Must Add Fabric Softener

I am really, really bad at multitasking

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 21:04:00 +0000

I know I haven't posted since...January? February? Whenever I posted the first half of last year's recap. And I know I haven't posted the second half of last year's recap yet; it's still sitting here in draft form, looking at me accusingly. I don't have a good valid reason other than when I have to do more than, say, three things in a day I get really overwhelmed. Hence the title.

I've talked about my back injury before, and now I have "graduated" from physical therapy and steroids and am trying to lose the weight I put on when I couldn't do anything without excruciating pain. (Shout out to you, too, emotional eating!) This is part of my inability to multitask: if I focus on working out and losing weight and basic "keep everything kind of running smoothly" stuff, nothing else can fit in my brain. And when I say keep everything running smoothly, I mean feed the kids three times a day and make sure they have enough clothes to wear something clean to school, even if they have to dig it out of a laundry basket. Cleaning does not happen on any sort of a schedule right now, which is slowly but surely driving me crazy.

Then I start thinking about finishing house projects. I've got a million of them, and I'm adding more every day. Then it overwhelms me to think about doing that AND doing the workout/weight loss stuff AND doing the most basic household tasks. Sewing or crafting? I'd love to sew clothes for Baby Girl or finish one of my million craft projects, but my craft room is a mess because we switched rooms again and I get overwhelmed just looking at it. How many times am I going to have to put all this stuff away? And of course to blog I need to have content, and that would require me to do more than just look at the project list or look at the house and acknowledge that, yes, these things that I have to do exist and now I need to go take a walk, doctor's orders.

But I'm trying to get things figured out. When will I be back? I don't know. I do know that we're planning a lot of back yard work soon, and even if I don't post about it until August, since B is involved it's a project that will get done and therefore something I can write about. As for everything else, including that second half of the 2016 recap? Let's take that a day at a time.

What I didn't post in 2016, part one

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Sun, 08 Jan 2017 06:30:00 +0000

When I started thinking about coming back, the obvious choice for a first post was a 2016 recap. So I looked back at the posts I published in 2016. There were only eight. Obviously that wasn't going to be super helpful. But it made me think: what did I do in 2016? I mean, there were lots of non-blog accomplishments. I spent a lot of time with my kids. My back/leg started getting better. Um...what else? So I decided to look back at the pictures I'd taken. There were fewer than usual since I wasn't writing on here as much, but there was still enough.

Of course the first thing I noticed was the billion pictures of Baby Girl.

Ok, so let's get these sorted out a bit more.

I actually did blog in January, twice! First was my Christmas post, then a post about connecting two Barbie houses. We've moved stuff around in the house and most of Baby Girl's toys now reside in the living room, so the Barbie house is temporarily in a box. I know she would like to have it back, so I'd like to figure out a way to get it back out. If we can get it in a smaller space that would be good, but we do technically have the room to put the full layout up.

I blogged again in February, listing five relatively easy things I wanted to get done. To date, I believe I have finished one of them (specifically #5, recaulking the bathtub). Of course, this was right around when I think I started to get more pain from my back, so I'm not surprised I didn't get any painting or baseboard done. Meanwhile, I put the kids to work shoveling snow.

In March I posted about Baby Girl's fourth birthday party, although it took place in February.

Nothing on the blog in April, but we enjoyed some nice weather.

I made a pie for a horror movie party, which I shamelessly copied from a Pinterest post that I can't find anymore.

And Baby Girl, B, and I went antiquing.

Apparently almost every picture I took in May was blurry, so here are Baby Girl and B examining our new digital picture frame. She loves this thing, we have pictures of all our relatives and all our pets in it.

I also started setting up an aquarium in May. Here is Poppy patiently waiting for fish.

Finally, the last month for this post, June. Not much happened this month. This was about the time (ok, past the time) that I should have gone to the doctor for my back, but instead decided to just take it easy for the summer and go see someone in August. This was not the correct choice, if you were wondering.

Baby Girl had her last day of school.

(The boys did too, but they were gone before I was awake enough to think about getting last day pictures.)

Baby Girl learned about design.

And Poppy continued to wait for fish.

I'll continue with the second part of the year next time. Spoiler alert, it's going to be more of me saying "I was in a lot of pain, so I didn't do much this month." I'm hoping for a different narrative in 2017.

Break

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Sun, 27 Nov 2016 05:16:00 +0000

I've been putting off writing here because I've felt like I haven't had anything to write about. Then, after I wrote that sentence I couldn't immediately think of anything else to write so I read blogs for three hours. And then I came back to this, stared at it for a second, and clicked away for about a week. That's kind of how all writing has been for me lately. As I was trying to put this post together--and failing to come up with much--I decided that it was time for a break. I don't know for how long, or if I'll come back at all, but if I do come back I know that I won't be back until 2017. I am hoping for a full recovery for my back (and the leg pain it's causing) but until then I'm just not moving fast enough to sustain content here. I am on the road to recovery but I'm not there yet. I had a steroid shot in my spine a few weeks ago, and I felt better for a little bit but now I'm more or less back to where I was before the shot. My hopes are now 100% on physical therapy, and the things I'm learning there are telling me that I really should have gone last time even though I had to have surgery. This whole back thing has stopped me in my tracks for such a long time it's hard to remember when I was last able to actually do consistent work on the house, or on anything, really. I made two Halloween costumes for friends (the kids' costumes were all store bought) and a few costume pieces for myself, but those were the first and last things I've made in a while. I'm gearing up to make curtains for the family room, and we'll see what happens after that. But until then, the list of partially finished projects, and projects that I want to start but can't, keeps growing and growing, as does my frustration.

Sad

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Tue, 06 Sep 2016 22:42:00 +0000

Two years ago, almost exactly, I found out that I had a herniated disc and that I'd need surgery. Well, the last few--um, several--months I've been having leg pain. It was different than last time in that there was almost no back pain, so I thought it was sciatica and just tried not to overextend myself. It was getting a little bit worse in May, right as school was getting out, and I thought "eh, I'll just tough this out over the summer and get an appointment in August." It got worse as summer went on, as these things do. The boys went back to school August 25. Baby Girl didn't go back until the 30th, but I was in the doctor's office on August 26. She sent me for another MRI and yep, I have a bulging disc. I suppose it's better news in that it's not herniated, but that doesn't mean it won't herniate.

I couldn't get in to the neurologist until October 11, and as I am not a doctor I can't be sure of what he'll say, but I feel like "you can't do physically strenuous stuff anymore" is definitely on the table. That would mean most DIY stuff will be out. I can't imagine that any doctor would recommend someone with a recent history of back problems bad enough to require surgery should go ahead and take down walls or rip up and lay down their own floors. If that's the case, most plans of what I wanted to do with this house and what kind of house we wanted next are out.

I've wanted to buy and restore an old house since I was a kid. I had planned to just do one and move to another one, then repeat until I got too old to repeat any more, but then HGTV and DIY Network let me know that you can flip houses too, and I thought that would be a great way to save even more old houses. That part was more of a "maybe when the kids are older" dream, but I always thought I would at least be able to find a house to restore for us. I can't say for sure at this point that all that is off the table, but realistically, it probably is. So I'm kind of pre-mourning the fact that I won't be able to save at least one old house, and also kind of wondering how I'm going to finish all the projects I have to do here. B certainly has no interest in doing any home stuff, nor does he really know how. Also, it seems like whenever I finish one project I have two more when I turn around, so even if I did somehow get everything done, it wouldn't stay done.

I had such big plans for this year. All three kids were in school and I was going to get so much done during the day. Now I'm just going to be able to do laundry or something. At this point I can't even comfortably bend over to pick up stuff off the kids' floors. It's making me even more sad just thinking about it. I never thought I'd be sad to not be able to clean.

On a non-related note, I am working on updating all old links on the blog. I thought I'd only have to do the ones from the time I had the .com domain, but it seems like maybe every link was changed from a blogspot to a .com? It's in progress.

Update those bookmarks

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Thu, 18 Aug 2016 19:16:00 +0000

I am choosing not to renew my domain name this year, as I have done zero with it since I bought it. I'm not 100% sure when it's going to revert, so I will be removing the redirect and my domain name will once again be mustaddfabricsoftener.blogspot.com on August 31.

I took the summer off without really intending to, but I will be back. School starts August 25 here, and Baby Girl will be in full-day preschool this year. I have no idea what I'm going to do with myself.

Back soon?

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Fri, 06 May 2016 05:30:00 +0000

I've been dealing with some health stuff--nothing terrible, just a reoccurance of my back problems and what is probably sciatica. (Note to self: call the doctor, should probably verify that or something.) I was also sick with sinus and throat stuff the entire winter, from about October to March. I think I've gained thirty pounds from eating nothing but mashed potatoes and oatmeal for six months. All of that has put a damper on me doing much of anything physical beyond what I have to do to keep us from living in squalor.

We've also been mostly at a standstill on almost everything house-related because of a) the aforementioned health problems, b) the yearly "should we sell" debate, and c) needing to get the foundation fixed before we do anything else. We finally got a home equity line of credit, so we should be able to resolve C soon. The answer to B is probably going to be "no" again, like it always is (nothing we like on the market, as usual), and A...well, A might be the sticking point. But if I work slowly--even more slowly than I usually do--I might be OK. We'll see what the doctor says. As soon as I call her. I am feeling a little bit better, though, learning my limits etc etc. So I have a little bit of hope that I might be able to get back to doing stuff around here soon and, consequently, posting on the blog.

As for what I've been working on, or what I've been planning to work on, I'm redoing at least Baby Girl's and Mr. Man's rooms. Yaya's room doesn't really need a full redo just yet, maybe a minor refresh, but I don't know if/when I'll do anything substantial in there. We did move his loft bed out and put his old bed back in, but that's about it.

We might get to do some work in the backyard and put up our pool this year; it just depends on how much the foundation ends up costing and how much it will cost to cut down the trees back there. I want to cut down all the trees on our property (only four--a black walnut, a pine, a honey locust, and a maple that I think is a silver maple--but all of them are very tall, in stupid places, and very messy) but I doubt we'll be able to get to the front two (the pine and maple) this year. We need to cut down the two trees in the back and jackhammer up the patio to put in the pool. I'm not sure it's required, but I'd like to install another outdoor outlet for the pool. That might require us putting in a new subpanel inside (I think that would run about $1000), I'm not sure. The garage is wired mostly with an extension cord (thanks previous owners!), but there is an outlet that seems to be properly installed--it's not GFCI, but it is in an outdoor outlet box--but it's on the wrong side of the garage so maybe we could just get that moved. Of course that will involve digging a trench and stuff, but that's got to be cheaper than installing a new subpanel. We will have $3300 at the most to do all that, which is why I'm not holding my breath on getting everything done. I'm not even going to add "put a cute wooden cottage fence around the front yard" to the list.

We're also planning to switch rooms in the basement (again, for the millionth time) and fully finish the basement. I can't imagine that we'll get to the finishing this year; I just don't see it being in the budget or my schedule of maximum two hours of physical work a day, including cooking, cleaning, and child care. It'd be nice to get the basement finishing done before winter, but I'm not holding my breath.

I'd love to do a quick kitchen refresh, too. Nothing much, but I'd like to finalize the footprint in there and replace the floor (again) because I hate the one we have in there now. Amusingly (or annoyingly, whichever), when I was going through the tool area yet again, I found an entire box of the discontinued tile that prompted me to put down the hated floor I have in there right now. (I went to look for a post about the new kitchen floor to link here, but apparently I hate it so much I never wrote about it. That seems right. You can see a picture of it on Baby Girl's fourth birthday party post, though.) I had completely forgotten I had any tile down there--there were actually three boxes of various tile there. So...oops.

That's enough of a list to keep me busy for a while. I feel like I've lost a few years, but I guess that happens.

Baby Girl's fourth birthday party

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Tue, 29 Mar 2016 20:29:00 +0000

We had Baby Girl's birthday party ~~three weeks ago~~ a month ago and I haven't been able to focus on writing long enough to sit down and finish the post about it until now. (And then I got halfway done with the post and got busy again until now, so let's hope I can get it done today.)

On the kids' birthdays, we let them pick out a piece of cake from the bakery. Baby Girl chose carrot, much to B's dismay. I don't know why; carrot is my favorite, and apparently hers, too. Now I want carrot cake.

Her party was a few weeks after her birthday. We get fewer and fewer people at the kids' parties each year. I don't know, next year maybe we'll just go to Chuck E. Cheese. But anyway. It was kind of train-themed and Baby Girls' favorites-themed. So train-shaped cookies, popcorn with candy in it, strawberries, and "train cars" of Oreos and more candy.

For her cake (chocolate this time, sorry Bub), my mom sent me a picture of a cake with mini Thomas trains on Kit Kat tracks so you know I had to do that. I made a waterfall out of a cupcake (vanilla, for Yaya because he doesn't like chocolate cake) and some Oreo crumbs on the back to be dirt or rocks or something.

Someone has been in the strawberries.

Stealing either strawberries or Oreos, or maybe both.

Present time! Bring on the Thomas track sets.

Aaaand party's over, time to play.

The February Five

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Fri, 05 Feb 2016 19:51:00 +0000

We all have those projects that have been hanging around for a while, maybe they're partially done or maybe they'd only take ten minutes to do but you just haven't started. I probably have more of these than most people, so I decided to create some accountability for myself and do a post about five of them that I think I can finish this month. It's going to be hard choosing just five, actually, since there are so many things to do around here.

I've been having back problems again so I haven't gotten nearly as much done around here as I've wanted to for the past ~~four years~~ few months. I think the issues this time are posture-related and not spine- or herniated-disc related, so that's good. Doesn't make it hurt any less, though, and by the time I get my few hours of free time while Baby Girl is at school I'm about done for the day. Hopefully by limiting my projects to five things I really want to get done, I'll eliminate some of the pointless flitting from project to project that always happens.

So anyway. Here are my five projects for February.

1. Finish painting Mr. Man's room. I don't remember when I started this, but I'm pretty sure it was actually this year, so it hasn't been unfinished for long. It's kind of difficult to find time to do this when Baby Girl isn't around, but I'm chipping away at it. Now I just need to finish it.

2. Finish Baby Girl's Barbie house. Or at least make some progress on it.

3. Finish my mom's birthday present. Her birthday was January 26, so I really need to speed this along. Of course, I have projects I've been working on for her for years, so this is really just a blip on the radar when you look at the big picture.

4. Fix the baseboard in the bathroom. There are a few spots missing baseboard (I have them, they're just not installed) and I cannot for the life of me get a nail to catch the framing on the longer pieces. So...this might be an ongoing project. Oh, and they desperately need to be painted again. As does the bathroom, because I don't like that green anymore, but let's not let scope creep get the upper hand today.

5. Recaulk the bathtub. Needs to be done yet again. Forgot to buy painter's tape when I was at the store today. Crap.

Connecting two Barbie houses, part two

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Tue, 19 Jan 2016 06:30:00 +0000

Unlike many other projects I have, I have actually been working on this since I wrote about it last. Mostly I've been thinking about it, what finishes I want, where I want the rooms to be, how to make it cute but withstand a toddler, etc etc.

I kind of got hung up on the wiring aspect of it. I would really like to have it as a house where you flip a switch and lights turn on, but after a lot of research, I've decided to stick with battery-powered LED puck lights that you push to turn on. Womp-womp, anticlimactic, I know. First, there's cost. It's not really expensive, or it doesn't have to be, but nor is it what I'd consider super cheap. The wiring supplies alone run about $35 (you can get them for 40% off at Hobby Lobby if you want to make multiple trips, of course) but the hardest part, in my opinion, is finding dollhouse lights that don't look ridiculous in a Barbie house.

Let's say you're doing round wiring, not tape wiring. First, you have to collect all your light fixtures, and it's much easier to find those in 1:12 scale (dollhouse scale) than 1:6 scale (Barbie scale). If you decide to make all your fixtures that's more time added, assuming you decide on something that's a little involved (always the path I choose). You decide all of your lights are going to be hard-wired--you can wire dollhouse lights to have little outlets in the room the light goes in, but you decide against that because you know this is for a three-year-old. You have to carve your channels for your wire (not the easiest thing in this house), take the tiny plug-ins off the wire on your light fixtures, run the wire, put the tiny plug-ins back on your wire, plug everything in to a dollhouse power strip, figure out a way to hide the power strip so your daughter can't yank the cords out, wire the power strip to a transformer lead-in wire with a switch (because there's a switch on the tiny power strip, but you don't want your toddler messing with that), wire it to a transformer, and finally plug it all in. Also, this particular Barbie house is open on most sides which makes wires harder to hide, though I do plan to change some of that. The thing that really decided it for me was when I realized that the only outlet in the room was pretty far away from the house and the cord would either be stretched taut or wouldn't reach at all. If you want to do it, I think this is a pretty good tutorial, and it shows you how to make pretty simple Barbie scale light fixtures.

Baby Girl has four LED puck lights in there right now. I think they all run on three AAA batteries, and I have worried about their lifespan. I need to change to rechargeables in all of them because some are starting to dim. They still have whatever cheap batteries they came with right now. If not rechargeables (they take three AAAs each and I'm 99% sure we don't have that many) then at least something better quality than what's in there. The thing I don't like, though, is that I bought different brands and the LEDs are obviously different color temperatures. Also, they're not the easiest thing to push on in the positions that they're in, and I had to kind of stick them in weird places based on where the ceiling was flat enough for the adhesive on the backs to work. Here's a shot of where they are in the kitchen. I forgot to get a picture of the other side.

The back one is pretty dim because the batteries are going dead, and you can see that they're just stuck wherever. I haven't decided yet if matboard would be an acceptable ceiling material or if I should go for some 1/8" plywood. I'm afraid matboard would crease when you push on it to turn on the light.

Here's a shot of the lights from the front. These pictures are all kind of deceiving and I'm a little shocked that they're as bright as they are. It's pretty dark in the toy room and these don't do a good job of showing that.

I'm getting way ahead of myself, though. There's a lot to do before we need to worry about lights. First we need to worry about setup. I never really liked the way I had it last time, so the best way to deal with that is to change it. I've been working on insulating the joist spaces in the basement and had a 30x96 piece of 1" rigid foam insulation left over. I put it on top of the piece of MDF the houses currently lived on and tested the layout I had decided on.

They might be a little too far apart.

I also toyed with the idea of multiple levels, like a sunken living room or a raised front yard so Barbie could have a pool. Raising the front yard would require raising the whole board, so I'd need to have almost another full sheet of insulation. Of course it should be easy to add later, which means it won't be. I still haven't decided which way I want to go on this. I do want to leave this side with two layers of foam.

I'm going to trim it down so it's not the full front-to-back width of the board, though. It's supposed to be a function of the house, not of the board. I'm not sure if I'll just have a step on the interior side or on both the interior and the front.

You can see here that there's already kind of a built-in step.

I was thinking about trying to recess the house into the foam so that little lip at the front is more flush with the "ground" and also as a way to keep the house in place, but I'd want the step and the foam to be the same depth, and I don't think they would be. I'll have to measure, but if I can't recess the house fully then I'll fill in under that front lip with some scrap foam and make that part of the foundation.

You may have noticed that one of the front doors is missing. I thought I had a spare, but I don't. At some point, the little tiny plastic piece that holds the door into its frame got broken off. I don't know how because it's seriously a tiny plastic dot roughly the size of a pin head. But anyway, it's broken, so I have to do something to build that back up. Maybe a cut-off pin head heated and stuck in there? That's another thing that I'll have to do some guessing on.

I'm going to have to put this on the back burner for a few weeks; my mom's birthday is next week so I need to work on her gift. I assume I will post about that sometime before June, but these days, who knows?

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Thu, 07 Jan 2016 20:46:00 +0000

I'm a little bit late on both of those, but the kids went back to school on Monday and I've just now had a chance to breathe. Baby Girl and I were both sick over Christmas, and I'm still sick, so projects have mostly hit the back burner. We have done a little rearranging (what a shocker) but I don't have pictures of that yet.

Not too many Christmas pictures this year. Yaya will not be shown; he doesn't want his picture posted anywhere. I don't know if he knows I have a blog, but I know he doesn't want them on Facebook and that's close enough to the same thing for me.

Christmas morning.

(Yes, we give our kids cereal as stocking stuffers. We don't buy it otherwise, so to get a bunch of little boxes is a treat for them. They also got Pop-Tarts in their stockings for the same reason.)

Baby Girl when she saw her new train set. She is very into trains now.

Sorting out the presents.

I think the headphones were the first gift Mr. Man opened. He wore them the whole time.

I like this one because of the cat under the tree. She's a good assistant.

We didn't do anything except eat junk food for New Year's Eve. We never have; we're not going-out-on-New-Year's-Eve people. We are eat-junk-food-on-New-Year's-Eve people, though, all five of us. Handy, right?

So we're caught up to now. I need to start thinking about Baby Girl's fourth birthday party. I keep remembering that her birthday is coming up then completely forgetting for a few days. I must be in some sort of denial. I hope to get a new house tour up soon, although maybe we should just say the end of June for the anniversary and call it good, because I have a lot to do. I'm also still working on combining the two Barbie houses; I haven't forgotten. I would like to have something up for that next week, but we'll see. I've been fighting viruses and colds and sinus infections and pinkeye for almost a month now; my energy is slightly low, to say the least. I finally bit the bullet and went to the doctor for antibiotics, so let's hope for a full recovery very very soon.

Making a horse head wreath

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Thu, 24 Dec 2015 06:30:00 +0000

Life pro tip from me, you guys: don't make something with the intent of posting a tutorial, take kind of bad pictures (without realizing it), and then put off writing the tutorial on the project for a year. Because not only will you only have crappy pictures to look back on, you will probably have forgotten a lot about how you made it. I guess that's a life pro tip and a caveat to keep in mind as you read this post.

So last Christmas, I was having absolutely no luck finding a gift for my mother. Both my parents are the typical "have everything they want and will just buy it if they find something they want during the year" people. As I've written before, she's really into horses--she has five or six--and she had shown me a picture of a horse wreath she liked a little bit before Christmas. That one suggested using candy cane wreaths turned a certain way to make a horse head shape, but she couldn't find any candy cane wreaths and neither could I. It eventually clicked that this was a gift I could get her, but at the time I didn't really want to make anything. That was kind of true for a lot of 2014. And 2015. But I digress. I looked into buying one, but the only ones I could find went for about $150. That is not in my budget, even for my mother, whom I love dearly. So, a day or two before Christmas, I decided to make one. I found this tutorial so I didn't have to reinvent the wheel, although I did make a few of my own changes. It wasn't that hard; I remember it being maybe three hours of work, most of which was tying the garland.

Most of the horse wreaths I saw were pretty understated. I didn't want that. The horse on my wreath would be dressed for the season. She's the type of horse that gets ribbons braided in her mane, preferably glittery ribbons. She was going to a Christmas party and wanted you to know. I kept this in mind as I bought my supplies. I got everything at Hobby Lobby, except for the hardware cloth, and of course it was all 50% off. I don't remember the exact cost, but I'm guessing under $20. I think right now all this stuff is 66% off at Hobby Lobby, so it would be even cheaper.

I bought two types of garland (a regular wired type for the head, and a finer type for the mane), a few types of wired ribbon*, floral wire, and some ornaments and pearl garland in red and gold, because that's my mom's favorite Christmas color scheme. I made sure to choose ornaments that weren't too round, since I knew this would hang between the front door and the storm door.

*The gold ribbon that I used wasn't wired, but that's because I had it already. If I were buying it new, I would have bought wired.

Start out by finding a horse head silhouette you like online and print it out. I don't remember, but I probably used the same method as here to change the size. Duck tape it to your hardware cloth. (The other tutorial uses wire mesh, but I used hardware cloth. No reason.)

I marked the outline with a Sharpie and left the paper in place for as much of the cutting as I could. I used tin snips to cut it out, then covered the outer edge with wide masking tape. I tried to cut off any sharp points that weren't necessary to maintaining the shape of the head. I think the ears were really the only place that I couldn't cut everything off; your garland will be doing a lot of the work of showing the shape of the head.

I followed the other tutorial as far as the pattern to attach the garland in (she uses a serpentine pattern). I think I'm showing you how I attached a new piece of garland here. Pull it through to the back and wire it flat.

Progress. Note that I'm leaving space for the mane.

Bend your floral wire into a C shape. Remember, cut it longer than you need. It's much easier to deal with excess wire than not enough.

Aaaaand I skipped a bunch of steps, so here's the finished wreath!

The "bridle" is made of wired ribbon, twisted and held in place (on itself, not on the wreath) with a dot of hot glue on the back. I honestly don't remember if I hot glued it in place or wired it in place. I probably hot glued it, but you could easily glue a C of floral wire to the back of some of the twists and wire it into place. That's probably a better idea.

In case you did not grow up making looped bows (with paper ribbon! Anyone else remember that? It was fun to untwist, unless you got too rough and tore it and your mom yelled at you) here's a tutorial. It was kind of a pain to make these bows because I was constantly fighting against the non-wired ribbon. If I were doing it again, I'd only use wired ribbon.

I put the ornaments on the wire I attached to the bow to wire it to the wreath. You might need to shorten the string on the front ornament to make sure the back ornament shows well enough, although both of mine were fine.

A better picture of the bottom of the wreath, though still not great. The reins are wired on the back on each side and are just loose on the front. I also used the wire that came with the hardware cloth to make a hanger on the back. I just cut a long piece and wired it at each end, next to the tape, just making sure to place it so that the wreath would hang straight.

I will try and get a better picture of this hanging up at my mom's. Baby Girl has pinkeye so we will be home for Christmas, but I'm pretty sure Mom will have her decor up for a little while longer. I just need to make sure it doesn't take me until Christmas 2016 to add the new picture.

So, should I just backdate a bunch of posts and pretend I was never gone?

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 04:46:00 +0000

How long have I been gone? Let me check; I don't even know.

Wow, almost four months. Obviously a lot happened between then and now. Back to school, the boys' birthdays, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and now we're almost to Christmas. B's birthday is tomorrow. I think we're more or less leveled out and into our routine (knock on wood), so I'm hoping to write more often now. It might not be until after Christmas since I still have a few gifts to finish (read: haven't even started). I do have one tutorial that is seasonal, so I should probably get that written up and posted. Until then, here is a picture of my obese cat.

Hey, I still know how to format pictures! Well, at least that's something.

Back to the basics

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Fri, 28 Aug 2015 19:20:00 +0000

Edit: I was unable to cancel my domain (yay for auto renewal and confusing sites that hide things!) so I will remain www.mustaddfabricsoftener.com for another year. Just refer back to this post in September 2016.

Original post: A few years ago, I decided to buy myself my own domain as a birthday present. Since then, I've done just about nothing with it, or really with this blog. So I decided this year to just go back to my blogspot address. If you need to update your bookmarks or whatnot, I will be reverting to mustaddfabricsoftener.blogspot.com around the beginning of the month. Thank you everyone for continuing to read.

Combining two Barbie houses, part one

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 05:30:00 +0000

A while back, I bought Baby Girl a Barbie Glamtastic furniture set off of Craigslist. It came with a vanity, kitchen, living room, and, the best part, a bathroom with a toilet. I had waited to open it for a while because she was pretty young when I got it and I worried she'd lose all the small parts. (It also came with tiny shampoo bottles, food, dishes, makeup, etc.) I still haven't given her that stuff, but she loved the furniture, especially the toilet. The only problem was that now her Barbie Victorian Dream House was just too small for the all the furniture. Barbie problems, am I right? I told B that I wanted to get her a bigger Barbie house, maybe build one for Christmas. He rolled his eyes at me. I don't think he's accepted that her playing with Barbies isn't my doing; she just likes dolls.

Anyway, the next day I went out on my own, because I haven't been out of the house alone for a long time. I saw a sign for a garage sale and impulsively stopped by, then I remembered that I'd seen a Craigslist ad for another sale four blocks away that mentioned toys and, specifically, Barbies, so I decided to go to that one, too. I had seen the garage sale ad for a few weeks, and there was so much stuff that at first I thought they were buying storage units and selling estates, but the guy told me they had a basement full of stuff to bring out yet, so maybe borderline hoarder? I saw at least three original Little People buildings (hospital, Sesame Street, and farm, if you were wondering) and lots of '80s stuffed animals. There was an E.T. lamp. But all of that is beside the point, which was that I saw what I thought was this house.

Turns out, it was actually two of this house.

You can see where I might be confused, maybe? The houses came with a big bag of parts, which I thought might connect the two "halves" somehow. I didn't really remember what the 1978 dream house looked like, and I had never heard of the 1982 dream cottage. But oh well; this works just fine, too.

I cleaned it up and cut a piece of foam core to connect the two houses. So far this is what we have.

There's only one set of each kind of doors (French and sliding) and they are both on one house right now, the one set up as a foyer.

I don't know what the hell that thing is supposed to be. It came in the Barbie Glamtastic set in the living room section. I assume it is supposed to be some sort of decorative room divider? Anyway, I go back and forth on keeping this as a foyer. I love foyers, but does Barbie really need one? Maybe not. But it's kind of small for a living room. If it becomes a living room, I'll probably move the sliding doors in the back over to the bedroom house and put a fireplace in this spot. Here's a view from the side.

There's not much point in having the sliding doors in either spot since the piece of wood this whole setup is sitting on isn't really big enough for Barbie to have a backyard (the room isn't big enough for it, either), but there's no point in taking them out, either. Barbie will be getting a roof deck; she doesn't need a backyard.

Here's the living room/kitchen area.

This was supposed to include a dining room, but there's just not enough space, and since we don't have a Barbie dining room table I don't really care. Baby Girl doesn't either; she and Barbie mostly just open and close the sliding doors and sit on the toilet.

I might build a ceiling for this area, which will, of course, allow more space for rooftop furniture.

Barbie's bedroom. This is super small. If Barbie ever upgrades to a double bed, we'll be in trouble. I forgot to take a specific picture, but you can kind of see the bathroom furniture above the bedroom. Who doesn't want an al fresco toilet? I have the railings that go around the top there, and the roof panels to extend the space, but Baby Girl won't allow me to put the railings on and she stepped on one of the panels and cracked it about five minutes after I brought it into the house, so I don't really want to put it on lest it be broken even further.

Sorry for the blurry picture. The cat couldn't decide if she wanted to be in it or not, so I just grabbed this before she came over to lick my face again.

This little space was supposed to be the bathroom, but I think I might slide the whole thing down and build a carport over on the other side of the foyer. Barbie's got three cars that need a space to park.

The next time we go out I'm going to grab some little LED battery-powered stick-on lights and put them in the two houses. If I build a fireplace I'll put a flickering light in that in the form of a battery-powered tea light. When I was little I had this Barbie TV (well, I don't think it was Mattel, but it was fashion doll scale) that had a flickering light in it; maybe I'll build one of those, too. I also need to build columns to hold the roof panels level since the original columns are missing. I might take out the roof panel in the center in order to put that ceiling in and also to avoid columns in the middle of the living room.

What do you think? Foyer or living room? Ceiling or don't bother? Baby Girl is three and will, of course, play with it like it is, but a big part of the reason I bought this was to have a place for all the Barbie furniture, so the more floor space the better, as far as I'm concerned.

Lazy summer

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Sat, 27 Jun 2015 03:41:00 +0000

We're about three weeks into summer and so far we've been pretty lazy. The mosquitoes are always bad here because our street doesn't have a storm water runoff system, and we had a very wet May so the mosquitoes are worse than usual. Bug spray only seems to work a little bit and only for a few minutes. In fact, I had to take Mr. Man to the doctor this week because he had bites on his arm that had swollen so badly the school nurse thought it was a spider bite and he was having a bad reaction. He was having a reaction, just to mosquito bites instead of spider bites. The nurse measured the area at roughly 4 1/2 inches square. Some massive doses of Benadryl and hydrocortisone cream later, his arm looks much better, although not totally healed. So for now we're just keeping the kids inside as much as possible. B and I will be spending some quality time outside tomorrow, loading up old junk to take to the scrapyard, so there will be no escape from the little bloodsuckers for us.

I've been trying to come up with a list of goals for this summer. Other than a few things around the house and making Baby Girl some clothes, I'm coming up blank. Maybe that's my brain trying to tell me something, that I should just be lazy. Or maybe it's just that I am lazy? I could go either way, really. We've walked to the park a few times. Ballerina Minnie came along on this trip.

The pool is up at my mom's house. We bought a sand filter for it this year, and it's taking forever to really clear up, which I guess is typical. Still annoying. The kids don't mind, but I feel like I'm swimming in a lake.

We've been working on potty training Baby Girl for about three weeks now. I'm sure those one- to three-day potty "boot camps" work for some kids, but they haven't worked for mine or anyone I know. She could not care less. I've offered her kittens, puppies, candy, ice cream, toys, anything I can think of. She perks up at the idea of ice cream (she's lactose intolerant, so we have to get her special lactose-free ice cream and it takes her forever to go through a carton because she's one three-year-old and I won't let the boys steal it from her) but when I talk about not using diapers anymore and just using the potty, she ignores me or decides she'd rather not or something. Who knows? She's got amazing bladder control so there aren't many messes to clean up, she just holds it. I'm sure that's super good for her health-wise.

B is at a friend's house for the evening, so I'm watching movies and reading blogs. A pretty good Friday night, if you ask me. Now I'm going to get back to Guardians of the Galaxy.

Brain dump

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Fri, 29 May 2015 23:47:00 +0000

You know how some people talk about the end of the school year and say "oh, the time just flew by"? I do not feel that way about this year. I feel like I can remember every minute of every day for at least the past six months, which is not usually a good thing, I think. It seems like you have more bad things happening when time goes like that, which isn't really the case for us, but it kind of feels that way. You know? Maybe not. I don't know.

Anyway, we're getting ready for the end of the school year now; their last day is next Friday. That'll be a huge weight off my shoulders. To say that this hasn't been Yaya's best year would be a massive, black hole-sized understatement. Next year he starts middle school, and I really need a break before we start on that battle. He and I both do.

B is supposed to be getting a raise at work to go along with the new job he got like a year ago. I mean, he got a raise when he got that job, and he's gotten a few little raises since, but they're redoing all their job titles and descriptions and pay grades, which is supposed to lead to a raise and him moving from hourly to salaried. I think he's kind of annoyed with me because I'm not jumping up and down, but we don't even know how much money it will be yet and this was all supposed to happen at the beginning of May. So I'm not counting my chickens before they're hatched. I can't hold my breath for that long.

The house hunt, even though I just wrote about it two weeks ago, is kind of on hold. (It actually started in March, so it's been going on for longer than it seems.) I had set a deadline for myself of June 15, that if we couldn't find a house by then we wouldn't have enough time to sell our house and move by mid-August. At this point I'm just tired and I feel like two weeks isn't going to make a difference, especially given that we know our house will be difficult to sell. I don't even know how people do this. Are they just finding really great houses straight out of the gate? Are they carrying two mortgages? Becoming landlords? I don't understand it.

I feel like all I'm doing is complaining, and I guess as far as this post is concerned I might be. I guess it's true what they say that the negatives stick with you longer. I've spent the better part of the day cleaning and decluttering the house, so my nerves are a little calmed without stuff lying around everywhere. Of course Phyllis Diller was totally right when she said that cleaning the house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the sidewalk before it starts snowing, but sometimes you've got to suck it up and do work you know will be almost immediately undone, if only for your own sanity.

We're hoping to get some scrap metal out of the yard this weekend. It's been waiting for a few months but with Yaya having tae kwan do fairly late on Saturday morning kind of limits some of the stuff we can do. We tried to get a scrapper to come pick it up but apparently it wasn't enough. It's probably going to take us three trips to get it all there, so I don't know what would be enough for them. Oh well.

I hope everyone has a good weekend. My Friday night is going to involve either a Property Brothers or Hoarders marathon (I just found out they kept broadcasting it on Lifetime, it wasn't just reruns) and cats on my lap keeping me from getting up, oh no.

House hunting

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Tue, 12 May 2015 19:24:00 +0000

It's been so long since I've posted that I can't remember, but I think I mentioned that I've been trying to get the house ready to go on the market. Of course, before we can put the house on the market we need to find one to buy, and the search has not been going well. Turns out that what we want is very specific, possibly so specific that it doesn't exist in any price range, let alone ours (although there are some $350,000 houses that I certainly wouldn't turn down). So what is it that I want? Well, maybe writing it down will help keep me focused instead of panicking and wondering if I can make a 2+ bedroom work for my family of five. This is kind of a "forever house" list; neither of us want to move again so we're picking a house that will hopefully work at least until the kids are gone and we think about downsizing to a two bedroom ranch.

1. A foyer

This is first because it, I think more than any other item on this list, immediately eliminates so many houses. And I mean a real foyer, not the 4x6 entry in our current house and in pretty much every other split level. I also can't stand walking directly into a living room. It's just so abrupt. Also, living in the midwest, it's nice to have a little bit of a space where the cold or hot air from outside can stay and dissipate a bit instead of being dumped directly into our living space. That said, I do go back and forth on this one. Not enough to where I think I might seriously consider a house that goes right into a 12x12 living room, but maybe a living room that runs the length of the house could work. I also waver because I know, intellectually, that it's not ideal to pay for space that will be empty most of the time. It's higher taxes and higher utilities. Emotionally I don't find that argument very convincing, but that doesn't stop me from looking longingly at houses that would work if they just had a foyer.

2. Four bedrooms

This is probably tied with number three for the next item that knocks so many houses out of the running. Three bedrooms are probably the most common, with two bedrooms next, then four, then one, then five and up. This is based on my unofficial observation of the listings, so take it for what it's worth. Anyway, I plan to try and get around this by looking for a three-plus--basically, a house that has three bedrooms and a den or something. I'd love to have four true bedrooms (closets!), but I feel like if I held out for a four bedroom with all the other things on this list I'd be waiting a while. Our current bedroom is in the semi-finished part of the basement and that's taught me that I really don't want to do that again, so that's pretty much my only requirement for the fourth bedroom space right now: not in an unfinished basement.

3. Hobby rooms for me and B

B and I both have hobbies that take up a lot of space, therefore we both want rooms to house all our hobby-related crap. In B's case, that could be a formal dining room, since he does have a lot of D&D crap but they're mostly miniatures, so he only really needs a space with a table once or twice a month. He has a hideous table right now, but we'd like to get him a custom table at some point in the future so that whatever room he has doesn't look so bad. Alternatively, he could use space in the basement, which is probably where I'll be relegated. I could also use the formal dining room as a sewing room, but I'd rather not. We'd also like to have space for a toy room, but if my space is big enough it can just be put in there. If not, maybe some awesome storage in the living room (which will be bigger than our current living room because 12x12 is not big enough, especially when there's only really three walls).

4. A large yard

This is almost directly at odds with number seven (an older house with character), at least where I live. I assume that a lot of the older houses here were originally on larger plots of land, which were sold off or seized via eminent domain or whatever, but seriously, it's like there was absolutely no consideration for leaving the lot at a livable, useful size. There are a lot of older houses on 3500 square foot lots, which is just about the absolute minimum lot size you can have and still put a house on it. In fact, if the house ever burned down, I'm not sure that we could even rebuild, because the lot has to be at least 40 feet wide for that. Many aren't. Our current lot is roughly 7500 square feet (.17 acres) and that's pretty much the minimum that I will accept in a new house. This isn't always foolproof, though, as this town has several hilly areas where the houses have half-acre plots with 80% of the space unusable because it's at a 35 degree angle.

5. A rural or at least quiet location

Ideally, I want a house in the country. I live in the midwest so this is like any space within five minutes of my current house. But there are two parts of town--coincidentally the two where the most available houses are--where the houses are so close together that you can practically reach out your window and touch your neighbor's house. I saw one listing where the houses were so close together that there was space for a paver path down the gap between them and that was it. I think you would have to turn sideways to use it. I can't stand that; just the thought makes me claustrophobic. To find a truly rural house, or a house in one of the rural subdivisions, will be a feat. Those houses were mostly built later on, and they're larger and more expensive. Every once in a while a foreclosure or an estate will come up in that area that we could afford at the top of our budget, but almost certainly not in the much lower price range that I want now. Also a lot of them are three bedroom split entries.

6. In our current school district but not our current neighborhood, or maybe in the city where B works

These two are kind of the exact opposite of each other, which is how I roll on a lot of things. Basically, for some reason our neighborhood was not built with a storm drain system. I don't know why, since it was built in the '60s and, I'm told, to be compliant with HUD guidelines so that soldiers from the nearby air base would be able to buy here. I don't know if there are HUD guidelines related to storm drains, but it seems like something they'd cover. But anyway, with the wet weather the past few summers, we almost can't go outside from about April to October without getting swarmed by mosquitoes. They don't bother B or the kids as much as they do me. I guess my blood is really tasty. We once got fleas (yay pets) and it was the same with them. B got no bites; I was covered as high as they could jump. Anyhoo, besides not having storm drains, at the end of our street there is a large depression that fills with water every time it rains and sits there until it evaporates. So it's a huge mosquito breeding ground one house down. We can keep them down a bit at our house by spraying, and taking out the dead juniper bushes in the front probably helped a lot (peonies, I love you, but you're next) but we can't take walks or have the windows on the car down or anything like that. This bothers me more than it bothers anyone else, because I do like to work in the yard and I can't. At all. For half the year.

Our current school district covers this subdivision, two trailer parks, and a lot of the more rural areas. The same rural areas I mentioned in number five, where we basically can't afford to live. Open enrollment is an option, but one I'd rather not take. If we do, we'd be looking at leaving Mr. Man in the current district and enrolling Yaya in whatever district we actually live in. That will probably be a huge pain, though--different days off, different start and stop times, etc etc. But if we open enroll either of them, then he doesn't qualify for transportation and I know from experience that picking him up every day will take a ton of gas, time, and mileage, and minimizing the use of all that was one reason we're considering moving in the first place. (Note: I'm not actually sure that open enrolling Mr. Man will negate his ability to qualify for transportation, since it says he needs transportation in his IEP, but I think logically we shouldn't count on it.)

As far as living in the other city, the main problem I have with that is that the houses that I like are all in the older part of the city. That's not a problem in and of itself, but it's the older part of the city that the city government has basically given up on. There's lots of crime, streets don't get plowed as well or at all, potholes don't get fixed, etc etc. As far as the crime, I generally believe that if you mind your own business you'll be safe from most violent crime, but these places have a lot of property crime, and I have a husband and children that are constantly leaving cars unlocked, doors open, bikes out of the garage, etc etc. I don't think it'll be a good fit for us. It is easier to find houses that fit most of my requirements over there, but they're either really far from B's job (so we might as well stay over here), they're split levels, or they're more than I want to spend.

7. An older house with character

This could be either an old old house--Victorian, Craftsman, what have you--or a midcentury house. Midcentury modest is all well and good, but I'd love a midcentury modern. There are a very few around--more in B's work city than here--and we can't afford most of them if they even come on the market. They're new enough that the original or second owners still live in them, and apparently most continue to do so until they die and the house is sold as an estate. So I'm not holding my breath for one of those to pop up.

8. Hasn't been remuddled, or at least not too badly

If you're unfamiliar with the term, remuddling is a combination of the words remodeling and muddling. It means when someone has remodeled a house with no consideration of its original character and style, and it can also refer to someone doing a bad job of that. It makes me want to cry when I see a house built in 1910 that has been stripped of all its original character. I expect the kitchens and bathrooms to be from any decade between the '60s and '90s (a '40s version is a welcome surprise even if it's not original), but when I see one that's had all the original trim, doors, and staircase taken out for some (presumably terrible) reason and replaced with 3" trim from Home Depot and slab doors, it just hurts my heart. I can work with kitchens and bathrooms, or even when one part of the house has had the trim replaced, but when it's the entire thing? I mean, it's doable, but it's overwhelming and it would be expensive, too. And yes, there is at least one house on the market here that has had this done.

9. No structural issues

This one is kind of self-explanatory: as B says, we already own a house with foundation issues; why would we buy another one? I say that if the price is right it wouldn't be unreasonable to spend $10k on helical plates or whatever. Although that is a slippery slope; we'd get an estimate before making an offer, of course, but I know not every structural issue is only going to cost $10k, and there's also the possibility that it could be worse than it looks. Siding a large-ish two story house might be closer to $15k, and there's one house on the market here with a collapsed basement wall that I am guessing will cost closer to $40k. It's been on the market for a while. (Of course, I'm fully aware that there will be a lot of people avoiding our house for this exact reason, but our neighborhood is supposedly pretty sought-after, the price will reflect the problem, and we do have an estimate available for people to see.)

10. Cheaper than our current house. This one is totally optional, of course, but the two big reasons I even started thinking about moving this year were: a, to move to the city where B works to shorten commute time, mileage, wear and tear, and possibly even to allow us to get down to one car; and b, to find a cheaper house. I think that we could find a house for about 25% less than we paid for this one if we were willing to deal with really ugly finishes, and I don't mind that at all. It kind of goes along with the no remuddling above: to me, there is no such thing as a move-in ready house. I will always want to paint, and I will probably always want to change flooring and light fixtures (unless they're original; they usually aren't). To me, almost all kitchens need to be gutted, as do almost all bathrooms. It's no difference to me if I'm tearing out new mosaic backsplash (can't stand the stuff) or if I'm tearing out 1980s tile with ducks in bonnets on it.

11. Not a split entry.

(All the split entries on Pinterest are nicer than my house, not surprisingly.) Split entries are super common around here, both in our city and in the city where B works. If we were OK with split entries we could go out and buy ten right now. (Well, we couldn't afford ten, but you know what I mean--there are a ton of them available.) I have grown to absolutely hate our split entry, to a degree that I can't quite explain. I shudder whenever I see real estate listing pictures of that railing wall overlooking the front door. It's just...ugh. I can't stand it. Do I still look at the listings, hoping that maybe this four bedroom split entry listed for $80,000 could be The One I Can Tolerate? Of course. But it never is. At that price I should just build a wall. A split level might be OK, to a certain extent, but most of the split levels that aren't split entries dump you right into a tiny living room, so that brings us back to number one on the list.

Other things that are so rare that I don't even bother including them, just count them as bonuses when they come up: fully fenced with a 6' privacy fence (for our dog who climbs fences; she has a trolley tie out but this would be nice), south-facing windows (light is a must but south-facing is optional), an awesome midcentury time capsule house or a Victorian time capsule or a Craftsman time capsule or...basically any time capsule house (defined by me as a house with original or very old finishes in good shape that I actually want to keep), play structure already in the yard, two full bathrooms (it's easier to redo a shower or tub when you have another shower or tub to use), and a screened porch (I grew up with one and have always wanted one).

If there's anyone still reading, let me ask you a question: having a list like that, that you know is going to be difficult to fulfill, would you sell your house before you had a house to buy so that it would be easier to buy your "dream house," should it ever appear on the market? This is what B wants to do. I'm leery. For reasons I can't go into here, if we sell this house we cannot save the money we make from it, we'd have to use it to pay bills or whatever. So how would we even be able to buy when the time came with no down payment? The down payment money we get from selling this place won't be much, but it'll be something more than zero. We would be living with my mom in the meantime. She has a big house, but there's already three people living there and I think another family of five would be pushing it. Big time. I think we'd be better off fixing the foundation and trying again another year, although I'd hate it. What would you do?

Don't do this: a Pinterest fail story

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Mon, 20 Apr 2015 05:30:00 +0000

I've made no secret of the fact that I don't like my kitchen. It's a typical midcentury modest kitchen, except with no redeeming features to make it cool or worth saving. The cabinets were ugly and dirty with faded and scratched stain when we moved in, and the countertops weren't too aesthetically offensive except that the previous owners screwed something into them, plus they're chipped and scratched and they stain when you look at them wrong. The avocado sink had no redeeming features even before it chipped. The whole thing was just worn out. A gut remodel is not within a thousand miles of my budget, though, so I'm constantly on the lookout for some sort of miracle DIY that will improve the kitchen even a little bit. I painted the cabinets and the laminate backsplash, which improved things a little bit, but when I saw this on Pinterest my interest was piqued. I've tried to stay away from countertop DIYs because, as someone who's tried a lot of them, they always look like DIYs to me. But I kind of figured it was a win-win: if it worked, it would be cute. If it didn't work, well, I have to replace the countertops anyway, right? And maybe if the project failed but the substrate still looked OK I could get a sheet of laminate and just re-laminate the counters. What I failed to take into account was that I wasn't planning on replacing the countertops, in any form, right this second, nor was there money to do that. But you know how these things go. I was eager to get started. Maybe I could even get it done before B got home from work and surprise him! Ha.

So here we go on a photo journey through my failure. Oh, and a note about the pictures: some of these are from my camera, but once I got going I forgot to take pictures except the few times I took cell phone pictures to send to my mom to keep her up to date on how big of a mistake this was. I am not a good blogger.

First up, the backsplash had to go.

No turning back now! Well, I mean, I could still keep the countertops, but...

Nope, no turning back. Setback number one: this is not particleboard or MDF or whatever the hell the underlayment in the Pinterest project was. It was wood. Stupid 1960s construction. But maybe it's planks! I mean, plywood existed well before 1968 so it's probably not, but it might be, right?

Shocker.

So at this point, I was still confident. I mean, the plywood was very dry and splintery and, not to put too fine a point on it, shitty. But I persevered because what choice did I have?

I had to stop because that counter is in the darkest area of the kitchen and it was getting dark, so I decided to use the evening to do some research. The general consensus on the internet is that you should just rip out laminate countertops rather than try and restrip and replace the laminate, unless you very recently applied the laminate. If that's the case, you can use heat or acetone to get the laminate off. Well, 47 years ago isn't recent, but I decided to give acetone a shot. It worked, kind of. I mean, the laminate did come up easier. But it also came up in smaller pieces, and the front was flaking apart from the back. I kept on, though, until I tore a huge chunk of plywood out. Like, almost entirely through the entire board huge. And you know I forgot to take a picture. I can patch a lot of stuff, especially if I were still planning to paint. But when I saw that hole, I was just done. I know when to hold 'em, and I know when to fold 'em. I gave up and played with Baby Girl and watched Property Brothers for the rest of the day.

And what did I do with the counter I destroyed?

It's the flooring version of duck tape: sticky tiles. I bought a 4' countertop at Menards that actually looks pretty decent, considering it cost $17. But I need to cut 6" off of it, and I'm working up my nerve. My plan is to stage this as a beverage center or something like that; it's different because it's supposed to be, not because I totally screwed up! We've decided to take the plunge and put the house on the market in a few weeks, so it'll have to be better than sticky tiles.

I'm glad this project worked for the original blogger (and her project looks really good, too) but I would say unless you know exactly what's underneath your laminate, or unless you're ready to fork out the money for new counters if this goes bad--something that's a little more expensive for me because I have to custom order since we have a peninsula--either skip this project or try it somewhere that you can pass off as a beverage station if it doesn't end well.

The room of unfinished projects

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Thu, 19 Mar 2015 18:40:00 +0000

I realized the other day that the living room is like a microcosm of my house: full of unfinished projects. Pretty much every single piece of furniture needs work done, as does the room itself.

This is the one room in the house that's never been painted. Even the unfinished basement has been painted, but this room was an inoffensive white that I was happy to leave for the time being. Now it's five years later and every other room has been painted, many of them twice, and this room just looks sad. The idea of painting, of course, opens up all the color options, but I'm kind of thinking I'll just paint it the same color as the kitchen or as Baby Girl's room. Keep things simple.

From the doorway. Unfinished projects in this picture: dresser, floors, walls, desk, bookcases, side table, lamps, and benches. So, you know, pretty much everything except the couch.

The partially stripped dresser. I still have no idea how to get right up next to the brass trim, but procrastinating probably won't solve that problem.

You can also see Baby Girl's little play area there. It's not big, but the toy room is like fifteen feet away so I don't think it needs to be. Of course her toys are spread all over the room; that corner doesn't contain them. The space heater (mostly hidden by my laptop) is almost out of season, but I might leave it there because a)I don't know where else to put it, and b) there'll be random cold days or nights for probably at least the next two and a half months, plus the basement is colder than the rest of the house anyway. I just have to remember to unplug it in the summer or the kids will turn it on. Actually I'd like to buy a new infrared heater and get rid of this one, but we'll see.

The aquarium portion of the room. The aquarium is not really that green; I had just started scrubbing it and stirred everything up when I decided to stop and take pictures because that's how I work. We're going to upgrade to a 55 gallon tank, which is what that wood thing is for; it will eventually become the stand. It should be sooner rather than later, because I've finally saved up the money to upgrade but I don't have anywhere to put it until the stand is built.

The trim has been taken off because there is a tiny, like seriously two inch wide, strip of laminate flooring that still needs to be put down. Sigh.

Count the unfinished projects! Chairs, desk, bookcases. Probably window trim--I've painted it in every other room so I might as well paint it in this one. That curtain rod and curtain also need to be changed. The bed was there when this first became a bedroom, so I hung an extra long rod to mask the off-center window. That's also just a single really wide curtain panel, because I didn't see the need to make extra work for myself when that curtain wouldn't really be used.

A better shot of the desk. The cushion foam in the corner was from the pullout loveseat, which has since found a home at the dump. I kept the foam thinking I might make the dogs a bed out of it, but I realize now it should just go in the trash. They're not going to give up their chairs for dog beds.

I'm trying to focus on just this room right now, which is a very difficult concept for me. I think it's hard to stay in one space because I work so slowly and I'm afraid that if I don't jump around then some projects will never get started or maybe get forgotten. I don't know. I just know that my mind is always five years ahead of my hands.

I've already started on the bench redo. It's going slow, which is pretty much exactly what I expected. At this rate I'll be done with the benches in a month and the room in three years. That sounds about right.

I made DIY Japanese fishing floats

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Wed, 25 Feb 2015 06:30:00 +0000

As I've been decluttering, I've found it pretty easy to get rid of a lot of stuff. One thing I didn't want to give away, despite not being able to use it as we originally planned and having no other place to use it, was this brass light shade.

At some point in the last week I saw what looked like this exact shade used as a vase with a tall pillar candle in it. I have no idea where I saw it, and Google searches have not been helpful. But it got me thinking about what I could put in that if I used it as a vase. I'm not really a candle person, but I remembered this Mod Podge Japanese fishing float tutorial that I saw forever ago. I bought the ornaments for this probably two years ago, and they've been sitting around ever since. Time to do some crafting.

The first steps--fill the ornaments with matte Mod Podge, swirl it around, pour it into the next one, repeat--went great. I didn't have any toilet paper tubes, so I used some grody old cupcake pans I had around. I lined the cups with foil, or you could use foil cupcake liners. I wouldn't use paper liners.

The original post says to bake them at 180 degrees, but doesn't say anything about the length of the time you have to bake them, just until they're clear. I went in ten minute increments and eventually lost track of time, but after maybe two hours, I noticed that there was condensation on the inside of the ornaments. I didn't know if this would mess up the Mod Podge, so I took them out and let them cool for maybe two minutes so I could touch them. It didn't take long since the temperature was only 180. Anyway, the extra Mod Podge had pooled in the throats of the ornaments, and in most cases had gone up far enough that it was now on the outside and had baked to a skin that attached the ornaments to the foil. It was pretty easy to detach them, but messy. If you have to get help to separate them, be sure to be super clear that this is hot liquid glue so don't jack around when you're pulling the foil off and burn yourself. B didn't really understand what I was doing, if you can't tell.

Eventually they started clearing up, although the clear side was really streaky. Well, nothing to be done about that. They were clearing on one side (the back) so I rotated the pans so the other side would clear. Then when I went back to check, the fronts that were previously clear were cloudy again and the backs were clearing.

I started this project after I put Baby Girl down for a nap, so let's say 2 PM. The ornaments were still cloudy at 7 PM. I finally gave up and took them out of the oven at about 7:30, and they still looked like this.

I eventually figured out that the ornaments I used were bigger than the ones used in the original tutorial--mine are 4" across--so I have no idea how much time this would take normally. I assume that was the cause of all my issues with this step.

The next morning, despite my hopes that they would miraculously clear up overnight, they still looked the same. I decided to throw them back in the oven, but this time at 220 degrees. After 30 minutes, it seemed like a miracle! They were clear! But as soon as they came out of the oven they clouded up again. It wasn't so much that they clouded up--that's part of the point, after all--but they were streaky and spotty. After an hour I decided to just make the best of it. We'll pretend that it was the glassblower's first day.

The original post used two glasses of dye: blue and green plus some yellow. I had kelly green Rit powdered dye and navy blue liquid dye. I followed the same recipe she did--pinch of salt, teaspoon of dye, water--even though I probably should have used less liquid dye. Since my ornaments were larger, I needed three. I didn't realize I'd need three at first and ended up having to dump some bottled water into one, so I suppose it all ended up equal in the end. I was a little worried about how they would balance on the cupcake pans, since I had thrown the plastic packaging away by this point, but they did fine.

I let the dye sit for three-ish minutes. After I mixed the dye for the first time, the ornaments mostly came out blue, so I tried redying a few of them with green. It took the second coat of dye just fine and I got a color I liked much more. This is the final product.

Sorry for the blurry picture, but I wanted to show my favorite one. I didn't stir the green dye and it (and probably the salt; I used kosher) made this starburst pattern. It's on two, but it's much more pronounced on this one.

And, of course, there were a few places where the Mod Podge didn't cover right and therefore the dye didn't cover right. Oh well.

Here they are in the vase.

My favorite one on top.

I tried to turn the stems toward the back or just keep them hidden as much as possible. I think it worked out fairly well. Oh, and pro tip: clean your glass container before you carefully arrange your floats in it.

Just to be clear, I don't think the issues I had were the fault of the original tutorial. I didn't realize that the ornaments she used were so much smaller than the ones I had, and I think the key to a smooth finish is having the Mod Podge melt quickly and evenly so it doesn't split or whatever happened with mine. I like to follow directions, so I probably would have used the lower temperature and screwed it up anyway, although I might only have used one package of ornaments to find out if I was right rather than messing up both.

I would also say that you should let these drain really well to make sure there's really no excess Mod Podge in there. Not too long, though, because I assume you don't want the Mod Podge to dry too much before you get them in the oven. Probably no more than ten minutes. Again, this may have been a function of having them at too low a temperature, but the pooling Mod Podge caused condensation and also made a bit of a mess around the openings of the ornaments, so try and avoid that as much as possible.

My vase isn't quite full, so I might give this a shot with another four pack of ornaments, assuming I can find them at this time of year. Maybe I can get them right using a higher temperature from the beginning.

The state of the house

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Mon, 23 Feb 2015 06:30:00 +0000

I can feel my winter funk starting to lift. I'm sure I've written on here before that winter is not my season, and my ideal way to spend it would be curled up on the couch with a blanket and my laptop, and not go outside from November to March. Sadly, I can't make that happen, mostly because there's no grocery delivery in my area. But I think I see a light at the end of the tunnel, or a warm temperature at the end of the season, and I'm starting to think about home projects again. First I felt like decluttering (which you probably won't be able to tell from these pictures), so that's what I've been doing for the past few days. So far I've done the dresser in the living room, most of the kitchen, Baby Girl's closet and dresser, Baby Girl's and Yaya's bookshelves, and the bookcases in our room. I also finally decided to get rid of the play kitchen I built forever ago that was not built well and really too big. Here's the Goodwill pile so far, minus the kitchen set. The Little Green Machine is just there to be returned to my mom.

I've never shared pictures of most of the rearranging we've done over the past few months, so I think it's about time for that. I'll also share where we're at with the new room switch we're doing. There is no end to the room switches.

I was going to do more cleaning up for these pictures, but I still haven't been cleared to do as much cleaning as I have been so my back hurts, and the idea of either bending over or crawling on the floor to pick all that stuff up doesn't sound good to me.

So first of all, the living room is now where our bedroom used to be.

Spot the dogs. This is actually the second or third layout I've had in here since we moved it. The room is long and narrow, but it's not big, so most of the advice on furnishing long and narrow rooms is a bit tricky to adapt. I like this so far. My main complaint with the last layout--couch against the wall where the toys are, chairs in the center of the room where the couch is now, desk against the back of the chairs--was that the children would take flying leaps onto the furniture and the desk and chairs would end up pushed against the back wall. Also the back of the desk is ugly. They still take flying leaps onto the couch, but it's heavier so it only gets pushed a foot out of place instead of six feet. Plus now we don't have to see the back of the desk.

Here's the back half of the room.

Only one dog in this picture. The upholstery on those blue chairs was almost perfect when we got them, but of course it's destroyed now. I don't know what to reupholster them in, so they're getting dropcloth slipcovers. They also need new foam in the seats; I need to hit a sale for that. Also, you can see the bench that was in the entryway over there. I want something much more low-profile for the entry--I have a shelf to hang--so that's homeless for now. I might put it next to the couch instead of that table that's there now since the table is too high.

It took a while, but I think I finally hit on a reasonably decent layout for the toy room/sewing room.

It's hard to discern because it's messy. Story of my life. Here's just the toy room side.

We also have the small toy storage chests in the entry of the storage area under the stairs.

My sewing room.

This has also had several arrangements, but this one works for now. This layout actually allows me enough room to get to my chair and sit in it, so that's a plus. I've actually done a fair bit of work in here; the white table was just a pile of junk before, but now there's actual work space. Well, there was actual work space before I put that dollhouse there. It was on top of the play fridge that we got rid of, so it's temporarily homeless. I have no idea what I'm going to do with it; it was $1 at the secondhand store and I couldn't resist.

The dresser is another thing I couldn't resist. My dad called me one day and said "Do you want this dresser in my garage? If you don't take it, it's going on the burn pile." I couldn't let that happen--it's got a few inches of missing veneer but otherwise it's in great shape--so for now it's sewing storage. I might fix it up and sell it at some point in the future, when I get a permanent sewing room and can therefore install permanent storage.

Here's our current bedroom.

Itty bitty living space. That TV stand makes it look messier than it is. It's not too bad, at least on my side. B is a slob.

The walls will eventually be finished, either later this year or next year, after we get the foundation plates (helical plates? I can't remember the technical name) installed. At that point it will really be too small to be a bedroom, so...we'll be moving everything back! Yeah, I know. I really like having the living room downstairs; I love having that extra space. However, like I said, that room will no longer be usable as a bedroom so we'll have to go somewhere else. There may be a small period of time where we switch our room and the sewing/toy room, but ultimately we'll be going back to the living room space. When we sell this house (2016 oh please oh please oh please), we want to market it as a four bedroom. In order to do that, we have to have another room with an attached closet, and while we could probably do that in the sewing/toy room (probably; I haven't really thought about it), it would be much easier to do it in the living room. In fact, we might do a huge walk-in closet the full width of the back basement. I don't have enough clothes to justify that, but it seems like it would be a selling point. I'll ask my real estate agent.

So then, of course, B's game room would go back downstairs instead of being in the original living room space. I don't foresee this as being an issue, because a big part of the reason they moved upstairs was because it was cold in there. If the walls and ceiling are finished, the basement will be much warmer. B doesn't actually know that my intention is to have him go back to the basement yet. Again, I don't think it will be an issue once the basement is finished, and mostly I don't care, except that when we go to sell the house I'm pretty sure we should have the living room staged as the living room. I could see the potential in having it as a different room even if it's set up as a game room, but according to HGTV most people can't see that potential. That'll probably be something we address in early 2016, so no need to worry about it now.

Anyway, I said earlier that we have another room switch going on right now, because I can never leave things alone. Mr. Man, when he gets upset, tries to destroy things, and he doesn't discriminate based on size. He's knocked over dressers before. As a result, his room is pretty much completely empty except for his mattress on the floor. He did have a twin bed, but now he has a queen mattress. My mom had an almost-new queen mattress that she didn't want, so Yaya had that for a while, but then we traded our old unused chest freezer for a loft bed (and two hamsters that promptly had babies), so Yaya no longer needed the queen mattress. I want to get Mr. Man a platform bed, something very low, but that's been hard to find. I don't want to build it, but that's the way it's looking.

Baby Girl's room has always been too small for her from the beginning. Her room is the smallest room in the house, and I don't know how you could fit anything in there with a regular-sized bed. The vent is directly in the center of the room under the window, and will probably be covered up by any size of bed except crib/toddler. When she switches to a twin bed, she won't be able to have that and her dresser in there; there won't be room to walk. So it makes a lot more sense to have the kid with no furniture in the smallest room. Of course, when we go to sell the house we probably won't be able to have a queen mattress in the smallest room, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Mr. Man's room gets the best light, and I thought I wanted it to be yellow for Baby Girl. I thought I wanted a very definite yellow, with brown/orange undertones so it wasn't lemony. I painted these samples on the wall, with a sample of her dresser color. From left to right, the colors are Behr Pale Honey, Benjamin Moore Peach Cloud, and Behr Amber Moon.

I have now learned that I do not want a strong yellow. I'm not sure what I do want, but it'll probably be cream. I'm going to dig out the leftover kitchen paint and, if it's still good, put a sample of that up and see how it goes. I'll write more on that later, when I've actually made progress.

Happy third birthday, Baby Girl!

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Thu, 12 Feb 2015 23:08:00 +0000

That time has come again: Baby Girl is three today. I can't believe she's this old; this is the year that the big changes start happening. Next month I can go to pre-K screening for her (to start in August). I knew that was coming this year, but having it actually here is different.

We're still having firsts, of course. She recently had her first dentist appointment, which I know is about two years late, but she's been on a waiting list at the boys' dentist since she was six months old. I believed them for a while when I'd call to check and be told "oh, another six months." But then one of the two dentists retired (he was an orthodontist; he did my braces when I was 17 and he was almost retirement age then) and I was tired of waiting, so off we went. She was not super thrilled.

A first she has yet to have: first haircut. I've been trying to talk B into it, but he wants her hair to grow out. It's more than halfway down her back, but it's so fine that I think shorter would look better. I've tried to explain to him that you can't just let hair grow forever, you have to cut it to get rid of split ends. He is skeptical, so we're still working on that.

And, of course, she is incredibly opinionated and not willing to take any shit from anyone. She hates it when people (or the dogs) walk behind her, she hates it when Noah sings, she hates it when Elijah repeats lines from her shows, etc etc. In short, her brothers annoy her the same way they annoy each other. Sibling love. B and I don't escape the annoyance, either. This is the look I get for most pictures now.

Sometimes she throws me a bone, though.

Happy birthday, Baby Girl.

The very very late Christmas photo post

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Wed, 21 Jan 2015 19:49:00 +0000

I thought I had more Christmas photos than this, but...I do not. I mean, I have more, but they're either of Yaya so they will be staying on my hard drive, or they're pretty terrible so they will be staying on my hard drive. Potato, potahto.

I helped a little with decorating the tree, which is probably why there aren't many pictures; this was after my surgery but not by much so I wasn't terribly useful. Mr. Man was very very helpful, as you can see.

As was Baby Girl. She was probably taking this off the tree rather than putting it on, because that's pretty much how the season went. If it wasn't her taking them off, it was the cats.

I bought a cute Target gingerbread house kit, but it did not work out well. We built it too fast (this is what happens when you have kids: do it fast or not at all) and it collapsed. The upside is that the gingerbread still tasted good because it hadn't sat out for a month. As you can see, Baby Girl was right there to act as cleanup crew.

Christmas morning! I don't have many good pictures of this. Oh well, I lived it.

The boys each got a DS. They were used, because you cannot buy a new DS anymore (I don't think you can, anyway) and Mr. Man got pink because that's what the game store had. He could care less.

The kids also each got a tablet for Christmas. It was the year of electronics. The tablets were only $55 each and work well for the kids, although it seems like the screens scratch if you even look at them. Still, for $55, you can't ask for much more. I think it was this tablet (I didn't really pay attention; I let B take care of all that) and this case.

We went up to my parents' house on Christmas day to open gifts. Baby Girl actually held still long enough for me to do her hair. It was little buns on either side of her head, but her hair is so fine it was coming loose by the time we even got to my parents' house. She ended up in pigtails. Still cute.

And one last picture of Mr. Man, getting a Lego kit. Yay Lego. We stopped buying him big kits because he tends to throw things when he's mad, but these little kits are perfect.

I know this is more than a little late, but I hope everyone had a good Christmas! I actually have at least two more posts planned, I just need to focus up and get them written. Maybe it'll be two weeks between posts this time instead of three.

Fall 2014 photo dump

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Wed, 31 Dec 2014 05:12:00 +0000

Not to be confused with the ostensibly upcoming "Christmas 2014 photo dump."

Time did not stop while I was off my feet with a herniated disk, and even though B made it sound like most days it was a miracle he got everyone to school and they ate way too much fast food, there were some fun activities.

This might have been taken before I hurt myself; we did quite a lot of basement cleaning the week before that. You can't tell we were cleaning from this picture, of course.

A clean toy room. I was wrong; I'm pretty sure this was all B. This was during the very brief time where he switched his game room and the toy/sewing room. Now his game room is up where the living room is supposed to go, the living room is downstairs, and our bedroom is in the semi-finished part of the basement, to the right in this picture.

It snowed!

She was wearing a coat under there, I promise. Knowing B she's probably got four layers of clothing on, too.

You'll have to trust me that this is Yaya.

I had a hard time finding pictures of Mr. Man that weren't blurry. That's a problem I have a lot with him.

He had a pretty chapped face for a while there; so far we haven't had a repeat.

OK, so maybe not much happened for those few months. Or at least, nothing B took pictures of. There are more from Christmas stuff. A few, anyway.

Merry Christmas!

noreply@blogger.com (Jessica) — Thu, 25 Dec 2014 08:27:00 +0000

Happy holidays; I hope everyone is having a great season!