The Honey Do List

I have been oddly busy for not having a traditional job structure but I have managed to do a couple of chores around the house this year. I cleaned out the garage (it had never been organized from the move in '09) and re-stacked the woodpile. I feel better about both areas being a bit more structured. I can find things easily in the garage and there is a little more yard to mow with the wood re-stacked.

How you feelin' ?

Hot hot hot! That was the theme song to the weekend at the England abode. The A/C went out Friday afternoon sometime and the temperature kept climbing on Saturday. By about 9:30pm it was 89.5 degrees in the house. It was in the low 80's outside. It is amazing how many people will tell you to open the windows at that point in time. Windows were open and ceiling fans were in high gear. Poor little John endured the heat with me.

I am evil and decided to follow through with the plans we had made to make cookies as well. We couldn't decide on just one so we made 3 kinds...oven...no a/c. I know, not the brightest idea I have had. We did it though and I have all sorts of cookies to prove it. I even gave some to the HVAC repair guy that came yesterday to fix the problem. I am now with cooling capabilities...for a little while at least. My heat pump is 18 years old. It was suppose to konk out years ago. Here's hoping it decides to try to break a longevity record.

The next big challenge

So I started this challenge a smidge over a week ago and am not through with it. I did want to do an intermediate post though because who knows when it will be complete. I decided to tackle THE OFFICE. First step was to move everything out of the office. This was no small feat since it was the room I moved everything into when I bought the house. I chose the adjacent dining/living room as the repository for office limbo as you can see here.

Next step was to attack the room and the hideous wallpaper border. Ok, I admit I have seen worse but there was no way this was staying. If I am remembering correctly, the previous homeowners just kept the room like it was from the people they bought the house from. I can't hate the previous homeowners then so I will have to hate the grand-previous homeowners. Get it? Grand-previous = Grandparent? Anyway, so here is what it looked like...
And what I found out is that I hate hate hate residential "paper" wallpaper. I am not sure if the wall was primed at all but what I am sure of is that the wallpaper took off a lot of the top layer of drywall. This next shot is an action "drying" shot of patching compound drying (goes from pinkish/purple to white). It took almost all day to just prep the room for painting.

After the great accomplishment of getting everything removed, patched, and sanded I was ready to paint. To those that have been around me for years you already know that I normally don't paint things white. It not only bores me but it is aggravating because white paint doesn't cover well in my experience. I had little choice though since I was working with a whole scheme in mind for the room. Let me set the scene...months ago while flipping through the Land of Nod catalog, I spied some super awesome wallpaper that was freehand looking drawings of picture frames so that you could color on the walls. I immediately logged that away in my little brain and knew that the office would be where I could pull something like that off. The dilemma was really about what accent color I wanted in the room and where. I have been liking the bright greens a lot lately and kept gravitating back to it. The next question was, what gets the green? Well another bit of inspiration hits me, this time on the internet with an RSS feed. They showed this white bedroom with a blue ceiling...that's it! So on the ceiling went the "lime green" paint. Here is an in progress shot which is the last I have for you right now.

There has been more progress on the room since this photo was taken. New bookcases were assembled (you can see them in boxes in the living room pictures) and added to my existing bookcases to make a wall of bookcases. I also made a stand up table in the middle of the room out of 3 small bookcases and custom cut, frosted and tempered piece of glass from clearview glass company. In addition, the ceiling fan was switched out to a less '80s style with help from a coworker. I moved my desk back in as well as all of the books. I need a file cabinet and something to put my printer and scanner on near my desk. These are the details that are slowing me down right now. I will try to wrap it all up this weekend and get a final photo on the blog. Until then you will have to use your superb imagery skills to imagine.

Feel free to stop by and draw on my walls any time you catch me home.

The painting saga continues

I am finally done with the bedroom painting. I have some in progress shots. Even in the "done" photo it didn't have the curtains hung. The curtains are the same color as the quilt. Oh and there is one thing that I seem to do more often than not, paint the ceiling the same color as the walls so I don't have to be as careful. I did the same thing in the bedroom. ...lazy.

Oh and don't be overly impressed by the painting on the wall, I saw it on a website and "copied" it. I will attach it to the bottom of the post.

I am being such a "client"

I started painting my bedroom Saturday and if you follow me on Twitter (englandaia) then you will know I moved my gigantic pillow-top king size mattress by myself on Friday and even managed to trap John and Lucy in two separate rooms before shoving it into the guest bedroom...from where I am writing this entry now. I tweeted about the process mainly in case people stopped hearing from me then they would know that I had been pinned under the mattress and could send help. Don't laugh, it was a real possibility. :)

Anyway, I am off topic now and need to get back to the story in the title of the post. So, I prep the walls and ceiling (patching, sanding, taping and such) and start cutting in with the field paint. Lingo translation; field paint is the main paint color. I am being odd/lazy and using the same color on 3 walls and the ceiling. The wall behind the head board will be a darker accent wall. There will be pictures later.

So...cutting in corners, windows, and such and I start second guessing color choices. I picked out the colors and bought the paint in June and this is the last room I had to paint from that era of color choices. I remember thinking that I could get it painted before the furniture arrived. I was so very wrong. I came home at lunch one day and set my brand new quilt from macy's in the floor and pulled out my box of paint chip samples and selected the two colors for the room. I then dashed away back to work. It seemed fine at the time but now I am rethinking.

Did I want a blue paint with a little gray or a gray paint with a little blue? It is a medium dark blue/gray. Did I want it this dark on the ceiling too? Do I want to paint the trim in the accent wall paint (almost black) or paint it white? Is the accent wall going to be too dark? What was I thinking? Did I smoke crack when I picked this scheme out?

These are the types of thoughts clients have at times and I felt very much like that type of client. I took a deep breath and decided to continue on and trust that it would come together. I have never done illegal drugs so I figured I probably WAS thinking when I picked it out and I should go with it. We will see. Anyway, if it doesn't turn out well then I can always paint over it. That is the beautiful thing about paint...you can always try a different color!

I will post before and after and if need be, the between schemes photos, once the bedroom is painted. Fingers crossed.

Catching up - Halloween (House)

John and I have been working on making the house spooky for a few weeks now. It started with some tombstones and skull pictures in the windows. Then the cobwebs and ghosts in trees appeared. Every time we would go for a walk around the neighborhood he would see something and get another idea. There are a couple of window pictures he wants to have that we saw at other people's houses and what he doesn't know is that I have found them and have them as part of his birthday present. He will be excited! Here is our house and pumpkin for this year. Oh the pumpkin idea came from a magazine so don't give me too much credit. :)

Quick Post

Today my sister and I helped clean out my Mom's closet. We will have to return to finish the job but we packed up 19 kitchen trash bags and took them to Goodwill. There were 4 bags of trash as well. It took 3 1/2 hours to get that much done. Whew.

Here is a little tid bit about me that not many people know and probably should if I ever offer to help you do this...I don't caulk well. I get more caulk on the surrounding surfaces and my hands than I do in the area to be caulked. If I am helping you do something around the house, make sure it is not that.

As I write this, there are multiple parties in the neighborhood with live music. I live in a hipper place now than where I was (west knox vs. fountain city). West Knoxville, hip? Who would have thought it? I am not hip enough to attend the parties but I can listen to them. :)

The yard

I have come to the realization that I am going to have to mow the yard every week. This is not a "keeping up with the Jones'" type thing, it is just that the yard is growing so fast I can't keep up. Honestly, the back yard could probably stand to be mowed more often than once a week but that is insane. This week it took 2 hours (40 minutes for front and side, 80 minutes for the back) to mow which is much better than the course 0f 4 hours last week...there was some stopping to wash out the underside of the mower and then let whatever engine part dry that I shouldn't have gotten wet. This week it only died twice in the back yard due to high wet grass. I went r...e...a...l...l...y slow and that helped a little. I had to refill the gas tank twice.

If you missed it, just check the previous postings to see what sort of river washes through the yard during big thunder storms and you will know why the back yard stays wet more than most yards. I still haven't quite figured out where I should stop mowing and where the neighbors should start. I have been eying fencelines and treelines where the property lines should be but I have a feeling that the previous home owner just mowed over to both neighbor's driveways. Not me, buddy.

I also don't know what to do with the sticks and such that are picked up out of the yard. In the City you just put them at the curb and trucks would come by once a week and pick it up. Now what happens? I still haven't called to set up trash pickup. I am taking advantage of my last week of City services and taking the trash to the old house. This week I need to call...maybe they will pick up my brush too.

Tomorrow I am going to go buy hedge clippers like I have been meaning to do for 2 weeks and I may even attempt to use the weedeater that I bought and am terrified of. In a couple of weeks I am suppose to do an oil change on the mower, according to a coworker. I am not even sure if I have the correct tools to try this.

I have several owner's manuals to catch up on...garage door opener...vacuum...mower...weedeater. Rivitting reading.

Should I build and ark?

We have been having some afternoon thunderstorms lately that have been real frog stranglers and I happened to be up in John's room during one of them. I thought I would try to capture the small river that flows through the back yard during heavy rains. My thought... it helps me identify where to plant a weeping willow. Really, the home inspector and I checked it out one day and we were both ok with the distance from the house to the river.

The Monochromatic Room

I have a "before and after" shot of one of the rooms I have been frantically trying to paint. This is the dining/living room. Before it was an off white box with a white ceiling. I changed it up a little bit but what was funny is that excluding the dark brown, everything is about the same color. The ceiling and upper walls are the same color which match the carpet which matches the rug which matches the chair. Tomorrow the movers come and so there will be more furniture in the room to help break things up but for right now it is a very monochromatic color scheme.

Painting machine

I have tried to turn myself into a painting machine without much success. I really need to have three ceilings painted before tomorrow morning so that my Dad can come over and reinstall the light fixtures in those rooms. I have 2 out of the 3 complete. After an awards dinner (no, I am not winning one) I will be headed back home to start on the last room. Everything is taped off I just have to pull out some paint and get to work. I have finished the smallest room and the largest room and the one tonight is the most complicated room. All of this is to be done with one antique light fixture as the light source. Last night I painted with only the help of track lighting. I only had one section I could find this morning that was a little light on paint. Next time I have flat white on a roller I will hit that spot...maybe.

As a side note, I think I am the first person to paint the ceilings since the house was built in the two rooms I have painted thus far. Oh, and the evolution of paint colors in the den are this; pink, light blue, khaki, and soon to be a medium-dark blue. I have decided to leave the trim a dark wood and not paint it white in that room. I figured that if I change my mind I can always go back and paint it later. Better go, work is about to start. :)

Jacene

...it has started

I have bought the first thing for the new house, a string trimmer. I bought it based on the consumer reports recommendation. I may not be able to mow...or store cold food...or wash or dry clothes...but I will be able to trim the grass around things. :)

This weekend I also plan on buying a bed since there are sales galore right now. I will save $100 on it. It isn't a huge amount but it is still $100 that I couldn't save a week and a half ago when I went to check it out. I am ashamed to admit it but I am buying it at Rooms To Go. I now feel bad for making fun of RTG for so many years. There stuff isn't so bad for mid-line furniture. Look at me and my frugality. :)

Jacene

Does this house make me look fat?

Over the past little bit I have been trying on houses...some were too big, some too snug, and some were just down right scary, but this one seemed to work. I put an offer on the house a little over a week ago and so did two other families ON THE SAME DAY! So my realtor, I love her and recomend her to anyone wanting to buy or sell a house, said "give me your final and best offer to bring to the table tomorrow". *gulp* I gave it to her and waived a home warranty...didn't get it.

To continue the story, I look at more houses and am a little sad but hopeful to find another house that fit as nicely as this one seemed to. Low and behold, I get a phone call in the women's restroom in the Denver airport and it is Laura. No, I wasn't in a stall, thank you. The other buyer backed out and I was runner up. Yippie. I said that I was still interested and by the end of the day when I was back in Ktown I had signed updated offer papers and am on my way to being a homeowner in a west Knoxville neighborhood. All you soccer moms...beware! Hopefully I will close at the end of the month and John is SUPER excited about having his very own bathroom which is the biggest one in the house.

Jacene

You never realize how important something is until it is gone...

The title sounds more ominous than the post. I was giddy to have power again in the house today. Storms blew through the area Wednesday late afternoon and knocked the power out all over town. I found out that my house was affected at around 9:30pm Wednesday and decided to just hang out since it was a warm night and I figured things would be up and running shortly...wrong. I set an alarm and figured I would just shower and get ready at the office if need be. I knew it had power since I left there after the storms had passed.

I did have to get ready there. I got home after dark and left before daylight Thursday morning so I wasn't sure if there was a tree down or anything but it didn't seem that there was too much debris around. I also had tried all the breakers except for the main the night before but that didn't do anything. I started to get worried when I left for the office at 5:45am and a neighbor's light was on. Did I do something wrong that could have restored power? The short answer was...no.

I did stash some groceries from the fridge at the office. I also stashed some frozen food at my parent's house Thursday night when we stayed over there. I kept calling KUB and eventually started getting the message that "one" customer was affected. That "one" customer was me. It is amazing how many people questioned my ability of paying utility bills at this point. I assured them that wasn't the problem.

Anyway, this morning after spending another night at the parental unit's house I called KUB to see what the message said and there was not the part about the "one" customer. I was so happy that I had the potential to have power. I ate breakfast and then went to check things out. The house was warm, the fridge was cold, and I went on a whirl wind tour of food roundup. I brought everything back threw in a load of laundry and was a happy camper. I literally hopped around a little while, I was so happy.

Again, it is amazing what you take for granted. I love power and sleeping at my house...no offense Mom and Dad. :)