Down-Grading

Have I ever told you how much I love my shower curtain?
Let me show you:

My beautiful shower curtain was one of my favorite wedding registry items. I am kind of wishy washy when it comes to decorating my house, but when I saw this curtain, I knew, without a doubt, that this would be the inspiration for my bathroom.

The brown, the tan, the various blues and the circles. It was perfect.

Our towels are blue and brown and beautiful

I had plans for pain on the walls to match the colors. It was going to be gorgeous.

Unfortunately it was not to be.

Between the water damage in our little bathroom and my own procrastination, this bathroom is not going to be painted. And it was very evident that this shower curtain was not going to make it to the next house. It was ripping at the top...

...and molding at the bottom.

Mon Amour and I were just hoping that it would do the trick long enough that we could just pitch it when we moved and start afresh. However, this curtain was in bad shape and I was stretching the limits of my tolerance for gimpy-ness.
The original holes from which you hang the curtain had ripped, and so had the ones I had punched in the curtain a little bit lower. That's when you know your curtain has outlived its day.

So we caved in and got a new one.
However, since its going to be some time before we can move somewhere where we can actually decorate the bathroom, we didn't feel like spending a lot of money on this new curtain.

The cheap options at Wal Mart were oddly limited.
We ended up with this one.

It's blue and it was cheap. That's why we picked it.

But it makes me sad every time I think of it. Not because I don't like it (though I wouldn't call it beautiful and the clear part at the top is oddly unnerving) but because I liked my old one so much. It's distinctly possible when we move and I can decorate my bathroom, I will go out and buy the exact same shower curtain that I just threw in the dumpster.

Pretty Lillies

On both front corners of our little farm house we have lilles. White ones on one side, pink ones on the other. They have been racing to bloom for a long time now....

The big blooms getting fatter and fatter every day - waiting to burst open.

The white ones bloomed first.

and boy howdy were there a lot of them!

Last year there may have been half this many....maybe.
I love lillies....and I think the white ones are my favorite.

Blog-Dead

Blog dead...its like brain dead. It when you can't manage to conjure up anything to blog about. Nothing, nada, you just draw a blank. I guess it hasn't actually been that long since I last posted....but I wrote that post a long time before it actually posted. So, if I haven't actually written a blog post in a while.

The recent lack of blogging is sort of brought to you by a serious shortage of blog worthy life happenings. Just this evening, as I tried to get out of my blog-dead state of mind I thought "well, what shall I blog about...doing laundry....seriously, I haven't even done that recently"

Then it hit me - the fact that I have not done laundry in a long time but am finally doing it, makes laundry a news item. On top of that I have a really sweet washer and dryer, which makes it doubly blog-worthy. All I needed was some pictures, and I could break free from my Blog-Dead state!

So here it goes.

This is my laundry room.It is also my entryway. It has a concrete floor - good for laundry rooms, bad for welcoming guests. Oh well.
At first glance they seem pretty normal. It's a washer, and a dryer. Nothing fancy.


Then you look more closely.

"Heavy Duty" and "Super Capacity"
Those are good words for a washer.


It doesn't look much bigger than your average washer.
But having come from a much smaller washer, the first time I did laundry in this new machine....I was blown away. You can fit a ton of clothes in this washer. Seriously, it fits a lot of clothes.


With a almost-literal ton-of-clothes in the washer, you then begin to think to yourself: "Self, how will I ever dry all these clothes?

So you look at the dryer



mmmmhhmmmm
"Heavy Duty" "Extra Large Capacity"

Don't ask me why they use different terminology on the dryer, cause I have no idea. But I do know that you can fit the entire ton of clothes you just washed into one dryer load.

It's a beautiful thing.

It makes the ongoing task of laundry just that much more bearable.

When I return to normal sized laundry appliances, I suspect I will be in the depths of house-work-despair for some time.

Until then, I love my industrial size laundry machines.

Happy to Rent

One day, Mon Amour and I hope to buy a house.
When we do, it is distinctly possible it will have just as much "character" as our current rented house. The difference will be, that the "character" that requires attention, will be much less entertaining.

Our bathroom is the smallest room in the house, and yet definitely has the most "character". Its character includes:

• It is the smallest bathroom I have ever seen
• Such that it has no bathtub (there is not space)
• The doorframe is a mere 5'8" ish tall
• And it leaks:
  

This is a picture of our bathroom wall and ceiling after the recent spring rain.
Thats a bubble of water that has build up behind the paint. You can pop it with a pin and it will all come oozing out.

Fortunately, we rent. So we call the landlord. And they will come fix it.

However, they have been trying to fix this problem since we moved in. There are so many spots on the wall where they paint has been pulled off the wall by the water. They have patched, and patched and patched again. And still it leaks.

Secretly, I am kind of hoping the whole bathroom caves in. If our tiny bathroom collapses, they would have to build us a new one, right? Maybe? Possibly...
Perhaps this time they could make it big enough for a bathtub, or at least a sink with a little counter space around it.

Project Beginings: Painting the Bedrooms

Yesterday's post was too wordy for my taste. I will try and keep this one short.

Because of the ugly and disappointing results (that ultimately ended an a eucatastrophe) of the last time I opened a can of our free paint, I decided to go ahead and open the rest, just to see what was workable and what wasn't.

There was one other can of paint that was mostly dried solid. But that is ok, it was a weird color to begin with.

The other 5 cans were just fine though - yay!


There were 2 half-cans of white - those will come in handy some day, I am sure.

There was also a weird mauve color. If any one finds themselves painting a tiny (half paint can sized) nursing home on a minimal budget - we have the paint for you!!!


But, the most exciting ones were the other two............








Ta da!


Two completely full cans of fantastically beautiful paint.
The peach at the top will be for the master bedroom.
The yellow at the bottom will be for the spare bedroom/office.

Both these colors will probably be for "accent walls". In other words, I don't think that I am brave enough to do an ENTIRE room in that yellow. But, once again, these colors were pretty much exactly what we were looking for for these two rooms.

This project is hardly begun. Both bedrooms have wood paneling at this point - so we will need special primer for that. And I haven't taped in or anything. But, as you can see, I did open the paint to make sure it was usable - so I would consider this project 2% done.

Project Beginings: Painting the Living Room

The new found warm weather of this past weekend inspired me to take a look at the remaining cans of paint that had been given to us by Mon Amour's parents. I knew we had a bunch more paint, but couldn't remember what colors.

Much to my great delight, there was a color that seemed ideal for painting the living room. A nice warm neutral color so as to freshen things up without adding too much color to our already busy color scheme (when you have cheap used furniture and free material for curtains, you don't ask questions about the colors).


I opened the can without any trouble....and initially, it looked pretty innocent.

Until you tried to stir it.

It was frightfully clumpy. We looked it up online, and were informed that you should just stir - lots, and the paint should be fine. A clump here or there, but nothing you can't just strain out.


So I stirred.
And stirred, and stirred and stirred.
With not luck.

The moral of the story:
When your paint looks like this:

Put down the stirrer, go to Wal Mart, and head directly to their....

CLEARANCE PAINT DEPARTMENT!

That is where they stash all of the reject-colors. For many of them, it is pretty obvious why they were rejected. But look hard enough, and you just might find what you need.


Mon Amour and I were blessed with some excellent clearance-paint luck, not only did we find nice cheap (clump-free) paint, but, we also got almost exactly the colors we would have gotten if we had paid full price.


As proof of this - here are the two colors we found on clearance, next to the paint swatches we have had hanging on our wall. They were even just the perfect amounts of the correct colors - tan for the walls, and green for the trim.



This project is temporarily on hold - our house is VERY old, and there are cracks in the walls, we are waiting for the Landlord to come check them out before we paint over them.
But, I have taped in the walls with fun blue tape. So I would call this project 15% done.

Project Beginings: Intro

I think last weeks theme worked out pretty nicely. So, let's do it again.

This week's theme shall be:

Home Projects - the Beginings

In other words, I shall tell you about all of the projects that this new found warm weather and longer daylight hours have inspired me to take on. I haven't gotten terribly far in any of them, but hopefully, before to long, I shall run another Series - perhaps something like "Completed Projects" (hopefully that series will not be shorter than this one....)

Topics for this week include:

1. Washing the Cars
   
2. Painting the Living Room
3. Painting the Bedroom(s)
4. Growing a Garden

The series will officially begin tomorrow.
Trust me, it will be exciting. *

*Actually, it will only really be exciting if you like house projects. Which I, personally, very much enjoy. If you don't like house projects, do still tune in on Thursday - there will be some paint colors revealed that you will not want to miss. :-)

Cows in the Backyard

I ruined the plot of this post in the title, didn't I?
Oh well, its still a good story.

This past Friday, I had just signed off of work, and Marge and I were headed out for our evening walk. I opened our door - Marge dashed out as she always does, but then she looked to her right...and froze. Something had caught her eye.

She actually does this a lot (usually at night when I can't see what she thinks she sees...its rather freaky). So I jokingly said "What do you see, Marge? A leaf? A pile of snow?". Then I, too, looked to the right...this time, Marge was not faking.

There were 3 cows in our back yard!

In actuality, they are not that much closer to the house than they normally are. The significant difference is simply that they are on my side of the fence

Though, they were awfully close to the house.

This was right outside the bedroom window.

This was one of them walking towards the front door. I rushed to greet him (with the camera) but when I opened the door, he ran away)


They were all rubbing there heads against our water pump, and one of them managed to turn it on.

So they all gathered round and drank from it.
The "string" coming from the cow on the left's mouth - is drool, or slobber, or whatever you want to call it. Tis gross.

True to form, I promptly called my landlady.
Also true to form, she asked "Are they big cows, or little cows?"
"Mid sized cows" I said confidently.
"Hmm. ok. I am miles away. I will call someone though".
"Ok"


No one ever came. The cows hung out for a while. Then walked around the perimeter of the fenced in field. I suppose eventually they went back in whatever hole in the fence they came out of, but apparently I should not be too concerned when "midsized" cows escape. It is only the "big cows" that you have to be worried about.

My House

This is my house:

It's tiny, in the middle of no where, has no space for entertaining guests, has 8 door ways and only 2 actual doors one of which is the outside door and the other of which is only 5'8" tall, temperature regulation is nearly impossible, it has one tiny closet, and has wood panneling on the walls AND ceiling.

I hated it when we moved it, calling all of these things 'flaws'.

We've been here about 9 months now, and I have taken to calling these same things "character"

My house has a lot of character.

And I love it.

Thermostat

This is primarily how we heat our house:

As previously mentioned, we don't really have a thermostat in the house. So we improvise. The most accurate indicator of the temperature that we have is this:

It's a candle. Well, really, it used to be a candle. Now it is just a glass jar of wax.

It is wonderfully helpful. It sits on top of the stove, and anticipates the temperature of the room. When it is completely liquid (the dark pink), it will soon be very warm in the room. When it starts to solidify again, you know you had better work on the fire, or it is going to get cold soon!

It is not an exact science, but it really is more helpful than you would think.


On a semi-related note....below is a random picture of our thermostat (with me in the background, on the computer, of course). I thought it was weirdly artistic.

Colored Walls: Part 1: The Kitchen

As previously mentioned, we have gotten permission to paint our house. Which is very exciting, cause we are going to be here for a while, and are trying to make it feel as homey as possible.

Also as previously mentioned, we recently received a bunch of free paint from Mon Amour's parents. So, when Mon Amour found himself with a day off from work, we decided to pull out this paint and see if we liked any of the colors.

We discovered we had 2 half-cans of a green color that was very similar....but possibly a shade or two off. Knowing that we would probably need a whole can of paint, and noting that both cans were of the "Satin" variety, we decided they were safe to combine.

So, into one can went both greens, resulting and a 3rd shade of green in a totally un-reproduceable , but lovely color.

Still not being sure how much paint we would need to paint the whole kitchen, we decided we would take it one wall at a time. Making accent walls, if you will, until we ran out of paint.

Wonderfully for us - we have enough paint to do both of the main (i.e. not cabinet covered) walls in the kitchen. It looks lovely:

My kitchen is now full decorated...at practically no cost to us.

• Curtains - Free material from Mon Amour's Mom
• Paint - Left overs from Mon Amour's Parents
• Paint Supplies - Gift from my parents and some loaners from friends
• Curtain Rods - Real cheap at walmart

My favorite part though....was the fact that we had a little bit of paint left. Not enough to do another whole wall.....so Mon Amour had this brilliant idea (he is the one in the family who has all the quirky ideas that end up being really cool)


Let's paint the trim around the door green!

So we have two walls that are green with white trim
And one wall that is white with green trim.

I love it.