Our winter

Welcome to winter. Although it's been a mild winter, weather-wise, I'm so tired of winter and wish spring would come. So I'm going to rant.

• House is completely torn up. We had to clear out the pantry and porch. Everything went into the living room and foyer. It is very cozy (read: cluttered) in our house. 
• They might turn the water or electricity off any time. 
• The city had to dig a four foot hole in our tree lawn today to try to get to the box to shut off the water so that our plumber can change a pipe, and, after showing up 90 minutes after they said they would, they couldn't get to the box. Then they took off without telling our plumber when exactly they were coming back. They claim that they're coming again tomorrow to "try again." Water will probably shut off just in time for me to make dinner and try to mix and warm up a bottle for Ian.
• The kids have had various colds, congestion and coughs since the beginning of November.
• Jim just got the mother of all colds.
• The neighbor cat, Donovan, has claimed our front porch, which is now completely open, awaiting delivery of windows and door. So our cats, especially Zeus, have a fit every evening when he makes his appearance on our porch, sounding a little like a screaming baby.
• The only time Jim can get an appointment with the building inspector for phase 2 of our home project is on a Thursday from 2-4. Because, apparently, people doing home projects can't have normal jobs to pay the bills; they have to spend all their time with the home inspector or waiting for Home Depot to make deliveries. Our door delivery from Home Depot arrived at 6:45 this morning, as I was chasing Annie around, trying to get her dressed. Really. Also, the city randomly sent us a letter today and said that we have to have our water meter changed, appointment required, our responsibility to contact them.
• After all is said and done with this home project, there will still be 1000 things that need to be done to our house and I'm very tired.
• Our car needs a muffler.
• I need to find a matching hub cap for my car. It's bothering me because I think my car looks like junk. But I don't have time to go to a scrapyard to find one, and don't want to spend the $50 it would cost to get a new one from the dealership. It's the front passenger side wheel, and now that I look around, it appears that everyone is missing this particular hubcap. I don't exactly know why. 
• I have to unload baby stuff and I'm sad about it. 
• I wish I wasn't a pack rat. Jim wishes I wasn't a pack rat too.
• Did I mention that our house is a cluttered mess?
• I need a vacation that involves swimming outside.

A wild mouse chase

Jim is in Seattle this week for some business meetings. He left the house this morning at some God-awful hour, and in a random act of true localism, our neighbor Dennis happened to be the taxi cab driver. Somehow, Dennis seemed to think that Jim was a sibling of our next-door neighbor, who is also named Jim, and couldn't seem to understand that he was not! The great part is that Jim got Dennis' business card, so if we need a taxi pickup at the airport sometime, we can call him. This will work especially well when my sister flies into Boston at 1am and needs a ride back to Quincy. Most cabbies have no idea how to get to or around Quincy, but Dennis will be perfect.

The drama of the day happened this evening when our cat Solomon brought a mouse into our house. One of the windows in our front porch was open and he was able to squeeze in there with the mouse in his mouth. The mouse was still very much alive. Solomon likes to play with the mouse before he kills it. Luckily, I was able to get there in time to close the front door so the mouse didn't get loose in our house. But there I was, with our neighbor Scott, trying to get the mouse out of the front porch. Annika was next door with Lisa and the boys, yelling "Mama! Mama! Mama!"  She is currently going through a stage where she's obsessed with Mommy.

The mouse finally ran out, but it took some gymnastics. There are a lot of places on our front porch where a small mouse can hide.  I felt like I was in a sit-com. As I walked back outside afterwards, I noticed that this was the second mouse that Solomon had caught today. The first was lying dead next to the hydrangea, with flies all over it. Yuck. We think Solomon is getting the mice from our next-door neighbor's back steps or garage. He is always hanging out there. You'd think that mice wouldn't want to come near our neighborhood, between Solomon and our neighbor George's 6 cats! Let's just say that, knock on wood, I've never had a problem with rabbits or squirrels in my garden!

Tonight I'm going to enjoy a bowl of Ben and Jerry's ice cream (my treat while Jim's away) and probably curl up with a book.

1461 miles

Here's the trip we took:

View Larger Map

According to Google maps, that's 1461 miles. And that doesn't even include all the little trips we took around Buffalo. I'm tired. Note that the trip was so long that it doesn't fit on the map without clicking and dragging the map around. :) Ha.

But we are now back home and readjusting to normal life. The house looked abandoned when we got back, mostly because our lawn died in the heat. Jim is trying to solve that problem with a irrigation system of sorts. There are lots of hoses, a timer and "zones" involved. Jim also replaced 3 stairs on our back porch last night, after driving for 7 hours. Superman!!

Mother's Day weekend

Happy mother's day to all the moms out there. Hope you had a wonderful day.

Aside from the obvious gifts in my life (my beautiful Annika and my handsome Jim), I got an unexpected present today too. I got to sleep in until almost 8am this morning. Why is this? Because Annika decided to sleep that long! I don't think this has ever happened before. She must've known that today was a special day! Jim is grilling kabobs for dinner tonight - for anyone who hasn't tried grilled pineapple, you need to do it as soon as possible. It is so good.

It's been a really nice weekend. Now that Jim is done with his class, we are starting on some of the home projects that have been building up over the last year. The first project is to put a door on Annika's room. Several years ago, we decided to get rid of the door to her room. It had been damaged when we refinished the floor in that room, and honestly, it was just garbage. Really, all the outer doors on the second floor are garbage. The closet doors are beautiful, original, paneled doors. But for some reason, one of the prior owners decided to get rid of the matching outer doors, and replaced them with the cheapest hollow doors they could find. The closet doors continue to be beautiful, despite the fact that they are 90 years old. The outer doors, perhaps half the age of the closet doors, have just gone downhill.

So yesterday, Jim bought a solid, paneled pine door from our favorite home improvement store, and is now working on hanging it - not as easy as it sounds. He has to fit it to the door frame, attach hinges, install hardware (such as a door knob), coat it with polyurethane or a stain, and then hang it. He has done the first two things on the list and will continue working on this over the week. Good thing for all those wood tools. :) It should be beautiful when it's done.

Other projects? Replace part of the ceiling in the porch, strip and refinish our rocking chair, replace some wood in the garage and paint it, plus the usual gardening, and possibly replace the attic windows. I think it'll keep us busy!

Organizing

In the interest of beginning-of-the-year organization, I have started a new quest to scan in all of my old photos. This is going to take a while. I have a lot of old photos. Today I focused one of my wedding albums. It was fun! I hadn't looked at them in a long time. It's funny how long ago that all feels now. The end goal is to get everything saved on a DVD disk and put it in the safe deposit box. Jim has even found a service that does this (the DVD part, not the safe deposit part!). Another idea, after we finish the DVD project, is to print out the photos into small books. Then we can put the photos in storage and save some space. This will take a long time though.

In other good news, we are getting our oil tank removed this afternoon at 4! We thought it was going to be quite costly because frankly, it's going to be a pain in the a$$ to get it out of our basement, particularly since it's still about half full of oil. But our plumber recommended a guy who does it quite cheaply. The sketchy part about it is that I don't know the guy's last name. I know his first name is Richie and I have his cell phone number. But this is the Quincy way. Everyone puts a "y" at the end of everyone else's name, even if you've never called yourself that version of your name, and everyone's pretty trustworthy.

Annika had a follow-up with the dr. today and sorry to say, that ear infection is still there. So she's back on antibiotics for another 10 days. Seriously. We've now been dealing with the stupid cold she got over Christmas and its remnants for a month now. Let's just say that we've gotten to be good friends with the pediatricians and their staff, and I'm able to tell the pharmacist which size syringe I need for the medicine, like a seasoned professional. (She tried to give me another small one that doesn't reach into the bottom of the bottle).

And to end this post on a happy note, I learned today that one of my asylum clients was recently granted asylum in Immigration Court.  It's really satisfying when good things happen to really deserving people to whom good things have not historically happened.

Onward and upward!

Becoming good friends with the plumber

The bad news: our hot water heater, aged approximately 14, bit the dust this evening.

The good news: Jim was here when it happened. Thus, minimal flooding in the basement. And I'm off tomorrow so I can be here when the plumber comes to replace it.

The bad news: No hot water til tomorrow.

The good news: The plumber is supposed to arrive between 10 and 11, so not a big deal.

The bad news: Water in the basement.

The good news: The basement floor is really clean now!

Jim researched different hot water heating options, including the "on demand" system, where there's no hot water tank and the water is just immediately warmed up as you turn on the faucet. (This is apparently popular in Europe, probably because no one has any space for hot water tanks, and they're supposed to be more efficient). But it sounds like there are a lot of down-sides to that, and we really need something installed quickly (and relatively cheaply). So we're going with the standard hot water tank.

More Plumbing

We are getting to be good friends with our plumber. Ah, the joys of owning an old house.

Today Jim is going to Home Depot to look at toilets. The mechanism that flushes our toilet is broken (the second time this has happened since we moved here). The vertical part of the toilet is also cracked (although not all the way through). The crack is not a new thing, but we haven't been able to flush the toilet all week without pulling off the back and manually flushing it that way. And since we've been doing that, the mechanism has further deteriorated. Initially, it was just the chain that was broken. But now, the suction cup part of the mechanism is no longer attached to anything and could get swept into the pipe at any time. This would cause the toilet to keep filling constantly, requiring a plumber right away.

For all of you who are in an apartment but would like to buy a house, take note. If we were in an apartment, we could just call maintenance and they would've taken care of this. (That assumes, of course, that you have a responsive maintenance person). But now that we own this house, it's all up to us. Broken toilet? Great! Hire a plumber. And stay at home while you wait for them to come. And then shell out the money. And by the way? If you decide to fix it yourself and end up causing a leak that destroys your ceiling? Well, you get to deal with that too! And while this is all being fixed, no toilet or water!

Anyway, it would be nice to get a new toilet and not have to worry about the crack getting larger and causing a huge leak when we least expect it. According to Jim's Plumbing "How-To" book from Home Depot, replacing a toilet is one of the easiest plumbing jobs you can do. Takes 1 hour. Unless you own an old house (pre-1940). Then the pipes and holes might not be the standard size, possibly requiring you to have to cut new holes and replace some of the pipes, etc. And of course, judging from our prior experiences with this house, it would just be our luck that after Jim pulls off the toilet, we'll realize that this is actually a bigger job than we can do in a day. Then we don't have a toilet and need to get a plumber ASAP and pay their elevated Sunday rates. And the water cut-off valve for our toilet is also broken. Which means that we'd have to shut off water to the whole house to fix it.

Jim is pricing out toilets to figure out if we can afford to replace the whole toilet, or if we're just going to fix the mechanism and wait longer for the new toilet.

So, in conclusion, for all those out there thinking of getting a house, here are things you need once you move in and have to do plumbing work:
1) a good plumber;
2) a good plasterer;
3) a sturdy bucket to place under the destroyed ceiling so you don't have destroyed floors too;
4) a Home Depot nearby;
5) 2 bathrooms with functional toilets would be a nice bonus; or
6) nice neighbors who would let you use their toilet; or
7) a membership to the YMCA to use their toilet and shower.

Makes you wonder whether owning a house is really worth it, eh? :) (But it is)

New configurations

We have moved into our new office. Here's what it looks like now:

(Still have to find something large to put on the wall above the desk). We have a window AC unit up and running, and it's quite nice up here. For some reason, the phone isn't working yet, but Jim is going to look into that.

Here's what Annie's room looks like now:

And Jim finished the blanket chest, which is now in Annie's room. Here's a photo of the final product:

Pretty cool! And given our small closets, a great place for storage. Everything is organized and feels much less cluttered.

Attic in progress

As requested, here are some photos of our soon-to-be office, in our attic.

Some background first: We have a full attic with a full (albeit very steep) staircase from the second floor. Long before we moved into this house, someone had turned the attic into 2 small rooms. They put up dry wall, hung doors, created closets, put in pretty nice moulding, and even put some cheap carpeting and linoleum down. We think the rooms used to be very small bedrooms. In addition to these rooms, there are dormers, which are unfinished. While you can stand up and walk around with no problem in the main part of the attic, you sort of have to crawl in the dormers - the roof slopes downward there. The attic also has 2 full windows.

Before Annika arrived, we had been using our third bedroom as an office. We constructed bookcases and had our desk, computer and filing cabinet in there. Now that she's here, we want to move the office stuff out so that we don't disturb her when we want to use the computer or desk.

Our ultimate vision is to completely renovate the attic. We want to take down all the walls and turn it into one large room. With a couple of sky lights and some HVAC work, it could actually be a really nice bedroom. We would probably be able to see the Town River from the sky lights. We hope we can eventually put in a half-bathroom up there too. But this will all be more money than we want to spend right now, particularly given the uncertainty of my job right now. So until we can do this, we decided to do a quick fix-up of one of the rooms in the attic and move our desk and computer up there.

While I was in Buffalo, Jim cleaned out the front room in the attic. He patched up a couple of large holes in the dry wall that our contractors had made when they were doing duct work for the bedrooms. He also started painting the walls. Yesterday, we got an electrician to come in and put in a couple of outlets, wire a switch for the overhead light in the room, put in telephone service, and put lights in the dormers. Today I washed down the stairs and hallway floor. Tomorrow Jim is going to try to finish painting the walls and I will clean the carpet in the room. Hopefully by the end of the weekend, we'll be all moved in up there!

So here are some photos of our work in progress. Here are two views of the staircase. First, from the second floor (you can also see the very bottom of one of the attic windows):

And heading down the stairs from the attic:


The next photo is of the hallway with the 1930's linoleum. We are going to use the room off the left of this hallway for the office. On the right of this hallway is the door to one of the dormers. We are using the dormers for storage space. The door at the end of the hall (with the weird opaque glass) goes into another small room, which we are also using for storage at the moment.

Next is the view of the new office from the top of the staircase. You are looking through what used to be a window, complete with glass. We removed the window, posted it on Craig's List and someone took it away. You'll see that Jim patched the wall. We still have to paint it.

Opposite view, from the office to the top of the stairway. You can see the closet door on the right.

The room (complete with the new outlets, as well as our paint cans and drop cloth):

You can see a large patch job on the left side of the wall. There used to be a huge water stain there. When we had our house inspected, before we moved in, the inspector sort of freaked out about that until he saw that it was an old stain and it wasn't wet anymore. Still, we were glad when we got the roof replaced.

There also used to be a door to the room, similar to the door you saw above, with the opaque glass. But there was a huge crack in it from top to bottom. It looks like if you slammed it a couple of times, it would become separated from the hinges. So we took that down and also posted it on Craig's List, and someone took it away.

I'll post more pictures once it's finished and we're moved in up there.

Birthdays and Attics

Today would've been my dad's 63rd birthday. I remember that he and my mom were here for his 60th birthday in 2006 and we went to Tanglewood for a concert. We had an ice cream cake from Frozen Freddie's. My mom and I walked down there to get it (a few blocks from our house) and then had to almost run to get it home so that it wouldn't melt. Here's a photo of us from my dad's 50th birthday:
(Notice that even my usually-prim-and-proper grandma put on a party hat and blew a noise maker!) I have few regrets in my life, but I deeply regret that my dad never got to meet Annika and be a grandpa. He would've loved her.

Today we finally got the electrical work done in the attic, after trying for weeks to have an electrician even call us back. I think they did a fine job, and I'm hoping to clean the floor and stairs this afternoon in an effort to start the process of moving our desk up there. I even bought a brand new bottle of Murphy's Oil Soap for the occasion! (Jim semi-jokingly worried that the soap will make the stairs disintegrate but I have more faith in our stairs). It will be interesting to see how our AC window-unit will do up there - I'm happy that we're going to get some more use out of it. Then, all we really need to do is finish painting the walls. It's not pretty up there, but it'll do until we have the money to renovate the attic.

The Neighborhood

Yesterday, we went to a birthday party for the little girl who lives across the street from us. She turned 3 years old on Saturday, and on Sunday, her parents threw a party and invited their families and all the neighbors.

Jim and I always feel really happy to be living in this neighborhood after going to a party like this. The people who live on our street are really close. For example, the two boys who live next door and the girl across the street often have sleep-over parties. They play with each other everyday. Their parents seem to be best friends. Some people on this street seem to have known each other their whole lives. They have their own culture in some ways. For example, do you know what they call those little single-serving cartons of ice cream that you often get at ice cream socials? Hoodies. Named after Hood ice cream, of course - a Boston institution. We learned this yesterday. They served Hoodies, along with a home-made sheet cake, made by our next door neighbor for the birthday girl. (Apparently she did a "test run" cake a few days ago, which she was passing out to all the neighbors, but we missed it).

For a long time, I was sad that we couldn't seem to "break in" to the clique of the street. We talk differently, we didn't grow up in Quincy, and we are often on the road, traveling to see family. But now that Annie is here, I think we are fitting in better (although I do still have my doubts about completely fitting into the clique). I think that once Annie is up walking and talking, she'll be a natural with the other kids. There will be lots of kids to play with - there are the two boys next door, the little girl across the street and her baby brother, who is only 2 weeks younger than Annie. Then, there's another little baby a few doors down who will be born in September. We got to meet those neighbors at the party yesterday.

All the neighbors love Annie. They always want to hold her and kiss her and talk to her. I remember when we took her out in the stroller for the first time, one of the neighbors ran and got his wife, who was eating dinner. She jumped up and ran outside so she could meet Annie, pizza still in hand. This is the sort of neighborhood I always hoped to live in. It's similar to the neighborhood where I grew up, which was full of kids my age and neighbors who looked out for each other.

Sometimes I'm sad that we live so far from family, but the truth is that we have a pretty established life here in Boston, and perhaps more friends than I always consider. We do our best to maintain our relationship with our family, and hope that they will put in the same effort.

And now that Annie has FINALLY gone down for her nap, I can finally clean up the house and head out to lunch with Jim!

The hole in the wall

Here is the new hole in our wall, caused by the cracked sewage pipe:

This photo was taken before they replaced the pipe. The big black, cast iron pipe is the one they replaced. We're making progress. No puddle in the basement anymore.

Update

So miraculously, we got the entire plumbing job done today. I have a feeling that there is not a lot of work to be had for people like plumbers and carpenters and other contractor-type people given the economy.

The plumbers ripped open the wall (*sigh*) and found the crack in our sewage pipe. The pipe was cast iron, rusted, and about as thin as a piece of paper. This was because it was 90 years old. Water degrades cast iron after a while, and they very rarely put cast iron pipes in houses any more. According to the plumber, they've used PCV pipes for sewage since the 1950's. So the crack was about 3 inches long. They pulled the pipe out and replaced it with a white PCV pipe.

There was some talk that they were also going to have to go into our ceiling to replace the last part of the cast iron pipe. They speculated that it could very well be in as bad shape as the piece they pulled out. But that would've been a big job and there was no evidence that this part of the pipe was bad. It'll probably give way next year, with our luck.

So now we have to have our trusty contractor, Joe, come in to fix the wall. It's funny how the downstairs is looking a little like it did last year, before our walls were fixed. I have a friend coming over on Tuesday for lunch and I was looking forward to showing her all the improvements to our house, since she hasn't been here in a while. Now she's going to be wondering what I'm talking about, with the hole "still" there. :)

Fun with plumbing

This must be the year for plumbing difficulties.

Over the last year or so, we noticed that sometimes in the basement we would see a small puddle of water in the corner by the stairs. Sometimes it was foul-smelling. We figured that the cats were peeing in the corner. It seemed to appear when we didn't let Solomon outside. We figured he was mad at us.

But this winter, JK^2 started to notice that the pipes in that area were wet. And the puddle was getting larger. We flushed the toilet a few times and sure enough, the water was running down onto the floor. This was not cat urine. (So I guess our cats are better behaved than we thought). There's a cracked pipe. And guess where the pipe runs! Well, right through a piece of wall that we just had redone last spring. You know, with the nice blue board and plaster. (For those of you who know our house, it's the piece of wall right next to the stained glass window - the wall that was all opened up for about 5 years due to the frozen pipe incident).

We are having the plumber in this morning to give us an estimate but everyone's pretty sure they're going to have to open the wall back up to replace the pipe. (Oh, and by the way, the plumber just came back and said he couldn't give us an estimate because it's in the wall and he has no idea how much it's going to cost. Great!)

It is so depressing. We finally got the downstairs to look nice, and now we're going to have a big hole there again until we can get it fixed. (As I write this, I'm listening to him drill into our beautiful wall. It makes me cringe). Also, the toilet will have to be turned off during the work, and that will be interesting. Due to the baby sitting on my bladder, I generally have to go every hour or so.

Sometimes we look at people who bought expensive houses or who are expecting to buy an expensive house, and we say, wow, we got a great deal and we have a manageable mortgage - a good thing in uncertain economic times. But as JK^2 commented the other day, we also purchased a $300,000 house. We just only paid half of it with our mortgage. The other half comes sporadically and unexpectedly as things break in our house. Ugh.

Happy new year!

It's a very bad sign. The first event of 2009 was me waking up at 6:30 to get a drink of water and realizing that our cold water pipe had frozen.

We have had this problem before. Back when we had the old crappy walls in our house, we had a similar incident. Jim ended up ripping open a wall and seeing that the prior owners had insulated that wall by putting insulation on the inside of the house - with the pipes on the outside, not insulated. And the cold water pipe happens to run up the outer wall of our house, between our front hall and the unheated front porch.

We thought we'd solve the problem by putting the insulation on the correct side of the pipes - so that they would benefit from the heat in our house. This was accomplished last spring when we had our walls redone. Jim had also installed one of those cords that you put next to the pipe, and then if it freezes, you can plug it in in the basement and it's supposed to warm up the pipe. The problem with the cord is that we're now convinced it's a fire hazard. It was OK when the wall was open (we had a hole in our wall for several years before redoing the walls), but now that it's closed up, it's more worrying. Having an undetected fire in one of our walls is far worse than a frozen pipe.

But here we have the first really cold night since we redid the walls: it was 2 degrees at 6:30 this morning, with a windchill of -10. And the problem is back. Ugh.

Jim tried to warm up the pipe by running the hot water. The hot water pipe is right next to the cold water pipe, so he hoped that it would give off heat. Also, we warmed up the house. We keep it in the low 60's at night. About an hour later, the water thawed. Phew. No burst pipes.

As I was lying in bed, trying to go back to sleep, I thought about how most people have small house problems. Like a window that isn't insulated and is letting some cold air in. Or a kitchen that's ugly and needs to be redone. Normally, people just have to do some routine maintenance on their houses.

Our maintenance includes new furnace, new roof, new walls, new insulation, replacing 90-year-old windows with cracks in them, and worrying about whether our pipes are going to burst at any moment because the people who built this house didn't realize that it got cold in New England in the winter.

Jim reminded me that other people have problems too. Other people have had pipes burst. Other people have had flooding in their basement. Yes, that's true. It just feels like we're always the ones with the problems. Maybe those people feel that way too. And I will agree that things have definitely gotten better at our house in the last 8 years that we've been here. For example, we have lights in our kitchen and foyer that are not florescent outlets that belong in a bathroom vanity mirror. And we have already covered most of the major projects on the house. We've done major work on the HVAC system, the electrical system, the structural integrity of the house, the roof, and the insulation of the house (through windows and wall insulation). We should be getting to the point where we're more worried about maintenance and cosmetics than overhaul.

But hopefully this pipe issue isn't a bad omen for the year. :)

Productive Weekend

It finally feels like fall here. Temperatures in the 40's, the heat going on in the house, the plants going to sleep for the winter. I normally get a little sad in fall, because we are heading towards winter, such a dead time of the year. But there is an element of coziness in being able to come inside and be warm, or curl up under a quilt and take a nap. (See above photos of our adorable kitty cats - they curled up together in our piano cover, their current favorite spot for napping. If you look closely, Solomon is hugging Zeusy - so cute!).

Yesterday was errands and yard work day. First thing after getting up, we went to Cape Cod Lumber to order a replacement window to finish off our living room. For those who know our house, you'll remember that we had a window in our living room that was covered over with dry wall for probably 40-50 years. The story (according to the neighbors) was that the prior owners got into a feud with the neighbors over something stupid. This window looked out over the neighbors' house, and the story is that they put the dry wall up so they wouldn't have to look at the neighbors any more. Ha.

(As a side note, these prior owners believed that if they couldn't see something, it didn't need attention. That is why they only painted and roofed two sides of our garage).

We discovered this window only after moving into the house. JK^2 had removed the old, dusty Venetian blinds from all the other windows in the living room. One day, he was out cutting the grass, and he saw a window that still had blinds in it. And he started thinking, "How could I have missed taking the blinds down from one of the windows?" Then he realized that we had a hidden window. About the same time, our neighbor was standing on his porch, laughing at us. He had witnessed the whole revelation.

Anyway, when we did our "home improvement project of the year" this spring, we took down the dry wall in our living room (along with the messy horsehair plaster underneath the plaster and on the other walls) and opened up the window. It really makes a big difference in our living room.

In classic fashion, the prior owners (I am leaving them anonymous because they really should be ashamed of the things they did to our house) decided that instead of taking out the window, they would just close the skanky Venetian blinds and cover it up with the dry wall. So we got rid of the blinds, and somewhere along the way, one of the panes of glass got cracked. So it is time to replace this 90-year-old, single-paned window.

We haven't ordered replacement windows in a while. I think it could be close to 2 years, actually. Of course, the price has gone up quite a bit, and they now charge for delivery. Since we don't have a large car or truck, we had to have the window delivered. It should be ready in 4-5 weeks. I'm looking forward to the extra insulation value.

We got drapes for our windows. Or rather, JK^2's mom made them for us. They are blue and cream striped. She also made us sheers, which are a cream color with a design. I'm still getting used to them, but they're nice.

After ordering the window, getting some groceries, and having lunch at Baja Fresh (I love it), we came back home and did some gardening. We are trying to transplant our hydrangea. It is my favorite plant at our house, but it is very overgrown for the spot where we had planted it. JK^2 thought that if we pulled it out about 3-4 feet from the house, it wouldn't look so crowded. Plus, we really, really need to redo the landscaping in front of the house in general. So JK^2 worked on that, and I worked on pulling the tomato plants out from behind the garage. Pulling these plants out has never been easier, since I haven't had a taste for tomatoes in 5 weeks. There were a few tomatoes left, and we're going to bring them over to our friends' house tonight. It's much easier to pull things out when you're not so attached.

JK^2 managed to pull the hydrangea out with a good part of its roots, and replant it. We're very hopeful that it'll survive the winter. If it doesn't, then we'll just plant another (and I'll be sad). We also planted all the bulbs that A.Fuss gave me for my birthday (except for the paper whites, of course). Hopefully that will guarantee us some cheerful flowers in the spring. She gave me a bag of crocuses (I love them) and something called "Giant Snow Drops," which I've never grown before. I put the snow drops in under the lilac bush and next to some irises. The crocuses went in next to our front stairs.

Today is homework day for JK^2. He's gotten a lot of it this semester. We did get to go out to lunch again, though. We went to Webster's, which is this little diner-like place in Quincy that has some pretty good Mediterranean food. We like going out to lunch on the weekends. :)

Tonight we get together with friends for dinner, and then we'd probably watch the Red Sox game, if they were broadcasting it on normal television. Unfortunately, only TBS is broadcasting it and we don't get a cable. Oh well. Let's hope they kick some butt. It would be cool if they made it to the World Series again, especially if they're playing the Dodgers (where they traded Manny Ramirez to this summer).

Curtain Problems

JK^2 and I need professional help. Although we do a pretty good job of picking out paint colors for the rooms in our house, we are absolutely horrible at picking out curtains or in home decoration in general. As JK2 put it, on the scale of goodness at home decorating, where 1 is bad and 10 is fabulous, he gets a 1 and I get a 0.5. He's right.

Sometimes we get lucky and have some help. For example, my Aunt Ellen made us this beautiful stained glass window, which we installed this weekend:


It happens that the blue in the window matches perfectly with the paint colors we used (deep blue in the living room and very light khaki color in the hallway). It is perfect. Do you think we planned it that way? I know I didn't. I just like the color blue. :)

So now we have our living room. It really, really, really needs curtains because we live in an urban neighborhood and the houses are relatively close together. We need some privacy.

We love the colors in our living room - deep blue (walls), white (trim) and khaki (sofas). But today we went to try to find curtains and had NO luck! I liked this certain striped curtain at Linens 'N' Things, but Jim didn't think it would match. Jim liked other curtains, particularly dark brown ones, but I'm not a big fan of anything dark brown in the house. We went to LNT and Bed, Bath and Beyond. We left both places empty-handed.

Part of the problem is that it's a relatively big investment. We have 4 windows in our living room, and with drapes and sheers, that's 3-4 panels per window. Thus, although we fell in love with some silk drapes that we saw at Restoration Hardware about a year ago, that is just not going to happen at $200+ per panel.

I should add that we redid our bedroom about 1 1/2 years ago and still have no curtains hanging in there, even though we have curtain rods. We put up blinds until we could figure out which curtains to get, but now nearly two years have gone by.

So following is a photo of our living room. What should we do?? Drapes? What color? What style?


We are seriously thinking of trying to find an interior decorator. We are so bad at this.

Gratuitous Flower Photos

Today was a perfect day for planting, since it was cool, overcast, with a chance of rain later. JK^2 and I have been planning to redo our front flowerbeds for a while, so today was the day to get a start on it. We pulled out a sickly azalea to the left of our front stairs, and replaced it with a lace cap hydrangea, a variety called "Blue Bird." Here's how it looks:

And if you click on this link, you'll see what it will look like when it blooms. It should be great. Our goal was to give it a lot of space to spread out. We didn't do that with our other hydrangea, and now it has outgrown its space:

(And this is after I cut it back all the way to the ground a year ago). We are going to dig it up and move it out next spring. With the new hydrangea, we have a lot of excess space, so we planted impatiens and marigolds, and then put a good layer of mulch over the top.

And while I'm at it, I thought I would throw in a couple of other photos of my beautiful flowers. Here is a close up of the blooms on my other hydrangea bush:


And here is a closeup of a gerbera daisy I have growing in a pot on our front stairs.

And my tomato plants have flowers. So everything is right in the world. :)

Plumbing

So much for an open, carefree Saturday morning. I went into the basement this morning to do laundry and saw that our main drain in the basement was leaking. We called a plumber, who snaked a small camera through the main drain, all the way out to the street. $350 later, we learned that the pipe was clogged, has rusted and does not entirely connect to the pipe in the street, due to age. The good news is that it's a good enough fit with the pipe in the street, and even better, it wasn't a collapsed pipe, which may have required ripping up our porch to fix it. He was able to clean it out so it won't back up.

Here's the silly invoice:

Cabled main line: $295, minus $20 for Beeline Discount (because Beeline, our normal plumber, referred us to him)
Camera Inspection: $375, minus $300 (also apparently for the "Beeline Discount.").

Who knew we were going to save so much money by going through our normal plumber. :) Sounds a nice load of B.S. to me. He was probably trying to make us feel better for paying $350 for 1 hour of work.

The joys of home ownership.

Things are back under control ... for now

We moved back into the house today - yea. It was all a little more rushed than hoped. They put on the first coat of polyurethane on Tuesday, and planned to put on the second coat on Wednesday. That would give us Thursday to sleep in our own bed and clean up for my mom's visit this weekend. But it didn't work out that way. Of course.

On Wednesday, the floor guys came back and realized that the floor was still wet. So they had to wait til Thursday morning, which meant that we couldn't move back in on Thursday because the house smelled strongly of polyurethane and the floors were still sticky. Plus, Jim was coming back from a three-day business trip, so instead of being able to come home and relax, we had to go to our favorite vacation retreat - the Adams Inn in North Quincy. This morning the floors were all dry. They are really nice, except for one tiny triangle that they missed when putting on the second coat of the polyurethane. Of course.

My mom arrived around 2pm. Luckily, I had changed the sheets on the guest bed last weekend, so she didn't think we were total slobs. The furniture goes back in tomorrow, and then the house will look somewhat normal again. We are dreaming of the luxury of being able to sit on our couch and watch regular TV. We are hoping to go to the Lilac Festival, except that I think it's supposed to pour rain all weekend.

Less than a week til we leave for our road trip!!