Author: Susan

Another step in the right direction

Our new vanity is here!! I went to pick it up yesterday, and now it’s happily hanging out with the fish. Cherry, finish color, door style, and sturdiness are perfect.

(Please ignore the paint collection at left and the assorted fishtank buckets at right. I didn’t think to move them before taking photos or frame the shot differently. Oops. At least it’s representative of our decor.)

Here’s the inside – you can see our pretty drawers and their upgraded tracks with their awesome glide.

Any opinions on what paint color would be perfect for the walls around this?

Pillows!

I finished the two pillows for my room! JoAnn Fabrics had 24″ square pillow forms on sale (only $8!) a year ago, and though they seemed large it also seemed like a good back support for reading or watching tv on the daybed in my office.

When I started the quilt I did two sample squares to test out the pattern. I decided to tweak the size of the strips, so I couldn’t use them in the quilt itself but I wanted to used them in coordinating pillows. The best way seemed to be to add sequential borders. I’m fine with the diagonal pink pillow, but I really like the square red one (much better proportions and color contrast). Fun. 🙂

I also like the ¼” flower detail on the back of each strip. I used my sewing machine attachment to make button holes (with the buttons facing in so that they wouldn’t scrape against the wall or catch on the bed frame) – a fun detail and the cases are staying in place well.

I’m about 90% satisfied with these. The pillows are about 6″ too big visually (though they are very nice to sit against) and the patterns are fine but not my favourites. But still – a project off the long, long list!! Hooray!

House Progress

Yesterday was one of those success stories that you fantasize about. Both of us were sick of having had certain home renovation items on our list for OVER a year. We’d done research, we’d saved money, the holes were punched in the wall, and yet the project was still “in the planning stages”. There are actually several projects that fit this description, so with 49 minutes until the relevant stores started to close, we chose the two most dire (lights for the dining & living room, and a vanity for the main bathroom), and in a moment of wild decision-making headed north to the cabinet store. This apparently set off a chain reaction of shopping & home improvement awesomeness.

I’d been a bit hesitant about this store because the prices were so, so low. (One of those “don’t test it in case it’s not true” scenarios.) It’s a tiny minimal operation on a dead-end warehouse sort of road, which could either be awesome or horrendous. We were really impressed with the quality of the cabinets when we saw them in person, and the one we chose (it was perfect) was about ½ of our budget and about 40% of the prices of any of the other reasonable alternative options I’d found. Cherry, perfect door detailing, and nice glides on the cabinet drawers. Awesome. We were offered granite countertops with undermount sinks for $300, but the colors weren’t great so we decided to wait on that piece of things.

We tried Home Depot and Lowes for countertops – expensive and really crummy. I’m glad we checked so that we can enthusiastically cross them off the list. I know of a bunch of stone /granite places, esp south of Seattle, so we’ll try there before we jump for anything.

A break: We stopped at Pete’s Wine in Bellevue – missed the tasting but still were able to stock up on plenty of fun bottles. It was a good pause (and right next to our wedding ring store – always good for karma), and for the first time we were able to use our new, free 6-botttle bag from QFC for our purchases – a fine addition to our “green” canvas shopping bag collection. 🙂

The standard bathroom remodel seems to require matching your mirror and your cabinet. Our place didn’t do mirrors. I’m really happy about that. I don’t tend to love the standard “matching” mirror styles, and they are wildly expensive for what they are (four small pieces of wood and a mirror for $200+? Really?). I’d found a few mirrors that seemed possible at Pier 1 Imports (of all places!), and one of them turned out not only to be perfect but to be $20 off. We’ll take it! (And how amazing to have something that’s a bit more creative and fancy-free.)

At home (in my room for the moment), from 8 feet away:

The more I look at it, the more I love it. (Both photos and in person – it keeps getting happier.) The leaves are enameled, so it there’s a silhouette from afar and a great color interest close-up – it’s an interesting effect as this can be seen from our entryway/the main crossroads of the house (at 18 feet away).

From 3 feet away, with all of the color:

What’s left for the bathroom?

  • The vanity top.
  • New lights.
  • A toilet paper holder.
  • Actually installing the vanity, plumbing, etc. (My uncle/ godfather sent the most wonderful anniversary card in June that basically joked if you can paint a home without divorcing, you’re probably in it forever. That one stayed on the kitchen counter for months and months. My guess is x2 for installing your own bathroom sink without total meltdown.)
  • Paint (somewhere in the cream or yellow range) once we’re done the drywall repairs.
  • And hopefully, someone to refinish the tile and tub – goodbye to the hellacious aqua?

The goal is still to do a sub-$2000 remodel, and we’re on our way, especially with the potentially woah-expensive vanity + mirror costing less than $575 with tax. Woohoo! If we can bring a 1980s bathroom up to snuff without going over that budget I’m going to be very pleased.

New Trick for Click

For the last few months, the clowns have been hanging out under the leather. Before, they used to mostly stay under the purple rock near the zoos and the xenia, but Click started to move over around the time we got the shrimp, and Clack decided to join him in late September. Typical photo of Click hanging out and keeping watch, with Clack zooming back from a jaunt to join him:

(Click for a bigger photo) The leather has been getting quite large, and so it must feel like good protection and shelter from a fish perspective. The tang occasionally tries to join them, but the clowns don’t like having him there and he doesn’t seem to like the way the leather feels (every time he gets brushed by it, his fins flare and his tangs come out) – definitely a clown-only fort.

When Kevin was at PDC last week, Click started mostly hanging out IN, not under, the leather!

Clownfish instinct takes over!! We don’t have an anemone for them, so the leather must seem like the next closest thing. While it used to shrink every time a fish brushed it, the leather now seems remarkable unperturbed about its new resident – all of that boneheaded fish persistence clearly paid off and it just decided to succumb to the inevitable. 🙂

I videod Click swimming away (my first youtube contribution) – no sound and pretty low quality, but you can get the idea.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJwhQvsN3-Q]

I love the tang in the background, keeping an eye on everything from a safe location by his rock. He’s basically completely cured – adding Selcon to his Nori did the trick. We’re cutting the Selcon down to every other day now that he’s looking better (it definitely seems to contribute to algae in the tank). So yay, Tang.

More bathroom demolition

I tried to pry the wood backsplashes for the bathroom sink off the wall when Kevin was at PDC, to no avail. In addition to all of the screws, which I did remove, they were glued quite thoroughly. So when Kevin got home from work on Wednesday, he was barely in the door before I had a crowbar in his hands. Luckily he always seems up for demolition and didn’t seem to mind the non-downtime.

The glue was stronger than the surrounding wall, so we definitely have drywall replacement in our future. In some ways, it’s really not a bad thing since those two walls are so damaged already and we already have the drywall and materials sitting in the garage. Better to do it right, even if that wasn’t the original plan?

A great night

For election night, we both left work on the early side and by 5:45 we’d set up camp in front of the tv, with laptops fired up and beverages at the ready.

Kevin picked up some Sam Adams for luck — at some point it turned into our superstitious choice for Red Sox and Patriots games, and I thought it was an appropriate choice for a night of high-stakes national politics. 🙂 (You can also tell from the mess of blankets in the foreground that while the heat is on, our place still isn’t balmy. The new insulation seems great, but the thermostat is still set to 64. We keep considering upping it, but it would mean getting out from under all of our blankets… inertia and cheapskatedness are a tricky combo.)

This marks the first time that I’ve voted for the winning candidate in a presidential election. (finally!) And now that the results are in, I’m so proud and relieved. It’s been such a long campaign (I started listening to Obama’s campaign speeches several months before the wedding in Spring 2007– impressive when you consider how much has happened in the intervening time). Kevin pointed out last night that it seems like eons ago that I got to caucus for Obama. And in recent months, the stakes (economy, energy, environment, education, etc, etc) kept rising.

My only point of sadness was that the primaries were officially my last time voting at the polls. We finally went in to update our addresses on our drivers licenses in September, and sometime during that process they updated our voter registration (which I’d actually already done, but still) and marked us for mail-in ballots. Our county officially switches to mail-in only next year (Washington is following Oregon’s lead), and so from here on in, it’s all stamps and the postal service. I’m disappointed — I enjoy going to the local elementary school to vote, and I’ve always appreciated how happy the volunteers are to see a twenty-something roll in the door.

E-A-G-L-E-S , Eagles!!!

The Eagles haven’t played in Seattle since 2002 (two years before we moved here), and Kevin was deliriously happy when he found out that ’08 would be the year. He bought tickets about the instant they went on sale, and so we bused to the game on Sunday. Kevin’s jersey attracted plenty of good-natured trash talking from a bus full of season ticket holders (you can tell from their ticket-holding lanyards). Made us both grin. The 12th Man (aka massively cheering crowds and a loud stadium) is a major Seattle Thing. We’re used to 12th Man banners at work, and by January you really see them everywhere. I regretted that I didn’t bring ear plugs, but my coworkers assured me on Monday that it had been a “quiet” game.

I have three NFL teams that I cheer for – the Eagles, the Patriots, and the Seahawks. Stack ranking them is difficult. I started watching football in 2002 because it was a prereq for dating Kevin. When I’d come up to Boston senior year of college, we’d spend Sundays in his dorm room on the futon, eating turkey and cheese sandwiches and watching the Eagles game. I now have seven years of Eagles/Donovan experience, and the Pats and Seahawks trickle in around four years. But to have both Eagles and Seahawks on the field was so, so cool since I know so many of the players (despite all of the injuries). Here are Eagles running onto the field.

We id’d many major league players in this shot: #86 Reggie Brown (who screwed up my last two fantasy seasons), #20 Brian Dawkins (defensive awesomeness embodied), #10 DeSean Jackson, #28 Correll Buckhalter, #83 Greg Lewis, #26 Lito Sheppard, #72 Tra Thomas, #24 Sheldon Brown, etc, etc.

The seats were awesome – just a few rows off the field, right by the endzone and the tunnel that the Eagles ran out of. I was totally bemused to find that all of my TV-honed football watching skills were useless. I’d watch the play, be mystified, and then watch the replay on the jumbotron to understand what had happened… Oohhhh. 🙂 I’m sure part of it was the angle, but all of my playcalling and positional skills were moot. I even had to check the board to see if we’d gotten first down.

We brought my camera (smaller and more convenient, but less capable of action/distance shots – bummer). Here’s Andy Reid (red arrow), Defensive Coordinator Jim Johnson (orange arrow), and some guy in a rubber eagles helmet (yellow arrow):

Kevin grins:

Our seats were especially neat because they were next to the tunnel to the Eagles lockerroom. By the fourth quarter all of the Seahawks fans started to empty out, and the Eagles fans drifted our way. The Eagles win was awesome, but even better were all of the smiling, chatting Eagles heading for the locker room. Here’s Donovan (green hat, hand waving, right of center):

All of the Eagles people started cheering “E-A-G-L-E-S, EAGLES!!” and singing the “fly, eagles, fly” song about halfway into the fourth quarter. The stadium was nearly empty with 8:00 to go – it really felt like only the Philly crowd was left. I actually found it to be one of the most severe expat experiences I’ve ever had – this tiny, tiny (100 people?) but emotional group waving Phillies banners and singing Eagles chants. (When it’s the Red Sox, I feel like we’re in the thousands, but for some reason this made me feel so far away from home. It made me pine for the east coast. Sad. And I *love* the Phillies banner. Our sort of people.)

We watched all of the players walk out before we left. So fun. It amused me to no end to walk past all of the men’s rooms on the way out and hear them singing away in there about the E-A-G-L-E-S, EAGLES!! and how they fly. We got so many high fives (due to Kevin’s jersey), and it was an awesome game.

I have to post a photo of Akers. (Who not only got both extra points, but kicked four field goals and gave me 15 points in my fantasy league. Rock on. I appreciate his contibutions to both real & fake football.)

All up, what an awesome afternoon.

Pillows

I have two 24″–square pillows for the daybed. When I was figuring out the Hidden Wells pattern, I made these two squares (they don’t quite match the quilt, but they’re close). I added a border of floral fabric. Here are the two squares at 12½ x 12½”.

My plan is to put the lighter one on a diagonal and build up around it, and treat the darker as a square and build around that.

I love this fabric, but I can’t wait to have it all folded away in the closet, and be done with the whole project.

When the cat’s away, the mice further deconstruct the bathroom

Kevin’s in LA all week for PDC (Professional Developers Conference), and about five minues after he got on the airport shuttle, I was full of project plans for the house. I write to-do lists constantly, and I’ve had “repair mbr, closet, BA walls” and “paint MBR, closet, bath” on every single list for at least eight months. I’m so ready to be done with those line items. The biggest problem, of course, is that we need to sleep somewhere else for two days while the room ventilates and the paint dries. So, when Kevin left I only needed to displace one sleeper, and the renovation plan was set for the week! (I should note: Kevin totally approves of this work, it’s just that neither of us have started it yet.)

Of course, once I started with the joint compount, I found many other places to use it. The major one is the main bath, and while repairing the known wall damage is great, I was holding my breath about what we’d find under the big mirror. We were pretty lucky – four 1″ wide holes, plus the holes from the wall anchors that held up the mirror, so all well within the realm of my new-found joint compounding skills.

I unscrewed the two wood backsplashes for the vanity, but they won’t budge, so that will be a task for Kevin and his crowbar.

The thing of joint compound we had in the garage is amusing. The stuff is Barbie Pink (it dries to white – useful), and so slathering it on the walls doesn’t really feel like a legit DIY project.

I’m finding that I like joint compounding WAY more than painting – it’s fast, satisfying, and the cleanup is instantaneous. MUCH better than the priming/painting nonsense! Too bad that the whole edging/rollers stage is next in the process!!

For the next few days, the major potential blocking issues is figuring out how to move our bed (by myself??) in time for painting… hmmm?

Hidden Wells quilt

I finally finished the Daybed Quilt!!

I finished sewing the trim on Tuesday night, and then spent Wednesday night and the last few minutes before James and Thanh arrived on Thursday sewing in all of the thread ends from the quilting. I washed it (to removed all of the starch, and to give it that wrinkly look), and it was finished in time for their stay. Yay!

I’m very pleased with the way it turned out. The trim, especially, is gorgeous to me, and really frames the quilt well. Here’s the top:

And here’s the back:

You can see the quilting pretty well (especially if you click for big), and I got another closeup picture of the quilting in the sunshine:

The pattern for this was Hidden Wells. My full log of blog posts is here. It was a slightly unusual project because it reminds me of so many other people. I bought the fabric with a Christmas gift certificate from Kevin’s sister, I started starching and piecing all of the fabric when Amanda, Brian and Lily were here, and the color combo now makes me think of Kevin’s mom because she was so enthusiastic about it. It’s neat to have all of those associations. 🙂