought in August.  A few fun facts:

1.  When we first moved in, we had to change our socks 3-5 times a day because the floors were so gritty.  My mom and I each mopped the entire house three times and we STILL couldn't go barefoot.  It took about a month of several-times-daily cleaning before we could go to bed at night without first washing the grime off our feet.

2.  The floors and bathroom weren't the only things that were utterly filthy.  On the day we closed, I took a few photos to commemorate the grossness.  Enjoy:


Living room walls, ick.

 Baseboards in dining room, ugh.


Door between kitchen and dining room, blergh.

 Ceiling vent in master bedroom, gross.

3.  In addition to the few things you've seen on the blog, we've done a lot of invisible and outdoor work.  For example, when we moved in there was a 9-foot-tall hedge along the property line that completely obscured the house from the street; we later found out the neighborhood kids called our place "the haunted house" because they imagined that all sorts of creepy stuff was happening behind that hedge.  We actually had no idea what the house looked like, and when Ray chainsawed the hedge down to waist-height two weeks after we closed, I was pleasantly surprised to discover it was kind of cute.  And it looked even better after we painted the front door, removed a screen door that didn't fit and was actually TIED to the front of the house, pulled out an old dead bush which was also TIED to the house with bright-blue nylon rope, and put up house numbers.  Some photos:

Dying bush AND screen door tied to the house.  Seriously, who did that?

Believe it or not, you're not looking at a photo of a car.  See the roof there on the left?  Yup, that was the view of our house from the street when we bought it.  AHHAHAHAHAHAH!

 And now you can see the place, which we think is an improvement.

4.  There were no house numbers when we moved in.

5.  We had to call a plumber on day two of home ownership when we noticed the hookup for the washer was leaking all the hell over the place.  At which point I promptly burst into tears because we were obviously in way over our heads-- the place was filthy (see Exhibits A-D above), the yard was like a jungle, the plumbing was bad.  Luckily Ray talked me down from the ledge.  I went back to cleaning, Ray went back to clearing the yard of its rogue blackberry bushes and bamboo clumps, we gave the plumber $250 to stop the leak, and now we're all happy-- especially the plumber.   

Thursday, December 6, 2012

Little Bit O' Progress*

Ever since we moved in nearly four months ago, our foyer has been a little bit sad.  I mean, I call it a foyer, but it's actually a 4' x 4' square right inside the door.  Anyway, it's been looking kind of downtrodden with its inappropriately tiny $2 IKEA doormat:



Womp womp.  This picture also shows one of my least-favorite things about the house, which I've mentioned before: the mismatched doorknobs.  One of these days I'll get motivated to replace all the huge shiny brass knobs (like the one on the entry door) with small old antique brass knobs (like the original 40's one on the coat closet door), but until then I'll just die a little on the inside every time I touch a monstrous 80's "update" one.  


Anyway (aside to Mrs S: ennyWAYS), on Monday I made a pilgrimage to the local Target and scored three Nate Berkus bath rugs for $5 each.  They weren't supposed to be $5, but they were mismarked and the nice Target-ers offered to sell them to me as marked.  Whee!  I also bought a larger jute-and-gray diamond patterned rug.  Ever since last month's attempt to layer one rug over another, I've been thinking I'd like to try it again on a smaller scale.  Years of working for J. Crew have left me completely unable to leave the house without a "third piece" on my body, so why shouldn't my floors get all the benefits of the layered look?  

This morning I tossed one of the Nate Berkus rugs on top of the jute one.  This photo's colors aren't great (you can't at all see the pattern on the bottom rug), but in person it looks pretty awesome:



And then I decided to throw an old mirror (its frame was black when I paid $39 for it at T.J. Maxx last year, and I painted it gold just 'cause) on the wall just to see how I liked it:

 Hey you guys!  That's me in the corner, that's me in the spotlight...


And I'm kind of feeling the overall effect.  This way we can stop on the way out the door and make sure we're presentable, and it's also reflecting one of my favorite vignettes in the house: our old bookcase with its books arranged by color.  You can sort of see it behind me in the photo above.

Another vista, this time with my halfhearted attempt at mantel decor (I really wanted a shiny reindeer to go up there with my cedar garland, but I couldn't find on anywhere, and I have some stray lights dangling on the side, yeesh):


Side note: something I DO love about this house is that it has two electrical outlets over the mantel; to plug in the Christmas lights all I had to do was take my Henri Cartier Bresson print (bought at the Benaki Museum in Greece in 2003 when I worked on an archaeological excavation in Athens) off its nail and lean it on the fireplace.  Voila!  Outlet still covered, lights plugged in.

And finally, another mini-update: several weeks ago at T.J. Maxx (this is becoming a theme) I spotted some orange flame-stitched pillows.  I tried to resist them, because I really have no good place to put two orange flame-stitched pillows, but they were so, erm, affordable that I wound up bringing them home.  They've been hanging out on my bed ever since, and while they probably won't stay forever, I have to admit I kind of like the crazy pop of color in what is otherwise a boringly neutral space:



And also, I hate using the flash on my little point-and-shoot since it makes everything look yellow as hell, so please pardon the chiaroscuro effect in the photo above.


*Aside to Mrs. S:  Little bit o' problems, little bit o' problems!