Sneak a Peek

Not sure if you know this, but the bathroom is almost done.  I mean, really close. Here is a sneak peek.

If the lighting is weird, it's because what's left to do is... well... the light fixtures. Also, clean up the giant mess that bathroom slave Eddy made.

Seattle Redux

I went to Seattle again!  The Mid Winter meeting of the American Library Association was there.  The highlight of my trip was hanging out with my friend Rachel!

No, wait, I mean hanging out with Lily and Smith!

No wait, I mean hanging out with sea creatures!

Who am I kidding? It was all basically great.

I Totally Helped! (I Swear.)

Despite my kvetching about the kitchen and the bathroom, we really *have* been making progress.  Especially lately. In case you are just catching up, our bathroom went from this

to this.

Now we are starting to nice it up again. We paid to have it tiled (because look at all of those itty bity tiles. Would you want to install all of those?!  No, definitely not.)

Then we installed drywall.

(Despite the way this looks, I totally helped. A lot.)

(I mean, seriously, I really did help. I swear.)

Then Eddy did some unconventional out of doors washing of our old toilet.

It wasn't dirty when it was in the house, but it has been sharing the houseboat with the dogs for the last few months, so it was pretty ick. We (alright, just Eddy) assembled furniture.

(Look, even Harry Potter cone head worked more on this bathroom than I did.)

Then we (I!) painted and started installing stuffs.

(See! I totally helped! FYI, don't wear red during photo shoots in your new purple bathroom. Just don't do it.)

2 Weeks

Has anyone ever seen the movie The Money Pit?  If you have ever even considered any home project ever you must watch this movie.  One of the recurring jokes is that every contractor tells them the project will be done in two weeks.  Who would believe that?!  TSFB, that's who.  We started our kitchen reno in October and we are just now *almost* finished.

You probably don't even believe me, I've been moaning about it for so long.  I basically don't believe it myself. I just keep waiting for the whole kitchen to collapse in on itself and cease to exist.

See, this used to be our kitchen.

Keep in mind, when I took these pictures I was trying to get *exactly* the right angle to make it appear as spacious as was humanly possible. But to be honest, it was a little too cozy. It was also kind of an unfortunate blue gray. Now that's just paint, but we were locked into some blue color because of this (hideous?) backsplash tile.

Not really our taste and so, so navy blue.  With black counter tops, people!  Also, we had this large, awkward corner of our living room that was just not doing much for us.

So we basically ripped out half of our kitchen and started over. Painful? Yes. Lots of meals out? Yes. Finally over? Well, yes, actually!

Here's what it looks like now.

The view from the living room is a bit less awkward.

Yeah, that's some TSFB engraved wood.

Here's the half of the kitchen we didn't change (except for the tile and paint).

Looks pretty much the same. Just less navy and you can actually get more than 2 feet away from it to take a picture. Soooo, the one little tiny detail we are still working on is the door problem.

Did you spot it? Yeah. Recently, it changed to this



So close and yet so far. It will probably take me about 2 weeks to paint these doors.

Shut the Front Door

Our 1930s house has a lot of antique charm and we love that about it. However, the front door was that type of "antique charm" where the (lovely crystal) door knob didn't actually fit the door or work properly, where there was a smorgasbord of hardware pieces attached (none of which worked properly), and where the whole thing got pretty un-charming pretty quickly.

One weekend I got fed up. Basically I took a hammer and a power drill to the door and rid it of every single extraneous piece of hardware.



This ginormous thing came out:



(But, you know, after like 2 hours worth of banging and prying.) Then I put on new hardware, filled the holes and sanded them down, and taped for painting.





Voila!



One knob, one deadbolt. Both of which function perfectly. Finally we don't have to say, "Oh, let me get that door for you, the handle is kind of tricky," every time someone visits.  It's like we're adults or something.

Symmetrical Dogs

The thing about having two pit bulls is that (when they are not running at top speed through the house, destroying everything in their wake) they sometimes do adorably symmetrical things.

Norman and Harry Potter can even be used to teach the three types of symmetry. There's reflection symmetry:

Rotational symmetry:

And a whole heck of a lot of translation symmetry:

Symmetrical dogs: a perfectly legitimate argument for fostering a pit bull.