Migrating

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Come visit! :)

Let there be light!

One of the very first things we did when we bought our house was paint. All the rooms (minus the bathroom, which can only be helped with a stick of dynamite, and our bedroom, whose ceiling will be replaced) got a new coat of paint on the walls and ceiling.

When we did the walls, we didn't worry about the top edges because eventually, they will all be covered with crown moulding. When we did the ceilings, we took down the light fixtures and let them dangle, so that we could evenly coat the entire surface.

That was two years ago.

And, this is what Avery's room (top) and the spare room looked like as of last week:

After painting, we never reattached the lighting fixtures because we knew that we wanted to replace them. A few months ago, we bought new lights (Avery picked his out) and finally last week, Jason braved the very old fabric electrical wires:

Yikes, I know. He's an excellent boyfriend. And, we only got into one fight during the project. Progress people, that's all we want :) So, here are the "after" photos:

Now, about that crown moulding in Avery's room... ;)

"Curtain Rods"

Um. Yeah.

That's Jenn.

They're going to be curtain rods.

Trust me, kids. We'll make it work.

:P

I do stuff, too. I swear!

Lest you think I lounge about, lazily flipping through magazines, surfing the interwebs and scratching my kitties under their fuzzy little chins whilst dearest boyfriend slaves away painting trim and installing windows, I show to you this:

Before.....

After!

(Yes, that is an old school Bop It to the left.)

There used to be a rubber tree in that pot, but it had slowly begun its decent to the compost pile about three months ago when new growth ceased and leaves began to drop one by one. Once there were only about three and a half leaves left, we emptied the pot and decided to wait until we could get to Ott's for a replacement plant. Who doesn't love an excuse to go there?!

So, we went to Ott's and totally did not buy a house plant. Perhaps we were too stunned by the awesomeness of the place. Or perhaps I just forgot. Either way, we returned from Ott's with no houseplant, but instead some adorable little decorative pepper plants, flowering cabbage and on-sale perennials for the front bed and stairs. (See, I'm on charge of those, too.)

And, thank goodness we didn't get a house plant there, because our neighbor had a I'm-selling-everything-I-own yard sale (he's moving to Arizona in two weeks) and we scored this money tree for TEN DOLLARS. Hells, yeah.

Tonight when you say your prayers, please include this plant's survival on your list. We live in a row home and this baby is right in the middle of the house, where it can see a few windows from the corners of its eyes, but maybe can't get a whole lot of light. Don't worry, if it starts to look sad, I'll find a sunnier place for it. But dang... it just looks so perfect where it is. Don't you think?

We've got more trim than you...

Good god, there's a lot of white trim in our living room. And Jason touched up every last square inch of it this weekend :)

The banister is my nemesis. My friend Michelle and I spent an afternoon shortly after we moved in (almost TWO YEARS AGO) trying to cover the maroon with white. Covering up a dark color, especially red, with a light color, especially white, is hard enough, but we ran into an additional bizarre problem:

Everywhere there is maroon paint (all the trim in the upstairs hallway, the banister and staircase, and the living room and dining room trim) there is also a force field that repels any other paint form covering it.

I'm not kidding people. When one tries to paint white over the red, it "slips" off. After about 14 coats (with drying time in between each), the maroon goes away. It's really, really strange and really, really frustrating. Which is why the banister and upstairs trim is half-assed not done. See that first picture for an example of "half-assed not done."

Jason had the white paint out for some minor touch up work in the living room and for the repairing of the living room window sill. Cinder likes to throw herself at the window whenever another dog dares to walk down the street and her claws have scratched the daylights out of the sill. Also, one side of our couch is near the window and there's a gap of about two feet between the arm of the couch and the window. Cinder's preferred investigative perch is in the shape of a bridge, with her back legs on the couch, front legs on the radiator and slobber dripping onto the sill. Cute, i know.

So, that was Jason's mission today, to repair and repaint the window area, as well as finish up the box-that-looks-like-a-column he made to cover the radiator pipe. Because he had the paint out, he decided to tackle the banister. He's good like that.

The banister looks awesome and so does the window. We're ordering a piece of Plexiglas to cover and protect the newly-painted sill.

Oh my goodness... maybe soon we can look into putting up curtains! How exciting :D

Jase rocks

Jason finished up some flashing on the roof, and while he was up there, he plugged up the gutter over our porch. The one that spills buckets of rain water onto the flower bed in front of our house. That means, we could also plant the hibiscus and phlox that we bought today. Yay!

But, the real story is the praying mantis that Jase saw in the bed. She was eating a fly. A fly whose leg was still twitching.

You can't see the fly leg twitching action in these photographs, but if you make them larger (by clicking on them), you can see it's lower body. By the time we saw the scene, the mantis had already eaten the fly's head.

As I was taking photos, it stopped eating and turned to look at me. While looking up praying mantis at Wikipedia, we learned that they are one of the few insects that can turn their heads, and that there are 2,300 mantis species world-wide. We also learned that a praying mantis is capable of capturing and killing a humming bird.

Pretty wild.

Details, details, details

Right begfore we left for holiday, Jase finished up the crown moulding in the living room. The actual moulding has been up, but the caulking and touch-up paint had to be done:



He's pretty good, yes? Oh, and don't mind the slash of paint on the ceiling, which is visible in the photo, as it's not visible in real life.

While he was finishing this project, I was updating one of our other blogs, and we were listening to This American Life. A perfect no-work afternoon :)