Pre-resolution

Well, I did it! I kept my pre-New Year’s resolution to finish the baseboard along my staircase and hallway. But to show you where this project started we actually have to flash back — WAY back, I’m embarrassed to admit, to last January…

…when the aforementioned baseboard was covered in something that resembled Barney the Dinosaur’s cuddly purple hide.

Worse than that, the baseboard wasn’t even one board:

^This is a mess that was clearly never meant to see the light of day.

My options were to rip it all out or try to unify it. And honestly, neither option seemed practical — unification was never going to be perfect, but how would I ever cut another baseboard to match the grooves of my 91 year-old staircase? In the interest of not making a bad situation worse, I decided to make the best of what I was given and leave the boards in place.

I armed myself with a putty knife and got to work. And what do you know — I made amazing progress! At first. Then my hallway rug was delivered and I hastily slapped a coat of primer on this thing, and abandoned the project. Whoops.

It took about two solid days of very dull, repetitive work to finally finish what I had started 11 months ago. After a lot more patching and sanding, the unification plan was (again) going pretty well. I added a bit of molding to make my Frankenboard look a little more purposefully designed:

Then came even more sanding, caulking, and top-coat painting, after which I very carefully peeled away the vintage January ’11 painter’s tape and neatened up my paint lines by scraping the stairs with various pointy objects.

Each side took about an hour and a half to clean up. Just to clean up! SO TEDIOUS. I listened to EIGHT HOURS of Radiolab alone in two days working on these damn stairs.

But it was worth it. Behold:

Frankenboard lives!

It’s not perfect, of course — it has its share of waves and lumps — but considering the original condition of the thing, I think it came out pretty well.

I also managed to get smaller baseboards (that match the ones in my bedroom) added to the other side of the hallway.

I still have a little finishing work to do on those, but it can wait another 11 months.

Kidding.

I think.

Speaking of 2012, I thought I’d do a quick wrap-up of my greatest accomplishments of the year for new readers. I think this was actually a pretty good year, house-wise. The rest of it was terrible, awful, no good and very bad, but within these narrow walls things did, in fact, improve. In 2011, I:

Thanks, everyone, for your supportive tweets and comments throughout it all. I appreciate it. You help keep me going when I’m on spackle round six of some nutso project, my muscles are sore, my nose is itchy and I’m running on repeat podcasts.

And now, a prix fixe menu is calling my name. Happy New Year, everyone!

A truly happy holidays

I’m not normally a big Christmas girl, but this year I’ve been earnestly looking forward to it ever since jacket weather started. Perhaps it’s because I recently added Chez Larsson to my RSS reader, and Christmas in Sweden just seems so…magical. Whenever Benita posts a photograph of her cozy little house at dusk, all cheerfully lit up with candles and strings of holiday lights, I immediately want to beam myself over there to share a cup of something warm and play with bits of ribbon and paper. (Sidenote: if you’ve never seen Benita’s blog, holy hovjärn*. Her house is incredible. I have no idea how she keeps it so clean; I suspect Scandinavia is an enchanted place where dirt just falls from your shoes out of politeness before you enter the house.)

So maybe it’s Sweden. But also, after what has amounted to a really horrible year for myself and my family, maybe I’m just appreciating the comfort and the togetherness of the holiday season more than I used to. Bad shit — not just the normal “my life isn’t living up to my exceedingly high American expectations” angst, but the really bad shit — has a way of clarifying how important family and friends are. And why wouldn’t you want to bake a ton of Christmas cookies for the people who have been lending you kleenex and a listening ear for six long months?

Or, replace cookies with candied pecans in my case:

I made, um, 3 pounds of them. Packed up in little IKEA jars and spruced up with tags I cut from an old gift box, they make pretty good hostess/office gifts.

Let’s see…what other Benita-esque photos can I share? You can see that, after many shenanigans, we finally got that pesky tree up. Here’s what goes under it:

I have serious present-wrapping envy when I skim other DIY blogs. People do some amazingly elegant and creative things. Me, I had no present-wrapping game plan, so I had to put this together in an hour or so using whatever I had lying around. And then I whipped up one of these…

…using a few leftover tree branches. The icicle lights pressing up against the ENJE shade make a pretty nifty pattern, but I wanted something to cover the lower half of the window. Enter the wreath made of reject tree parts. I googled how to make tissue paper flowers and added a few of those to fancy it up a bit, since I don’t have access to holly berries or anything.

That’s all from this holiday house! Enjoy your together time, everyone. Have a glass of glogg for me.

 

*Horseshoe, apparently. I was just going for the alliteration.

Merry FAILmas!

Jack and I tried — and failed — to put up the Christmas tree yesterday.

The tree may have been a bit too big.

And a bit bald at the bottom. The bottom, say, quarter of the tree? Was just a little naked. But certainly more than half of the tree had needles. I think.

And the trunk may have been a bit too wide for the base to hold it straight.

And on top of that, the base may have been broken. At an angle.

[flickr video=6517029405 secret=38741e0160 w=500 h=375]

We’ll try again tonight.

One window at a time…

Ohhhhh, dining room…

And dining room window, where curtains from my first dorm room are still in active use. Like that pair of too-short pants hanging around in your closet that you know you should get rid of, but dammit your paid money for those. Seven years ago.

It was time for the curtains to go. This pair was an awkward size for the window, but I’ve found that curtains in general don’t seem to play well in my little, sunlight challenged house. I’ve committed to the minimalist solution and am installing simple white IKEA ENJE blinds instead.

No bulk, no clutter, just a little diffuse light. And if you walk by quickly enough, you can pretend that the hideous air conditioner — and the battalion of angry pigeons currently occupying the breezeway behind it — isn’t even there.

At $20-to-$40-ish per blind, I haven’t managed to march into IKEA and buy as many as I need. Instead, I’ve been picking up a blind or two whenever I happen to be there. So expect to see window posts for another 6 months. Yay?

Hey, a girl has to reserve a little money to build her collection of shiny objects! On the left, it’s my new $10 piece of student pottery purchased from UPenn’s semi-annual ceramics program fundraiser (<3). On the right, my bowl of Jersey shore seashells finally found a home! Next to the…half-full jar of wine corks!*

Half-full? Pshaw. I can do better than this. I’m off to “work on decorating the house.” Enjoy the rest of your weekend, everyone!

*I don’t know, I probably saw it on Pinterest. Is it too silly?

P.S. Does anyone want those curtains? I’m popping them in the washing machine and when they’re done I will gladly throw them in a box and send them to you for postage money. Fair warning: they do have a really subtle floral pattern.

It’s a date

HALLWAY.

STAIR CASE.

YOU HAVE BEEN LIKE THIS FOR A FULL YEAR NOW.  Unacceptable.

You.  Me.  The week between Christmas and New Year’s.  Let’s finally get this done.

I’m putting my plans here for everyone to see in hopes that you, my fine blog readers, will embarrass me into sticking to the deadline.  I know I will be a lot happier when I don’t have to look at painters’ tape and a pile of unfinished baseboards every time I need to go to the bathroom.

Help me help myself.

Lucky Horseshoe

My family hikes a lot.

One day near the beginning of July, not long after my mother’s memorial service and after a few weeks of gorging ourselves on sympathy food, I got fed up (so to speak) and suggested that we find a woodsy park where we could take the dog for a walk.  We’ve been hiking once a week ever since — 85 miles total by my Runkeeper records!

We find all kinds of interesting things while hiking.  Not just snakes and bees and freaky fungi, although they certainly make appearances.  This past weekend Dad spotted a 105 year-old dime.  We got pretty excited about it until we googled and found out that a Barber dime that has been sitting in a field for a century is worth about $4.  Not gonna pay for a post-hike dinner.

Two weeks ago, I spotted this thing in the dirt near what may have been an old farmyard back in the day, but is now a weirdly desolate part of the Wissahickon Valley Park:

An ancient horseshoe!  Who knows how long this thing had been sitting around.  Perhaps as long as the dime?  Parts of it were nearly rusted through, but I like rusty old things (and horses, of course!), so I took it home where I could attack it with some vinegar and a steel bristle brush.

This was the night, for those of you who follow me on Twitter, that I ended up putting my iPhone through the washing machine.  So I’m a little suspicious of this “horseshoes are lucky” thing, but I mounted it above a doorway anyway.  This is the correct position, right?  I was told I hung it upside down the first time.  I am a bad luck magnet.

Work, little horseshoe!  Win mama the money she needs to finish those baseboards already!

Simple Upgrades

October has been a whirlwind of wedding cakes, presents, costumes, and freaky weather events for me, but there are a few house changes worth documenting.  So let’s get to it!

I mentioned earlier that a bit of my cornice came apart during August’s freaky weather.

Check it out — it took all of a week before a pigeon made itself right at home in my freaking roof:

UGH.  SCRAM.

Anyway.  I thought it was just wind damage and would be a quick fix, but as fate would have it my roof was actually leaking at the very front edge of the house, which had caused a big chunk of the old cornice to rot away.  So the best (and more expensive — sad trombone) solution was actually to build a whole new cornice.  The contractors banged it out for me, and here’s the before and after:

This is not thrilling stuff, but along with the basement plumbing (which is also fixed — I’m sparing you photographs) it was a repair that had to get done even if it didn’t amount to much of an aesthetic upgrade.  Although the white is nice, I suppose.  Anything’s better than those shingles!

I did try to make a minor visual improvement in the living room over the weekend, specifically to this window that faces the street:

It had no blinds, no curtains — just a few frosted shutters.  I wanted to improve two things:  add a little more privacy, and make this dinky “picture” window look as wide as possible.  I didn’t think those shutters were helping by dividing up the space, so they had to go.  I did like the way my ENJE roller shades from Ikea were working in my bedroom, though, so I decided to give them a shot here as well.

Unfortunately for me, in the last few months the old ENJE shades have been recalled and replaced with a new design that isn’t as easy to hack.  Anna at Door Sixteen had a great tutorial for cutting the old pull-chain shades to a custom width.  But Ikea has since ditched the chain and installed some kind of spring-loaded tension something-or-other in the top part.

I went ahead and hacked mine anyway, but I’m fairly sure I broke its rolling capability.  Or maybe not — I haven’t done much testing because I figured from the start that I’d be leaving this shade down all the time.  So once I got the shade to the width and length I wanted, I stopped futzing with it.  Here it is:

Excuse the dark shots; I was trying not to blow out all the detail in the shade by overexposing.

I definitely think this tiny change is an improvement.  It’s especially nice now that night has fallen and I have a simple white screen over what used to feel like a creepy black hole in the wall.  I have 3 more downstairs windows to go — here’s hoping my hacking skills improve.  Or that I can find some of the old strangler shades on eBay….

48-second gift

I owe you some house updates, but I wanted to share a different sort of project first. This past weekend, a very dear friend of mine married her awesome fiancé in a really sweet, fun ceremony at a nature conservancy in Maryland (congrats, guys!).

Flash back a few months: I was debating what to give the couple as a gift, and the bride suggested that I go off-registry and make something by hand. This is kind of a tricky proposition — as well as you know someone, it can be difficult to narrow in on the style of art she would appreciate in her (and her husband’s!) home. So I thought it might be best to focus on something classic, nature-based, and calming.

My inspiration for the piece came as I was editing photographs for this post. In one of my shell dishes I have a lone cluster of seed pods, plucked from the sidewalk not far from my house. I love the shape of these pods. They have a form that reminds me of a tulip just beginning to open. Their structure implies action — a promise that something good will be arriving.

I started to picture a field of them, reaching up from long stems, almost as though they were flowers emerging from a morning fog.  They don’t grow this way in nature, of course, but that’s why we have such a thing as artistic license.  I think you win one of those after you’ve spent 4 years sketching ugly ceramic pots on rumpled sheets.

I gathered a bunch of additional pods over the course of a few days, and began to sketch an arrangement of them on a pale gray illustration board. I thought it might be fun to document my process and share it here in video form:

[flickr video=6244681651 secret=44fb3d1c0d w=640 h=360]

 

I used an app called TimeLapse to capture an image every 30 seconds (except in the beginning, where the images were spaced out over a few minutes as I played with the app settings). The video a little wonky since the piece itself is big, requiring me to move it/myself frequently, and it’s filmed over several days in different lighting situations. But still: warp speed drawing is fun to watch.

I took my finished piece to a great local framing shop, where they got to work making the thing all proper and archival and stuff.  No cheap-o plastic frame from the craft store, here!  This is a gallery-quality product.

When my gift came back to me it was wrapped in heavy brown paper, which was practical but not pretty.  So I took on a second, last-minute project: stenciling my own wrapping paper. I used a template to trace a pattern of diamonds with alternating stripes in silver marker.

Et voila!  A DIY wedding gift.  I hope it suits your home, Marissa and Dan!  May your marriage be full of lots of little promises of good things arriving.

Little Fixes

I’m still waiting for resolutions to both the basement plumbing issue and the cornice issue.  Hopefully things will start getting repaired next week, but anticipating the inevitable draining of a savings account can get a girl down, you know?  So this weekend I wanted to tackle a DIY project that would be quick, cheap, and happy-inducing.

These days, my cheerful new purple closets are pretty happy-inducing.  Except for this one nook where I store my belts:

I credit What Would a Nerd Wear for my new-found love of thrift store belts, but my growing collection of $1 bits of leather was getting out of hand.  Some buckles just wouldn’t fit over those round knobs, leaving all the other belts to stack up on two crummy hooks all the way in the back.  Messy belt storage:  the perfect tiny problem to fix with a quick Saturday morning trip to Ikea.

…And some life-hacking, of course. I wanted a little metal rail and some s-hooks, but Ikea’s bathroom/kitchen rails were all too long.  After wandering in aimless loops around the kitchen showroom forever, I discovered these drawer pulls:

Those are the 5-inchers, but they also sold 13″ — perfect.  I grabbed a set and took them home… where I discovered that there really is no way to mount a drawer pull to a wall.  Pulls are normally mounted by feeding a screw through them from the inside of the cabinet.  Duh, Laur.

I pawed through my drawer of loose bits of hardware for some kind of modification, but the answer was right in front of me:

I just grabbed the crummy hooks my more difficult belts were hanging from, and anchored them properly to the wall.  Then I fed their tips right into the existing screw holes in the drawer pull.  Perfect fit!

I organized my belt collection by color because I am slightly insane.

With the little hooks recycled and the rails installed, I then searched for a new home for the set of knobs.  They landed on a stretch of open wall next to the bed:

Hey!  A place to hang your bathrobe or your outfit for tomorrow.  Useful and free.

Organizational improvements always cheer me up, and this set did not disappoint.  Next week it’s back to the gritty stuff, yeah, but until then I can just stare at my belt rainbow.

At least I got this cool new patch!

I think there ought to be a series of merit badges you can earn as a first-time homeowner. So when, after you’ve spent an entire day scrubbing bathtubs and sinks and floors, you run a quick load of laundry down to the basement only to discover that all of that water has been forming some kind of horrible-smelling basement bog all day long because the waste main has cracked, you get a little something nice for your trouble.

Thankfully, I have not yet earned the “contractors ripping you off” badge. The plumber who came out to plug the leak late yesterday was awesome. A more permanent fix is hopefully coming later this week.

Did I mention I’m also getting my cornice redone? Because the hurricane ripped part of it down and the wood is too rotten to repair without redoing the whole thing?

It’s OK. I don’t like having money in my savings account, anyway. Plus I’m working towards my bankruptcy merit badge.