Living Room Cabinet

We have two amazing corner cabinets in our house. One in the Living Room and one in the Dining Room. Before R's birthday party in November, I cleaned off the Dining Room cabinet and put some dishes on the shelves, so that I could get rid of some boxes and set up a table in there. It's not finished or acceptable in my terms, but it's better than nothing! At least it got rid of boxes!


The cabinet in the Living Room has basically been ignored since we moved in though. The paint is peeling really bad on the back (curved back) and I shudder to think about the super big project of removing all of that paint. Ugh. I don't even want to think about it!! The shelves were basically empty, with a couple random things thrown on there from time to time (papers, boxes, etc.). It didn't look nice. When I was removing paint this weekend, I had to clean out the little corner between the end table and corner cabinet. Once I start cleaning something I go crazy. I found two boxes shoved in the corner. One of them was filled with picture frames that I had forgotten we even had! I needed somewhere to put them. I decided to clean off the shelves and put the pictures up. It's not done, but it will at least make the room look lived in a little. I ended up putting some books on the bottom shelf and realized that it helped cover up the horrible looking peeling paint on the curved back. I need to find more books (never thought I'd say that!!) to fill the top shelf as well. It's the only shelf I don't like how it came out.

Nothing fancy, just better than what was there. And it really helps make the room feel more lived in and less of a 3/4 finished room. We're slowly getting there.. As soon as I finish removing the paint from the windows and paint them we're getting a rug and possibly some new couches. And curtains. And hanging stuff on the wall.

Goodbye Paint!

Our Living Room is still 3/4 done. There's just that little 25% of the room left keeping me from officially finishing the room. That 25% is the reason there's nothing on the shelves. No rug. No curtains. Nothing on the walls.

Well, I've had enough. I want a rug. I want curtains. I want a pretty Living Room that I'm not embarrassed by.

First things first, lead paint needs to be removed. I went to Home Depot to buy another gallon of Peel-Away, only to be told that they don't sell it anymore. Thought I was going to break down and cry in the middle of Home Depot. Some quick research on my phone brought me to a Sherwin Williams store. They had my Peel-Away. For twice as much as I had paid at Home Depot. Ouch. But, I needed it. I swore to myself that I'd be more careful and not waste any this time.

As I'm reading the directions, I see that "1 gallon is enough to remove the paint on approximately one side of one average sized door". Uh.. I have three windows, three doors and one large corner cabinet. This is going to get expensive. And fast! But. It's cheaper than $32,000 to have a contractor do it.

It appears that Peel-Away has improved a bit in the last year and half since I bought my first gallon. The cover is child/tamper proof and literally took me a half hour to open. You need 4 hands to open it. No easy task when you're home alone. After rigging something with string, tape and a nail, I got the cover off. I remembered from the never-ending project that is the Living Room fireplace, that the more PA you put on, the easier the paint comes off (it's a trade off.. you're using more PA, so you're going through the gallon faster, but it removes better...), so I glopped on the stuff and put the paper on. I had also grabbed a roll of duct tape, so I taped the edges to the wall so that it wouldn't slide down (a HUGE issue I had with the fireplace... no matter how thick or thin I spread it... no matter the temperature in the house... no matter if I let it sit a couple minutes before putting the paper on, it always slid!). I also went around with a pin and popped any air bubbles I saw, about a half hour after applying the paper.

The duct tape worked. When I came back the next day, it worked amazingly! When I did the fireplace, I had a lot of areas where the paint just didn't come off, due to me not putting the paper flat enough, air bubbles or sliding. I've been able to correct this on the windows and had no issues. It came off clean and beautiful! I wasn't able to get all the paint in the crevice on the edge of the trim, but who cares. It came off enough that when I paint over it, you'll never notice.

On the second window, I put up the PA, but then was too busy with work the next day and couldn't remove it. I prayed that it wouldn't ruin the windows and I wouldn't need to re-apply and waste more PA. So, 48 hours after application, I removed one side of the casing. It came off pretty well. However, it still took about 45 minutes, and was only half of the side. The other side of the window I had put the PA on the whole side and I had tons of work that needed to get done. I once again prayed that it wouldn't be ruined and put it off until the next day.

So now we're 72 hours post-application. Oh my God. I need to wait this long always! I removed and cleaned the whole side of the window in about a half hour. Less than half the time it should have taken me. And it came off perfectly! That section of casing is the best looking out of all my PA projects so far!

I thought it was interesting because in the pamphlet that came with the PA it said to leave it on for 12-24 hours.. basically don't leave it on for more than 48. With the fireplace I found that if I left it on for about 20 hours, it worked the best (though comparing the fireplace to the windows, I did a horrible job on the fireplace!!). With window #1, I left it for about 24 hours. The section left for 72 hours wasn't messy coming down (my one concern is that because it wasn't messy, the chemicals(? whatever changes the toxicity of the lead paint) weren't working anymore and it had reverted back to it's bad self) and quicker to clean up.

Not So Scary Anymore..

This is actually a project I finished over the summer, but I finally just took pictures of it this week. Between work, other projects and a LOT of cloudy days, I had an excuse every day for months.

You'll remember from earlier posts that this is the room we've dubbed The Twilight Room. When we first viewed the house it was completely empty, except for two Twilight posters. And the walls were a beautiful striped montage of black, magenta, and purple, with a lovely bright blue carpet. Just delightful.

R claimed this room as his soon after we moved in. He took the desk that the previous owner had left and that's where he had his computer. He doesn't use it much.. maybe once or twice a week. The room wasn't really a priority. We have the guest beds set up in the Guest Bedroom, and R didn't really care about the scary walls (which by this point were primed, but you could still see the stripes peeking through).

However, this spring, I was attempting to organize all of the remaining boxes upstairs and realized that I could empty the majority of them if only I had somewhere to put my excess office supplies. I had boxes and boxes full of art and craft supplies, pens and pencils, notebooks.. etc. Plus a bunch of random stuff like our winter coats (downstairs coat closet isn't very high on our to-do list), all of my gift wrap, and what I call my memory boxes (basically plastic boxes filled with mementos). As I was sitting on the floor amid all of this stuff, I realized that I had a huge closet in the Twilight Room, sitting there basically empty.

In April and May I got to work on the closet.. not as easy as you'd think, seeing as it was covered in hand prints.

Once that was done, I started filling it up. That didn't take long. But I managed to unpack almost every box left in the Guest Room! Plus all of the boxes that I had accumulated in the Twilight Room.

The walls weren't that bad. Two coats of the light yellow paint, over two coats of Kilz covered all of the stripes. There are still a couple spots where you can see a little raised line (whoever painted the stripes taped off the lines and there are some spots where there's a raised line of paint along where the tape was), but only if you look really really close. The trim and windows were a pain because the paint was so dark and I was painting it white. I'm still not 100% done with the doors... they're taking an obnoxious amount of paint!!

Over the summer I moved in some furniture I had in the Guest Room. We got R's childhood bed and I had to rearrange the Guest Room, and all of the furniture didn't fit any more. I moved in his old bookcase and  Madison's papasan chair. We also have an old filing cabinet in here that was left in the house. It's broken and not very eye-pleasing, but it's too heavy for me to move out of the room, let alone down the stairs, so it's staying in here until it bothers R enough to move it (it'll be here for awhile).

In the fall I bought some Ikea curtains for the room. The next time R went to use his computer, he was like "What is all of this? What happened to my office? There are flowery curtains and stuffed animals in here!" It had definitely gone from being his room to mine.. My craft supplies take up one whole wall, there are stuffed animals on the shelves there and on the puppy's papasan chair.. there are flowers on the walls and curtains and there are pink stripped tie-backs on the curtains. His wall does have a nice panoramic view of Fenway (I said, if this was my room I definitely wouldn't have hung THAT up!) and all of his books and CDs and This Old House magazines, etc. by his computer still :)

The room still isn't completely finished (what is in this house?). I haven't painted the ceiling yet and we're planning on getting a new carpet soon. I plan on painting the ceiling and touching up the base trim when we get the new carpet. I also need to finish the doors and install the re-painted hardware.

**Picture disclaimer** I broke our camera. Our good, fancy camera. So these pictures are blurry and not the best (after waiting so long to take them you'd think they'd at least be good!). Sorry.

Madison's corner of the room. It's her favorite spot to sleep.

All that's left of R's space in the room

Bought these frames and pictures at Ikea for a total of $3.  I spray painted the frames black to match everything else in the room.

Curtains from Ikea with ribbon tie-backs. I spray painted the existing curtain rods black.

Our 2011 Goals... How'd We Do??

First off, here's the list. Most of the finished tasks link to my progress posts.

*Finish the Kitchen I'd say it's 90% done.. we're almost there!
*Landscaping the front yard Instead of doing this, I did a little landscaping in the backyard (my sidewalk)
*Cleaning up the front entrance/porch
*Get the rest of our boxes from our parents' houses
*Buy chickens and build a coop
*Fence in the backyard This is going to be our #1 large project of 2012.. as soon as the ground thaws
*Install new exterior light fixtures by back door They're purchased. That's something, right?
*Install new motion detecting flood light Same here.
*Renovate downstairs bathroom Our plans have changed here. We're now leaning toward just replacing the fixtures and leaving the layout the same. For now.
*Re-work/re-build the back staircase The back stairs/lean-to are a project we may tackle this summer.. it's a big one because we're going to be completely re-building the lean-to and putting in a foundation, so it may get put off for another year...
*Finish off closet under back staircase
*Figure out what to do with my pantry
*Install shelving in Living Room closet It's painted, just not installed. The walls need a lot of repair.
*Figure out lighting solution for Living Room
*Strip paint in Living Room Ended up being a lot more time consuming than I had originally thought (and expensive). I'm working on it though!
*Re-do front Hall
*Install chandelier in Dining Room
*Get a Dining Room table We have a folding table with a table cloth on it in there for now. Better than nothing, right?
*Organize tools in basement They're actually in the basement now, which is Step 1 :)
*Buy bookcases/etc for office
*Make new bulletin boards for office
*Second coat of paint in Guest Room
*Paint Twilight Room
*Re-do upstairs back Hall
*Lighting solution for upstairs Bathroom and Laundry
*Clean out Laundry cabinet
*Install permanent dryer vent

Now here's my disclaimer. I never really made  it apparent on here, but 2011 was filled with a lot of job changes for me. So there was a lot we had planned to do that we weren't able to do (especially the larger projects), because we were figuring out other things. Things are pretty settled for now, so here's hoping to a very productive 2012!

I've also realized there were a lot of things that we didn't include on the list.. like a garden and a dishwasher (though I guess I included in the Kitchen task). I still feel like we got a lot done this year. Just having almost the entire second floor be finished feels good. And have I mentioned that there's a floor in the Kitchen???? :) And of course we also had the unexpected projects.. painting/cleaning the other bedroom closet, the need to do some electrical work in both the back Hall and Kitchen, plus the expensive new chimney cap that we desperately needed!

Our Second Christmas in the House

This Christmas was a little different than last year. I decorated more, for one thing. We had more finished (or semi-finished) rooms. It was also nice to be able to do a lot of baking in the kitchen. Having a kitchen table again definitely helped! I think I made over 25 dozen cookies (some of which I brought around to our neighbors).

And this isn't even all of them! I think I made about twice as many as shown in this picture!

We (and by we I mean me) decided to change things up this year and put the tree in front of the front windows. I love being able to see the tree from the street (which you couldn't really do.. oh well.. you could see it a little!). I've also been wanting to try out a different furniture layout in the room. We moved the loveseat to in front of the fireplace. I like it. R doesn't. I think it makes the room feel larger. The only downside (according to me) is that the coffee table is a little awkward because of the tree.. it can't be centered on the couch, so it's just kinda hanging out in the middle of the room.

I especially loved being able to decorate in the kitchen. Last year at an after-Christmas sale we got these two artificial trees for $2 each. The garland was about $1.

I think this was one of my favorite things in the house this Christmas. I could never seem to get a really good picture of it though.. It looked awesome when all of the rest of the lights in the room were turned off though!

This year at an after-Christmas sale we bough some night pewter and white candles to put in the windows (for $1 each!). We're considering keeping them up all year long. There's another center chimney house across town that does this and I've loved it ever since I was little.

Party Deadline

It has now been exactly one month since the big party.. which means that I haven't blogged in over a month.

In case you're wondering, we did meet our party deadline. Well, kinda. We didn't finish everything on the schedule, but that was partly because we lost a week and a weekend due to the power outage. But I was still pretty pleased with the progress we made.

The last progress post I made was on day 1 of the floor installation. Since then....

We finished the floor.
We painted the walls.
We painted the ceiling.
We installed the dishwasher.
We installed the lights.
We installed the door trim.
We installed some window trim.
We had a successful party.

I'll do posts for all of the work we did, but first... let's talk about the party.

It was the first time some of R's family had seen the house... and the first time some of my family had seen it in almost a year. So everyone got a tour :) Then everyone got to meet the chickens.

Then we ate. We had chicken parm (R's favorite dinner), ziti, spaghetti, garlic bread, and salad (plus a million appetizers!). For dessert, I made this cake for Ryan and these cookies.. so so good!! (Remember that the party was suppose to be in October.. hence the pumpkin/Halloween theme!)

By the end of the night, we were all exhausted... especially the dogs :)

Our New Kitchen Floor

This weekend R continued working on the Kitchen floor. It had been put on hold thanks to the power outage, so we were now very behind in our schedule!

He got quite a bit done Saturday.. but wasn't able to finish. Sunday, however, was a different story. He had finally gotten the hang of it.. and it was going down incredibly quick!

He first had to go to Lowe's to buy some more plywood. While he was gone, I put a second coat of paint on the walls (I'd prefer to paint when there's just plywood on the floor) and painted the ceiling. The ceiling looks so much better.. you can't even tell where the old upper cabinets used to be (we also used some spray "popcorn" to cover up that area).

This is how much he had done by dinnertime on Saturday...

Barely half of the kitchen.. and about half of that was from the previous Saturday. By dinnertime on Sunday, he was done! We still have to do the little hallway that goes to the Living Room and Bathroom, but we haven't decided what we're doing with the walls in there (lead paint that would take FOREVER to take down.. we might just replace the walls with drywall...). But we'll worry about that after the party.

Also on Saturday, he unpacked the dishwasher. It's not hooked up (again.. that'll have to wait until after the party. Sadly), but it's in place. Madison enjoyed playing in the dishwasher box for awhile. So much so that we're keeping it for her..

Because the last couple rows were pretty tight (with the wall/hutch there), I got to do them! It was a lot of fun.. and not that hard (especially seeing as everyone told us it would be impossible..torture..worse thing ever to install the floor).

And look how pretty it is!!

A Week in the Eighteenth Century.. Day 5

Day 5. Everyone in the state is complaining like crazy, but I'm still having fun. Madison has been sleeping in our bed with us, smack dab in the middle of us, for the whole night. She's so small I worry about her being too cold. So she's been spoiled all week... big bed... going to grandma's house everyday... everyone paying lots of attention to her!

When we drove up to my parent's house this morning she was excited, but not near as excited as usual (I guess the fun is starting to wear off). Despite the heat and electricity, I still plopped myself down in the living room on the floor. Only this time I had my laptop and cell phone charging next to me.

Before we both left this morning, we cleaned our refrigerator and freezer. It was killing me, the quintessential Yankee, to throw away all of that "good" food. Ugh. And of course R had stopped at the store on Friday night to get a couple things we'd been out of all week.. orange juice, butter, milk. All of which I had to throw away, completely unused.

Freezer before (please excuse my messy freezer that needed to be cleaned out before the storm!)

Freezer after (with the ice cream for the party)

I didn't do a refrigerator "before" picture... but here it is after. By the way... what do you think about condiments? We had 5 days without power... some websites say they're ok, some say to throw them away... I threw away all creamy dressings and marinades, but kept stuff like ketchup, bbq sauce, steak sauce, etc.

Fridge after (basically everything not on the door is all new, for the party)

Again, trying to be optimistic, my fridge and freezer really did need to be cleaned out. I hadn't cleaned it out since we moved in, so the last time it was cleaned/purged was a year ago. It was due. I just wish we didn't have to throw away so much good food. I also wish all the ice pops on the freezer door didn't melt and create a sticky mess all over everything...

This was empty before I cleaned out the fridge. I filled it up with all of the plastic/glass bottles full of stuff I had to throw away!

Around 6:00, I was on facebook, waiting for R to get to my parent's house, when I saw that one of our neighbors posted that our village was back in the 21st century! The entire village had been out for 5 days.. even stoplights (and let me tell you... that was a disaster! If a stoplight isn't working, the intersection becomes a four way stop people. You can not just speed through the intersection going 90!) I called our house, and the phone rang, meaning that she was right! R stopped by on his way home and took this picture, to "prove" it.

My poor cornstalk just did not make it :(

A Week in the Eighteenth Century.. Days 2-4

Bad picture quality because I was driving, but you can kinda see a tree snapped over, leaning over the road and power lines.

So crazy... this street was one of the last to get power in our area..

Woke up Monday morning still without power (Happy Halloween!). I'm still having fun. I've always loved losing power. Reading by candlelight. Walking around the house with flashlights. It's all fun to me.

R went to work today (the town he works in is along the shoreline and they only had 1% (so basically like 1 household) without power). I decided I didn't want to stay in the cold house all day by myself, so I drove me and Madison over to my parent's house. My mom and sister were home and we all camped out on the living room floor in front of the fireplace (which had only been lit once before... in 1979). It was fun! Madison loved it! Everyone laying on the floor with tons of blankets and puppy toys? It was her dream come true! And she even got to wear her Halloween costume (she was a bumble bee) all day! My dad came home about an hour later. His work had no power too.. so he had gone over there to talk to any employees who came in. My dad is worse than R when it comes to not having power. He was just walking around aimlessly... not knowing what to do.

My parents prepared a little better than we did. They got out the big beach coolers and filled them with ice on Saturday night right after they lost power. All perishables (that they could fit) went into the cooler. They were able to save mayonnaise, drinks, meat, eggs, etc. by doing this (our food wasn't so lucky..). My mom made tuna sandwiches and soup (boiled the water on the grill) for lunch. Mmmm...

My dad and I ventured out in the afternoon to pick up some things from the grocery store (ok, mainly I wanted hot chocolate...). We also tried to get gas... that was just a joke. Most gas stations were closed.. the two we found that were open, one didn't have gas and the other had lines to get in that were over a mile long. The cars at the end were turned off and just parked there they had been waiting for so long!

All afternoon I read and played with Madison and worked on a Christmas craft I'm making. R came after work for dinner. My dad made kielbasa and baked beans on the grill and my mom made some baked potatoes in the fireplace (soooooo good! a million times better than grill potatoes!). They only got 1 trick-or-treat group. My dad and R were out in the driveway cooking on the grill and the group (and their dad) walked right up to them (the house is up on a hill, on a long driveway) and wanted candy. My dad was like "uhh... Happy Halloween... Want some kielbasa?" (this is apparently Polish Halloween this year). My mom reluctantly gave up some candy (she's a first grade teacher and was mad that kids were out in the unsafe conditions... plus we had kinda been eating the candy all day).

Around 9:30 R and I left and came back home. Still no power... but we spent weeks last fall without heat, so sleeping here wasn't a problem. Also, it turned out that my parents still had hot water (gas fired, not electric), so we were able to take showers before coming home.. which was nice!

Tree in parking lot at work.. all of the trees in front of our building were like this. They were cut down by the end of the day :(

Tuesday I dropped Madison off at my parent's house (and picked up my car, which R insisted I leave there... he didn't want me driving home in the dark) and I went into work. I work from home normally and this was the first time I actually worked in the office. It was weird :) My boss was wicked nice and even said I could bring in Madison and take a shower there. For lunch, the receptionist and I got Chinese food (the only place open in town!).. and it was so nice to be warm all day! And have internet!! After work, I drove home and waited for R to get out of work. Then, back to my parent's house. Tonight we had pizza.

Branches down in my parent's front yard.

Two houses down from my parents... trees snapped and broke their fence and went into their pool.

Wednesday was pretty much the same as Monday, without Halloween. R and I stopped at Dunkin Donuts on our way to my parents and got everyone coffee and munchkins! I finished a whole book today, and broke my head (ok, not literally... but Madison and I were playing pretty rough and I smacked my head on a coffee table... I have a huge bump. I'm such a klutz). In the afternoon my mom made baked apples in the fireplace.... sooo much better than ones in the oven!!! Around 5:30 my dad came in from outside (he'd been cleaning up branches and stuff outside all day) and "fixed" the fire in the fireplace (my mom just wasn't able to keep it going today for some reason!). While he was doing that, power came back on!! For dinner my mom made basically everything in the freezer that was about to be no good anymore. We had chicken, hamburgers, kielbasa, two kinds of french fries and three kinds of vegetables. It was crazy. Still no power at our house though..

Mmmm... munchkins and hot cider

She loves to snuggle!

She also kinda really likes fireplaces... Too bad we don't have one. Oh wait..

Best baked apple ever!

A Week in the Eighteenth Century.. Day 1

We're all gung-ho about getting the kitchen done. We have a schedule. I'm posting every day with our progress. Then I drop off the radar for a week. Where was I?

See all that black? That means that 90-100% of the town doesn't have power. Guess where we live. Yuuup.

Here in New England we had a major nor-easter. In October. It was crazy. R and I enjoyed it at first. Saturday was a gorgeous day filled with snow (we love snow in this house!). R cut the grass early in the morning (in anticipation for the snow) and I painted the kitchen. Then we set up the miter saw and started installing the floor. By the end of the day we had 10+ inches of snow on the ground and a new floor in 1/4 of our kitchen. We realized that we weren't able to use our stove though (can't walk on the new floor for 12-24 hours while the glue dries), so we went to a local pizza place and got pasta take-out and sat on the couch with our warm food and watched American Horror Story. A fun night.

1:30 in the morning we were woken up by the volunteer fire department's siren going off. We had just lost power (siren goes off when we lose power). Ok. This is fun. No power. We went back to sleep. Woke up around 7:30. Still no power. Ok... now my eye is starting to twitch. We were suppose to have a long day of working on the floor! We had to finish the floor today!! I decided to look at it positively however. I grabbed It by Stephen King (my book club's October book) and took advantage of my hidden blessing.. I now had time to finish reading it in time for our Halloween discussion on Monday. R said he was going out to fix our SUV's heat, which he had noticed the night before wasn't as warm as it should be. I said ok, bye, without looking up from It.

2 1/2 hours later, he comes walking back into the house complaining about lines at Dunkin Donuts. Apparently he wasn't fixing the car... he had driven around for 2 1/2 hours looking for an open Dunkin Donuts (a man and his morning coffee... sigh). The closest DD to us was open, but had a mile long line. The other DD down the street had no power. He drove to my hometown (town of 17ish DD). One was closed. One was open. One had a long line. One had no coffee. You get the picture. He drove by my parents house to see if they had power. They didn't.. and there was a HUGE tree down blocking the road that had fallen from one of our neighbor's yards. He gave up and came home. Without his coffee.

Now, I'm a person who can adjust to no power with no problem. R can't. All of his "fun" consists of TV, computer, power tools.. and it was all taken away. He wandered around for a little bit. He ended up taking a nap upstairs without dog. Meanwhile, I'm plowing through It! This is awesome!! Then it's time for the Patriots game. And we still don't have power... He found an old battery powered radio the previous owner left, hooked up his ear buds and sat on the couch listening to it. While I read (almost done now!). Then it started getting dark. I pulled out some candles from the candle cabinet. It was pretty in here.. and smelled pretty good too! 

Then it was time for dinner. R grabbed some meat out of the freezer (might as well use it while it's still good!) and some potatoes and threw them all on the grill. If you've never had potatoes on the grill, do it. They were so good! Well, except for the bacon bits he threw in there that just got completely charred... other than that... a little olive oil and Sicilian salt... mmm so good!! We ate in the almost dark... with Madison sitting on the end of the couch staring at us trying to figure out what was going on. About an hour later (football game was over by now), R was ready for bed. I said I wanted to finish my book first. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore, so I said fine. We'll go to bed. Then I looked at my phone. It was 8:31. Sigh. Is this what time people in the 1700's went to bed? I felt silly going to bed so early! Then I decided to be stupid. I read the last 50 or so pages of It in bed. In the dark. With a flashlight. Needless to say, I kept seeing and hearing things all night...

Luckily, we didn't have too much damage in our yard (we had more damage in the hurricane, when we didn't lose power). Our next door neighbor had some really large tree branches fall in her front yard, but luckily none hit her house!