Deconstruction

It's funny the way these things come when you need them. I suppose any big project is like that. It's been a frustrating month and so this project was well-timed. There is something incredibly liberating; joyful even, about tearing a room apart with nothing but a hammer, a crowbar and your own hands. I'm not much of a destructive person, but I have to admit this came when I really wanted to tear something apart.

Of course, I'm also a little daunted by the fact that my master bath, although never beautiful, had at least been functional before I got at it. Now, sadly, it has no plumbing with which to function. No toilet, no sinks, no tub, not even many walls. It started just because we were thinking we would replace the tub surround, and so had to pull the tile off the wall. Once that started, we found out that the tile was the only thing holding the wall together - apparently there was long-standing water damage. In any event, what started as a relatively minor project turned into a room stripped down to the studs and about 10 trash bags of rubble.

So - who's coming to visit who knows anything at all about bathroom remodels? Hmmm? Any takers? It would be nice if you had also recently won the lottery, so that I could buy the raw materials. That would help too. Anyone?

Now that the destruction is done, I'm largely ignoring the existence of the master bath and will probably finish the master itself before I wade back into the scary gaping-hole that I've managed to create. Mom and dad helped me to lay the first couple of lines of bamboo in the bedroom so that they're straight and I can carry on over the summer. My parents, like the sane people they are, have escaped to Canada where it is not hovering around the 100 degree mark, but is a normal human temperature. I'm stuck here, sans plumbing.

The Horror of a Pink Floor

From the start of the floor-staining ambitions I've pictured the floor as a warm brown/burgundy combo - swirled and mottled and generally more interesting than a flat color. As it turns out, interesting isn't hard to come by in stained concrete. Huh.

Everyone had a different theory on how I should apply the stain, but generally the consensus was that if you want more uniform color a roller is good and less uniform color you use something more irregular - string mop, rags, whatever. Given that I wanted irregular I went for the string mop.

The color is semi-transparent and layer 1, which was brown, went on easily and looked completely blah and boring - flat, kind of dead-ish brown. I went to talk to the paint guys at Lowe's about the brown/red idea and they suggested a red called 'gem stone' which provided hours of fun and entertainment and at least one melt-down.

Apparently semi-transparent isn't actually the same in all colors and different colors have different levels of transparency. Who would have known this?

Long story short is that gem stone is apparently so close to not being transparent that it mops on to the floor in big terrifying dark pink/fuchsia streaks that immediately start to absorb into the concrete and don't want to wipe away causing minor hysteria. Fun! Nobody could ever say it was flat and boring.

Thankfully I started in a corner that is going to be largely hidden by other things, so the shockingly pink part of the floor will be mostly covered. In the end I had to dilute 'gem stone' with about one part stain to five parts water to increase the 'transparency' and then put another brown coat on top of it to tone it down.

All in all the final product looks pretty good - a swirly brown-red that is warm and pretty without being the center of attention in the room, which is good. I don't want people staring at the glare coming off of a hot pink floor all the time or anything. That would have been a little bit different than the look I was trying to achieve.

I'm really happy it's done because that means that I can actually get my furniture! Woohoo!

Door dreams

So clearly I'm a complete slacker for not posting with any kind of regularity- the writing project has been monopolizing my time and energy but that's no kind of excuse. Progress is, actually, being made on the house - albeit incredibly slowly. The best news is that the color choices in the living room, which I've been agonizing over, have been made and look fabulous. Walls are painted, ceiling is painted and the floor is being sanded and scraped (inch by painful inch - not kidding) to prepare for stain. I may soon, fingers crossed, have a real living room. This would be a huge step for me because it would mean that I could finally hire movers to get all of my stuff here - given that i can't even remember half of what I have, that will be like Christmas all over again.

We've run into a minor problem in terms of the back door though. The cement around the door was crumbling and the jam? The sill? The bottom part, at any rate, of the door was rotting out. Dad and I chipped the whole thing out (involved a wedge and a rubber mallet - highly satisfying) but now there's a slightly alarming gap below my door that is actually big enough for Cat to get in and out. Going to have to fix that before I develop a varmint problem. Mostly I just wanted to use the word varmint in a sentence...

In cheerier news, I've planted my little vegetable garden, and apparently have enough onions to feed an army - I'm really not sure what I'm going to do with them all if they come, but I've got a similar excess of spinach and lettuce, so expect lots of random food to be distributed this spring. I've also planted peonies, for the first time, which are apparently ridiculously picky and have to be the right depth to bloom. Naturally I just shoved them in and covered them with dirt like everything else, so I'll keep you posted on peony progress (because I'm sure you're all waiting with baited breath).

I've also taken a ridiculous ton of rose cuttings so if anyone wants climbing roses, I'm going to have some spares. Put some morning glory seeds to soak this morning, so I'll start those indoors and move them outside in a few weeks. Clearly I'm more excited about the garden than anything else. But that's probably because I don't have to scrape anything to work in the garden.

What am I doing???

So - I have spent the last two hours trying to figure out what is going on with the economy and if this is, in fact, the worst time to buy a house. Or, for the sake of argument, if I'm secretly cashing in on something that everyone else is missing. Mostly I think we're just trying to reassure ourselves that the sky is not actually falling as fast as the stock market.

The bottom line is that I've fallen head-over-heels for a very ugly house. It's sea-foam green. That might make sense if the house were on Fire Island or in Boca Raton, or if I was 84. One of my friends tried to reassure me with "I like it, it's... beachy." Right - except that there's no ocean for 232 miles - I googled it. I don't think we have fair claim to "beachy." Aside from the sea-foam, it has popcorn ceilings with water stains, holes in the walls, an AC duct system that would do nicely in a 1974 double-wide and carpet that has been there since the dawn of time complete with wrinkles to prove it. The kitchen is an insane combo of white cupboards with forest green "trim" (read: faux-trim created with the clever, and somewhat obvious, application of paint), fake "wood" counters and peeling vinyl tile. Also a mysterious and inexplicable drop ceiling - only over the kitchen, and for no apparent reason.

I've fallen in love with this ugly house and really want to fix it up myself. To work on it with my own hands and turn it into something that I can love and something that shows a little bit of me. I work all day, but at the end of the day there isn't really anything physical to show for it, so perhaps this is compensation for the lack? All I know is that all of the logical arguments for why I shouldn't do this seem to be sliding away with alarming ease. All of those minor details like utter lack of construction ability and experience, no actual budget for it and the house itself being far too big, not to mention the sheer number of hours needed seem not to matter so much right now.

I'm assuming this is going to be a comedy of errors, and for that reason I'm just going ahead and setting up the blog so that we don't have to go back and write about everything in retrospect. I can just post it as it's happening - in it's full glory. Besides, if Jan and Marg can buy a fixer and do it themselves, then damn it I can too.