"Funny thing about weekends…"

"… when you're unemployed. They don't quite mean so much, except you get to hang out with all your working friends."     -- Today's musical quote is courtesy of Primus.

I hope all of you working folks are looking forward to the upcoming weekend. I am looking forward to spending time with the Hubbie and also the rest of my family, including that sister that lives in Athens! The Indie South Fair is taking place in Athens, GA this weekend, and my talented sister and dad will be selling some of their wares. All those available should come by. I will of course be supporting them with my presence, and I also hope to knock out some more work at The House (I believe our undertaking is big enough that it now warrants capital letters).

As an update, we are continuing to work on preparations for painting (you may read about how that is progressing, here) and hardwood floor installation. -- I hope to complete the rest of the sheet rock work this weekend!

One task that is complete is the removal of the trim. ALL of the baseboards and door jams had to be taken down because with the layer of particle board gone, and the disparate heights of hardwood and carpet, the trim would have been at the wrong level once things were all said and done.We also decided to go ahead and take it up before floor installation so that the floor installers could easily get the hardwood in place and would have one less thing to work around.

This pile is one of two cased openings. In addition there are, ten door jams, three bedrooms, the living room, dinning room and hall worth of baseboards to be removed. In order to keep this from being a 1000 piece puzzle at the end, I have bundled each rooms trim and marked it with an appropriately clever title. 

(by 'appropriately clever', I meant clear and predictable)

For any readers out there who may be faced with such a chore, stay tuned. For those who will never face this task or are already familiar with it, you may skip to the cute picture and anecdote at the end.

For trim removal all we needed was a pry bar, a hammer and a pair of blue snips (a the more technical name -- pliers, but I don't use this). If we had been removing painted trim, we also would have needed a box knife to cut the caulk. Alas, we caught a break on that one. Below is an action shot…

Next you just use the snips to pull the nails through the trim in the same direction they were shot into the trim -- this keeps you from making further marks on the face of the trim. Below is a picture of me pulling nails out the wrong way, notice the craters I have made on the face of the trim at the base of the nail (I had already completed a whole room's worth before I realized this was the wrong way).

So, don't do it the pictured way. You also want to remember to only use the pry bar where the nails are at in the trim. This means that you will be using the stud behind the sheetrock for leverage, instead of just sheetrock, and you will avoid putting huge holes in your sheetrock as you pry the trim loose. 

In conclusion… isn't Macy cute. She likes to climb up behind me and stand in the chair I am sitting in so she can be close and look out the window. This was taken with the laptop camera while I wrote this. 

Have a great weekend!!! 

"You've got to know when to hold'em, Know when to fold'em, Know when to walk away…"

(Imagine Kenny Rogers singing the title to you for an instant mood lifter.)

For me, some DIY home projects are more emotionally grueling than physically taxing. I like projects that push me physically. I always feel a great sense of accomplishment from pushing myself to complete something that was not easy and enjoy the muscle fatigue that comes afterwards. These provide their own high. Today though, I am not working on such a project. There is no muscle fatigue, or sense of 'WOW! Look what I did'. Today, there is just monotony and dust and minuscule progress. Today, I am working on paint prep and after an hour, I was ready to boo-boo.

As I have already shared with y'all, I have been working on removing the wallpaper. Removing wallpaper was not bad. I could immediately see my progress as I went around the room and when I was done, the room looked dramatically different. Task Complete. The walls were paper free! Many 'Excellent job. Well done, Emily.' were handed out from me to myself. BUT… then came the next step. The sheet rock was pretty banged up. This originally did not bother me because I was on wallpaper-removal, and I was not concerned about all the gauges and glue residue that were left behind. Now I am crying (usage is more literal than figurative) a different tune. The picture below shows some of the sorry shape of the sheet rock.

Every gauge has to be smoothed out and all the glue residue, which is the darker yellow lines, has to be sanded so that it texturally does not stand out. This is all in preparation for the painting that will come next. I do not have all of the pictures to show you the vast quantity of sanding that needs to be done. I was to over whelmed to take pictures. Below is the tool I was using to sand. I spent an hour sanding this morning and am not even half way through with the dinning room. 

After the hour mark, I had to sit down to regroup. Regrouping did not go so well, and I ended up leaving. These tedious and seemingly never ending projects are the ones I struggle with the most. In my head I know that I just have to stick with it, and my hard work will pay off. I will finish and when we paint, I will be glad that I put in the time to do a good job. I know all of this. But today… I just can't believe those things. 

Sometimes, the best way to handle a project is to walk away. So for today, I am not worried about all of the sanding. It will be there tomorrow, and I will tackle it then, more motivated to do the job needed. And until then… I will do other things.

 I hope everyone has a great Thursday. 

HUMP DAY!

Happy Wednesday!

First things first, the cake. I know I promised reviews on Monday, and it is now Wednesday. I will blame it on the pregnancy. Once Frances Harper is here, I guess I will blame everything on being a new mom. Then I can use the excuse of chasing a toddler around. Then… well maybe by the time she is grown I will have my act together.

Anyway, back to the cake.

As all things chocolate are prone to be, the cake was good. I am calling it a cake because that is what the recipe was titled, but it was actually more along the lines of a fudge-iced-brownie. Also, the recipe calls for it to be topped with whipped cream. I didn't have any whipping cream on hand, but I think it (now I don't know whether to call it a cake or a fudge-iced-brownie) would have gone great with a big scoop of ice cream, which I also didn't have on hand. 

Sooooooo, my verdict would be four stars. While it was super tasty, if you had your heart set on a chocolate cake, you might be slightly disappointed with this sweet concoction (this disappointment could probably be buried if you had ice cream to go with this). However, if you wanted a fudge-iced-brownie, this would be right up your alley. 

I hope everyone is having a great week!

Decisions, Decisions, Delicious

This post is about paint, but do not leave yet! I have worked hard to interject it with enough of my witty sense of humor to make it interesting. So please, read on.

Work on our hardwood floors should begin on May 12th. (Now you are saying, 'she said it was about paint' and it is. Keep reading.) Before the floors are installed, we would like to have most of the painting done so that we do not have to worry about messing the floors up. This all means that the painting must get done next week. We are going to paint all of the living area (kitchen, dinning room, living room and hall) one color. Our current house has a different color in every room, and I have decided it is slightly dizzying. So without further ado… (please imagine a drum roll, now) here are the colors under consideration.

To give credit where credit is due, all of these are Valspar colors. We are leaning towards Gravity. With the limited windows in much of the house, we are afraid that going with one of the darker ones will leave the house feeling closed-in and gloomy. What do you think?

One room that is not going to be gray is Frances's bedroom. Her bedding is very colorful, and many of the decorative touches are as well. So we want her walls to be a bit subdued. I like color, but I don't want her room to be a clown tent. Valspar lists the colors below as warm whites. You can not tell in these swatches but they both have a slight purple/mauve tint to them. This ties in with the part of the room I am really excited about. 

Her closet door is going to be GRAPOLICIOUS. I love the color and the name. 

I originally got this idea from a blog called Young House Love. They just painted their kids closet doors fun colors, and it really made the rooms pop. 

Now, I just have to hope that everything stays on track: finish floor prep this week, paint next week, hard wood floors go down, we move in the beginning of June, and I lay around fat in the air conditioning for a month and a half. Sounds good. Lets go. 

The Joys of Homeownership (that word looks wrong but spell check didn't object).

The joys of homeownership swept over the Thornton-Naughtin household over the weekend. Michael tackled the grass, the round-upping of weeds, cleaning the gutters, and of course, continued on with the task of pulling nails out of the particle board that must be removed in preparation for hard wood floors. Here are some shots of Hubbie in action…

(Yes, he likes to wear tall socks with shorts and tennis shoes. I have decided to fight other battles.)

I do not want to mislead readers and have y'all think that the above picture is candid. He was pushing the lawn mower up the hill, but he was not smiling AT ALL before I held the camera up. The pictures below show you why he is really crying on the inside.

Our house sits on top of a steep hill. The type of hill that makes you question whether your car is going to make it all the way to the top when you are about halfway up the driveway. 

These pictures also show you the amount of work the yard needs. That is mostly going to wait until next year though. This summer we are focusing on getting the inside ready for our new addition (BABY FRANCES!!), and we will focus on simply cleaning up the yard and maintaining it until next spring/summer. 

In addition to following Michael around with a camera, I also tackled the wallpaper in Frances's room. Seeing as Frances will have an actual cat, who we fondly refer to as Kit-Cat-Quick-Snack but whose actual name is Bella, we did not think that she needed cat wallpaper in her room.

I used two tools to get the wallpaper down. The first is a wallpaper steamer (pictured below). My dad bought this a couple of years ago, and it set collecting dust until last week. I am really pleased with how easy it makes this. I generally have to go over each section twice. The first time I remove the top layer and then I go back and steam off the wallpaper backing and use a putty knife to scrape it off the wall. I really just glide the knife under the paper and it peals right off. (Please forgive the lack of pictures. I meant to take some that would make that explanation clearer, but… after scrolling through all of my pictures, I now realize I must have forgotten.)

The second tool you need for wallpaper removal is…

a reluctant helper. She was in charge of morale, and it was not a job she took seriously (notice she is in a completely different room and is just waiting for someone to take her home). Steaming off the wallpaper was not hard, but it was time consuming and pretty monotonous. Below is an after shot of the bedroom.

Overall, an extremely productive weekend. I hope all of you had a great weekend too!

Happy Friday!

I hope everyone is having a great Friday!! I wanted to share a few things I discovered this morning, with the hope that they would bring others a smile as well.

(These are not in a ranked order.)

Who doesn't like to start the day with a cute puppy video?

My parents got the chairs in the picture below last week in preparation for everyone coming over for Easter. They are plastic adirondacks and came from Lowe's. They are pretty comfortable and are much more portable than the wooden ones they have. Feel free to comment on how pretty their back porch looks (yours truly cleaned and decorated it and compliments are important when you are gaining 1/2 a pound a week).

Then, today I was at Lowe's and saw the little cutie below. The pictures do not do the chair justice, but you should imagine the cutest little adirondack chair you can. The baby will not be able to sit in it for a year, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to get it. 

I will sit in the big chairs later while I enjoy the next thing on my list... this cake. It is in the oven now and going by the smell, it is going to be scrumptious. I will have reviews on Monday.

I hope everyone has a great weekend!! Enjoy the beautiful weather!!

With the baby arriving in 13 weeks, we have finally made some progress on the new-home-front. The house we bought is a fixer upper (you may read 'savings sucker' instead), and last weekend we made our first steps towards fixing her up.

The house came with wall to wall carpeting. I grew up in a house with all hard wood floors and thought that houses with carpet were really nice when I was little. As a young kid, that was a sign of a fancy house to me, especially if it was white. I now recognize this as a sign of having no pets or kids. This all to say the first thing on the to-do list was rip up all of the carpet so that hard wood floors can be installed. (I am waiting to hear back on an estimated price for the new floors, everyone say a prayer with and for me.)

The pictures below are my before pictures. I was not on the ball enough to get them done before we started ripping carpet up, but you can just ignore the hard workers (my husband, dad, and mom) and imagine the rooms with carpet on the floors.

This is the carpet that has been ripped out. We are currently piling it in the area that is going to be the carport. When the house was originally built, this was the carport and then was converted to a family room. We are converting it back. 

This is obviously a 1980's kitchen. Lots to do in here. Hey Cooper!!

Once the carpet was up, the particle board that was underneath it had to come up also. This is an instance where being pregnant is handy. This picture shows my parents working in the dining room, which is right off of the kitchen. You can see Michael in the distance working in the living room.

Bedroom #1-- Our plan is to make this into an office for Michael. 

After loading these pictures, I discovered that you should rotate the photos before putting them in the post. Obviously, I am working on a learning curve. 

This will be the nursery. You may have noticed by now that there is a lot of wall-paper in this house. ALL of it has to come down. Updates on that later. 

Here we have Mace Girl showing where her bad will be. This is the master bedroom and by her bed, she means the queen size bed she shares with me and Michael. YES!, we are one of those families that revolve around the pets comfort. 

Master bathroom with duck border. Nothing says romance like ducks in a bathroom. I have an aunt who recently had a mallard duck come down her chimney. True story. 

And here is Michael slaving away in the living room.  Please ignore all of the little water spots. I am not sure what is causing those.