Still Life With Socks

There shall be no rhyme or reason in this post.  Just sayin'.

Mom was here for the weekend.  We were hoping I would have a working bathroom next door, and perhaps for the first time we would be able to sleep in real beds, but alas, it was not to be.  No contractor dudes last week, but Erin told me they would be here on Tuesday this week.  Rock and roll. 

One night last week I had popcorn for dinner.  Usually when I do that it's all I have, but since I'm trying to eat better this month I had a salad for dessert.  Made me feel virtuous.  I cooked tilapia and carrots for dinner on Friday when mom was here - I accidentally went a little overboard with the carrots.

Tasty.  It's really easy for me to get in the habit of eating whatever I can find that doesn't require any prep work; I forget that cooking isn't difficult and (usually) the end result is worth the extra effort.  Here is my food porn from tonight:

Scallops with green beans, shallots, garlic and the leftover soy sauce stuff that comes with scallion pancakes from the Chinese store.  Awesome.

I painted a few more coats on the face of the cabinets next door over the weekend.  I keep forgetting to take pictures because nothing looks different.  This is three coats of primer:

That's three coats just on the face, only one coat on the sides and back.  These are all the uppers.  As of Sunday afternoon they also have three coats of blue paint on their faces.  And here are the base cabinets, after one coat of primer on their sides and back bits:

They now have all three coats of primer on their faces, and tomorrow will get their first coat of blue.  Sandpaper is my friend.  Since I took these pictures, I moved some of the uppers into the kitchen to make room for the lowers in the living room.  I was hoping my dudes would fix the two broken cabinets on Tuesday so I could start painting them, and was trying to make room for them to maneuver.  Also, the range and microwave were scheduled for delivery Wednesday - today - and I had no idea where I was going to stick those buggers.

Then Erin called and postponed me until Thursday.  That was good and bad:  bad because I really want to get this project rolling again; good because while I was unable to sleep last night it SUDDENLY occurred to me that I need to paint the beadboard in the bathroom before they install the vanity and the toilet.  Oops.

This morning the phone rings and it is the delivery guy, calling from the next town over.  The roads were getting slippery and he was worried.  Better safe than sorry - we rescheduled the delivery for Monday.  And tonight Erin called and said he thinks they will be shoveling out tomorrow and won't be able to make it.  So it looks like Monday will be the day for serious progress around here.

Oh yeah, did I mention we are having a storm?  I got an email from Stowe earlier today and as they said, "it's puking powder around here."  I shoveled twice today, and this is what my driveway looks like right now:

I can't wait to see what it looks like in the morning.  My back hurts just thinking about it.  I sure wish I had figured out how to work my snow blower.  Someone in Montana posted on facebook today about driving around with her sunroof open.  Grrr.  I curse you.

But here is a happy something.  Way back last year, maybe around this time last year, my friend Lauren sent me a link to a small design company that was putting together a book about dogs called "1,000 Dog Portraits:  From the People Who Love Them" and she encouraged me to submit artwork for consideration.  I looked at the submission form and thought "what the hell, it's free."  So I sent in the two portraits I painted of Roxie and waited to hear if they made the cut.  I waited for a couple of months, only to find out the woman putting together the book decided to notify all the accepted artists when the book is actually published in the spring of 2014.  Poo.  So I forgot all about it.  Until a notice showed up in my facebook newsfeed today saying the book is available for pre-order on Amazon.  I clicked on the link and used the Look Inside! feature to see some of the pages.  No, I didn't see either of my paintings, but I DID see my name in the list of contributing artists!  WOO HOO!  I think only one of my paintings made it, and I don't know which one, but WOO HOO!  I put the book in my shopping cart.  I hope you do, too.  Roxie is going to be famous.

As a final note, here's an awkward question:  do you ever multi-task in the bathroom?  If you are one of those people with a magazine rack next to your toilet, the obvious answer is "yes."  But that has nothing to do with why I am asking.  Other than the toilet part.  Not to get all TMI or anything, but the other night I sat down to pee and, taking advantage of the fact that my feet were closer to my hands than they usually are, I also whipped off my socks at the same time.  See?  Multi-tasking.  Anyway, I got up, walked to the sink to wash my hands and brush my teeth, then turned around to leave the bathroom and saw this arrangement:

Standing up, all by themselves.

Okay, maybe it was really late and I was kinda tired, but at the time this was so funny I wanted to leave them there until someone else could see.  But the only company I am expecting in the near future is a bunch of contractor dudes and I don't think they would find as much humor in my socks as I did.  So I took a picture.  Still Life With Socks.

Hot Lips

Today is Day 4 of getting up early for no good reason.  Poo.  I thought my contractor dudes were going to show up on Monday to put my bathroom together, but I have yet to see them.  And today is Thursday.  We didn't have a set date and I'm sure if I had slept in today they would have been knocking on the door bright and early.  But all that is neither here nor there (begging the question -- where is it?).  The bigger issue is that it is March already, and we all know what that means.

It is time for my annual confrontation with my personal trifecta.

I have never been able to simultaneously master three particular areas of my life and every March - for reasons I cannot now recall, although it has something to do with March Madness - I give it another shot.  I am attempting to paint well, eat well and exercise well.  I was thinking about my trifecta the other night and I realized that were I to give it an acronym I would have to say I am attempting to PEE.  Paint, eat, exercise.  Awesome, right?  Looking at it another way, I've got EEP, the initials of my friend Eric.  You can see his blog here and his website here.

Anywho, my first step was to give something up for Lent.  I know, I know, I'm not a practicing Catholic, but all this happened on the first day of Lent, so there you go, I'm taking advantage of the coincidence.  And what did I give up?  If you think I'm going to say chocolate, you obviously do not know me at all.  I gave up sloth.

Yep, that's right, sloth.  And not the three-toed variety.  We're talking the "habitual disinclination to exertion" variety (thank you dictionary.com - I couldn't have said it better myself).  You know that expression about things in motion tending to stay in motion?  Well the opposite is also true.  Things not in motion have a hell of a time gettin' a move on without some external influence.  I have become habitually inclined to take the path of least resistance, which is to say when I am lying on the chaise with poodle reading a book, I tend to stay lying on the chaise with poodle reading a book.  The only one around here getting a good workout is my library card.

And this is a problem.  So yesterday I got up early and waited for the potential arrival of contractors.  After an hour I figured they weren't coming so I made a lovely breakfast of sausage and scrambled eggs with shallots.  I can't remember what I did for the rest of the morning, but early afternoon poodle and I packed our gym bag and headed out into the world.  I put my running shoes on for the first time in months and although I only clocked two miles on the treadmill, two slow and pathetic miles, a girl's gotta start somewhere.  I feel so much better after I exercise, and yesterday was no exception.  Dinner was chicken soup with a crap ton of broccoli and some leftover chicken boobs, so I feel pretty good about what I ate yesterday too.  That just leaves the P.

I painted the background of this canvas the other day and finished it last night.  This was going to be my teaser photo for you but since I didn't write this blog post last night like I intended and I took some beauty shots this morning, here you go.  I named it "Hot Lips."

My first cow.  A wee small cow, 7" wide by 5" high.  Happy me.  That rounds out a successful day of PEE.  I hope this is the start of something good.

In poodle news, someone got a new coat.  It is a hand-me-down from Jane's dog Carly.  Carly is a Rottweiler so the coat is a bit big on poodle, and when Jane reached in the jeep window and put it on her, poodle was already wearing a sweater underneath another coat.  It was cold that day.  When we got home and poodle jumped out of the car I almost fell over laughing because she looked like a little pork sausage.  She's not quite sure what to do with this coat because it is so much bigger than all her others.  When we went out to run errands on Sunday she wore the coat and I tried to get some pictures before we got in the car.  This is the best I could do:

Our first stop was Costco (I know, on a Sunday, but it wasn't as bad as I expected) and when I got back to the car poodle was in the front seat.  Naked.

Huh?

Did I forget to lock the car doors?  Did someone break in and steal her coat?  It took a bit but common sense finally prevailed and I checked the back seat, which I had flipped up when I put the box of food in the way back.  There was the coat.  How she got it off I have no idea.

We also went to Lowe's to pick up the bathroom vanity.  Ann met me there since it wouldn't fit in the jeep; she took it home and brought it to me on Monday for which I am very grateful since I'm not sure how I would have gotten it here otherwise.  Last stop was at Home Depot to pick up my kitchen sink.  Now the only major item I am lacking is the kitchen faucet.  Range and microwave are being delivered on the 12th and Kevin from Morrisville Lumber will come get the final measurements for my countertops as soon as the cabinets are installed.  Which means I've got an immediate date with some primer.

Gottagobye.

We're cooking with gas!

In honor of 7,701 page hits on my blog, here is a picture of poodle fixing my range:

She worked really hard and to celebrate our ability to fry, sauté, bake, boil, simmer and otherwise cook with high heat, guess what I'm having for dinner.  A salad.  Huh.

While this was happening, a delivery truck was here.  I was expecting an 18-wheeler and while the truck may have had 18 wheels, it was one of those flatbeds with a fork lift velcroed onto the back.  You can see it parked a bit down the road.  These shrinkwrapped packages...

... turned into this:

There is also a box full of bathtub upstairs.  The two biggest cabinets (sink base and 30" base) were damaged but my contractors said they can fix them easily.  Four guys came over on their lunch hour and carried everything inside for me.  They.  Are.  Awesome.  Which reminds me - did I tell you what happened over the weekend?  At about 9:30 Friday night I suddenly had no water.

That's right, no water.

Seriously?  Just as I was getting a little excited about seeing progress next door, now I've got no water.  Talk about taking four steps back.  I'd be making more progress if I just turned around.  I was due to have company for the weekend and now I had no water.  Grr.

I spent a few hours online looking up "no water" and "no water pressure".  I learned a lot and can probably add "amateur plumber" to my resume, but I still couldn't figure out why I had no water.  The pressure tank sounded fine but the gauge was at zero.  I sent a text message to Jane, the broker who sold me this property and my only real friend in Morrisville at this point (the contractors work for her husband Nathan, and one of them is her son and one is her son-in-law), and went to bed hoping against hope I didn't need a new well pump.

Woke up Saturday morning to the phone ringing - it was Jane.  I really need to stop sending her distress signals, but she has been my savior many times over.  She sent Nathan and Dean (her son-in-law, who fixed all my plumbing next door) over and they figured out the problem in about five minutes.  It took about 15 minutes to wrap it all up because of the awkward way everything is installed in here.  See this thing?

I saw it Friday night while I was doing my diagnostics (heh, that makes me sound like a professional) but I couldn't tell what it was.  I had to reach my arm way behind the pressure tank and take a picture of it to see what the label said.  Turns out the guts of this baby don't make a full electrical connection unless the lid is screwed down tight, and we are guessing whoever installed it (the date on the label is 2012) couldn't reach back there to tighten the screws all the way.  Over time they wiggled loose and suddenly, on Friday night, they became just loose enough to lose the electrical connection.  Dean was contorting himself around the pressure tank to screw the lid back on, and Nathan was trying to lean over Dean so he could hold a flashlight in the right spot.  They saved my bacon.  I told Jane those boys are keepers.

And back to present day, when Erin, Jeff, Dean and a fourth guy (whose name I can't remember) came over to help move the cabinets inside, I told Dean I still have water.  He laughed and said he didn't!  On Sunday HIS water was off and he didn't get it back until Monday when he had to replace his water pump.  GET!  OUT!  I couldn't believe it.

Jumping back to the weekend, Kathy, Abby and Evan arrived Saturday at about 6pm.  They had the dubious honor of being the first people to sleep upstairs next door, even though there is no working bathroom over there.  First Evan fell asleep with poodle on mom's chaise:

Johnny came over on Sunday after finishing the Stowe Derby (you can read about that event here) to take a shower and regale us with tales of his athletic prowess.  He went back home Sunday afternoon but the other three stayed until Monday.  We watched Despicable Me 2 (GREAT movie) and made many a bracelet on Evan's Rainbow Loom:

Roxie was very sad when everybody went home, but she crashed right after dinner and was out for the count.

Tomorrow will be a painting day.  It's time to commit to a color for the kitchen cabinets and for the bathroom walls.  Tonight I'm going to assemble the cart I got for the pantry.  It's the least important thing I need to do, so of course I shall do it first.

Over and out.

George Foreman

I discovered it is possible to cook fried eggs on a George Foreman grill.

Tonight, when I do this again, I will crack the eggs into a bowl first so I can use my left hand to hold the grill more level.  I had it resting on the lid of a pot, but it slipped off and the counter got a bit messy.

"But Christine," you may say, "why go to such extremes when you can just eat Chinese take out for a couple of days.  Your range should be fixed by now."  Yes, that is all true.  But I got an email from Sears saying the replacement part has been backordered.  Indefinitely.  HAHAHAHAHA!  That's so funny.  Luckily, I got another email two days later saying the part had shipped.  The propane guy is coming over on Tuesday morning to fix everything.  Not sure how I am going to feed my house guests this weekend, but I will worry about that tomorrow.

Here is a picture of some stuff:

I didn't think I would have any real news to report, so this was going to be filler.  Then there is this:

Oh sweet poodle.  Mom's air mattress is still set up in the living room; we use it as a chaise.  And poodle naps there.

Yesterday I finally got off my butt and did a little work.  First I went and joined a gym.  I.  Need.  Some.  Exercise.  Now that I've got 24-hour access to treadmills, rowing machines and free weights, I already feel better about myself.  But back to the remodel.  I put the first coat of paint on the kitchen beadboard walls.  Do you have any idea how time consuming that is?  I basically painted the entire kitchen with a brush, because I had to get in all those wee little cracks.  Then I went over it all again with a roller.  I really thought I would get to the second coat yesterday, but in the middle of the night I realized that wasn't going to happen and I still needed to slap more Kilz in the pantry.  Two o'clock in the morning, and I went to bed, thoroughly covered with a layer of oil-based paint.  That stuff stinks.

So I was just getting out of bed, literally JUST getting up, when I noticed someone was at the door.  The floor installer guy was early.  ACK!  He got started on the bathroom floor while I placed an emergency call to my contractor friends, and they came over to de-squeak the kitchen floor.  Now, seven hours later, here is my new bathroom floor:

Wicked nice, for in-stock sheet vinyl!  The beadboard will end up being white, and those walls - the ones that have been pink, green and hideous blue - will be either a pale lavender or some kind of apple green.  First I have to fix my mirror mess (which will involve cutting off the flappy bits of drywall, then skim coating it with mud).  I need to pick a color and get it done before Tuesday next week because that's when I'm hoping the Home Depot delivery truck will get here.

Now for the kitchen:

It looks so tiny with poodle sitting in the middle of the floor!  The blue thing leaning against the wall is a piece of mightycore painted cabinet color.  It's a Behr color called Ionic Sky.  I'm going to have the paint guy here at Ace Hardware match it because he can get it for me in an oil-based paint, and Home Depot can't.  I will have a whole lot of cabinets to paint next week.  Oh, and Morrisville Lumber is making my wood countertops.  I'm still stunned I can afford them.

I love to see visible progress.  The kitchen and bathroom are going to look SOOOOOO different from their previous selves.  They already do, but the end results are going to be crazy good.

We just had a bunch of wicked thunder and hard, heavy rain.  Roxie put herself to bed.  Hmmm.  Naptime.  Sounds like a good idea.

Things that go bump in the night

Okay, so it wasn't really night yet, and it wasn't exactly a bump.  But late yesterday afternoon Roxie head a loud noise and ran to the door barking her head off.  That can be a bit startling when you are home alone and the lighting situation makes it so it is much easier to see in than it is to see out.  But have no fear, it was this:

Can you see all the snow that slid off the roof?  There's a huge pile out there.  And speaking of snow, I am developing quite the talent for meeting all the neighbors who own plows.  Roxie and I were out shoveling my other driveway when a guy in a pickup drove by.  A pickup with a plow on the front.  He stopped and asked if I wanted any help.  I asked if he would help with half the driveway - the outside half that included the berm made by the town plow.  I needed to shovel something because I need the exercise.  Turns out the neighbor is named Byron; he and his wife live about half a mile up the road and poodle and I sort of met them a couple weeks ago when we were out for a walk.  He was quite nice and offered to plow both of my driveways anytime I need some help.  Awe.  Some.

"And now, the continuing stooooory of a quack who's gone to the dogs."

(HAHAHAHAHAHA!  Anybody remember that one?)

Anyway, back to the continuing stooooory of  a remodel that's ....  I don't have a good ending to that sentence.  So here's a little story that has nothing to do with the remodel, but illustrates my one-step-forward-two-steps-back theory.  Since I am technically a new customer with the propane company, they had to come out and do a free site inspection to check for leaks.  I also asked if they would cap the other propane line (I've got two tanks, one for each of the gas ranges in the two kitchens) and remove the extra tank.  Remember, I'm replacing the range in my soon-to-be-new kitchen with an electric range so I'm not completely surrounded by fuel sources.  So the guy comes out and instead of looking at everything and telling me it's all hunky dory, he tells me the safety valve on the range is defective and he has to turn off the propane and lock the tank until I get a replacement part and someone comes back out to install it.  (Read $200 or so.)  Plus, the tank itself has a leak, so that baby needs to be replaced.  AND the tank is too close to the door so when they come to swap it out they need to relocate it several feet farther down the driveway.  I briefly thought about getting rid of this range and ditching the propane altogether, but my new electrician friend told me it would be a nightmare to run wires for an electric stove.  So I ordered the part, which won't get here until Thursday at the earliest.  In the meantime, I have no cooking apparatus, except my toaster oven.  Yay me.

When the propane guy went over to look at the other tank next door, he said it isn't one of theirs so he couldn't remove it.  He did turn it off and lock the tank and shove the gas line down through the kitchen floor, but it took several phone calls to other propane companies before I found the rightful owner of the tank.  They must have taken it away sometime on Thursday when I wasn't looking; we got a crap ton of snow Thursday night and when I noticed the tank was gone on Friday, there were no footprints in the new snow.

But let's go back inside.  The kitchen went from looking like this on Thursday:

To looking like this on Friday:

Here's the other side of the room:

I still need to slap some Kilz on the walls and ceiling of the pantry.  Did you know they make that stuff in a spray can?!?  I found it at Home Depot and almost did a happy dance in the paint aisle.  I also want to fill in the cracks between the beadboard panels before I paint everything.  Ann says I can get wood filler that squeezes out of a tube like caulk, which is exactly what I was hoping to find.  The flooring installer is coming end of the week so I have a couple of days to get this done.  I forgot to take a picture of the kitchen ceiling - Erin and Jeff took those "beams" down for me.  If I get my act together, I will paint the ceiling this week too.

Up in the bathroom, the Thursday-to-Friday transformation isn't very spectacular:

The beadboard has been wrapped around the room as far as it can go until the bathtub gets installed.  I need to figure out how to deal with that mess I found/created behind the mirror before I can paint the walls in here.  I also need to figure out how to deal with the skylight.  If you remember from previous pictures, it looks like raw wood, which just doesn't seem like a good idea considering the skylight is above the bathtub.  I'm going to paint it high gloss white but I don't know if I need to seal it first or if the paint will act as enough of a seal.  And I want to make sure the damn thing isn't leaky.  Again, flooring installer is coming end of the week and I'd like to have the upper walls painted before he gets here.  The beadboard is going to stay white but I think I will wait until the tub is in and the rest of it is installed before I bother with filling nail holes and painting it.

As a final unrelated note, poodle and I found out our friend Cisco headed off for his journey across the Rainbow Bridge.  In the same way that Ubu went during a lunar eclipse, Cisco went while there was a beautiful rainbow across the Flathead Valley.  Back in December Cisco gave poodle a going away present, and she has been really good at keeping it in one piece.  Here they are together in the jeep somewhere around Minnesota, and again at my mom's house at the end of the trip:

We named the toy after Cisco so we will always remember him, and poodle will keep him close to her heart.

Shave and a Haircut

It has been non-stop activity around here - Roxie is beginning to think we are popular.  I have had a landline for mere days and the phone has been ringing off the hook (Google maps recorded message, wrong number twice), we've had visitors (FedEx guy, census worker) - I just can't keep up.

Other than that, I've had so little to report I was going to resort to regaling you with tales of my first leg shaving event in months.  When you avoid this personal grooming task for as long as I did, trust me when I say there IS a learning curve.  That shaving cream really flies out of the can - it was all over the side of the tub, on the wall, on a plant, halfway up the window shade....  Truth.  But I'm not going to tell you about that after all because more important things have been happening.  Also bathroom related, but better.

This is what I did last night:

On Saturday morning, three guys who will be my best friends over the next couple of weeks came over and assessed my project.  I have a fair idea of what I want the finished space to look like - I just don't know how to get there.  So they looked, they assessed, they discussed, they ripped that last remaining kitchen cabinet out of the wall, and they said they would be back Monday morning at 8:00 a.m.  We needed to figure out where the mold on the kitchen wall was coming from so I demoed as much as I could in the bathroom last night.  It wasn't much - I took the mirror and the shelf under it down, took away the shower doors and all the door tracks, then ripped off the shower surround.

This is what my bathroom looks like right now:

Bathroom?  What bathroom?  The leaky culprit was the toilet.  Of course it was.  So now I have a skylight in my kitchen right up to the bathroom:

Talk about a blank slate.  Dean is going to replace all the plumbing that lives under the bathroom floor tomorrow, then they will replace the rotted subfloor and add a layer of 1/4" luan on top.  On Wednesday I have planned a field trip to Home Depot to look at a tub, the shower surround, a vanity, fixtures, toilets and new flooring.

And back down in the kitchen, did I ever post these pictures from last week?

That's the hold out - the last cabinet we couldn't get down.  The one my new friends ripped off the wall yesterday.  Now the kitchen looks like this:

WOO HOO!

You know, I have been following the blog of an Etsy seller who moved from Boston to rural Vermont (outside Woodstock, actually) with her groom-to-be.  She was posting all the home improvement projects they were doing in the months before their wedding, which they were hosting at their house.  I kept thinking how unrealistic her situation was because she was obviously marrying someone with remodeling super powers and they were doing everything themselves.  (Wonder Twin powers activate -- form of This Old House!)  And by everything, I mean EVERYTHING.  They built a huge garden with raised beds and a fence with a fancy gate.  They converted the basement space into a spare bedroom, and redid an entire bathroom (including pouring a concrete shower and tiling the crap out of everything).  They walled in the open space under their deck and made it an indoor space with reclaimed windows they sanded and repainted, and huge bluestone pavers for the floor.  It all looked so cool and sexy.

Well.  Let me tell you.  So far there has been exactly nothing sexy about my remodel.  Not that I expected it to be, mind you.  That would have been unrealistic and I don't smoke THAT much crack.  At this point there is not a thing happening next door that I can do myself.  Once the cabinets get here I will break out a paint brush - they are unfinished oak.  And when the beadboard goes up on the walls I will paint that myself as well.  In fact, here is Ann's rendering of what we hope the finished kitchen will look like:

Picture the beadboard on the walls in yellow, not tan.  And that thingy in the middle of the floor is a cabinet on casters that will live in the pantry.  Yellow walls, blue cabinets, hopefully dark wood countertops, and some kind of tile-look floor that is either a laminate floating floor or sheet vinyl.  Not the pattern in the pictures, but that's the closest Ann's software let her get to a tile look.  In fact, these rooms have only had ceilings for about a week - they looked so bright and airy with blue skies and puffy white clouds.

Anyway, this is parked in my driveway:

I described it to my nephew Evan as a pickup truck with a dump truck on the back end and he thought it would be big enough for him to swim in.  Evan, I would respectfully suggest that although that may be true, it perhaps isn't the best of ideas.  Even if it IS your birthday today.

So that's where we are right now.  My new best friends put two coats of Kilz on the kitchen floor right before they left today, and tomorrow they will finish with the plumbing and start putting the walls back together in the kitchen and the floor back together in the bathroom.  In the next couple of days progress will come to another screeching halt while we wait for the Home Depot delivery truck.

Now, let's end on a fun note.  Here is a picture of my knobs:

Wait a minute, what did you think I was talking about???

I found these on Etsy.  They.  Are.  So.  Awesome.  I ordered two to see what they look like in real life and they have the potential to be a subtle yet interesting bit of bling for the kitchen cabinets.  You know, when I actually have cabinets.