So Much To Do

I've been MIA again, but this time not due to sickness or sheer laziness or lack of anything to say.

A week ago Friday, I bought two bookcases from a shop that is moving to a new location. I got a steal of deal of $10 each. What a bargain!

The two bookcases, stashed in the corner

The next day, at about noon, Mr. J and I sat in my office, trying to figure out how to organize the room, where to place the bookcases, etc., etc., which led to the discussion of, "Well, we do want to pull up the carpet and paint the walls." "Yes, but I thought we were going to work in the garden this weekend." "Yeah, well, maybe we should do this first." And off to Home Depot we went to get all the materials to rip up the carpet, paint the plywood (for our temporary ghetto-hardwood-floor substitute until we can afford the real stuff), paint the walls, clean up the trim, etc. etc. All so that we could then move in the $20 bookcases. So much for my bargain.

For a week, our living area looked like this:

Ack!

as we did this to my office:

And now it looks like this:

Yay!

All that's left to do is hang pictures, shorten the curtains, and find some new bookcases. Because, alas, after all that, we decided that the bookcases really didn't go with my office. So now they are being used as clothing shelves in our bedroom (in place of the cardboard boxes that we had been using as dressers for the past 7 months ... really, we are not still in college. We are grown adults ... sort of. Really.)

After a brief respite of having the house all in one piece again, we started in on Mr. J's office, and once again our living room looks like this:

If you know anything about home "improvement" projects, I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that in the process of ripping up his carpets, etc., we discovered that the wood around his window was rotten and icky and mucky from a leak that the previous owners decided to just ignore:

Oooh, pretty!

So yet another quick-and-easy project turns into a major chore. But already, it looks like this, so we are making terrific headway ... all things considered:

In between painting and moving and taping and priming, we also had time to plant a huge donation of clippings and cuttings from our neighbor's garden, buy all the materials necessary to build a fence around our future veggie garden, and attend a fantastic wedding reception up at Bogus Basin for some good friends of ours.

The happy couple

So, that's where I've been. Oh, and I am also anxiously awaiting my prize for winning the most recent round of the Minion-lympics ... or maybe it's completely separate from the Minion-lympics? Hmmm, I don't know. (Some Minion I am!) In any case, I was so happy to hear that I had won the next incarnation of the GMBOA from Wandering Nana. I cannot wait, though I'm very apprehensive about the contest I'll have to initiate to pass it on to the next grand prize winner. [If you have no clue what I'm talking about, take a gander at Whimsy over here and Wandering Nana over here.] I never ever win anything, but I won this, and I'm so so happy about it! Yay me :-)

Tales of the So-So Sewer

So, I've proven myself somewhat adept at this knitting thing. I mean, I haven't yet made anything more complicated than a cap, a scarf, and right now, a blanket. But I haven't royally screwed up yet either, as I do with just about every other crafting endeavor I get it into my head to try (ask me someday about the sock log dog). And I've actually completed six or seven entire projects. If you knew anything about my childhood (which you probably don't), then you would know that I was the queen of beginning everything from hook rugs to those small wood ornaments in which you twirled wood (or maybe it was paper) around a toothpick and then glued coils of the wood/paper/whatever into crazy shapes. But whatever project I started, I would soon give up, and my ever-patient mom would either finish it or just toss it, depending on her mood.

Anyway, I think I got a little cocky with this knitting thing. It made me think that I was finally over my craft-ineptness. I became so cocky that I had a friend come over to teach me how to set up my sewing machine. We got it all threaded, etc., and before I knew it, I was stitching away on an old hand towel. It looked like I actually knew what I was doing. So much so that I believed it myself.

That lesson was three weeks ago. And now here I am, on a gloomy Sunday, thinking I can create curtains for our kitchen all by myself.

Problem 1: I really have no clue how to cut fabric properly, and I definitely do not have the correct tools to do so. So I am starting off with a crookedly cut hem. Is that bad?

Problem 2: Clever on that I am, I decided to do some practice runs on my practice towel in an attempt to learn how to do overlock stitchin and hemming. In the process, I mucked up the thread ... thrice. I ran out of bobbin thread. (Luckily I am a pro at loading a bobbin. If only all of sewing were as easy as that.) And I have yet to be able to figure out the correct bobbin and thread tension, which means my overlock stitches are all over the place in length and width ... but maybe they are supposed to be that way. I just don't know. Or maybe it's not a problem with the tension, and I just suck at sewing. Hmmmm, could be.

Problem 3: In an effort to see if I could figure out the whole tension thing, I started on yet another row of stitching on my practice fabric and promptly snapped the needle in two. Really.

So now I am done. I am throwing in the towel (literally). I am either going to send it all off to my mom with the measurements. (Times like these I definitely wish my mom lived around the corner instead of thousands of miles away.) Or, better yet, I'm just going to go out and buy some curtains, because this whole "let's save money by making our own" is definitely not working out.

Ugh.

High on Life

Well, OK, so I'm really high on B.I.N. shellac-based primer. But I'll take what I can get. Actually, we are going to be escaping the overly stench-a-cious place that is our home by checking out a friend of a friend who is performing with his fellow jazz-band members at the local steakhouse/bar. It sounds great, but at this point, anything that gets me out of this overly heated house that smells like about a million Dry-Erase markers sounds good.

The label on the paint can was extremely helpful, by the way. Something to the effect of "Use in a well-ventilated space with as many windows open as possible. The fumes should be no worse than if you were painting outside." Well, when it's 14 degrees outside and dropping fast, I can tell you that the windows and doors did not stay open long. However, we did open them for short bursts. Just to try to clear our vision! Oy!

But the floors are going to look so much better than the manky, munky, ucky cat-pee-stained carpet that was there. Even if we didn't sand it all down properly and you can see a faint outline of Mr. J's sneaker in one spot. I'll take that any day.

I have a whole list of fascinating, interesting topics for this blog o' mine. But this is all I have time for today. And it's also about all the few remaining brain cells in my skull can handle. Here's some pictures worth a thousand words (or maybe about 100) to fill in the blanks.

Before


During


Camera battery is dead, so no photos of the paint fumed floors.

P.S. I realize that the during photo is a thousand times worse than the before photo, but photos just do not capture the remaining 900 words, which would all describe the horrible stench of cat piss that those two layers of carpet and one stubborn layer of linoleum contained.
P.P.S I just reread this, and wow is this all over the place. I am blaming all the empty spaces in my narrative on chemical-induced brain-dead-ness.