If you give a girl a crowbar...

I'm starting work on our front room / former nighttime kitty jail / future crafty room of awesome. Much of the work has been really boring...cleaning, organizing, floor scrubbing.

But today, I started attacking with a crowbar! There is a bookshelf in our living room that was previously a door between the living room and the front room. We're reopening it!

The first step is to attack it with a crowbar. Bill hopes we're going to find some buried gold. So far, I've found a mirror.

I hope to report more exciting finds soon.

The fishy 2 year plan...

Two years ago, around this time, we bought our house! Very shortly after that we traded our television for a large fish tank.

Last year, around this time, we painted our living room and moved the fish tank to it's permanent location. Then we filled the tank with water.

The tank sat... filled with water but no fish for another year. There were complications with filters and heaters...it took us a while to sort it all out. But...

Finally! On New Year's Eve we bought fish! We started with some long finned zebra danios and added some mollys last week. See:

They swim fast...

We'll keep adding fish at the rate of one species a week for a little while, until we stop.

I'll also keep adding socks to the collection. The most recent pair (Bill is becoming quiet adept at taking pictures of my feet, don'tcha think?):

We haven't had much activity to report here in a while. There are a few things going on at our food blog, though. But it's been pretty quiet all around. We're just trying to stay warm!! And fill the fish tank.

Our Tree is Not Naked

Or "Holy Eskimo, I Am Old."

With only 4ish days until Christmas, Bill and I finally put up a tree today. As this is our first real tree since the early naughts, I was a bit nervous that we would have an insufficient number of ornaments. For reference, this tree was the last we "put up:"

It was a 3 foot fake tree on a table in our 700 square foot apartment. THIS is our '08 tree:

Though it is thin, I'd guess it's 9 feet tall. Fortunately, we have over 30 years of ornaments collected and our tree is nicely decorated. I even had to leave some Eskimos off.




So here, in all it's decorated glory is our $18 tree-farm Something Fir. It is mildly Charlie-Brownish, but it is less than a week from Christmas and we rather like it.

And an oldie of Bernie from the photo archive:

Now with 50% less blue

Two of the four rooms in our house that were a tired sky blue when we moved in have been transformed into much nicer rooms that people would actually want to spend time in. You may recall our bedroom was the first to be tamed...

Bluefore and after:
And now the living room is done being painted! More photos when it's cleaned up, but here is a preview.

Bluefore:

(This, by the way is a photo of Bernie on the night before we brought Sugar home and threw his entire world into disarray. He thought the new doggy-sized bed was for him. Sucker.)

AFTER:


Two rooms are still in a state of bluedom. This was previously, I imagine, a lovely parlor before an awkward bathroom turned it into a "master bedroom." We've never showed you a photo before this moment because it is really the saddest room in the house. It will be the next to be tackled with the intent of creating a hobby room. We'd ditch the bathroom, but the walls contain the pipes going to the upstairs bathroom we want to keep. Dilemma.


The kitchen and adjoining pantry are also blue:


Eradicating those blues, however, is for another time. After a hard day of painting, some sleepy snuggles are now in order and I'm going to get in on this:

Living room in progress

Some dark photos of our living room as it is currently half painted. The transition zones:



Before and afters:
We traded two TVs for this fish tank, which fits so perfectly in this spot Bill thinks it was made just for us. It is somewhere around 50-70(?) gallons and will eventually be home to a range of live-bearing fish.

We plan to finish painting and put up a real live tree from a tree farm next weekend.

Our bird feeders were visited by a Sharp-shinned Hawk this afternoon. He scattered all the chickadees and juncos and got away with a house sparrow in his claws. The commotion caused another house sparrow to fly into our window. She was stunned enough to let us hold her for a full five minutes before flying away. We suspect the Sharpie will be back.

Bye-bye blues

Like, every room in our house is a shade of baby blue. It's not cool. Well, it is cool and that is the problem. I think a drafty house needs warm colors to feel cozy.

Today we prime half the living room! Say bye to these baby blues:


I know my new curtains are a bit too short...they aren't on the correct curtain rods yet. They are currently being functional, though, at cutting down drafts - much better than the lace that was there before:
The ceiling has a darker stripe of baby blue. It's going too. I've convinced Bill that it should be red. He's a bit hesitant, so if you all could gush over the stripe when it's done, I'd appreciate it!

Off to paint!

Winter Prepardness - Play at Home!

All our bird feeders have been washed and filled with fresh yumminess. If you are playing at home...how many feeders can you find in this photo? Answer at the bottom of the post.


In addition to enticing neighborhood birds into our yard, we've been getting ready for winter by making curtains and testing the wood stove.

This is the curtain fabric and the design is inspired by curtains I was staring at during a (clearly engaging) meeting at the Indiana statehouse. Perfect for our deep window frames.



We've also been testing a theory that wood stoves are the great uniter in the house. Kitties and puppies will put aside their differences in order to sit peacefully near the wondrous fire. How many mammals will chose to be in the same 5 square feet out of the 2,000 available?

Second question...is it the stove they crave or the pancakes?



Finally, how many feeders were visible in the photo? The answer is...EIGHT. There are more that are just outside the range of the photo (for a total of 10). In November, will we spend more $ on people food or bird food?

Why?? Just....why???

It all started with the removal of this nail:


All night, this nail was staring at me -- my poor, lovely old mantle, whimpering at me like Aesop's lion with a thorn in his paw. So, in my first act of this-is-my-home-now-bitches heroics, I plucked out the nail...leaving, of course, a neat little hole in my 151 year-old wood.

I then noticed the 27 other nail holes pockmarking the face of my mantle.

Why?? Why, why why???

Why - when there are billions of non-invasive stocking holders out there looking for a home - would you do this? Did you feel a little pang of guilt as you swung the hammer? How many people were in the room, consenting to this ghastly wood-disrespecting event?

Is it awful to hope Santa filled those Christmas stockings with nothing but photos of dead bunnies?

This one simple question led to so many more (and this is when the reality of signing and initialing all those papers at closing starts to sink in). Why would you paint my guest room bright pink and install Cookie Monster Blue carpet?


Why is there more paint on my window panes than on the wood?


Why is my bathroom (10 foot walls and ceiling) encrusted with this wall paper?


Just....why?

In the optimistic afterglow

Somehow, we have purchased ourselves an insanely cool, 151-year old brick farm house. I've been expecting one of the billions of people we worked with to buy this house to pat us on the head, tell us we seemed like sweet kids but were in no way prepared or qualified to own such a building and why don't we look for a nice condo downtown - perhaps a loft with monument views?

But they didn't - and now that we've got the keys, we won't give them back!

Our closing was yesterday, so we spent last night camping in our living room with a nice fire and a bottle of wine. No ghosts yet, but we woke up this morning to a nice dusting of snow on a peaceful road.


More photos online here.

In my excited chatter about this house, I have confidently proclaimed a few things that people with actual home-owning experience have suggested I write down. I can't imagine why. ;)

• Home Depot is an exciting, magical place.
• I like scraping paint.
• This is a long term commitment - not a starter home.
• No cable. No satellite tv. No problem.
• Its ok that all our weekends are booked until 2038.
• Callouses, cuts and sore muscles are signs of hard work and not a cause for (too much) whining.
• Our new hometown (population 1,562 - no stop lights) is big enough.