Curtains: The Symbol of My Reintroduction into the World of Selfish Crafting

It's often said that when your "art" or "craft" becomes your living, you no longer do that art or craft for fun. There are the cliches of the carpenter with the crumbling house, the plumber with the leaky faucets, the chef who's dinner consists of canned ravioli and iceberg lettuce eaten leaning over the kitchen sink. Try as I might, I cannot avoid this cliche. My husband's clothes sit un-mended and the parts of various textile-related household projects (like making covers for pillow forms) are shoved into a corner while I sew products for my shop and gifts for other people.

No longer!

I am turning over a new leaf and giving just as much priority to those incomplete household tasks. Just this weekend I finally completed the curtains for our second floor bathroom (the one that looks directly into our neighbor's house).

The "before" picture might be some indication of why it was one of the more pressing projects.

I even used some of the left-over material to fashion a panel curtain for our backdoor and to replace the unfortunate floral one that was, I think, slowly driving my husband mad. But I'm digressing into another post. (In an upcoming post I'll give a quick tutorial for making a super easy panel curtain for a door.)

In the meantime more pictures of the completed curtains.

Please pardon the lack of trim on the window. Thankfully, my husband is a scientist, not a carpenter and that project should be complete before the turn of the next century!

Fence Building 201

The adage (or perhaps it's just a poem) goes "good fences make good neighbors." Our last couple of weekends of working on the fence beg me to ask "do fences make good families?"

Unfortunately, I only have pics from a few weekends ago when our mission was to finish getting the rails up and start placing the pickets on the first panels. Since then, we've (by which I, once again, mean "Eric's family") finished all the pickets and the three gates.

It basically went something like this:

Eric and his dad discussed the plan of attack: a conversation which I'm sure involved Loren offering all sorts of sage advice but then reassuring Eric that "it's his house" and that they should do it the way he wanted to. At which point Eric mulled it over for about two seconds before agreeing with his father. (Although to be fair, Eric did pretty much all the designing.)

Eric did most of the measuring and the math because he's supposed to be good with numbers, although, honestly, the calculator his mom carries in her purse (and gets teased for doing so) came in handy.

Dane did lots of cutting because he's meticulous.

Lu and Loren put the pickets up. I hope this fence didn't come between them.

That's supposedly that guy's middle name, but....
... it was Loren who was taking the real risks by ripping boards so that they would fit precisely at either side of each panel using a guard-less table saw.

But not to worry, the only major injury was incurred when Loren drilled into his own thumb.

A few weeks later, the crew reunited along with youngest brother, Tyler, who took on much of the drilling because, well, he's tall. Sorry, Ty, no pictures from this weekend. Loren's thumb had healed quite nicely.

I did a little measuring here and there, since I do so much when I'm sewing anyway, but mostly I found inventive ways to use my pregnancy as an excuse to not do much of anything at all. Or, as my five year old nephew pointed out his weekend when he dropped by with his mom and siblings to see the fence, "Let's leave the men to the work and go inside where the ladies are lounging." 'Twas true. We were lounging.

I'm still not entirely sure that good fences make good families. At least one member of my family is already jealous that I married into a family that is so handy, not to mention a little obsessive compulsive when it comes to home renovation. So I guess at the very least "good families make good fences."

Next time in the fences trilogy: pictures of the final product (we still have a few more finishing touches to put on) and the pros and cons of having a puppy running wild in the backyard.

Fence Building 101

Our poor pup has suffered in our fenceless yard long enough. We (and when I say "we" I mean my husband and his family) are building a fence and she will be able to run free through the crab grass, dig holes in the black earth of our garden, hunt bunnies, squirrels, and cats, and generally wreak havoc in every corner of our yard.

The first steps? Dig up the old chain link and centuries old wooden posts and put in new holes. I wish I had pictures of my father-in-law pulling up the old posts with the Bobcat that his work recently (and conveniently) bought. It was truly a vision of machine versus nature (or at least machine versus urban lot). Of course, we missed most of it because we had various wedding and parties to attend while Eric's father toiled away. It would not be unfair to compare us to Cinderella's stepsisters -- except for the fact that Eric's father pretty much has a huge grin on his face the entire time he's working heavy machinery.

Next, the menfolk had to dig 25 post holes using a rented auger. Getting the auger, the posts, and the flats of 80 pound bags of cement into our yard was enough of a feat. The digging was a whole other story. Turns out that repeatedly pulling this giant metal screw four feet out of the ground is hard work. Not that I'd know -- mostly I just took pictures and found any excuse to stay inside the air conditioned house. I am a delicate flower.

Eric insists that the pictures don't do justice to the amount of effort it took to lift that thing around. Lest you think Dane (in the blue shirt) did even less than I did -- he was waiting for hole to be drilled so he could pour gravel into the bottom: not the most romantic job, but necessary nonetheless. We're currently working on getting the poles straight and level and setting them with concrete. More pics to come...

Weekend Project

The old man kindly installed a retractable clothesline in our backyard and laundry has now become one of my favorite things to do. OK, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but hanging clothes out does remind me of when I lived in Thailand. Except for that then we didn't have any electricity or running water so we washed our clothes by hand and hung them to dry because there was no other choice, not for the fresh smell and to save a few bucks a month. Still, there's something deeply satisfying about hanging out clothes to dry. 

I feel like I should have a big wicker basket, wear a "housedress" and tie my hair up with a scarf to fully inhabit the quaint vision. The only down side is that we miss out on the extra benefit of the lint trap on the dryer: somehow it sucks up all the little white hairs that cover our clothes (the source of which can be seen in the lower left hand corner of the second picture -- sort of like that photo of Elvis where he's sitting inside the screen door of his house at his own funeral).

Loot Loot Loot

Two weekends ago, I was pulling down a small part of the ceiling in our sketchy basement bathroom, when I found these next to a little access hole.

The husband who lived here before spent a lot of time doing little home renovation projects. Now we understand why many of them were done very poorly.

I imagine that when he put the ceiling in the bathroom, he left that little opening to stash his vodka bottles, out of sight of his unwitting wife.

Or maybe I'm the unwitting wife and Eric has been popping down to the basement for a little nip every now and again. Thankfully, I'm pretty sure the bottles are pretty old -- or at least pre-date our July move in.

Wallpaper on Lead Paint and Lead Paint on Windows

After the initial lead paint panic and subsequent freak out, things have started to settle down and I'm able to be a little bit calmer about the lead paint issues in our house.

A few months ago we qualified for a grant with the county that pays for us getting some windows replaced in our house. We're sort of at a bit of an impasse. We have beautiful original windows on our house (it's hard to capture in a picture) and we want to preserve them as much as we can. Unfortunately, abating the lead means that we're going to have to change them in some way because windows are obviously high friction areas. We're going to be checking out some of the work that the organization has done on other homes where the owners has wanted to preserve as much of the original stuff as possible.

In the meantime, a quick update on the rest of the lead. Turns out that, other than the windows, we don't have nearly as much lead as a house built in 1927, which is good. There is some in the soil, which they recommend covering up with mulch or grass or stones. And there is some on a few walls, which are just sort of considered undisturbed surfaces.

The one area that I had really been concerned about was the front hallway. The hallway was covered in a few layers of wallpaper and then paint. Before we got lead testing, I did the scraping in that hallway. I took a few precautions, but probably not as many as proscribed by lead-safe work practices. I also got lead tested after we found out we had lead in our home. The good news is that I don't have lead poisoning.

So what did I do while scraping the wallpaper off of lead paint? I worked wet (very, very wet) with a very sharp blade. I sprayed all the surfaces with water both to get the wallpaper off and also to keep any lead dust down. I laid down plastic that I could just roll up and dispose of in a garbage bag tied with duct tape. I cleaned my clothes and myself immediately after I was done working. I did the whole thing in one day so that I didn't have to keep coming back and cleaning up.

Now, I'm not saying that that's fullproof or that that's even close to lead safe work practices (they would recommend sealing off the entire area, which I did not do), but it's what I did to get wallpaper off of a wall that I now know had lead paint and the levels of lead in my blood were negligible after that project. One of the reasons why I'm posting again on this is because when I was dealing with the whole wallpaper on lead paint issue, I did a lot of searching on the internet and didn't come up with much. Also, I took a lead-safe work practices class as part of this grant and even that class didn't cover this issue or how to deal with it. Again, not to say that I dealt with it in the best way -- just adding my experience to the mess of information.

An Open Letter to Real Estate Agents

Dear Real Estate Agents (Sir or Madam),

My husband and I recently bought a home. We looked at a dozen or so homes before making our decision. During the course of our search, I learned what it means to "stage a house" when trying to sell it. I had a range of reactions to different staged houses from "Oh, these people have a wine rack and drink Merlot. Would I drink Merlot if I lived in this house? I hope not. Red wine makes me sleepy" to "These people have no pictures on the walls and only two blue suits in the closet. This is really creepy. Would I only wear blue suits if I lived in this house?"

In fact, the house we ended up buying was entirely empty save the foam pillow-type-thing on one of the built in beds, a few random unused (as far as we know) lightbulbs, and this pin.


The second floor of the house was bought was only partially finished. When I say partially finished I mean there was some carpet thrown over two layers of linoleum, some drywall slopshoddily put up and painted what can only be described as the color a lilac bush might vomit if it vomited in technicolor, and a mass of electrical wires left to form a nest in the crawlspace. This is not to mention the built-in beds (of which there were two).


Needless to say, the decision to buy this house required the use of a very vivid and confident imagination. My husband and I had to imagine away all of the unwanted walls, the gross carpet, the tangle of wires. We had to imagine our way through months of blood, sweat, tears, and depleted bank accounts. We had to imagine a beautiful master suite and cozy second floor sitting area where my husband can study and I can write.

In fact, you, Mr or Ms Real Estate Agent, you were counting on a buyer like us to come along and imagine ourselves into this house. You, Mr or Ms Real Estate Agent, often count on having a buyer come along who's willing to see past the flaws and shortcomings and is willing and even hoping to buy a home where they can put their own elbow grease and vision.

Why on earth then, Sir or Madam, do you, when getting the house ready for sale, suggest to your client that all their house needs to see is just a "fresh coat of paint?"

Sure, you also advised them to pull up the carpet on the first floor and have the floors redone and we appreciate that. We might not have bought the house had we not known what condition the wood floors were in and re-doing floors is a serious investment of time and money.

The problem is that when you suggested that the owners just throw on a fresh coat of paint, that's exactly what they did. They went out and bought the cheapest thing they could find: giant barrels of white-out. They painted before they pulled up the carpet, meaning that all along the trim there are little flecks of carpet fuzz stuck in the paint. They painted high traffic friction areas like kitchen cabinets with the same cheap stuff so that now it peels off in giant swaths. They did such a haphazard job that now portions of our beautiful wood trim have drops of paint or even entire paintbrush marks on them. They did not sand. They did not strip. I do not think they even primed. They did not paint a second coat.

We're getting rid of or painting over most of it.

All the while, when we're picking carpet lint out of paint, when we're sanding off old cheap painting, when we're painstakingly removing the paint drips, we're cursing you, Mr or Ms Real Estate Agent. We're imagining all the things we hope go horribly wrong with your next home purchase. We're imagining you being attacked my a nest of hornets or, better yet, a nest of electrical wires. We're imagining you getting a technicolor stomach virus that makes you vomit lilac.

And we have pretty good imaginations.

Warmly,
Rhena

PS Thank you for leaving these scenic vistas. They bring Glacier National Park right into our basement and allow us to give our overactive imaginations a break.

Don't Lick the Walls: Lead Paint Freak Out

A few posts back, Eric and I were sort of paralyzed by the realisation that our house might have quite a bit of lead paint. We knew it would have some -- as most homes built before 1973 do -- but we were afraid that the lead paint in our house stood between us and completing the painting and other projects that we want to do in the next few weeks before the contractors get in there.

After furiously searching the internets (which was predictably full of half-truths and misinformation), we found a program that Hennepin County offers to help with lead abatement. We started to get the gears in motion to apply for the program and tried to figure out what we were going to do about our projects in the meantime. We decided that our wallpaper removal could continue because we were doing it wet, which would keep any lead dust down and because it was the wallpaper, not the paint, that we were disturbing. We took precautions -- covered our vents, changed and washed our clothes and showered immediately after doing the work, and cleaned up using trisodium phosphate (lab nerd Eric was ALL over that) and a shop vac with a HEPA filter.

The first phase of the lead program was some initial dust testing. Two women from the Sustainable Resources Center did the testing and advised us on how to clean around the windows, the likely source of most of the lead paint in our house. Then we waited for the results.

A week later a phone call and a letter indicated that our window sills and wells were off the charts. There was some (although not as high) lead on the floors of the entryway and the hallway where my sister and I had just removed wallpaper. Ugh. Using a home stick test, Eric and I tested the front hallway wall where we had just removed wallpaper. Pink to red means positive to varying degrees. The stick and testing fluid were so instantly red, it was like our walls were bleeding. Bleeding with lead. If we were paralyzed before, we were turned to stone now.

I called the Department of Health and explained our timing predicament. The lead lady there (and the reason I will never bad-mouth Hennepin County and the Health Department) tried to get our process speeded up. When that didn't work out, she dropped by herself with this crazy gun-like lead tester. She spot tested the walls we were worried about. Praise God and the Department of Health, the walls we wanted to work on were mostly negative. Our positive dust readings are likely from the trim, the windows, the front hall and half of the bathroom wall (the half we don't need to touch).

Finally, we're able to charge forward with our plans to remove adhesive and paint this weekend. Sweet, sweet relief.

This isn't to say we're entirely out of the woods. We're going to do our best to contain the few walls that have some lead in them, but our windows still need some serious work to get our house to be healthy. The county is going to help us out with a lot of that. It's going to take some time, but it will be worth it when our lead readings go down after that.

Eric and I were really nervous when we realised that we might have a lead problem. We tried to inform ourselves as much as possible, but there seemed to be a lot of inconsistent information out there. The best thing that has happened during this whole process? Getting tested and getting our concerns answered. We're so much better prepared to deal with this problem now that we know what in our house is of concern and what is not. Before that, I practically didn't want to touch anything in the house and definitely didn't want my sister's kids over there. Now at least we know which walls they can and cannot be licking. I highly recommend getting tested if there's any concern about lead in your house -- testing alone won't solve your problem, but at least it will help you figure out what to do next.

In the meantime, the work in our kitchen has continued. There's probably lead paint on the window, but for now we're not touching that. We ripped off some wainscoting and mudded the tile adhesive covered areas underneath. We've done a few coats now and should be able to paint the kitchen this weekend. Here's Eric, feeling good about the mud and good about the lead situation:

Eric's family will be down again and we even have a little project for the kids to work on (my sister's kids, not Eric's brothers).

The garden is doing great. The tomatoes are getting huge. The radishes, beans, peas, and carrots are abundant. We're a little worried about the edamame (soy), okra, and squash (did the birds steal some seeds or did we get a bunch of duds??), but the melon looks good. This picture is from a week ago and things are already much greener this week. I'll try to post more current pictures soon.

When you scrape wallpaper, you scrape alone

We got tons done at the house this weekend, thanks to many family members. My sister came over to scrape wallpaper in the hallway on Saturday, risking exposure to lead dust. Not to worry, we wet scraped and weren't gouging the paint under the wallpaper. We mostly used DIF, but when I ran out, I started just using water and water with TSP (trisodium phosphate) and it worked fine. Maybe it's because the wallpaper was old, but I'm starting to think that the makers of DIF add some chemically scent to water and call it wallpaper remover.

On Sunday, Eric's family came down to: install the washer dryer (which we bought at the appliance sale that's going on in the Education Building at the State Fair grounds for another week or so for anyone who doesn't mind a little scratch and dent), fix most of our electrical problems on the first floor, plant herbs and zinnias, clean the windows and the garage, pull off wallpaper, scratch paint off garage windows, generally offer wisdom and support, and remove the awnings from the front of the house.

That's Eric's dad disappearing under the awning. Our house looks much cleaner and fresher without that awning.

We got only momentarily sidetracked on Sunday when my sister's family dropped by. How could you not be distracted by these three:

Gus, the four year old, actually took this picture of Des hanging on the railing.

Something like 90% of pictures I have of Gus involve him eating some sort of sweet.

Laura bought Addie her first doll. Or as Eric's mom, Lu, said, Laura bought a doll for herself. Addie wasn't really impressed.

After having two boys, the quest to turn her into a girly-girl continues.

Addie was alternately enthralled by and afraid of Bailey, the perfect toddler-sized dog.

I spent most of the weekend scraping wallpaper. Just when we thought we were done, we found out that the front hallway was also covered in wallpaper covered in paint. Fortunately, my sister and my husband were available to lend a hand -- family are the only people you could actually ask to help with certain tasks.

Vegetable Garden In!

We spent a gorgeous Saturday morning getting our vegetable garden started. My brother-in-law Mike generously offered his green thumb. That's him pretending to have muscles. He is seriously going to embarrass his kids when they're teenagers. It's going to be awesome.
Eric loved digging up the grass.

Evidence that I actually worked and didn't just sit around taking pictures and sipping lemonade.
We planted tomatoes, radishes (four kinds!), carrots, soy beans, green beans, sugar snap peas, some kind of melon, and patty pan squash. The radishes have awesome names like German Giant and White Icicle. One of them had these supernatural shiny green seeds:


I hope they become glow in the dark radishes. I feel like Jack of Jack and the Beanstalk waiting to see what happens to the seeds that I foolishly traded for a cow. Only I never had a cow.

Also, the lilacs are starting to bloom in our backyard.

Five Things About the First Stages of Home Improvement

1. I found that my husband is truly a homeowner at heart. One of the first things that the old man did at the new house:

He was so happy.

2. Everything that the previous owners did frustrates me to no end. I spent the evening tearing this insulation off of the beautiful original windows of this 1927 homestead:


They put this on their walls:


Why do people put wood paneling on beautiful plaster walls? Once we started tearing it off, it was like cardboard under there. Do people want to see what it's like to live in a cardboard box? Is homelessness the new black?

3. Lead is dangerous. I started to scrape off the paint and wallpaper in the downstairs hallway (pictures to come) and after doing a little interneting, I decided that it might be a little dangerous. Could there be lead paint under the ancient wallpaper? We're investigating and will post the results here. We're almost positive that what was revealed under the wood paneling was lead paint:


Turns out homelessness is not the new black -- they were probably just covering up the lead paint in a way that would most frustrate the next owners. We're pausing downstairs paint and wall related operations until we can try to get the city or the county to pay for some lead testing.

4. I carried around a pair of pliers in my back pocket all evening. Carrying around tools makes me feel like I'm really serious about this whole DIY stuff .

5. Even though drinking beer (or consuming any food or drink) around lead paint dust is a dangerous proposition, I found that like carrying tools in backpockets, drinking beer and DIY go hand and hand. Maybe PBR will sponsor our renovation.

We're closing. Psyche.

We drove all the way out to Maple Grove (... or, actually, I think it might have been Maple Wood, I'm not sure) this morning, check in hand, all dressed up for a closing. After sitting in the closing office for two and a half hours, we found out that we can't close and we can't move in until Wednesday. Turns out the sellers want to check to go to their mother so that they don't have to pay the taxes. They didn't figure out that in order to have a check written to her, the deed needs to be in her name. Which it wasn't. Sucks.

They were less than agreeable to us moving in this weekend before we close even though we were assured that they would be ready to close on Wednesday. It's funny how as the buyer, you have to put down this "earnest money," but when the seller delays the closing (and drags you out to MAPLE FREAKING WOOD to do it), there's little to no accountability.

The picture above is of how we felt this afternoon. We're holding up the digital programmable thermostat that our agent gave us as a closing gift. In addition to getting that installed and getting our vegetable garden started, we were hoping to start on pulling down some wood paneling this weekend. No what are we going to do all weekend?

I will repost the post below on Wednesday.

We're closing!

I know, I know, we look a little like an ad for Coldwell Banker, but we wanted to get both the "sold" and the house in the shot. It's a little daunting to take on home ownership, but we're still really excited. My friend Kao Kalia Yang, the brilliant writer of the book The Latehomecomer, wrote in a recent e-mail, "How else do you stake root into the transient earth but for the honor of serious debt?" Exactly.