Fuck.

I had all these plans for over the weekend.  I'd had a little cold (ha. ha) last Wednesday and Thursday, which got a little worse, and a little worse...until I ended up in the ER last night.  Bigass bacterial bronchial infection FTW.  Does not play well with asthma, in case you were wondering.

So yeah.  Haven't been doing much around the house lately.

The Right Blue, x2

As I contemplate painting the trim in the guest bathroom (which is what you do while you're sitting around on your ass not getting started), I'm also contemplating repainting the master bathroom walls and ceiling...and possibly changing the color in the guest bath.

This is [part of] the master bath.  The color is lovely.  In fact, I've loved it so much that while I seem to paint every room in the house like every two years, this room has been the same color for nearly eight!  It's a bit too intense a blue for me anymore, though, as I've grown towards softer colors;  and the ceiling and trim and doors are all painted the same color, for a mostly-monochromatic effect.  Which I actually still like, but the paint on the trim and doors is getting pretty grubby, and it's time to freshen the paint anyway.   I figure if I'm going to do that, I may as well update the whole bathroom.

via In the Hushed Hours

I'm thinking something more like this.  A bit more green, and a bit more grey, but still some very soft, muted blue.

This is Benjamin Moore's "Grey Horse"

(For comparison, the current color in the master bath is pretty close to this color  (I mixed it myself, sorry) , and my bedroom is pretty much the same color as Sherwin Williams' "Rainwashed" (also mixed by me).

via Houzz

This is also lovely, but I think it might be a bit too dark.  The source doesn't name the wall color; but I think it's probably pretty close to Sherwin Williams' "Mineral Deposit."

This is my guest bathroom as it stands right now.  I only just did this gray/white thing last Fall, and I'm already bored with it.  It's soft, but it's kinda...blah.  I love the gray in my living room, but in here it's just not doing it for me.  I already have to prime and re-paint the trim and doors in here;  I was thinking I might try a very pale blue in here as well as in the master bathroom.







Meanwhile, I've also been searching for the perfect blue nail polish - in a similar color, actually.   I haven't been able to find one anywhere.  Everything is a bright Tiffany Blue, electric turquoise, or very pale baby blue, and none of them work on me.  I found the right color in a Sally Hansen, but it was all sparkly and glittery - while I love glittery on my toes, my fingernails are so short that glittery polishes just make it look like I have no nails at all.  (I keep them very short for guitar purposes).

So, I tried Finger Paints' "Hue Gotta Be Kidding Me"  (wall paint should have such exciting names).  It's really pretty, but it was SCREAMING! FREAKING! TURQUOISE!

* please excuse all the hastily- and badly-applied nail polish in this post.  I was just basically throwing the stuff at my nails to check out the color.  At least I didn't post pics from last night when I was testing it out on my knee. 

I tried mixing some of it into a bottle of white I had, to lighten it waaaay up...and it was waaaaay too light.  It looked like blue-tinted correction fluid. 

* also please excuse that one horribly-bitten nail.  That's my Throwdown Nail.  I can bite that one all I want, and it keeps me from biting the others!

And finally, I got it just right, with the addition (to the white-based mixture above)  of a bit of a deep teal I had but never wear, to make it darker but not more intense,  and a whole bunch of China Glaze "Nude" to mute the color - a trick I learned mixing the bathroom paint color, as a matter of fact.  You can mute a color by mixing in its opposite - in this case, a light blue muted with what basically amounts to a peach or a pastel orange.   
















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Summer and Post-Rain Yard Maintenance

In case you don't live here, it's just rained for like three weeks running.  I'm not complaining - last year's drought was the worst on record for Texas, and this year's rains (which are actually "average", if that even means anything anymore) are a welcome, welcome sight.  So is all the green - this time of year everything turns brown and goes semi-dormant for the summer, but grass and trees and plants are all so wonderfully fluffy and green this week. :)

Yesterday was the first day in nearly three weeks it didn't rain, and the entire neighborhood has exploded into lawnmowers, edgers, and people in shorts crawling around on their hands and knees.  For my part, I hit the front yard running as soon as I got home from work last night:

• "mowed" the front yard (with a weedeater - I'm between lawnmowers at the moment)
• and edged the yard and garden beds (also with the weedeater)
• pulled some weeds
• pruned a few shaggy bits off of the oak tree in the front yard
• hoed, raked, and weeded the front garden bed
• also pruned a few new suckers out of the Mexican Orchid Tree in the backyard

Before - shaggy hangy-downy bits                                                  After - not a lollipop anymore! 

I promise my house isn't yellow.  That's the sunset.  It's actually beige I hate yellow.  I hate beige, too, but I hate yellow more. 

Also?  OMG I HAVE GRASS IN THE FRONT YARD FINALLY.  It hasn't been this green in three freeping years!!

Before - shaggy bits, and even a dead shaggy bit! (broken branch)                                After:  visible tree crotch is visible

Ta-da.   Fall down go boom now.  Bit tired after all that.  

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More Cleaning Binge

I've been on a bit of a cleaning kick lately, and with things suddenly breaking around the house, I have also developed a newfound comittment to home maintenance and preventative maintenance, LOL.  So, because it's me, I've made some lists:


Done  (last weekend, and the weekend before):

• BIG kitchen cleaning (countertops scrubbed and bleached, canisters and appliances wiped and/or dusted, fridge cleaned out and cleaned)
• BIG vacuuming (includes moving furniture not normally moved for spot-vacuuming, and vacuuming a/c registers and return vents)
• BIG whole-house dusting with my handy-dandy new Swiffer 360 Extender (which is the absolute BOMB, and I'd never have tried it if Kress' mom hadn't bought one for us for no reason) - cabinet and door frames, baseboards, ceilings and corners, art and picture frames, knick-knacks, ceiling fans, light fixtures
• BIG bathroom cleaning  - counters, cabinet doors, cabinet interior (organization), tub and shower walls and fixtures, light fixture, doors and baseboards
• BIG laundry - curtains, rugs, comforters, and bed pillows

Yet To Do: 

• bleach and re-seal tile grout in all tiled areas of the house (2 bathrooms, kitchen and dining room, fireplace hearth, front entry)
• replace burnt-out light bulbs
• clean and repaint the baseboards in the dining room (chewed by puppies a year ago and never fixed)
• replace all the floor T-moldings in between the rooms and around the fireplace - most of them pop loose several times a year, and some are broken.  All of them need to be replaced with a better solution.
• Wash & scrub all the exterior windows, and clean the insides
• Clean all the blinds - if I take them down and hose them off on the back patio, I can spray-paint the last one in the living room while I'm at it.  
• Prime&  re-paint all the baseboards and doors in the house, starting with the guest bathroom (they're all yellowed with age;  since I painted the guest bath white and gray last Fall, it shows the worst in there)
• Repair or replace the shower/tub diverter in the master bath tub faucet.  Or replace the entire faucet. Whatever. 
• New garbage disposal! 
• Gutters for the back of the house!  

Omg, there's so much more I don't even want to keep typing.  UGH. 

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CLEAN! ALL! THE! THINzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Remember all that junk I said I was going to do, in my last two posts?  Yeah, I didn't do any of it over the weekend.  I was going to, but   NAP ATTACK.

I did manage to get a lot of heavy cleaning done over the weekend, even if I didn't get around to starting any projects.  Vacuuming, mopping, steam-cleaning the tile in the bathrooms and kitchen, cleaning the bejeezus out of the entire kitchen, nuking both bathrooms - I even washed the windows in my car.

It's been raining here, it seems, for like three weeks straight.  I love rain - it doesn't seem gloomy or depressing to me like some people say it is - but it sure does make me sluggish and sleepy, and not remotely motivated to get anything done but eat pie and watch The West Wing (trufax - this is what I did last night).

Actually, I DID get something done Saturday night:  I shuffled some tables and dressers and shelves and things around in the bedroom and in my closet, which resulted in "new" nightstands for the bedroom, and "new" shelving in my closet.  I'm not any happier with the closet than I was before - in fact, I actually like it less, but that's just more incentive to get off my ass and get myself a dresser from Craigslist to use in my closet, finally.  I DO love the nightstand situation, though...and so do the cats.

Sweet Pea chillin' on the new nightstand

Real pics later this week.  :)



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Wait...How'd It Get To Be July Already??

I heard a theory once that the reason time seems to move more swiftly when we get older is because as children, we're noticing everything, all the time, for the first time - we soak up every detail, and the world is full of new wonders.  We see more, we retain more, and our memory (and hence, our sense of the passage of time) seems stretched out, fuller.  As we get older and our focus narrows ever more towards going from point A to point B and getting grownup things done, we pay attention to all the little details of the broader world around us - we focus on it less, and so it seems less significant.  We're paying attention to the time we don't have instead, and our sense of the passage of time narrows as well, making it seem like things move faster and faster.

HOW is 2012 half over already?  Jeez.

June In Review

• remodeled the Clematis vine trellis on the back porch (update: the vines are now halfway up the new trellis already!  Pics as soon as they start really filling out). 
• thinking about replacing the 2yo "new" couch cover
• booked a cruise with my BFF!  OMG U GUYZ 
• pruned the Mexican Orchid Tree in the backyard
• noticing lots of things breaking and in need of maintenance around the house all of a sudden

Plans of Many Things

As I mentioned yesterday, I've been hella-busy with the costume sewing, and now that I'm finished for a while, I have lots of things around the house to do: 

• there's a little homeless side table that needs painting and a new top, for the bedroom
• a shelf in my closet needs some work, and the dresser in there is coming out into the bedroom
• more ceilings to paint white
• There's [always] more gardening/yardwork to do
• I need to do a HUGE Knick Knack Rodeo (wherein I collect all the gewgaws from around my house, and separate the things I love from the things I've simply amassed over the past year because they were on sale) 
• I may or may not be repainting the master bathroom - not an overhaul, just a slight color adjustment.  
• That bathroom, and the guest bath, both need a little bit of tweaking, too 

Upcoming Updates + Floor Fail

I haven't been around a in few weeks, as I've been busting my butt getting some costuming projects for people finished on time, all of which turned out to be more complicated and time-consuming than I'd originally planned.  Yay, scope creep!

Now that all that's finished, though, I have several small projects around the house lined up, and some painting to do - I'll be posting about those things in the next couple of weeks.  I LOVE "detoxing" from sewing projects by painting things in my house. Coming soon:

• A side table
• some more ceilings
• some gardening/yardwork
• accessories + cleanup
• Guest bathroom and bedroom

Meanwhile, I'm afraid I'm not at all pleased with the new flooring in the craft room.  The flooring in the rest of the house is a product from Lumber Liquidators - not Pergo brand, but one of the off-brands produced in the Pergo factory (same stuff, just without the Pergo label).  

The color is "Bolivian Teak" (now discontinued), and the floor was installed by my ex-husband and I in 2005.  The floor has lasted really well these past seven years.  The only problem I've had with the floors is that the T-moldings between rooms pops up when the weather changes drastically, mostly because they were originally installed incorrectly (hey, it was my first floor).  Aside from that, there's *one* wear spot developing under the computer desk where the chair slides around - it's only just appeared the past couple of months, and it took seven years for the first sign of wear to appear!  

The Ikea "TUNDRA"  flooring that Kress and I put into the craft room three months ago, however, has already begun deteriorating.  Boards are popping apart and leaving cracks in the flooring.  Edges and corners are chipping and peeling.  Granted, this floor gets a lot more wear than the floors in the rest of the house, from office chairs rolling around, ironing boards, and five cats who eat and poop in here (sometimes on the floor, argh) - but three months?  Really??   I am seriously unimpressed.  And I'm pretty disheartened at the idea of having to replace this floor in the next year once it gets so bad that I can't stand it anymore.  Damn it, Ikea!  

More soon. 

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Ways In Which My House Is Pissing Me Off

A couple of years ago when the dishwasher quit, I didn't mind so much.  I prefer to do the dishes by hand anyway, and have basically been using my dishwasher as a giant drying rack.  (And fantasizing about removing it entirely and putting in an extra cabinet the dishwasher hole).

When when my new puppy chewed up what was left of the baseboards in the dining room - why the dining room, anyway? Shelly did the same thing! - I just gave them a new coat of paint to minimize the visual effect, and left it for some magical Someday when I can afford to replace them (preferably a Someday when I'm replacing the dining room and kitchen floor anyway and can do it all at the same time).

• But then the diverter in the shower in the master bath started sticking, and now my water pressure's all screwed up in there because the diverter valve won't close all the way.  
• And there's a cracked tile in the kitchen all of a sudden. 
• And the brand-new, piece-of-shit Ikea flooring in the craft room?  Is peeling and chipping.  After three months!  AUGH!  
• And the garbage disposal seals are shot and it's leaking water  - and corrosion, for apparently it's been f*d up for a while and I didn't notice - down through the motor and out the bottom of the unit
• And there are *three* cracked tiles in the master bathroom that just appeared in the past three days.  
• And I'm pretty sure the thermostat on the hot water heater is on the fritz - it's scalding people at random, even when the knob in the shower is set to cold!  The fu..?

WHAT IS GOING ON, HOUSE?!  All of a sudden!  All the last month!   And I really can't afford to do anything about any of it, right now.  This is how people end up living in totally trashed out houses.  :( 

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