Spring has sprung!

Our garden is planted, and already we have several promising looking sprouts--zucchini, yellow crookneck squash, green bean, wax bean, sugar snap pea, cucumber, carrot and tomato. (The tomato plants were purchased at the farmer's market, so they're significantly more than "sprouts").

Also, last weekend was the first Farmer's Market of the season, and we loaded up on lots of fantastic veggies. Oh, how I've missed the Farmer's Market! We tried bok choy for the first time ever, and I liked it a lot. James liked it a little. Plus, we got fresh eggs, carrots, potatoes, green onions, broccoli, garlic, goat cheese, buttercup lettuce, and the above-mentioned tomato plants. It was quite the bag full by the time I was done.

AND.....I talked to some folks about a farming class that meets on Friday nights, and they said I could join them!!!! So this Friday will be my first class, and I'm super-excited!!!

I never thought gardening or yard work could be tolerable, not to mention fun and exciting, but, boy, have I changed!

Mission Accomplished!

We have refinished our hardwood floors in both the den and the living room. I'm glad I didn't know how hard it would be when we started the project.

First, we ripped up the old carpet and pried up the tack strips lining the walls...

And, by the way, this is what we found under the carpet by the fireplace...

I still don't know what that was. At first I thought it was cement. It was rock-hard and the right color. But I was able to remove it, so it probably wasn't cement. It's anyone's guess.

I removed the cement with the same goop I used to remove the finish from the entire room....a liquid stripper. I had it on good authority that the liquid stripper would be easier and produce superior results as compared to a sander, so I went to work with that. This is what it looked like with about half the room done...

Just so you know....liquid stripper is a bad way to go! It's slow, labor-intensive, hands-and-knees-scraping-and-scrubbing, fumes-that-kill-brain-cells, type of work. A rented drum sander is really the way to go. And that's what we ended up doing after I finished going over the entire living room with the stripper.

This is the drum sander we rented from the Home Depot, with apologies to my dad...

Man! What a difference! That sander is my new favorite! The picture above is after just one swipe over half the den. It really lifted off the old finish easily, and it wasn't hard to control, either--a lot like mowing the lawn (not that I'm too familiar with THAT process, thanks to the best hubbie ever!) And hardly any dust because of the built in vacuum and dust bag. One thing to watch out for--if the dust bag gets too full, the weight will cause it to detach from the sander, and that sawdust will go *poof* out of the bag in a cloud. So if you attempt this project, please for the love of all that is holy remember to check the dust level from time to time!

This is what the floor looked like after we had removed all the old finish in the living room...

The next steps involved using a little Mouse sander to get the edges and corners (apparently, there is a better tool for this task available, but we didn't rent one) and filling in all the cracks and divets with wood filler. Neither of those were too difficult, but we went through a LOT of wood filler. TWO TUBS! Looking back, the floors were in pretty bad condition. I can imagine why the previous owners might have covered them up.

And then...on to the stain! We chose a dark walnut colored stain called, appropriately, Dark Walnut. It was supposed to take 8 hours to dry. It took a week! Good thing we decided to do one room at a time! Here's James putting down the stain...

And here's a pic of the room post-stain, pre-polyurethane...

The poly is down, but I don't have any pictures of the finished product! I'll get some soon. Meanwhile, here are a couple more pics of James and me at work...

Lots to report!

We've been super-diligent with house work recently.


Cyndi, Katii and Dad came to help us with painting this weekend. We three girls went to Lowe's to "look at" paint and ended up coming home with three gallons. James had picked out the colors on a previous trip, although he didn't know that's what he was doing at the time. We were meandering down the paint aisle, and he picked up three paint cards and said, "What about these, for the kitchen, den, and living room?" As that was the first time he'd shown any interest in paint colors, I took that to mean that he was head over heels for those colors. Turns out he had only a passing interest in them, but how was I to know that?


First, we painted the den--a lovely lime-y green color, which turned out a lot brighter than we thought it would. As Cyndi says, "It's not the color you chose, but it's the color you'll love" Never were truer words spoken. I am infatuated with my den color. Here are some pictures:



Of course a good paint job starts with taping.




Cyndi hard at work--she's quite the expert at painting.



A little silliness.


After the family left on Sunday, James and I did the living room. The color is called chilled cantaloupe. It looks like a fleshy, peachy, salmon-y color. We're not as thrilled with it as with the den, but it'll look better when there's furniture in the room and paintings on the walls. Lots of paintings on the walls.

Speaking of the walls. There was a lot of spackling to be done in the living room. Here's a tip: the spackle has to dry before you paint. We thought we'd start painting in the areas of the room that didn't have spackle and work our way to the patches and by the time we got to them they'd be dry. Not the case. It seemed like the more we painted, the longer it took for the spackle to dry. Probably we added too much moisture to the room with all the paint. Lesson learned. We didn't have that much time wasted, but there was probably a half hour or so that we were literally watching the paint dry. Or the spackle to be more precise.

Here are pictures from that day:










On Sunday night and Monday, we ripped up carpet and started stripping the old finish off of the wood underneath. That is a big project which has not been completed yet, but there are sure to be lots of pictures when it is complete, as well as a too-long description of the hardships of stripping floors by hand.

Could be better, could be worse...

Ripped up the carpet in the den today and this is what we found...

There's lots of paint splatters all over, it's mostly scuffed up, a little uneven, and there's a pretty broad stripe of paint all the way around the room. Clearly, the previous owners knew they were putting down carpet, so they didn't take much care with protecting the floors. All told, though, I'm pleased. We'll sand and refinish, and I think it'll be just right. We can't make the floors perfectly even--if you drop a marble it will roll all over the place. But we bought a 60+ year old house, and that's what you get! I'm excited.

Here's a close up...

Yard Work

James did a lot of raking this weekend. The weather was beautiful. Here's a picture of the hottie at work...

And the product of all that work: 5 bags of leaves!!!

We could have filled a few more bags if we had them, but he raked the excess leaves and pinestraw around a couple of trees. I was hoping to use some of the leaves for compost, but I think there are too many pine needles mixed in. I'll have to look up the effect of pine straw on composting.

A Picture's Worth 1000 Words

Here's a picture of our house...we'll paint the outside eventually, but there are bigger fish to fry right now.

For the foreseeable future, this is what it will look like if you drive by.

And so it begins...

We have dubbed 2008 "The Year of the House". Although we technically moved in to our new digs in 2007 we were so busy with the holidays, etc. that we didn't have time to do anything to spruce it up. But throughout 2008 there will be sprucing galore! And if I am more diligent with this blog than I have been with the multiple other blogs I've started and abandoned there will be documentation...we'll see how that goes.

A few projects worth looking forward to:

• Ripping up carpet throughout downstairs to reveal (hopefully) beautiful hardwood
• Painting every wall in the house
• New shelves in the kitchen cabinets
• Gardening

The first major project should be the carpet, for multiple reasons. First, I don't like the carpet. Second, it's only a matter of time before Daisy's hair is all over the place and I'd rather not have to vacuum. Third, we'll probably have to pry off the baseboards to pull up the carpet and if we paint first, the painting will probably get messed up.

Obstacles to overcome with this project include laziness, procrastination, possible condition of the floors underneath the carpet, and figuring out what to do with the old carpet once we've ripped it up. Will the trash men take it if we put it by the curb? Is there some municipal dumpster to which we must haul it? Research must be done.