Dining Room Rehab

It's Christmas time at the Little Red House and the spirit (spirits? Haha!) are in full swing.  We made the long and arduous trek to Lowe's to purchase some snazzy little sap sopper - a tree, in layman's terms - and it has been decorated ever so haphazardly, as is my style.  Of course, there will be no pictures of my little tree.  My skills for decorating pale in comparison to all of you Southern Belles (you know who you are) that could make Christmas out of toilet paper and glue, if you had to.  So instead of embarrassing myself fully, I'll move away from the holiday cheer... keeping the spirits close by though... and onto the topic at hand.

DINING ROOM REHAB.

You were supposed to imagine a big booming voice saying that.  Did you?  Well, I'll wait while you try again.

Are you ready now?  Good, pressing on.

We all remember fondly the sexiness that was my dining room.  It was covered in the most 80's fantabulous vine inspired wallpaper known to man.  The curtains were white.  The chair rail had seen better days.  (Picture on previous post, in case you are not familiar with the loveliness).  In true fashion, Justin decided to take it upon himself to begin a massive revamp project, including all new trim, wainscoting, paint, and light fixtures, two weeks before Christmas.  Who am I to stop progress?

...Sigh...

So, let's start with the removal of the wallpaper, which actually began last December (anyone remember the hole?)  It makes for a nice blank canvas, I think.  Justin used a steamer, and the wallpaper - applied correctly in the first place, onto paint rather than directly onto sheet rock, like in the bedroom - came off relatively easily.

As is typically the case, our previous owners left interesting little marks from their lives here.  Anytime Justin redoes something, we find a little glimmer of the past and their personalities.  To me, the never-failing nerd, it's like an archeological dig.  Aka, coolest thing ever.  Here is a photo of the owner's handwriting and measurements when he put the wallpaper up in the first place.

Weird right?  I thought so.  Anyhoo, back to the updates.  So first went the wallpaper.  Next came the trim, every last piece of it.  It felt like the Grinch was stealing all the holiday cheer from my happy little red house when he stripped the trim :(. 

After this heinous crime had been committed, he then tried to cover up the injustice with primer.  Let me tell you, primer can do a lot of things, but this?  Well... it actually worked really well.  Now he had a crisp canvas to work with.  As if that weren't enough, he had to add insult to injury and cut up more trees and nail them into the unsuspecting walls!  If no one had been there, would we have heard them scream?

Okay, okay, I'm getting lame.  More pictures?  Must feed the blog gods more pictures!

Here's what the wainscoting and trim will look like.  It's all going to be painted white, but we've picked samples for the blue we'll use on the walls.  What color do you like best: 1, 2, 3, or 4?

Um, yeah, nobody look at the kitchen... it's a total wreck.  Hey!  I said NO LOOKING!  Avert thine eyes.

That's the work Justin has accomplished so far, and he has made some lofty promises to have the room finished by Christmas.  If I held my breath, I might be as blue as the wall!  Haha, in all seriousness it's going up rather quickly, thanks to my handy hubby.  He likes to play with tools.  (mehhehehehe)

SNEAK PEAK OF THINGS TO COME:

The dining room is only step 1 in a long process.  Step 2 will include making the living room inhabitable once again.  That, however, may take much more time, as Justin is hitting the drawing board to think up some snazzy built-ins.  Here is the sneak peak, though.  These are our latest PB purchases, a showcase coffee table and console table.  Apparently this style has been discontinued (stain, rather), so these were the last two they had in store.  We actually got a 40% discount on the console because it was missing two screws - two screws that at Lowes cost $6 total.  That's about $136 worth of savings.  We were pleased, needless to say!

Belated Update

Woops.

So here I sit, having what seems like one of the best nights of my life:  cheap wine, sleeping dogs, spinach and artichoke dip, Eclipse, and a purpose.  Life is only great when one has a purpose.  While I already had several purposes, one has suddenly come to the forefront in an effort to monopolize my life - and I love it!

I feel like I should walk around with a shirt that says "Save the Bobo's" (save the tata's).  For those of you who don't know Beau, he's a GSP, and we call all GSP's Bobo's.  We say, "Oh, look at that pretty Bobo" or "Wow, that Bobo is much bigger than ours".  Well, now I run my own Bobo rescue.  Purpose fulfilled?

So, that is my reason for the belated update (end bird walking).

Halloween Pictures:  you want them, you deserve them.  We had a blast, and if you missed it, we missed you - but were probably not aware of your absence... the punch is also a memory eraser, as the giraffe and the parakeet found out.

My festive tablescape:  Add one part Joanna's Fabrics, multiple parts food, and ten parts arachnid, you have it.


And now it's not letting me add more photos... This makes me angry.  Anyhoo, fun was to be had.  And now, my darling husband has taken it upon himself to strip this room of all of its wallpaper and remove all the trim.  He bought books and tools and fun things, and now he is redoing the wainscoting and trim.  I'm afraid, but I hope things will turn out for the best.  The neatest thing was uncovering all the previous owner's markings on the wall.  I took lots of pictures to show the family.

Pictures? No. Wine? Perhaps.

Okay, so who am I kidding?  There will always be wine. 

There are three things that will always "be" at the Parker house:

1.  Dog hair.  As long as I live, and and long as the Shop Vac that is currently serving as my vaccuum cleaner holds up, we will battle the dog hair.  But for all the pain and struggle it causes us, we wouldn't give up its source for the whole world.

2.  A sense of happy chaos.  What?  Chaos?  At the Parker house?  Never... hah.  I'm not one of those women.  You know... the kind that has the perfect wreath for every holiday.  The one that has a place for everything and everything in its place.  I'm too laid back - also known as pathologically lazy - for my own good.  The clean house you see when you visit only stays that way for 24 hours, if I'm lucky.  Any other time?  Well, let's just say it's safer to not come unannounced.

3.  And Wine.  There will always be wine.  It's a food group around here.

That being said, there will be no pictures of house updates in this post. 

*Shock!  Awe!  Aghast!*

I know, I know.  Who actually reads blogs?  It's all about the pictures, the quick drive-by creeping we all live for.  I'm sorry to disappoint.  But really, this post was not meant to entertain anyone.  The inspiration for this post came from my wonderful and ever-diligent husband.

Each and every day he impresses me more.  I look outside every morning, and I see the amazing sight that is our deck, and I think to myself, "He made that... all by himself."  He's currently outside - yes, the sun has set on Fayetteville - but he is still outside, slaving away, putting up railings, adding posts, doing who knows whatever his genius engineer-minded brain can configure.  And I stand - correction, sit comfortably under a blankie in the living room, Man VS Food and dogs playing as my background noise - in total and utter awe of the wonder that is my husband.

This post, in all of its fun and non-picture-posting entertainment factors, should really be titled this:

"My Husband:  Ninth Wonder of the World"

And I love him for it. 

*End sappy crap.

Okay, okay.  I know you're all dying for actual pictures.  Get ovah it.  There will be pictures soon.  We are beginning the preparations to turn the Little Red House into a very Haunted Manor.  For those of you who are able to attend the party, you will see first hand the bundle of absolute awesome.  For everybody else, I'll have lots of pictures of the decorating process, plus some step by steps for some of the fancier DIY projects we'll be creating. 

To give you a taste of the wickedness that will be this haunted manor, I'll impart upon you a little tale.  I went to the Spirit Store last night.  FYI, the best way to be taken seriously at a Halloween store?  Grab a buggy/cart/basket.  The ears prick up and the help arrives in droves as soon as the first item hits said basket.  I walked in, grabbed a basket, and began shovelling spiders into it.  Within one second, I had four, count 'em four, employees, including the manager, rush up to help me in my 'search' for everything arachnid.  They were actually really helpful.  But yes, be prepared.  There will be a spider room at the haunted manor. 

There will also be the classics:
Bobbin' for Apples Punch
Swamp Sangria - for those that the punch is too much for
A gaggle of ghoulish delights (that means food, and I don't mean just candy corn)
Beer pong on the behemoth of a deck
Dancing
And plenty of spooks and frights to go around.

Beds will be provided for all those who get lost, never to return home.....

Okay, so you can stay, but you better get the heck out by noon.

And to end this strangely erratic post, I leave you with one thought:

You know you have problems when you get more excited about a fog machine than, well, anything fathomable.  It's just wrong, but I'm so excited about my "Mist Maker" from the Spirit Store.  $19.99 well spent. 

Trash to Treasure

Well, it's a dreary and cloudy 4th of July.  Justin is hard at work on the deck, and my HGTV shows are intermittently interrupted by the sounds of sawing and hammering.  Not a problem whatsoever.  It's music to my ears, really.  The fireworks, on the other hand... at least no one is shooting them off right at this moment.

So since the deck is the only bit of anything that's been going on lately as far as home projects go, I figured it's about time for a few pictures.

Pictures!  Hooray!  Wow, we want them now!

Okay, okay, I know everyone is just dying to see some of the home purchases we've made lately.  But patience is a virtue, indeed.  My parents have been cleaning out their house of unwanted furniture, etc, so we've gotten the brunt of their castoffs.  All very exciting business to us, really.  We also went down to Warren for the PTF (yes, it's important enough for an acronym) - laymans = Pink Tomato Festival.  We actually did more antiquing than festivaling, neither of which included air conditioning, sadly.  We made a few purchases there and brought back a wicker chair from home.  When we got back we actually found a neat desk chair via Craigslist, so that got added to the mix very quickly.  Okay, I know.  Stop freaking out already.  Here are pictures, sheesh....

Our antiquing loot:

We got these two Coca Cola boxes at two different stores downtown for the great total of $25.  Quite a steal when you consider purchasing them from Pottery Barn for $40 apiece, and then you aren't guaranteed Coca Cola.  You could end up with - gasp - a Pepsi crate!  The bottom one is older, and the words are actually branded into the wood.

The wicker chair from home:                           

Is now Sherbert Green:

The question now is, which pillow to purchase for it?  Help me decide:

I'm favoring either the yellow/white stripe or yellow patterned one on the bottom right, but I also have my eye on the green/red/white combo on the bottom row.

And last but not least, the antique desk chair from Craigslist (a steal at $80):

Surprise Home Renovation!

It's never good to see random water sitting anywhere in a home.  Here's the timeline of our interesting evening:

Come home from Home Depot.  (Ironic, I know)
Go to the kitchen to clean up.
Find water on the countertop; not the first time, but more plentiful than usual.
Call in darling husband to inspect.
Open above cabinet.
Notice one droplet of water.
Follow drop to ceiling.
Hamster starts running on wheel in mind.
Realize that the ceiling is actually the unused bedroom upstairs.
Ponder what up there could cause such dripping.
Hear darling husband cuss from upstairs.
Follow the curses up the stairs.
See DH standing over huge bubble in the closet floor.

So yeah, the upstairs AC sits in the bedroom's closet.  A condensation pipe has apparently been dripping for at least a month onto the same spot in the closet floor.  The carpet was moldy (just great), so Justin started pulling the carpet up.

Wet particle board.  Yuck.

Wet moldy particle board.  Even better.

So we proceeded to rip up every ounce of particle board in the closet, wet or dry, and tear out the carpet.  To our amazement, there were beautiful lemon colored hardwoods underneath all of the particle board.  At least some good news came out of this almost incredibly horrible situation.  There are hardwood floors underneath the blue carpet, and that is very exciting indeed.  However, no matter how awesome that may be, surprise home renovations are never happy things. 

Pictures of the destruction:

Therapy of My Own

I'm a therapist.  I work with little children all day long, doing all sorts of different speech and language related therapies.  I play games, I chase, I hug, I restrain - when need be, I make weird faces and weird noises, and I fight constantly to stay on top of the psychological game that is working with children.

Therapy is tough.

And sometimes, therapists need a little therapy of their own.  Today's therapeutic exercise involved a rake, gloves, and lots of bug spray.  The pathways leading up to both front door and side door of our little red house are made of small pebbles.  The original owners, in their ingenuity and all-powerful intelligence, must have had a good reason for using this kind of material.  I, on the other hand, have yet to be graced with that knowledge.  The amount of weeds that come up through the pebbles at an almost constant rate.... no wonder they had three children.  Talk about cheap weed pulling labor.  I don't even want to look out of the window because I know I'll be able to see them growing.

The flowers keeping me company while I worked:

While I cursed and spat and raked and hauled in the front yard, Justin slaved away over the deck in the back.  He took about a week off for rain, and another week off just for fun, so now he's back with a vengeance.  He had finished one half of the deck before his little 'siesta', just enough, apparently, for the go ahead to purchase deck furniture.

Oh, Home Depot.  The deck furniture issue should have been a good enough reason to check myself into actual therapy...  We had it ordered to be transferred from another store.  They gave us a date to pick it up, one week later.  We went, and it wasn't there.  Another date, another try, still no gold.  Another date, another try, and by now the little lady at the customer service desk knew who we were, and I could see her cringe whenever we walked in.  After about 5 more dates given for pick up times by Home Depot and no furniture in sight, we were a little furious, to say the least. 

We were also apparently famous at HD.  While we stood there waiting for the customer service gal to wrack her computer for any information about the whereabouts of our missing furniture, one worker actually walked up and said, "Hey, are those the folks that have been waiting on their furniture for a month?" to her.  Yeah...

Needless to say, the people at the other store finally got off of their rears and sent the furniture, and we were soooooooo happy to pick it up.  I'm sure the customer service gal said a little prayer of thanksgiving at having us off of her back.

Fast forward to this week, and I walk over to the outdoor furniture section, and what do I see?

Our same set, on sale for $350 less.  I almost choked.  I walked, stone faced, back to the stain section, and told Justin.  He was nearly sick.  We both walked over to the customer service desk and had a polite conversation with the nice people there.

I've never actually made money when shopping, but I can honestly say we made $350 on that trip out.  One can only hope that lightning would strike twice, in this situation.  And all the hullaballoo was for this:

Hot, isn't it?  I thought so too.  We also have two matching chaise lounges with a little beverage table to put between them.  Justin wanted to highlight the sexiness of the deck by spraying water all over it before taking pictures.  Apparently our deck got to have a personal wet t-shirt contest.  Oooh, and a special thing that the former owners' children would appreciate:  we saved the 50 year old dogwood that was directly in line of the deck flooring.  My husband is one special man when it comes to power tools.

Long Time No Post

So it's been awhile since I last posted, but with good reason as always.  Life is busy here at the Little Red House.  Adventures with the fur babies, job hunting, and graduation have really been taking up my time.  On the other hand, my husband's time (almost every minute not spent at work) has been consumed by the deck project (see earlier posts).

However, this has not put any damper on our lives together whatsoever.  On the contrary, the more he works, the hotter he gets.  Not that he wasn't the most attractive man on the planet before beginning the project, but all those lunchtime cheeseburgers had been starting to show.  Now, he is a lean, mean hammering/post-hole digging/concrete-mixing machine. 

Did I mention screwing?  He's not so bad at that either - get your minds out of the gutter.

Point in case:

Gotta love a handy man.  Plus a man with vision, not to mention sheer determination and extreme work ethic. 

Anyhoo, here are some more pictures of progress for your viewing pleasure.  Please try to keep the drooling to a minimum, as I know you are all thinking of the many summertime deck parties to come.

If you can't tell, it's going to be a two level deck, complete with - my husband tells me - planter boxes and bench seating.  That makes me feel like one fancy lady. 

Moving on to other outdoor projects, I recently redid one of the flower beds out front, and I'll be moving on to the others soon.  And hopefully someday soon we'll start clearing a path for a circle drive through the overgrown wilderness speedily encroaching our little red house.  Bunnies currently inhabit the surrounding flora, and daily bunny symposiums are held in our driveway by none other than Max and Ruby themselves, although the demise of their favorite bushes may put an end to those meetings.  That is, if the huge dog sized hawk invading my front yard today hasn't gotten to them first.  For your viewing entertainment, I give you Max & Ruby:

Taking Recycling to New Heights

Well, ladies and gentlemen, the forecast will not be calling for springtime deck parties or barbeques anytime soon.  I'd hate to jinx myself and give the summer forecast too, so I'll side on the optimistic and leave it alone.  Why the doom and gloom report?  Drum roll, please.

We no longer have a deck attached to the back of our house.

It now resides in two piles:  one pile of timbers too rotten to reuse, and another pile stacked neatly with posts and beams that my husband hopes to make into a fence.  How quaint.  This little hippy - smile - is changing the world, one person at a time.  All of my years of digging in the trash to retrieve coke cans and water bottles, yelling at my husband when I catch him in the act of throwing said items away, and generally waving my hippy flag proudly in front of him have finally paid off.  My husband has taken recycling to the extreme, and painstakingly removed board by board from our rotten and dilapitated deck, storing nails in a large tin, and separated the reusable from the not so reusable.  It pleases me to no end that 1) my husband is handy like that and 2) he has more patience than an audience at a snail race.  It took him a few days to remove what would have taken others mere hours to sledge hammer their way through the crumbling pieces. 

Am I proud?  I'm positively beaming.

As for the doors on the back of our house that beforehand so conveniently led directly onto the deck now open to nothing but air.  I've considered selling tickets to our show, so that everyone can experience the mystery of the doors that lead nowhere.  The new deck will hopefully be complete before the bulk of summer is over, and I'm so excited for it because the plans that Justin has drawn out look wonderful.  It will still be a simple deck by design, but it will be able to safely hold more than two of us at a time. 

Oh, and by the way, nothing is scarier than an owl flying into your window in the middle of the night.  Apparently lights are attractive to screech owls.  As one of my good friends put it, it means I'm going to Hogwarts.

Belated Snow Day

With the impending snow being forecast for Sunday, I thought I'd back track a little to show some pictures of our first big snow back in January.  We accumulated six inches of snow and spent the following off days sledding down hills and chasing the doggies in the back yard.  Here's Beau, taking full advantage of the dog run. 

The snow was so beautiful and tranquil.  The trees surrounding the property held snow, and it added a heavenly air to our little piece of the world.  I always think of our little red house as such a magical place, and this next picture really lends itself to the belief.  Anyone else think of Narnia when they see this?

Wallpaper is a Pain

We bought the house because we loved the wallpaper... well, some of it.

The rest, while still beautiful in its uniquely patriotic way, is smelly and splotched with age. Our Master Bedroom, for instance, was covered above the chair rail in red and white New England themed toile, with a Quaker House, a Town Hall, and other revolutionary meeting places, all dappled with brown mildew spots. Beneath the chair rail was a tiny red almost paisley print, which had turned pink with age. Needless to say, it was sexy.

 

Like all virginal wall paper removers, we blindly believed that it would be a simple process, led to such conclusions by propaganda from HGTV. But no, like all things in life, it was not as easy as scoring, wetting, and peeling. Justin slaved over the tedious task of stripping the wall paper little inch sliver by little inch sliver for around two weeks. Then he spent another week mudding and sanding, his art for precision never failing him, only slightly lagging as curse words would fly through the house. I helped a little.

It was during this maddening period of our life during which we lived out of our den, mattress in front of the fireplace, that we came to realize just how similar we are to the old owners (now passed).  Apparently, he had an air for the meticulous as well.  As we uncovered more and more wallpaper, we discovered the pencil marks he had made on the dry wall to make sure every piece lined up correctly.  All of the little red buildings were alined exactly, and nothing was out of place at all.  Absolute perfection.  Each day we live here, we find more and more exhibits of this attention to detail, and we praise the designer/builder/owners of this house for all the wonderful gifts they've given us. 

Anyhoo, sappiness aside, Justin was able to finish the dirty work. Then came the hard part: choosing a paint color. My mind sees the grand scheme. My husband's only sees pieces, when it comes to interior design. So apparently, a very dramatic and halting minnow gray would not suffice. Tan it is, then. As if choosing a tan were any easier, it took another two weeks just to decide on which shade of tan would be best. I did, however, get the final say after realizing that all of his choices were merely shades of my own skin tone during different times of the year (can't handle that, as I don't want to be a chameleon in my own home). So my darker choice won out, and now we have a dramatically... tan master bedroom. It doesn't scream high fashion, but it's a cozy place to sleep.

Playing Catch-Up

Well, it's been a few months since we purchased our first home, which we lovingly call the Little Red House.  I first found this house almost two years ago on a realtor website.  It took me five months to convince Justin to go out and have a look at it - upon said visit we spotted a herd of deer, and he was hooked.  A month later and our real estate agent was showing us inside the house for the first time.  It smelled old and fussy, having been uninhabited for so long.  Almost every inch of the walls were covered in either fading wallpaper or some kind of panelling.  And of course, the cherry on top was the trailer park that butted up to the property and the rock quarry down the road.  Not to mention the price was a little out of our full-time student range (cough).

Of course we were in love.

Our friends thought we were insane.  Our families ignored us.  But we persisted quietly, taking weekly trips out to visit the house we wished would one day be our home (how about that assonance?).  That went on for about a year.  We watched the little red house morph before our eyes, the scenery changing with the seasons.  We waited and waited for the day when we would drive by and the For Sale sign would be missing.  It would crush us, we knew, but still we waited for the inevitable.  Surely a little slice of heaven like this place would sell quickly and for a high price.  Over a year later, we were still making our trips out, going slowly down the long winding driveway, windows down.  We'd park, get out, and walk around the house, all the while oohing and ahhing, pressing noses to windows and dreaming of life in the little red house.  After about 20 minutes, we'd sigh and return to the car, saying to each other, "One day we're gonna buy this house."  That was our routine. 

The price continued to drop, and it looked like Justin was going to get the job he'd been hoping for.  We got all of our finances in order and decided to go for it.  Aftert a month of excruciating back and forth negotiations, we got the call we'd been praying for:  the little red house would be ours.  Another month of paperwork later and after signing away our lives and our first born, we were given the keys and even a garage 'clicker'.  The weekend after Thanksgiving we started moving in, and by the end of that week we were sleeping in our new house, albeit on our mattress on the floor in the den.  Even now, every time we drive up to the house together, we look at each other and say, "One day we're gonna buy this house."  And then we smile and turn the key. 

This is the story of the little red house.  This is the story of making a house into a home.