This afternoon finds me very unhappy at the weather, my heirloom tomato plant, and a certain elusive disgusting brown spider in the mudroom who should do the whole world a favor and just die.

First, the weather. It is over 100 degrees. Today, in case you missed the memo, is the first day of fall. It feels suspiciously like California fall. Speaking of, there are hot, gusty winds that distinctly resemble the Santa Anas (the much-maligned winds known best for turning Southern California into a barbecue every year). These winds blow me to my next point: the heirloom tomato plant.

Frankly, I've been disappointed. Only now, late-ish September, does it have three small green tomatoes. I've just been hoping they ripen before the first frost. But I'm really mad at this plant because this afternoon, I had to go outside in the inferno to put stand it back up again. Then it blew over a second time and the pot broke into multiple pieces. So now I have a half-busted pot, held together by a bungee cord, stuffed inside another pot, and bungeed to the fence so it can't blow over again. All this took about 45 minutes at midday, after which I was dripping and ready to run over the stupid tomato with my car.

Honestly, I can't wait for the first frost. My gardening efforts this summer have been minimally rewarding, and the plants that aren't infested with budworms bent on eating everything colorful have some kind of weird leaf fungus. Next summer, I'm not growing any petunias, because I found out that the budworms come from moths that lay eggs. So they can fly to my baskets. They also eat geranium buds, but I love geraniums, so I'm going to have to come up with another solution -- screens or something. I tried poisoning them, but they don't like the bait. Rotten bugs.

I don't think I really need to say anything further about that spider, other than, I will stomp on you with much glee when I see you next, so watch your back or beat it.

Anyway, here's the picture of the headboad I was working on the last time I posted.

It turned out really cool, except for the part about the spray paint off-gassing and us waking up at 2:30 am with headaches and having to spend the rest of the night in the guest room. Avoiding stepping on pliers and nails sticking out of the floor in the stairway on the way upstairs was the most fun, especially since I didn't have my glasses.

After that, the headboard spent a few more days in the garage to de-fume. We moved it back in last week. I also have to post a picture of the crafty thing I did to one of our duvet covers...coming soon!

Building a headboard

I've been working on a bunch of fun little crafty projects, and I have to take pictures of all of them and post them, but this is my big accomplishment right now. Well, almost. It's not done quite yet. I built a headboard for our bedroom!

Riffing on the door theme I've seen going for a while, I designed a headboard and headed to the scratch'n'dent building supply store (motto: B-grade materials may or may not comply with building codes) to get my materials. After much deliberation and measuring, I went with a hollow-core dore (rather than a paneled one, which presents problems of symmetry when horizontal) and used these masonite panels they had to give it some flair. In case you want to build a headboard like mine, here's my materials list.

1 36" hollow-core door

1 piece of crown molding (or panel molding, like I used. The dif is that panel molding isn't as big, and fits flush against the surface, rather than fitting hollowly into a corner like crown.) Depending on bed size, you'll probably want 7+ feet to account for all your screwing up when you cut it.

1 piece of baseboard (7+ feet)

panels or whatever embellishments you want to use

1 tube painter's putty/caulk. Cheap stuff is fine

2x2s for legs, which I will explain later. Probably need 8' or so of 2x2.

Small finish nails

3" screws

Drill

Chop saw (or compound mitre saw)

You can see the panels, door and molding in that picture. I had the door cut to 65" at Home Depot. It was 80", which would be better suited to a California king than our queen mattress. After measuring out where the panels should go, I glued those in place with my construction-grade adhesive and put some paint cans on them overnight so they could dry in place. I also put a piece of trim on the hollow side of the door so there wasn't a hole there.

Next, the fun part. I measured out the molding for the top and started making cuts, which is sooo easy with a power saw. This is looking at the top of the headboard. (Here's another angle).

I drilled pilot holes and then dropped a few finish nails in, after gluing that piece of crown to the door. On top of that goes this:

which is the piece of baseboard that I made a neat 45* cut to and glued and clamped. The whole top of the headboard looks like a fireplace mantle. In the meantime, while I was waiting for my clamped pieces to dry, I caulked the edges of the masonite panels, so the whole thing would look like one piece once it was painted.

To get the best position for securing the baseboard to the top, I stood the headboard up. Here's what it looked like, coming together....

And here's how I finished the corners, so it wasn't just crown on the front:

That is my neat and tidy corner. The other one, I won't show you... Right in the center of the picture is the finished corner. The piece to the right is the baseboard, which goes on the top.

While I waited for glue and caulk to dry, I went to work on the legs. If you've been following my building exploits, you know that sometimes I have trouble getting things to be sturdy. I couldn't have that be the case with this headboard, so I thought up a great way of bracing the legs, and went with three for extra stability, rather than just two. Here's those:

I dropped two 3-inch screws from the top brace (the more horizontal piece) into the actual leg (the more vertical piece). And I glued the little corner pieces in with wood glue. They are very sturdy.

Lastly, I primed the whole thing. This was an unfortunate business, because we have a whole gallon of tinted primer left over from the living room paint job. That's right....

PINK!!

Totally reminds me of a book from when I was little, "Burt Dow, Deep Water Man." Burt and his boat, the Tidely Idley, got swallowed by a whale, and in order to get the whale to cough them up, he flung a bunch of pink and mint green and black (and maybe yellow) paint at the whale's insides.

Anyway. I glued and set the legs on it yesterday. Today I'm going to screw them in place and spray it with the first coat of black. More pix to come!!

I love freebies

Todd's aunt is moving to Hawaii, and is consequently clearing out her home in Portland. This means that there's McD family stuff headed our way. I am most excited about this amazing gen-yoo-ine antique steamer trunk. Given the age, it's in very good shape (and still has nifty little organizer inserts that I'm sure I will make use of soon). I decided to use it as my night stand, as I go about duplicating the room that the June or July BHG blatantly ripped off from my brain. If this picture looks familiar, that's because I have a white duvet and antique botanical seashell prints and blue walls and random oceanic paraphernalia littering my bedroom! I couldn't believe it when I saw that page.

They did, however, give me an idea for a black headboard, which I am still designing. If you're confused about the trunk connection, you have a good reason. While there's no trunk in that picture, there is antique stuff, and so I'm working with what I've got.

I also fixed something that's been bothering me for two years and nine months. I, having never purchased my own dust ruffle before, didn't know they came in different lengths. So I picked the wrong length, and have since had to engage in a war with getting the dust ruffle to look decent every time I rotate the mattress. It's always an ugly thing, and it's never ended well. I recently discovered that there's such a thing as iron-on hemming, so I bought some, and voila! The right length!
I also decided to take the plunge and hang a few pictures in my office. They look a little funny where they are, because the big one really should have gone over my couch, but then I wouldn't have been able to look at it. So the big one's over the computer, and the little one is over the couch. It's a little weird, but it works.

Lastly, this is kind of random, but I found this awesome piece of scrapbooking paper and I'm going to frame it. It's this sweet map of Europe. (You can just call me the queen of cheap art.) And I have some little cut dahlias in a bud vase. They're cute, and deserve a picture.

Goodbye

This requires a little background info. A few months ago, when our garage was getting downright dangerous to navigate in the dark, we decided to clean it out. We heaped all the trash into what we were then thinking of as a side driveway that was basically useless because you couldn't park a car there. This was March-ish. When it was cold, and we weren't thinking about being outside at all.

Fast-forward to July, and we have begun referring to the still trash-covered region as our "patio," because we have realized it is quite convenient to have our grill there, rather than next to the pool, which is not near the kitchen. I separated the trash into categories: recycling, which was the bulk of it; trash, like styrofoam and old carpet and crap; and things we might use again, like wood and stuff. We started getting rid of things as we had space in our trash and recycling, and threw a tarp over the pile so we wouldn't have to look at it. This is what that looked like, minus the recycling, which we hauled out to the recycle place a few weeks ago.


Not really so bad, but it all still had to go, and it was too much/dirty to put in the back of my car. So we procured Todd's parents' truck for the excursion to the dump, and proceeded to fill it to the brim with a boatload of old carpet and whatnot.


For the small fee of $16.50, I had the privilege yesterday morning of unloading it at the dump. That was, umm, smelly. And industrial. I wore gloves and felt very tough. This is our pile.


They mist in the building to keep the dust down, which is why there are water droplets on my lens.

Anyway, so I keep talking about all this old carpet. You may remember that there was green carpet in our stairwell and upstairs landing, but I thought if I was going to bother making a trip to the dump, we might as well rip the remainder of it out and dispose of it. So here's what our upstairs looks like, sans green carpet and coordinating green pad. It still has the tan-colored pad that's irritatingly glued to the floor, but that is much more flexible and stuffable into a bag than carpet is, so we'll get to that when we have time.

We've also been puttering away on the little hallway area downstairs, in between the living room and bathroom/bedrooms. Joining the long list of Things We Just Don't Really Notice Anymore In Order To Maintain Sanity was the paint in this hallway. The walls were white at some point, I think, but they'd gotten all dingy and gray and just looked plain crappy. Here's an example. You can see where we painted, to the right, and what hasn't been painted yet. Ick.

On Saturday night (wild night, I know) we worked on painting trim and rolling the walls and ceiling. Funny thing about painting, there is almost no correlation between how long it takes to paint a room and that room's size. Or maybe there's in inverse correlation. Anyway, it's taking a while, so we just keep chipping away at it. The whole thing looks a lot lighter and cleaner now. I am going to be stenciling in there, so I'll post an "after" when it's done.

Art smart

I looked around one day recently and realized that our walls are quite bare. So I've gone about remedying that in the most budget-conscious way possible: on-sale cheapo frames from Michaels and pilfered stuff from the web. I'm pretty pleased with the results, in the bathroom:


and also in the stairwell:



and I have two more that I'm going to hang soon.

What's new as of 8.5

Here's a video of what's new around our house, since May I think.

An update

We've had quite a July. After our friends left, my family came, and my dad hit the house in a blur of motion. On Friday, he tried to fix the garbage disposal, which turned out to be beyond repair but not beyond smoking up the kitchen. This made him discover that our exhaust fan had been taped shut outside the house, so he fixed that. Then we got a new garbage disposal and he installed it. He also fixed our kitchen faucet (the aerator wasn't working). Having spent enough time inside, he moved outdoors to chop down a scraggly tree, mow over the weeds in the front yard that we'd been waiting for the Round Up to kill, and break up a big pile of gravel and dry dirt with a shovel. We sat inside and watched in awe.

Saturday, everyone (Steven McD included) pitched in to clear out the cedar tree debris. About six trips out to Todd's parents' ranch to dump the stuff took care of it. Dad also pruned the ingrowth on the tree in front (it blooms pink in the spring, but I don't know what it is). It looks much better now, and it will be a lot healthier.

Also accomplished: fixed the leaky faucet in the upstairs bathroom, installed bolt to secure door knob on front door (we have one of the long ones that has a little thumb latch, and at the bottom where it meets the door, there's supposed to be a bolt), caulked around front door, hung begonia from oak tree in back in a way that DOESN'T cause it to fall off (not that that's how I did it...), mostly fixed the window in the office (that I now need to glaze before fall) and other stuff I'm sure I'm forgetting.

And David and Dad built a table out of the stump from the tree we cut down. It doesn't look that great from a distance, but it looks fantastic when set for dinner. Plus it's a lot nicer than eating off a box, which is what we had been doing.

After the fam left, Rachel stayed for a few more days. We worked on pulling up the carpeting on the stairs, because there's pine underneath. Though we unfortunately found that the carpet pad was idiotically glued to the floor, it is (happily) water-and-fabric-softener soluble. So it's a pain, but definitely doable. We also painted all the paneling that will go in my office. Now it just needs to be cut and installed.

Sorry for the lack of pictures. I owe you a video and some pix, but my card reader has decided to go on vacation, and I know if I save this to update later, I'll never do it. Pix to come.

Massive productivity with only one mishap.

As I probably have not mentioned, our friends from college (Kaylin and Daniel) are relocating from Alaska, and they're spending this weekend with us on their way to Texas. On Tuesday, we leave for Bend for a few days, and when we come back, we will be bringing my family with (they are here for vacation). There is nothing like knowing company's coming to motivate a flurry of activity. Here's what was done today:

1. Our awesome neighbors' friend cut down the cedar tree in our backyard. It was well on its way to dead, and it was also blocking a lot of sun from the pool. It was a real whopper, like 50 or 60 feet tall, and you can watch the footage yourself below. I am notoriously bad at calculating when things are actually going to "timberrrr" so of course I'm almost mid-sentence when I cut myself off to yell.



2. Look how cute our little garden is! I'm still waging war on earwigs and slugs, but my beer traps seem to be working. I've caught a lot of earwigs. Who knew frat boys and garden pests had so much in common?


3. Speaking of exploding plants, check out a) the raspberry


and b) our tomatoes, pepper and zucchini. They were but tiny starts just a short while ago....oh, they grow up so fast...
4. Lest you think I have only accomplished things inside, I give you this!

Also, this!

No, it's not merely a towel, hook and vent cover. I hung the hook, so that we don't have to put our towels on the toilet while showering (just seemed more civilized). That vent cover has been waiting to go up since, umm, February, and I'm really glad that that's done. And the towel rack is basically the same story. When we discovered a hook on the back of our bedroom door, I sort of lost motivation to put up a towel rack. But again, in favor of looking civilized...

5. Don't have a pic of this, but I put up our new address numbers outside. They're pretty generic, just Times New Roman numerals in brushed nickel, but it's all straight and nice now. Those have been sitting around next to our front door since March.

6. Lastly, I hung the curtains again in the office. When my mom and I wallpapered two months ago, I had to take them down. Putting up a curtain rod is real pain, especially since I thought I'd be all tricky and hang them off the window to make the window look bigger (and not block light). Well, I miscalculated how long the rod was, and spaced the holders like four inches too far apart, so when I tried to hang it, the rod separated into two pieces. Ooh, I was mad. Mainly because now I have two holes in the wallpaper that are kind of obvious, which was EXACTLY what I was trying to avoid. And don't give me the "measure twice, cut once" baloney. I DID measure twice. Just not the curtain rod. Anyway, looks cute, huh? Kate gave me those little wooden boats, which I love.


And now really lastly, I leave you with a shot of the pool, patio and fire pit. Todd has kicked some serious algae butt in the past month, and our pool is now almost crystal clear. Major props to him.

Satan's henchmen

While cleaning up the trash heap in our side driveway last night, I ran across not one but TWO evil black widows. Todd said they were approximately standard size, but with bodies the size of a green pea, they seemed rather monstrous to me. Anyway, one met his (her?) end by a swift whack with a paint stirrer and the other one I may have treated to death by bbq lighter. PS they smell bad when burning.



All together now, EWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Pool shack, but slightly less shack-ish

Last week, keeping in mind that the pool was coming along promisingly, I decided the day had arrived to paint the pool shack. Before I went to work, you may remember from previous footage that it looked like this: and also this, and this but it doesn't look like that anymore. I pretty much executed the world's sloppiest (and possibly a personal worst) paint job in Glidden Parchment White, which is slightly off-white (so as not to be blinding). I started off doing what you're supposed to do when painting outside: sanding and scraping. After a round or so of that, I sprayed everything off with the hose, and that's where the trouble started. More paint kept flaking off, and this made me mad. So rather than doing things the right way (which may have involved taking the whole thing down to bare wood) I went to Costco for a hotdog and a Very Berry Sundae. By the time I came home, the shack was pretty well dried out, so I started painting, making sure to apply it good and thick.

Considering that half the shack is rotted anyway, I'll be happy if it's still standing two years from now, paint job aside. Anyway, I'm quite sure you'll agree that it looks much better now. Our neighbors certainly do!