My husband is also a busy bee

This is a reference to a post that Feather Nester put up a few days ago about her industrious husband. Well, it's no dining room table, but he and our friend M did put in a new kitchen floor this weekend. Color me impressed.

In case you forgot, here's our old, gorgeous vinyl:

Notice the beautiful green-brown, perma-stained glory? I know what you're thinking: "Fools! Who could give up such a floor to a mere whim for a more 'modern', 'clean' look? What utter foppery!"

The menfolk began the process using laminate wood:


Ah, but feast your eyes upon this marvel!


Doesn't it look great? I think my favorite part, aside from how terrific it looks, is that Penny would not walk on it at first, as you see here:

See the scrap in the bottom right-hand corner near the trashcan? That's a large dog treat for her to chew that she whined at until I moved it close enough for her to dash onto the floor, grab it, and go safely back to the rug. I don't know if she didn't like the newness of it or if she feared she would slip...but it took us a lot of coaxing and food to get her to even put all four paws on there. We, however, plan to eat all our meals in there from now on. A special thanks goes out to M, who devoted his entire weekend to us, forcing his lovely wife H to come eat a delicious meal at my parents' house with me so she wouldn't be alone while the guys ate leftovers. It was a real chore for her, I could tell.

Next project: new cabinets. Those probably won't come for a while, but we are going to paint our dining room, so that'll be fun.

Enjoy your day!

p.s. You'll all be relieved to know that Penny seems to have gotten over her new-floor fear, particularly since that's where we put her food. It's all about priorities.

Continued greening efforts

So I promised I'd blog about my green updates as well as my renewed dislike of plastic bags. If you really need convincing, go here to see what got my blood boiling. I had no idea that it cost so much more to actually recycle plastic bags than it does to create them. Plus they're made from a polymer that comes from oil, a rather hot commodity right now, so if we can use fewer plastic bags (or NONE), use less (foreign) oil, and go a little greener, where does the harm lie? I'll tell you all again that I get my bags from www.1bagatatime.com, and www.ecobags.com sell a variety as well, including small cotton bags that work for getting your produce and bulk items at the grocery store. That was my Waterloo for a while but I use the cotton bags now (they barely weigh anything on the scale) and feel much better. Plus they have organic cotton if you like.

On that note, DH and I finally cut the downspout so we fill our rain barrel with actual rain from the house drainpipe instead of drop by drop and tossing in the water I boiled eggs with. With the rain we've had, the thing's already overflowing. I wouldn't use it for drinking water, but it will water my garden and the lawn nicely. Yay!

And did I mention that my lovely garden became deer food? I came out one morning to check on the progress and found deep hoof prints and chewed off tomato and pepper plants! FYI: Deer do not like lavender, so that has remained untouched, and they didn't seem to like the onions or the basil, either. Thus I put up deer fencing, giving myself a foot of space around the entire garden. This means that 1) I can get in and have a foot of space around the garden to work, and 2) the deer cannot simply crane their heads over the fence and chew away. My sister C, the organic farmer, also suggested dried blood, which you can get at garden supply stores. Gross thought, but she pointed out that the deer, herbivores, dislike the scent so much that they won't go near the garden, so you just sprinkle it all around. I may try it; I'll let you know. I just can't yet get over saying, "Hi, do you sell dried blood?" at the store like I'm some Satanic worshiper looking to supply her bizarre rituals when all I want are some good beefsteak tomatoes.

I think I'll start the compost heap this week as well. I've got the particulars from C. and I can't stand throwing food in the garbage any longer. Any suggestions on a small container in the meantime, since I can't always run immediately out to the far backyard to put scraps in? Williams-Sonoma has a ceramic compost pail for $32, but if I can find something even less pricey, I'll take it. It's all about budgeting, people. Plus we did crazy yard work this past weekend and have plenty of twigs and bark to throw in. Our front shrubs are dead on the bottom, so DH and I (ok, mostly him) hewed them down and made them look a lot better. The end ones do look like ugly green ice cream cones, but it's better than overgrown, brownish-gray, sad branches on the bottom. It's really nice to take care of your own space, yes?

I'm off...DH doesn't feel well and I need to minister to him. Pictures of rain barrel and garden with its sad little chewed plants will follow!

Finally, house pictures!

I finally got the memory card from DH, so here's the house. They're all interior, but trust it's a cute little cape with a big honking backyard that we feel very luck to have.

Hideous front hall wallpaper before I ripped most of it off--soooo satisfying!


View in the front hall, post wallpaper-ripping

Living room--the shelves will be filled with books; we still have boxes of them shoved into the cabinets below. And no, we're not keeping the valances over the windows. You can't quite see it, but we do have a working fireplace.

See why we're not keeping them? (Another living room angle)



Dining room


Kitchen with ugly linoleum and the scary oven. Notice the crock pot on the counter; used that again last night. Maybe we won't even buy a new range? I don't know why we have a kitchen chair in the middle of the floor. It has taken up residence; I'm thinking of calling it George.

Another kitchen view: our little table for mail and the phone and my one plant I've managed not to kill


Sorry this is on its side; this is the bathroom off the kitchen that clearly used to function as a closet. There's not even a sink in there, but hey, it works!


The TV for the "man room", although our friends have said until we change the wallpaper, they're calling it the "granddad room". The man room comes complete with large leather pullout couch, all very manly, yes, hmm, manly! Grrr!

Ech, another side picture. Wine fridge outside the man room. We love our wine fridge so much we received THREE of them for our wedding and that's the cause of my rant against Home Depot. DON'T REGISTER THERE. They made it nearly impossible to return it.


Contrast to manliness: Guest bedroom upstairs. Come stay!


My office. Notice I never let Kermit the frog or my Harry Potters (top shelf, the colorful ones) get very far away.

Screened-in porch complete with glider! That's the beautiful green thing. DH wants to get rid of it; I say no way.

So that's the house, in a nutshell. I have no pictures of our bedroom because it's a mess. You understand. And I didn't realize my last three captions ended in "-ay", but perhaps I felt the poetry of the house coming through my veins...or it's just coincidence. You be the judge.

Moving, Part I

I don't mean to rant, but have you ever noticed that when you move, 80% of your stuff takes 20% of the time to pack and put somewhere, and vice versa? We're at the last 20%, all the little stuff that doesn't fit anywhere but still needs to go, all the knick-knacky things, the unwieldy kitchen appliances that don't quite go in a box, the cleaning supplies that take up so much room, the cords, the spice racks, the tea bags, the bamboozles and wuzzles! Wait, no, that's Dr. Seuss.

Right now I'm sitting on my mattress with my keyboard in my lap while DH vacuums our now-empty bedroom. I admit I've taken an escape route, refusing for fifteen minutes to figure out how best to pack a large muffin tin, myriad pieces of Tupperware, and breakable glasses into a box. Very, very soon this will involve me simply putting a box together and throwing stuff in willy-nilly, just to GET IT DONE. I'm very, very excited that we're moving to our first house, and I'll laugh all about it in a week, but currently I am sticky and unwashed and I want the maid to come take care of all this and I gave her the weekend off, that sneaky little minx. She took the jet to the Hamptons.

Thus as of Monday I will not have Internet until we set it up at the new place or unless I go to school, not too far away, but still not as convenient as right at home. Oh, and I may be getting a new desk, new to me but an antique, which explains why I even mention it. It's not like, whee, new desk! Yeah! This one came from some sort of university and has wrought-iron sides, a little shelf, and it opens up like those desks you had in grade school (but it's wooden, not whatever they were made of. Stone, it felt like, when you inevitably slammed your finger with the top of it). So, yes, pictures. Aaand, hopefully I will have pictures of my tomatoes, which I take absurd pride in. I hope I can move them to the new place! Any suggestions on transportation?

OK, folks, I better get back to the grind--have a great weekend!

Coming attraction: I read the most interesting article about a professor who made his students go technology free (radio, cell phone, TV, etc.) for 24 hours and then had them write about it. Ponder that, my dears.

Our House!

So I wrote about house hunting and the terrible places we saw. And then, DH's mom called and mentioned a place she'd seen near her house. Three bedrooms, great yard, close to the town center but not too close, dry basement, etc. Long story short, we fell in love. After having my parents scrutinize it (R. has looked through many a home and we wanted his and my mom's input) and getting their OK, we made an offer... and we got the house! I'll post pictures soon. Trust that it's very cute. The interior decoration smacks of "early grandmother" (think 70s kitchen, several old windup clocks, and yellow/orange/brown floral wallpaper) but that's fixable. As the Realtor said, it has "great bones". The former owners raised their family there and obviously gave it a lot of love. My favorite part so far? The inlaid cherry bookshelves in the living room. Love 'em!

This may sound silly, but it feels so adult to own a house. DH and I now have a mortgage and a yard and a real, live basement (well, nothing lives in it as far as I know) and everything. We even have a raspberry bush! I find it all rather amazing and exciting. The house also happens to sit behind the football field of the local high school--not so close that stray passes will fly into the yard but close enough that my friend H. pointed out that the house will get egged on Halloween. It's all pretty exciting that we're really moving on to the next part of our lives, the part that will probably include children and Christmases and repainting and fights and everything. Mindblowing.

7/10/07 What makes this even more significant? Through a series of events, I found out said local high school had an English job opening. Bear in mind that the school is close enough to my house to literally walk out my door and across that field in five minutes. I figured I'd check it out just to see what would happen... and they actually offered me the job! I hadn't even thought of going elsewhere but I had to take the opportunity. Thus this means starting over again, but I think this could be something more permanent, finally. It also means I have to teach yucky boys again, ewwww.

So anyone want to come over for a painting party?