Sunday, February 24, 2013

Two Down

Now that we've finished the master bedroom, we're completely done with reno in two of the rooms of our nine-room (counting the hallway) house.  I thought I'd take advantage of another sunny day in Rain-land USA to take a couple of photos.  First off, here's what we saw the first time we walked through the house in June of 2012:


Nice curtains, right?


On the day we closed, we ripped out that cabinet:

 

The above photo also shows the ill-fitting yellowish blinds, weird lack of baseboards, and shiny walls.  Anyhow, within the first three weeks, we'd fully removed the cabinet and patched the walls (twice!) and changed the blinds to the white faux-wood plantation variety we've put in the rest of the house. 

This photo corresponds to the first one in the post-- it's the view from the door.  I'd estimate that this was taken in early September.  Then I painted the dresser light gray and added my favorite old Persian rug:


Then we installed baseboard and hung some art, and I bought some orange fame-stitched pillows for the bed, and at some point in there I bought some charcoal-gray velvet curtains that I subsequently returned because they were too dark.  Instead I'm currently using my old living room curtains from New Haven (tan hidden-tab blackout-lined oldies-but-still-okay-ies from Target), which I'll change out when I find exactly what I want (probably fabric to make my own, though I also have my eye on some from West Elm).  This photo also shows that we replaced the old boob light with a woven shade pendant, though I'm still not 100% sold on that, it's fine for now.  And I picked up a new duvet cover on mega-sale from Urban Outfitters last week.  So here's the view from the door as of this morning:


And here's a different view:


Still have a few decor adjustments to make, but I'd say we've come a pretty long way since August...

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Shave and a Haircut

No indoor projects to report on this week.  I blame this guy:


You may recognize him from a post way back in October-- he belongs to our friends.  When they go out of town, we always jump at the chance to host him at our place for a few days.  He's incredibly charming and polite, and seriously-- look at that face.

For obvious reasons I've been hesitant to bust out my painting supplies and attack the ceilings in the hallway, bathroom, and guest bedroom (all of which are shiny and yellow, ugh)-- it's just not good form to get paint in your borrowed poodle's lustrous curls.  And I felt weird about sewing with him underfoot too-- what if I dropped a straight pin and he stepped on it?  Am I just using him as an excuse to be lazy?  Maybe.  He likes couch naps almost as much as I do.

But we have been busy.  As I've mentioned before, our house was a rental for several years before we bought it, and during that time the lawn got a little wild completely insane.  When we first moved in, my dad detached a dying honeysuckle bush that was literally tied to the front of the house.  The following week Ray attacked the nine-foot hedge that had been obscuring the house from the street and ripped out the first of three epic clumps of bamboo that were on the chopping block.  Since then, he's pulled out the other two bamboo blobs, cleaned up the overgrowth on the left-hand side of our driveway, cleared the huge impassable thicket of blackberry bushes on the right-hand side of our house (literally, they were so overgrown that he discovered a five-foot-high metal gate hidden in the middle of them), denuded our massive buckeye tree of the ivy that was strangling it, and removed endless bags of leaves from the property.  Lest you wonder what Ray is doing while I'm fixing the bathroom ceiling, look no further than the yard.  Believe me, he's been busy out there.

Flash forward to today, the rarest of all things-- a sunny-ish Oregon winter day.  This is going to sound crazy, but we thought we had these two enormous trees on the left-hand side of our backyard until we discovered yesterday that they are actually two normal-sized (for the Pacific Northwest, anyway) trees that have been completely taken over by ivy.  Our pest-control man told us that the trees underneath would eventually die because of the resource-stealing ivy, and if they fall, our roof is toast.  Today we decided to hack some of the ivy away and try to figure out what we were working with.  Behold:



See all those leaves?  They're not from the tree.  They're from the ivy.  You can see some of the tree's branches popping out of the ivy towards the top.  Yeah, we thought the leaves were part of the tree too.  So if you look carefully you can see Ray in there detaching some of the ivy from the left-hand tree with 1) a hand saw, 2) clippers, and 3) a pry-bar.  The pile of ivy behind him represents half an hour of bushwhacking to get as far in as he is in this photo.  Doesn't LeBaron look concerned?

Here's another view:


Yes.  That is ivy.  Two different species, in fact.

Deep in the ivy thicket, Ray encountered a third (much smaller-- maybe 6" in diameter) tree heavily covered with vines.  It was leaning, so we decided to remove it.  Ray cut it in half, and when he tossed it onto the ivy pile, this is what we saw:

I don't know if you can tell this from the photo, but the tree rotted away a long time ago and is completely hollow-- only its bark, held in place by the roots, remains.  The ivy murdered this little guy.

We decided that the best approach would be to cut the ivy off from its ground-roots by cutting a full circle around the tree-trunk (which was not visible because the roots were covering it so thickly).  Here's what it looked like after Ray cut all the way around it-- see the darker, narrower trunk the in center and the lighter gnarly roots lower down and higher up?


The other thing you're seeing in the photo is our fence, or what's left of it.  Like I said, the ivy was so thick that we'd never seen this section of it.  The ivy has actually pulled the fence out of the ground and is pushing it over into our yard.  Hello, Little Shop of Horrors.




Above is a wider shot of the progress.  That dirt-pile behind Ray was once a huge (maybe 10ft high?) bamboo clump that was just randomly in the middle of the yard for no reason at all-- it'll get grass-seeded in a few weeks.  Anyhow, see all those hanging vines to Ray's right?  See the poodle-butt on the left?  Hehehe.

So this is a totally overwhelming project that will probably take one million years to complete (our town offers yard-waste pickup service once a week, so we've been operating on a fill-the-bin-wait-a-week-fill-the-bin schedule to remove our plentiful yard debris), but we're eventually hoping to make the left side of the backyard match the much-more-civil right side:




Yep, we've got a lot of work to do.  And yes, we see the ivy growing up that tree.  We're on top of it.

Friday, February 22, 2013

Rattitude

Disclaimer: you should not read this post if you're eating or if you plan on doing so at any point during the next 3-5 days.  

If you've been hanging out with us here for any length of time, you know we have a little problem in our attic.  It's actually kind of a big problem.  This is what it looks like:




It's a roof rat.  See the pointy nose, floppy ears, and body-length tail that distinguish him from your run-of-the-mill Norway rat?  On his own, he's maybe even kind of cute, right?  

Unfortunately, we have more than one living upstairs.  (Praise Jesus / Buddha / Allah / FSM / Goddess / Shiva / fill-in-the-deity-of-your-choice-here-- they do not or cannot come down into the rest of the house).  We don't know how many, but we do know that there were at least four up there today, because that is the number of dead rats that our pest-control company removed this afternoon.  Yes.  Four dead rats.  Four smelly, fly-infested, gooey-to-dessicated rat corpses.  Not so cute now, huh?

In the six months we've owned this house, I've learned a lot about rats (see my expert rat-type analysis above).  You see, where I come from on the East Coast, you do not have rats in your house unless you 1) are an utterly filthy person, 2) own a pet python, or 3) live in an overcrowded prewar NYC apartment building with lots of neighbors who are either utterly filthy or own pet pythons.  Okay, so maybe you have a cute little mouse or two, shitting in the corners of your closets and occasionally chowing down on an unattended box of Wheat Thins.  But you do. not. have. any. rats. in. your. house. ever. 

So when we moved here and everyone-- from the neighbors to the home inspector-- was super cavalier about rat infestation ("Every house in this town has them!" said one colleague helpfully), we were more than weirded out.  Okay, fine, we thought.  We will get rid of the rats, and then we will be the only house in town that doesn't have them.

We thought that because-- despite all our fancy postgraduate degrees-- we are clearly not that smart. 

As soon as we moved in, the neighbors' apple and pear trees began depositing fallen fruit on top of our carport faster than we could clear it off.  You know what rats love?  Rotting apples and pears!  We watched in silent horror one balmy evening as a rat ran across our cable line and onto the roof, surely on his way to enjoy his next fruity meal.   We waited helplessly through the fall as the apples on our own tree matured.  We started picking them to no avail-- every morning we'd wake up to find our yard littered with the chewed-up cores of apples that had fallen in the night.  And if they weren't happy with the tree fruits, they surely loved the raspberries and blackberries growing towards the rear of the yard.  Add in a few persimmons and the rosemary thriving under our picture window, and they were basically eating at WD-50 every night.

After seeing the epic amount of rat turds (ugh) in the attic, Ray spent days up there sealing up every possible gap with hardware cloth, but there were a few places he just couldn't get to.  So our pest-control company put a poison box up there (do not even START with me about being humane.  One word for you: hantavirus).  For months the box remained undisturbed-- turns out roof rats prefer nature's bounty to anticoagulants.  Finally, shortly after the last apples had fallen, we noticed a faint whiff of something we could only detect while sitting on our sofa or standing in the corner of the guest room.  Having little experience with dead-ass rodents, we didn't know what it was.  One night I asked a friend who'd had her own rat-related struggles to sniff the corner of my guest room.  She high-fived me: "You got one!"

Great!  I thought.  It'll just decompose up there and the smell will go away and we can all go back to pretending that we aren't sharing our home with a bunch of disease-ridden rodents.  But that actually isn't what happens at all.  Yeah, the smell goes away... right about the same time that your house fills up with gigantic, slow-moving, loud-buzzing flesh flies. 

Cue the pest control company.  One slimy dead rat was summarily removed from the attic above the guest room.

Two months passed.  Maybe there was only one rat up there all along!  To paraphrase Mrs. White, I've always been a rather stupidly optimistic person.

Last night I was chopping onions and I heard a deafening buzz.  Out from the recessed light in the soffit above the kitchen sink dropped the biggest. flesh fly. I have ever. seen.  It was seriously the size of a quarter.  And when I say flesh fly, you should know I'm talking about this:




That's pretty much actual size. [barf]

Then this morning I killed one on the picture window, and on the way to the grocery store the afternoon I looked in the third-bedroom window and spotted another (don't worry, they're all dead and vacuumed up now).  Cue the pest-control man.  He only needed about five minutes to locate and remove four mangled rat corpses from the insulation in the attic.

The moral of this story is that rats and flies are disgusting.  And also, that a beautiful lush green lawn full of mature fruit trees is not a blessing-- it's a curse.

The struggle continues.






 

 

  

Saturday, February 16, 2013

We Need To Talk About The Dining Room

First things first: you should know that I'm very proud of myself right now.  Because of this: 

 

What are you even LOOKING at right now?  Well, first off, you're looking at my poor spray-paint job, which I'm not even worried about because this is one of my dining chairs and they're going to get a coat of darker, glossier gray as soon as it's warm enough to spray-paint again (so, August).  And more importantly, you're looking at a chair cushion.  That I made.  Without any help.  Let's back up:


 The fabric is a navy and ivory ikat-ish stripe-- I ordered it a couple of weeks ago from fabric.com, thinking I'd make these chair pads for each of my dining chairs.  That seemed like a doable way to upgrade my craigslist dining chairs and make them look a little more finished, and also I was hoping to inject a little personality into what is currently an unacceptably uninteresting space.  

I'm not exactly a true beginner with a sewing machine-- my mom has always done lots of sewing projects and she's taught me a lot over the years-- but this was my first time taking on a project of my own without my mom to bail me out when I had no idea what I was doing.  You see, if you've never tried it, you should know that sewing is not as easy as it seems/seams.  This project represented the first time I've ever covered and used my own cording and the first time I'd even made anything with a gusset.  Also, I'm terrible at math, I had to make my own pattern, and this fabric has such a loose weave that it just disintegrates in your hands if you have to take out a misplaced seam.  Add all that up and you should have a recipe for disaster, but I managed it admirably if I do say so myself.

So just to recap, I'm very proud that I was able to produce a finished project that, while not perfect, is really very good.  Let's zoom out and look at it from further away:

As of today, I'm 3/4 done with the second of my four cushions.  Unfortunately, I need to order more fabric for the last two-- I didn't take into account that I'd need to match up all the stripes when ordering the first time.  Anyhow, in case you were wondering how I did this, the answer is here.

Now that we're in the dining room, we need to talk.  As you can see, there are number of design issues happening here.  First off, that rug is too small.  I bought it years ago and it happens to coordinate pretty nicely with the living room rug-- it's got a lot of the same pinky-red, and it also has a bunch of ivory and a few pops of bright orange.  See?


They play well together, but that doesn't change the fact that the dining room rug is too small.  I'm going to have to live with it for now, as I've decided not to buy any more crap that isn't EXACTLY what I want-- from this point forward I'm going to start holding out for what I really want rather than just buying a temporary band-aid that I wind up hating in the end.

The above photo also does a pretty decent job of highlighting the second problem we're working with in the dining room: the weirdest light fixture of all time.  Please, scroll back up and check it out.  Really let it soak in.  WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?  It's like a desk lamp had a horrible accident and somehow wound up on the ceiling.

So I'm in the process of deciding where we should go with the replacement fixture.  I've spent the last three Fridays in the local Habitat for Humanity Re-Store eyeing this ultra-shiny but otherwise not hideous brass chandelier for $30.  In my head I think I could totally spray-paint it glossy navy and make it look awesome a la Young House Love.  Then I think I'm not actually cool enough for a navy chandelier and maybe I should get a crystal one from overstock.com? And then I think maybe that's too dressy since it's a small room and it's kind of in the living room anyway.  And then I don't do anything at all [smacks own forehead in self-disgust]. 

On to our third dining problem:  the walls in here are soooo bare.  This is what I see when I'm standing at my stove frying falafels or whatever:


Super-sad.

You can also see in just about all of today's photos that I have a cool teal map on the floor.  It came from One Kings Lane a few weeks ago, and I'm not 100% sure what to do with it.  You may have noticed that I'm kind of obsessed with giant collages of art (have you seen what's over my mantel?).  I think this is because my grandmother has a wall in her house that's literally floor-to-ceiling original paintings.  They're all totally different-- some are watercolors, some oils, some really traditional, some very contemporary, some behind glass and others not, large and small and dark and light, landscapes and seascapes and portraits and still-lifes and funky abstractions.  You'd think the frames would all have to match for that to work, but there's actually no common thread whatsoever among them except they're all paintings.  And it. looks. amazing.  There's so much to see and interact with-- I happen to think it would be a very cool look for a dining room.  At the moment I'm not sure I have enough pieces to really do it up, but I think I'll spend the afternoon playing around with possible arrangements.  I'll report back later...





Friday, February 8, 2013

Guest Bedroom Inspiration

Since we're pretty much dead in the water reno-wise at the moment, I thought maybe I should use this space to make some plans for the sad-clown guest bedroom I'm half-done painting.  As stated in previous posts, the walls were in completely wacky shape and, though I've first-coated them, they're definitely going to need another pass with the trusty roller.  And I've been having a tough time psyching myself up to move all the furniture again.  Also, I desperately need to paint the super-shiny and yet also dirty yellow ceilings.  And I hate hate hate hate hate painting ceilings.  Blergh.

Anyhow, here's the paint color (technically it's Behr Pensive Sky, but its street name here at our house is Groban) for your consideration:




It's kind of greige, but there's also some blue in there.  It's really soft and pretty and it looks nice and fresh with out white-white trim.

Current plans include navy floor-to-ceiling hidden-back-tab curtains I'll be making out of this fabric:


At least, I think I'll be using that-- I ordered a yard of it (should be arriving, along with some very cool navy ikatty stripe I'll be using to make cushions for my dining chairs, on Monday) to make sure I like it, and if it's as cool as I think it'll be, I'm going to go ahead with it.  I feel like I need to stick with navy in any case, since there's so much navy in the rest of the house.  Plus I'm kind of a navy-blue-aholic.  That's right-- I'm addicted to navy-blue-ohol.

Here's where I stop knowing what to do.  EVERYTHING looks amazing with Groban and navy.  The room is presently populated by a bunch of dark wooden furniture that I no longer love but still totally need (all bought right after college from the now-defunct Bombay company.  Classy, right?) and an IKEA PS Lovas futon with a white cover.  Someday I'd love to get a real bed for our guests to sleep on, but until we're ready to invest in one, we'll have to keep torturing them with our futon. 

And the futon's gonna need some throw pillows.  Here's the question: what's the best color to complement my Groban-navy-and-white scheme?  Presently in the running, in no particular order, are:

Kate-Spade-y kelly green:






Bright poppy coral:





 This soft orange-- I have no idea what to call it.  Sherbet?  



Can you tell I'm geometric-fabric crazy and I MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE SPENT ONE MILLION YEARS GOOGLING FABRICS?  I'm losing my mind.

Anyhow, since for now it's kind of my girly-room (I keep my clothes in that closet so I can get dressed for work at the crack of dawn without waking the sleeping man-beast in the master bedroom, and I also do my makeup and hair in there) and it might someday (someday-- don't get all excited) be a nursery for a child whose gender we won't know until it's born, I'm kicking around the idea of a large capiz-shell chandelier like this one from World Market, which would have to be mounted pretty much flush so you could still walk under it (in case you don't know us, we're tall):

 And rug-wise I'd like to find a flat-weave navy-and-white something like this cheap-o from Urban Outfitters:


 Too much geometry?  Am I crazy?  I don't even like math.

Plans, or Lack Thereof

This has been a frustrating week-- work was crazy and I didn't get a single  substantive thing done around the house.  We've arrived at a weird place in our house-rehab-- we're actually much further along than I thought we'd be as we celebrate six months in our house (we moved in August 10, though we didn't officially close until the 13th), but we have so much to do.  And what's left is a whole pile of huge projects that we're kind of totally afraid of.  

For example, plans for demo-ing and refinishing the third bedroom have been put on hold by my crippling fear that the ceiling tiles contain asbestos-- if we get them tested and they DO have it, we're legally required to pay for professional asbestos remediation and it can cost thousands.  Some completely crazy part of me just wants to put on a rebreather and yank them out without testing them, but it's pretty irresponsible to send potentially asbestos-y tiles to the landfill (don't worry, I'm not going to do that).  And even if they don't have asbestos, I KNOW we're going to find all manner of horror behind every ugly surface in that room.  Fossilized rats, old rodent shit, chewed-up wires, termites, plumbing issues, animal nests, structural problems, etc etc etc ad infinitum.  And we really don't know how to handle any of that.

And of course we're anxious to finish the bathroom, but that'll mean picking the toilet up again, repairing / replacing the subfloor under the toilet and fixing the cracked cast-iron flange, putting down new flooring, paying an electrician to uncouple the outlets from the sconces so we can replace them,  ripping out the plastic shower surround, replacing what is surely hella-moldy drywall (and probably finding a million scary things behind it when we pull it out) with hardi-backer, tiling the shower, and refinishing the tub.  Have I mentioned before that it's our only bathroom?  Yeah, I don't know how we're going to pull all that off without moving into a hotel for the week.

And the kitchen?  It's too awful.  I can't even THINK about all the disasters we're sure to find once we peel away its hideous orange-peel drywall and seemingly pointless soffits and odd does-this-actually-vent-to-the-outside range vent and cabinets with no subfloor underneath them. 

So I guess what I'm saying is that we're going to have to continue in the decorating-not-renovating vein for the time being.  No photos of anything right now.  Sigh.  Please cheer me up.  Or send me a free contractor,  but not the HGTV kind that will put all kinds of weird goofy products in my house and leave me with, like, a rock-climbing wall in the kitchen and a tiki bar in the bathroom. 

Saturday, February 2, 2013

Gettin' Busy in the Bedrooms; or, Groban

I've accomplished a lot decor-wise in the master bedroom over the course of the past seven days.  I think at this point we're going to call it done reno-wise, even though I still want a new duvet cover.  Want want want want want.  Anyhow, this photo-- a view from the hallway-- shows some of the progress:




Check out our new baseboards!  Aren't they pretty? 


Also, I moved my great-grandmother's painting and hung up a painting I did several years ago-- it's that top one there.  That's the house we lived in in New Haven.  The painting itself isn't exactly amazing, but I like the colors and it goes with our stuff-we-love-for-sentimental-reasons theme in the bedroom.  Like  that Windsor-y chair that my grandmother found somewhere and refinished (well, she stripped and refinished the top rail and painted the rest black)-- the only other place I've ever seen chairs like that was at Greenfield Village in Detroit, where Henry Ford exactly recreated the Thomas Edison's lab with help from former Edison employees.  It's full of those chairs.  So as far as I'm concerned that is DEFINITIVE PROOF that my chair is from the original Edison lab.  Don't even try to convince me otherwise.

And you're also seeing one of my four new charcoal-gray velvet curtains.  I went to World Market-- which is a totally boss source for inexpensive, long-wearing, light-blocking velvet curtains-- and picked them up today.  When I got home, I moved the brackets so they're now about 11" out from the window on either side as opposed to about 4" before-- I didn't want the curtains to block any light during the day, and this way they're completely off the windows when open.  Then I switched out the curtain rods for some more substantial ones I already had and reattached the finials from the old rods.  The finials' screws were a little too small for the new rods, so I wrapped the screws with some Teflon pipe tape (the magic of owning a home with old crappy plumbing = you always have random plumbing supplies that are useful for other projects) to make them fit.  Next I gave the curtains a once-over with my handy steamer (I quickly learned while working in retail that if you don't have a steamer you don't have jack-- seriously, they're not expensive and they are LIFE-ALTERINGLY convenient) to knock off the wrinkles, and voila.  The above photo makes them look sort of purpley-black, and all the other photos I took are too blurry to use, so I'll have to add something later.  But really, it's an improvement.

I've also been busy in the guest room, which I've been studiously ignoring since we moved in-- I just haven't been able to decide what to do in there.  I finally picked a paint color that isn't exactly greige-- instead, it's a blue-greige that my friends have nicknamed "Groban" because that's a good combination of "gray" and "brown," and it's also the last name of a famous person.  The color is really Behr's Pensive Sky, but I'm going to go with Groban.  

In order to apply the Groban (I first-coated last night), though, I had to do a lot of prep work.  For the past week, I've been painting the trim and trying to make some sense out of what's happened to the walls in there.  Here's a picture of what the west wall looked like after two applications (and subsequent sandings) of drywall mud-- spackle wasn't man enough for the divots in these walls:

   
All that white is joint compound.  And the color you see in the corner and on the walls is my main man Groban.  You see, someone had filled some of the enormous divots, but s/he applied the spackle with some sort of notched trowel and then failed to sand the patches.  So basically it looked like the walls were covered with little Ruffles potato chips.  And also tons of other divots that weren't filled.  And whoever drywalled this room evidently didn't know that you have to tape the joints, so you can see a horizontal line where I had to re-fill the seams between two pieces of sheetrock.  Yesterday morning I made a final sanding push (which was HORRIBLE because I hate sanding).  Here's what I looked like when I finished.  Check out my dusty hands and jeans and slippers and gross ponytail and all the sand-dust on the floors:


Photos of Groban coming tomorrow!