Saturday dinner

Another dinner, since Larry (aka best man extrodonaire and the most favourite third wheel ever) was back in town interviewing – yay!! Shawn and Sanna and William the puppy came over to join us, and we did french onion soup and strawberry salad with the poppy seed dressing, plus a fair amount of cheese and crackers while we got ourselves in gear. I have my fingers so crossed that Larry moves back out.

(PS. The out-of-season tulips that appear to be sprouting out Kevin’s head arrived with Larry — gorgeous. When I’m not hauling them from room to room to hang out with me, they’re sitting in our sunny kitchen window and keep greeting me when I walk into the room. 🙂 So pretty.)

Brown dinner

I don’t generally post much about Brown dinners (aka our alum potlucks) but we hosted on Friday (theme: garnishes) and it was a fun night full of firsts to accompany the normal fun. We made drinks (streetcars and strawberry-basil martinis) and a cheese tray, and everyone else brought borsht, salad, awesome grilled steak, and pretty gorgeous cupcakes.

Here’s everyone prepping in the kitchen…

… and then munching in the kitchen…

And eating (or laughing):

And then we decided to light the fireplace! At first tentatively…

.. and then rambunctiously (photo taken from the fishroom, which shares the gas fireplace with the livingroom).

Week Nine

First of all: it’s already week nine?! What happened to October??

Not a bad game – I finally have a winning record, after this 79-63 matchup. 🙂 Rock on. Drew Brees was awesome AGAIN (crazy!), and my running backs were decent. Wide receivers were remarkably subpar, and the pats D and kicker weren’t their typical selves, but it was enough to win by a pretty decent margin. Poor Schobel did nothing, but at least I was cheering for Philly while he was out there (even if the game itself was painful). And 11 out of Burleson (a new local pickup off of waivers, riding the bench for the moment) is not bad. We’ll see how he does.

QB
QB Drew Brees, NO 28
RUNNING BACKS
RB LaDainian Tomlinson, SD 13
RB Marion Barber, Dal 16
RECEIVERS
WR Reggie Brown, Phi 5
WR Donte’ Stallworth, NE 4
TE Matt Schobel, Phi 0
DEFENSE
D/ST Patriots 7
KICKER
K Stephen Gostkowski, NE 6
BENCH
QB Damon Huard, KC 7
QB Jason Campbell, Was 7
RB Michael Pittman, TB (injury) 0
WR Muhsin Muhammad, Chi (BYE) 0
WR Deion Branch, Sea (injury) 0
WR Nate Burleson 11
TE Alex Smith, TB 1
K Matt Stover, Bal 1

In the “someday we’ll have walls and real furniture!” category, Metzger was in town and he, Shawn and Sanna came over to watch the Pats vs the Colts (and then the first half of Philly vs. Dallas until that got too depressing). We’re lucky to have the kind of friends that bring fancy cheeses and crackers (not to mention the beer!) but don’t blink an eye at watching the game from canvas chairs in a room that’s been stripped to the studs. 🙂 Our kind of people.

Plus, their puppy will be staying with us for Christmas! Pretty awesome.

Laundry Room Redo!

I don’t have a great “before” picture of the laundry room, since the sellers took their washer and dryer with them, and rooms without appliances always just look so bizarre and empty. But I did take a picture of the room when we were doing the inspection, so I suppose that makes a good before view. Major features of the room include doors to the garage and kitchen, a remnant-vinyl floor (it must have been the end of a roll, since it has brand names stamped all across it), a huge built-in cabinet, and room for a washer and dryer. The corners aren’t perfectly square, but the room is more-or-less 5’3” by 5’6”.

After removing the massive cabinet, Kevin did a fair amount of spackling, I plied off all of the old trim, and then I started painting. For the walls, we chose Behr in Sparkling Spring (730E-2) in a Satin finish. (Kevin’s parents recommended Behr – it’s the Home Depot house brand – as being great to work with for the price. So far, I couldn’t agree more.) We picked up two 30”W x 30”H x 12” D laminate cabinets (both have two adjustable shelves), new baseboard trim, and new vinyl flooring.

I decided to go with sheet vinyl for several reasons. Cost and speed of renovating were obvious considerations. This is for a laundry/mud room floor that sees a lot of traffic, so it needed to be durable and easy to clean. Barring plumbing nightmares, this floor won’t be subjected to tons of water, but the fish buckets will pass through several times a week, so there needed to be something that would hold up to that. Also, the old floor was in good enough shape that a new layer of vinyl could be installed directly on top – VERY appealing, especially since we don’t know how old the existing floor was (if before 1986, it probably contains asbestos, which obviously isn’t something we wanted to be ripping into). Also, vinyl sheeting comes in 6’ widths, which was perfect for this project. So, vinyl sheeting it was.

I found a pretty pattern, with little blue diamonds on a white background, but it ranged from 1.50 a square foot with a three week wait, to $2.89 per sq ft with a two week wait… Not ideal. Then, Home Depot came through again, since they sell 6’ x 8’ rolls for $20 – not a huge pattern selection, but I found one that I really liked and we were off and running. I bought a 3/16” v-notched trowel and the adhesive, and rented a 75-lb roller. The installation went surprisingly well. Kevin removed the door to the garage for ease of access and I sawed about an eighth of an inch off the bottom of each of the door frames so that the sheet could slide underneath. The adhesive was increasingly messy to work with until I got a cup of hot water – that and a paper towel solved everything when a little bit went awry. I installed new floor tacks, and then the new trim, and now I love this room.

Pretty, right? 🙂

I’m particularly proud of us for hanging the cabinets level and appropriately close together without incident. 🙂

(Sorry for the dreadful lighting in that one — it’s what you get when you take pictures at midnight.)

The new washer and dryer showed up the next day. We’re both getting a kick out of them. We ended up with the LG WM2455 (the only 4.0 cubic foot front washer that was shallow enough to fit in the room. Thankfully, consumer reports had great things to say about it!) and the matching dryer. The two of them are a riot. I would love to know what sort of market research went into the design, but it resulted in a cross between an arcade game and a huge laundromat washer. When you turn the washer on, lights flash and it sings a little “yay, we’re about to do laundry!!” song. Select your cycle, and it spends a few moments earnestly sensing its load, and then goes on its merry way. When it finishes, you get another triumphant little melody (perhaps it’s calling to the dryer? “This was such fun! And now it’s your turn!!”), and then repeat all of the lights and singing for your dryer run. I would have thought the noise would be annoying, but it keeps making us laugh and so we haven’t turned it off yet.