House St. Clair

Life is Cruel

2008-08-31T20:56:00.004-04:00

Book Recommendation

2007-05-11T21:36:00.000-04:00

The Walls Around Us: The Thinking Person's Guide to How a House Works by David Owen.

I've actually had this book for two years now, and it has sat on my shelves since I picked it up at a rummage sale. Now, I'm regretting that I didn't read it as soon as I bought it. What an interesting and informative book! I am really enjoying it.

He actually has another book out that I'm going to have to put on my list--unless, of course, I find it at a rummage sale too.

House Dreams

2007-02-26T09:06:00.000-05:00

Last night, in between my dream that will end up a YA novel if I have my way, I had a dream about my house. I was steaming wallpaper off one of the walls upstairs, when I came across some words scratched into the plaster. Unfortunately, in the light of morning I can't remember the names and dates, but I do remember that according to the writing on the wall, my house was a lot older than we had suspected. Like, Civil War instead of turn of the century. Like, one of the articles was about how Grant (That's Ulysses) had spent the night in my house. (He lived in my town when he was a child, so that's not impossible in the dreamworld, I guess.)

Also on the wall were newspaper clippings that someone had decoupaged under the layers of wallpaper. They all concerned my house, or, rather, the house I thought it was in the dream. (I'm pretty sure my house was never a carnival attraction, for example, but I guess you never know.) And as I read them, or skimmed them, of course I found myself drifting back through time until I was in the past.

I'm pretty sure my house never had a dome on top of it, too, so it wasn't really my house that I was dreaming about. But even though the details aren't cooperating and letting me remember them, it was an interesting dream.

I'm going to blame it on my missing closet. :)

Closets

2007-02-25T14:40:00.000-05:00

Unlike most old houses, my house--at least upstairs--has closets. It also has built-in wardrobes in two bedrooms. One bedroom is even lucky enough to have a closet and a built-in wardrobe.

But the weird thing is that my bedroom doesn't have an original closet. Or, at least, not one that I've been able to find evidence of. Instead, I get a whopping huge built-in wardrobe and nothing else.

So why doesn't my bedroom have a closet if the other three do?

My bedroom is part of the 'addition', somewhere between 1912 and 1920. And that would make sense if my office was also closetless, but the POs combined the closet from the bedroom that adjoins my office to make a secret passageway closet that joins both rooms.

In between my bedroom and my office is the upstairs bathroom, but as far as we can tell, it's the original bathroom to the house. (Or, at least to that part of the house; there was an outhouse too.) Since I'm assuming that all three rooms were added at the same time (that makes sense, after all) then it doesn't make sense to think that the bathroom--or a portion of it--was once my room's closet.

Any suggestions as to why my bedroom wouldn't have a closet?

The Honeysuckle Vine from Hell... is GONE!

2007-02-24T11:00:00.000-05:00

April 2006:

Two weeks ago:

Today:

Okay, that's not the best picture in the world, but you get the idea. It's supposed to rain tomorrow, so I thought I'd do it now while it was sunny, despite the fact that it's still cold outside. Still, I'd rather be out in 28 degree weather than 6 degree weather!

If it wants to grow back, that's fine, but the majority was dead and it needed to be cut down.

Mom's Brilliant Idea

2007-02-13T13:24:00.000-05:00

So on Sunday, after the 6 1/2 inches of snow earlier in the week, Mom and I went to Kroger. On our way, I told her about the low humidity in the house--something that hadn't happened last year. We were hovering right around 25%, our sinuses were screaming, and the amount of static in the house was truly terrifying (to the cats.)

I thought it was weird because I have hot water heat, and usually that takes care of the humidity. But not this time. So Mom had a great idea to up the humidity a bit by putting teapots full of water on the radiators; they will warm up and evaporate, and voila! More humidity.

I just happened to have enough metal teapots for most of the radiators, too. (That way if the cats happen to knock them down, they won't break.) And so far so good; we're hovering at 40% at the moment. Of course the humidity is higher outside too, but still. I think it didn't hurt to put the teapots on the radiator anyway. :)

There's a hole in my ceiling, dear liza, dear liza

2007-02-10T21:50:00.000-05:00

Well, a crack, at least, and quite a large one.

See, in my formal dining room there was a leak at one point where the water blew up under the flashing of the front porch and onto the bay window. (I'll try to take pictures tomorrow.) This leaked once last winter--my Dad cleaned out my downspout and the gutter and all has been well since then.

Tonight, on a quest for a roll of tape (which I thought I had left in the dining room), I walked in to chaos. My Night-Blooming Cereus was on the floor and one of the ceiling tiles was beneath it.

The strange thing is that the Cereus is on the other end of the conservatory portion of the dining room, away from those particular ceiling tiles. Weird.

Luckily, it didn't end up with much damage; I'll have to cut off and plant the pieces that snapped. But the ceiling tile split in half, and was wet as well, although the ceiling itself and the ceiling tiles around it were dry. So I'm hoping the leak hasn't returned, and the wetness on the rug and the ceiling tile was from the plant. We'll see.

I'm not sure when it happened, since I haven't been in the dining room since Monday. But I would have thought we would have heard the crash--it had to be loud!

So I got my ladder, felt the ceiling tiles, felt no wetness at all, then decided that I might as well pull a couple more down while I was at it. And I found out I was right--when they put the 'dropped' ceiling in, they didn't really drop the ceiling. It's about an inch lower than the regular ceiling, which is painted that pussywillow purple color that used to be so popular way back when. There are boards stretched across the whole thing, which much have taken forever to put up. And everything is screwed in, too. It looks so lovely. (NOT!)

So anyway, I guess I'll have to clean up tomorrow, since I'm not going to clean it up tonight. Just what I wanted to do! *sigh*

Leaky windows, Leaky doors, Leaky everything, Leaky floors...

2007-02-05T18:02:00.000-05:00

When the weather first started changing, I got the idea to put those air-filled packing thingys into the cavity of the transom window over the front door. The PO had a nice piece of plexiglass stapled to the outside of the window (which kind of defeated the purpose of having the window open) and I removed that as soon as I could.

Last winter, I put styrofoam in the cavity, which wasn't much better and blocked what light comes in that window. But this year, I thought the air-filled thingys would work just fine.

And they did, until a really strong gust of wind blew the window open in December, leaving the hallway littered with air-filled thingys and the cats spooked. I always meant to re-install them with a bit of packing tape holding them together, but even though heat is an expensive commodity around here, I've been wasting it since then.

Today I decided enough was enough. When you walk down the stairs, you get hit with a wall of cold air, and the temperature difference between upstairs and downstairs is like, oh, walking from a warm room into a freezer. A large part of the problem is the front door and transom window.

So I gathered up the millions of air-filled thingys that I have collected from work, taped them together to make a transom-sized air-filled pillow, and shoved them into the cavity. Then I slammed the window closed, and used a bit of packing tape to block the last of the air coming through. (You can't even see it! Honest!)

Then I felt all the cold air coming through the door. Argh. At least it's not really that much cold air; it's warmer when you go down the stairs already. But it's 70 degrees up in my hallway, which is a bit ridiculous, since I like to sleep cold anyway, and I have the house set at 65 while we're home and 62 during the day.

(I love hot water radiator heat!) However, it does seem I'm going to have to get some weather-stripping stuff for the front door, at least.

The Entry Room

2006-09-25T21:08:00.002-04:00

There are two lists for my house. What I would like to do and What I can do right now that will work until I can do what I'd like to do.

What I would like to do in the entry room is build a floor to ceiling closet with a hall tree that has a bench on one end that looks nice and has enough room to store things like the sweeper and my stepladders, etc. (On the wall in the picture.)

What I can do is rearrange furniture to make the room more functional vs. just a place to stick various piles of stuff that have no place at the moment.

What I did was swap Ethan's computer table (an old Arts & Crafts desk that someone sawed the legs off of a long time ago--just the right height for a four-year-old) with my typewriter desk and a so close to matching that it could have been built for that purpose stick bookcase, thus creating a nice little spot to keep all my cookbooks together, along with a desk to sit down and look for recipes. That also freed up about a shelf and a half in the kitchen, where we'll eventually put our cereal and suchlike in glass jars.

I still have a lot to do in this room, organizing-wise; I have to get all our junk mail off the mail table and take it to work to be shredded, I have to figure out how to organize my shipping boxes for ebay, and I have to finish painting the cute white cabinet that Mom and Dad found at the yard sales a couple of weeks ago. But the cabinet now has a place in the Entry Room, Ethan's computer looks great on the other wall (the wall where the piano was supposed to have gone) and I really really like my cookbook nook.

My idea (I came up with this Friday at work) didn't quite work out all the way, since I thought the wall was longer than it actually was, but I had thought to move Mabel's crate out from the wall and put a very tall set of shelves behind it that could hold my boxes and possibly make room for the sweeper and the ladders (unobtrusively; at the moment the ladders are hidden behind the door.) Unfortuantely, there isn't enough room to move Mabel's crate out from the wall at all, since the bookcase was an add-on idea at the last minute. So I'm still trying to work that out.

I moved the eventual bathroom sink into the bathroom, and it's #1 on my list of things to do ASAP, since the door won't open all the way now and it's going to drive me nuts. However, at least it's in the right room now.

(I need Dad's help for this, since I have no idea what I need to buy/how to switch out a sink. And since it's our only working bathroom sink, it's important that we do it right the first time.)

So. I think October is going to be my work in the house month; I'd like to get the wallpaper finished in the kitchen and paint my hallway too, both things I had hoped to get done much earlier in the year. I also have to start making things for both craft shows in October--in truth, I should have started already, but I haven't. So it's going to be a busy month.

It's Plywood! And Kitchen Flooring...

2006-09-25T13:13:00.000-04:00

Okay, my kitchen has ugly vinyl flooring that is probably 20 years old and is worn down in places, and is in terrible shape from my dog's nails and pretty impossible to get and keep clean.

Underneath is two more vinyl floors, and then plywood. So that means I can do anything I want--within budget.

Considering I don't have a budget, this is going to be interesting.

So I am looking for suggestions. Whatever it is has to be dark in color--NOT WHITE; I am sick of white because of the cleanliness issues. Whatever it is has to be self-installable, and fairly simple to do so, since it will be my Dad and me installing it. Dad has the knowledge, I just do what I'm told. ;)

Whatever it is has to go fairly well with the old green and cream/tan linoleum in the entry room--that's why I'm thinking dark in color too. Whatever it is has to be strong enough to withstand my dog's drooling tendancies and her claws. And hairballs, etc., from the cats.

So am I dreaming? Mom and Dad have hardwood floors in their kitchen--that is what I would like to have, of course, but that's not going to happen on my teensy non-existant budget.

For reference, the cabinets are medium-brown, the walls are blue. I am thinking that a slate gray color would probably work. Any suggestions?

EDITED to add: I should probably say that my kitchen is huge, like 11' x 16'. The vinyl flooring in the kitchen is also in the laundry room, which used to be part of the kitchen (They installed a wall to separate the 'rooms'. So we're not talking about a teensy little space here at all.

The House of Clutter

2006-09-13T21:36:00.000-04:00

I think I should rename my house the Clutter House or something. You see, I am either cursed or blessed with the antique gene--that particular heritage where you never accept the price marked unless, of course, the price marked is fairly close to free. My family was big on antiquing before the word was invented. I grew up living with, eating on, sleeping in, and using antiques.

I have collections of my own, like typewriters, teapots, old books, vintage quilts and fabrics and yarns and clothing--just anything that catches my fancy, really. My Dad has his clocks (over a hundred, with some of them ending up in my house) and his good antiques; I tend to keep my money close and try to spend as little as possible (unless I know it's really a bargain) since I don't have a lot of spending money in the first place.

Soon after I first moved in, my parents' neighbors came to call. They expressed surprise that the house was full already--I think they thought my stuff in the black hole that was Storage wasn't nearly as bad as I made it out to be. But they were right--I had furniture, knicknacks, and stuff (and books) in every room.

It's getting a bit bad lately. I can't turn down a bargain, especially if I have the money and I know it's a bargain. But the stuff is piling up in various rooms around the house, so I'm turning to my old nemesis Ebay again to get rid of some of it--especially the stuff I bought to sell in the first place!

So I'm going to try setting aside one evening a week for ebaying. One evening a week (Wednesday evenings) to post 4-6 auctions, so I can start to get rid of stuff over the fall and winter.

Selling it, of course, will just help my pocketbook recover from all the bargains I've found this year. And, even better, selling this stuff that I can part with will mean more room for other things that I might not want to part with.

No one needs five copper teapots, especially if you don't really like one of them. You know what I mean?

So if anyone reading this happens to like antiques and collectibles, my ebay name is 'jennifer'. Yes, just jennifer. I've been on ebay absolutely forever. I chose my userid the day they changed from your email address to userids, way back when. I really wanted 'jen', but unfortunately, someone beat me to it, so I had to settle for 'jennifer'. But I digress.

Rain!

2006-09-12T21:03:00.000-04:00

So far, since last night, we've gotten 3.4 inches of rain. I think we'll hit 4 inches pretty soon here--it's been pouring all day. Who ordered the flood?

My neighbor's house is right beside a culvert that likes to overflow into her basement, and it was a rushing river when I got home today. I also had a rushing river out front along the sidewalk, complete with rapids--it was three inches deep in places. Luckily, my garden just soaks up all that nice water. And the water washed away all the grass I left on the sidewalk after I mowed. Nice!

Not so nice was the fact that the wind blew water all the way under the front porch (okay, not to the wall, but close) so the outside cats' food got a bit wet. One enterprising slug was slurping away at the wet food when I walked outside to dump the bowls. Most of the stuff on the porch is still dry, but the porch swing is soaked--something that had never happened before!

Thank goodness I remembered to close the windows before I left this morning. I had to drive to Columbus (normally a 2 hour drive) in a torrential downpour. Not what I would call fun. :(

Thoughts on the extra rooms in my house

2006-09-11T16:40:00.000-04:00

When my sister moves out (which might be next year if she gets her duckies in a row) I will have two free bedrooms as well as the Green Room downstairs--one of the extra rooms in my house.

There are actually two extra rooms in my house that serve no real purpose, other than to add onto the square footage. And my quandary (dry?) is that I'm not quite sure what to do with them once she moves out.

Initially, it will be easy. I'm planning to use the Green Room (which is currently my nephew's toyroom) as a staging room for moving everything from the living room so I can tear down the fake dropped ceiling and paint. Then I will do the same with the dining room stuff, and the same with the entry room stuff, etc, until the downstairs is done.

However, what should I do with it afterwards? And in that same vein, what should I do with the Entry Room as well?

Let's go there first.

You walk through my side door into the Entry Room, which was called the 'breakfast room' when the house was for sale. It is the former kitchen, before the kitchen was added on in the 50s or so. This is the room where I tore up the fake plastic floor and found lovely linoleum underneath. (Its loveliness is debatable, I realize. But I digress.)

Anyway, so I have this rather large room that is too large to be a real mudroom. There is a five foot wide opening on one side that is the entry to the kitchen, a door that leads into the dining room and another door that leads to the basement on the same wall, and then the door that leads into the Green Room after that.

I had intended to stick my free piano in the Entry Room, but now I'm not so sure. Since the kitchen is large enough to be an eat-in kitchen, there's no real reason to put a table in the middle of it and call it a 'breakfast room', and I have a formal dining room already, so I don't need one of those.

This is Mabel's room, too, so it houses her crate and toys. It also houses everything that doesn't quite have a home yet, like my typewriter desk, my hopefully soon-to-be new to me bathroom sink, and other stuff I haven't gotten around to putting away yet.

This is not a great thing to see when you first walk in the door.

I should probably mention that there are no closets at all downstairs. I hide my vacuum cleaner behind my quilt rack. The closest thing to a closet is the laundry room, where we stick all the kitchen stuff that doesn't have a place. Our pantry is stuck in kitchen cabinets and jars displayed on the shelves.

I have been kicking around the idea of actually creating a closet in the entry room. My only issue is that I would have to make it look not stupid; it would have to be something like a built-in or something. There's even a nice rectangle in the floor where something once sat and they didn't put linoleum down. I could put it there, and it could reach all the way up to the ceiling.

Only, that still doesn't address the fact that I don't know what to do with the room itself. Any ideas?

The Green Room is accessible by the living room (via the pocket doors), the hallway (via a door) and it has the door to the bathroom as well. It is also a long room; one of the longer rooms in the house. It is called the Green Room because it is painted a *cough* lovely shade of mint green. Not by me, I swear! Coupled with the beautiful carpet my PO wishes she had taken with her, it was breathtaking, and not in a good way.

At the moment, it is Ethan's toyroom. The cats have their feeding station and two litterboxes in this room as well. The air conditioner is in this room.

When my sister moves out, and with her, all of Ethan's toys, I will have to figure out what to do with this room as well. This is where I'm leaning towards putting the free piano, if it ever gets here. And my Dad suggested that I could move my papasan chair and my mamasan couch to this room, and put something a bit more formal in the living room.

The only problem with that is I need two living rooms less than I need a formal dining room. So I don't think so.

However, I don't want it to be an empty room forever, because I will invariably fill it up with stuff. And I don't want to end up like my PO, really. Honest!

I have toyed with the idea of making the current living room into a library, and moving the TV and couch and stuff into the Green Room, which would make the Green Room the living room, per se. However, since I purged a lot of books, I would really have to buy a lot more books to make a library a viable idea.

I have thought about making some floor-to-ceiling cat trees and giving the Green Room over to the cats and letting that be their room. But then, what do I do about the piano?

I have also thought about buying Mabel a loveseat at Goodwill for the Entry Room, so she can have her own 'couch', since she's not allowed on the furniture otherwise. :)

Other than that, I have no wonderful ideas.

Upstairs is a little easier; one of the free bedrooms will be the spare bedroom. That will probably be Bekah's bedroom. Ethan's bedroom is destined to hold overflow from my office, which will probably end up being fabric. Or, I move all the fabric and sewing machines to Ethan's room and keep everything else in here. I'm not sure about that, though. I'm planning to do the same as downstairs with the upstairs bedrooms--keep one empty and move everything into the empty bedroom while I paint/remove fake dropped ceiling/etc.

I will definitely never run out of space here. Not with all these extra rooms!

Forty years of old letters--from your old house?

2006-09-10T10:08:00.000-04:00

My dad went to a yard sale yesterday, where he found three boxes of old letters (from 1900-1940s) that the seller had picked up at an auction some time ago. He brought the letters home, and after I got home from the RenFaire yesterday, we started to look through them.

There are probably hundreds of letters, from Emily Doughty to her betrothed, Walter E. King, from their children (Elizabeth King and Winnifred King) to their Daddy, along with pictures they drew (there's a particular adorable one that Winnie drew of her Daddy in one of the envelopes), Emily's brother George when he went to see the Paris Exposition of 1900 (he thought the World's Fair in Chicago was better, and he saw the Shaw of Persia (I don't think that's how you spell it, but that's how he spelled it) at the opera--he went to see William Tell.

There's one particularly poignant letter that Emily wrote to Walter in which she says that she is really not looking forward to joining him in Cincinnati, because her home in Greenville Tennessee is the only home she has ever known. And that she will miss it terribly, etc., but that she will get over it, because all women getting ready to marry must feel the same.

As far as we can tell, here is the house she spoke of: http://www.bbonline.com/tn/tanasi/index.html

It is a bed and breakfast now, which is cool. The coolest part, though, is the magnolia tree that her father and mother planted on their return from their Cuban honeymoon--the tree that is still living. Colonel John Harrison Doughty was Emily's father as far as we can tell (we have a letter from brother George to his father addressed to Col. John H. Doughty in Greenville, TN and there may be more--I only had an hour or so to look last night after I got back from the RenFaire.) There are programs for operas from 1910, a couple of deeds, letters and postcards, some photos, and bunches of other stuff. It will take a long time to sort through.

This kind of thing is like candy to me--I love finding history and this is definitely history. It is so cool trying to decode the flowery writing, and even more difficult to decode things when they misspell words as well. The letters from Emily's children to their Daddy are just too cute. They really saved everything!

If I came across a box--or even a letter written by one of the long-dead people who once lived in my house, it would be so cool. It would give me a connection with the past, and allow me to reach across the years like nothing else can. (We were speculating what ifs last night--what if George had been on the Titanic, for example? But he wasn't--I can't remember the name of his ship offhand, but I don't think it sank.

Did Emily--or whomever saved all these letters (I'm assuming it was Emily and Walter, because we have both sides of everything--reread these letters? We've found two or three that were mislabeled and never opened. Why weren't they ever opened? What happened to these people? What happened to Lizzie, who wanted to be an artist? What happened to Winnie? Did they grow up and prosper?

It's like finding a stash of old newspapers in the wall of your house, only better. And although the houses in question (because Walter and Emily lived in Hyde Park in Cincinnati--perhaps we can find that house too?) aren't ours, it's still neat.

I thought some of you would feel the same. :)

EDIT: And whew! Dad has been busy. He has a lot more information now!

Ohio Renaissance Festival

2006-09-08T16:18:00.000-04:00

I will be at the Ohio Renaissance Festival (selling my books tomorrow, and perhaps with some dolls on the other dates, time depending) on the following dates:

Sept. 9
Sept. 23
Oct. 7
Oct. 22

So if anyone is at the Ohio Renaissance Festival on these dates who sees this, mention that you saw this post in my blog or on livejournal and I will sell you one of my books for half price!

POs

2006-08-28T09:54:00.000-04:00

My PO was an elderly lady who filled this house (11 rooms) up with stuff, was not well enough to clean (I'm being nice) and basically could not manage to live here anymore. She should have rented an apartment at a Senior Living facility, instead she paid $5,000 more than what I bought my house for to buy a tiny little prefab house near the hospital.

She is one of those types of people who expect other people to do everything for her. However, my backyard neighbor has told me that all of her 'helpers' basically robbed her of things in return for their help--coming in to help clean and leaving with carloads of stuff. Yeah. She even had a nice Hoosier cabinet in the house that she sold to one of said helpers for less than $200.

So anyway, my backyard neighbor is an 80-something lady who loves my dog and is enjoyable to talk with, etc., etc. Evidently, my PO calls her--at the least weekly--and asks her about us, whether we're still living in 'her' house, whether her picnic table is still in the backyard (I never ever saw a picnic table in the backyard, so my guess is that one of her 'helpers' took it), and she mentions just about every week that she is still mad at me for tearing up the carpet in the living room, green room, hallway, and all the way up the stairs.

(Incidently, I don't think she's gotten anyone to drive her past the house, because she has never mentioned the garden I put out front. And that is something she would have noticed, definitely.)

So anyway, she mentions this carpet constantly. It's really getting on my nerves, because except for a very small piece, it's gone. She has even said that if she knew I was going to tear up the carpet, she would have taken it with her.

I said that I wish she had, because it was a pain in the butt to take up. Ha!

That carpet was in the house when they moved in--in 1978. Odds are, it was older than me. It stank, it was dryrotted, and it was covered with years worth of dust and dirt. Talk about a health hazard!

I am considering sneaking the last piece of carpet onto her front porch one night, but I think her neighbors might call the police.

Here is a picture of the carpet:

Okay, it's not that good of a picture. It's much brighter in real life, floral, with bright blues and greens. With a pale lime green walls (at least in this room--that's why we call it the Green Room) it wasn't what you could call nice.

We uncovered lovely oak floors that didn't even need to be refinished.

(My PO doesn't call me anymore. She started to--she kept asking about stuff that she thought she'd left behind that wasn't here--but when I started to paint the kitchen, I unplugged the only phone in the house and 'forgot' to plug it back in.)

My backyard neighbor calls her my landlord. hahaha. I'm not sure I really like that, but I know she is joking.

Just call me the crazy cat lady...

2006-08-07T13:50:00.000-04:00

I am a cat person. (Hopefully Miss Mabel won't read this and take it the wrong way.) My family has always had outside cats, and I grew up imagining the day when I could have my own house and my very own indoor cat would sleep with me, curled up at the foot of my bed, or beside me, or on me, or whatever.

Right before I moved out of my parents' house, they did allow two of the cats to be indoor/outdoor cats, and my cat Punkin did sleep with me at night. It was just as nice as I had imagined.

Fast forward to now, and I have my own house. At the moment, I have four indoor only cats and one outdoor only cat (due to some indoor issues she is now outside permanently.) After Cleo moved outside, I ended up feeding two or three of the feral cats that roam the neighborhood as well as my own. I don't really mind; they aren't doing any damage and Cleo actually gets along better with them than she does with anyone inside, for some reason.

Two weeks ago, someone either dropped a kitten off at my house or it wandered in from somewhere. It seems to be partly feral--we're working on the trust issue at the moment, and making progress--but it is the cutest kitten and it is sticking around my house, so I guess I'm claiming him or her as well.

Its eyes are blue, although you can't see that in the picture. I think it looks like a Siamese cat, too. It has lovely cream colored fur. I am hopeful that I can get it tamed and to the vet so I can help stop the spread of ferals in the neighborhood. I am not sure how my other cats would take to an addition.

I really like this picture

2006-07-22T18:15:00.000-04:00

The sunflowers I planted in front of my garden are starting to bloom.

Can anyone identify this flower?

2006-06-12T18:43:00.000-04:00

I found this growing in my little patch of 'woods' out back. It is a vine without viney tendrils, if that makes sense. I took the second picture to get a good view of the leaves. I haven't had any luck looking in my plant books as of yet, but I'm going to break out the Big Book in a minute here. Anyone?

They are really small flowers, about as long as my thumbnail, perhaps. The plant itself is probably close to 3ft. tall. Whatever it is, it's lovely, but I would really like to know its name!

EDIT: I should have known this, but in my defense, I've only really seen Nightshade once. This is Climbing Nightshade, less poisonous than Deadly Nightshade, but still poisonous. I still like the flowers!

Vinegar

2006-06-02T20:07:00.000-04:00

Vinegar can also be used as a solvent for removing the adhesive residue tapes leave on glass and plastic. It works well for quickly removing an adhesive residue that has been left on for about 1-2 weeks. To remove the adhesive residue using vinegar, you should:

Apply the vinegar to a cloth or paper towel.
Dab the cloth or paper towel in a little bit of vinegar.
Scrub at the surface with the damp side of the cloth or paper towel.
Dry the surface.

from Wikipedia.

Guess what? It also works on the glue residue left on my linoleum! My entry room smells like vinegar now. *sigh* But the test spot came right off! Very cool.

Wallpaper up! (Well, some of it anyway.)

2006-06-01T23:29:00.000-04:00

I learned how to put up wallpaper from Bob the Builder. No, really. There's this episode where he's putting up wallpaper and he puts the glue on the wallpaper first. Up until that second, I had always assumed that you'd put the glue on the wall, because doesn't that make more sense? I can't imagine trying to wrestle a sticky wall-sized sheet of wallpaper, and then trying to line it up correctly. It would make so much more sense to put the glue on the wall first.

Needless to say, I'm not done yet. Since I'm using ancient wallpaper, I decided to wait after three panels to see if it was going to disentegrate on me. I would have been very mad if I had done the whole border and then wake up in the morning to find it all over my kitchen floor.

Here is a close-up of the pattern. It's actually very pretty, and the brown is actually gold accents.

I don't know how old it is, and I can't read the maker's name on the other side. It's blurred. But I like it, and it only cost me fifty cents for a roll at Goodwill. :)

Although I can't imagine an entire room done in this at all. *shudder*

Progress in the kitchen

2006-05-31T15:31:00.000-04:00

I started painting the kitchen last May. I have no real excuse why I didn't finish painting it. I got involved with outdoor stuff, and it just never got done.

I wanted the old, decrepit gas heater out of the way before I painted this wall, but since that doesn't look like it will be happening soon (I need Dad's help) I painted around it. As the POs did, too.

I, um, also painted around the fridge. Because I can't seem to move it by myself and everyone else is in vacation in Florida until Saturday. But luckily I have plenty of paint for that leftover.

Now I get to attempt to hang the wallpaper above the cabinets. It will be the only place in my house that has wallpaper. (Well, not now, of course. But eventually.)

It is vintage wallpaper, and I matched the blue in the wallpaper with the paint I chose. It should look quite nice, but I have to hang it first. Have I mentioned I have never hung wallpaper in my life? So we'll see how things go.

Here are three of my lovely helpers. Mabel's job was to make sure the cats didn't end up blue. The cats' job, apparently, was to watch the brush move up and down on the wall with wide, interested eyes.

I have seen no footprints, so I guess Mabel did a good job. :)

(These are only two of the five cats, by the way. And note the lovely floor. You can't really see it in the picture, but it's in sad shape.

This is the gratuitous kitchen table shot, where you can see exactly where I piled everything that I took off the shelves, the top of the heater, and the wall.

I am glad everyone is on vacation, because there would be no way we could eat on this table like this. It's bad enough that I had to eat breakfast and lunch beside a can of paint. :)

Miss Mabel is pooped. She worked so hard painting the kitchen. Haha.

She doesn't know it yet, but later I get to clip her nails, which have grown rather long. (She hates that!)

And now, onto the wallpaper. I will post pics if it turns out. I'm not promising disaster pictures, though, but we'll see. (I tend to forget the camera while working.

Stumped.

2006-05-27T12:02:00.000-04:00

So I found the spot where my next-door neighbor's neighbor almost burned down my house when she was a kid (she said it was her sister's fault, and I know a candle was involved.) It wasn't the living room as she said--it was in the entry room, where I'm taking up the flooring.

Actually, I'm glad I found it because we had intended to bring the piano in from the kitchen door, and it would have rolled right over this (rather large) spot. And I just bet the floor wouldn't have held the piano and it would have ended up in the crawlspace, and I would have had to take up the floor anyway!

I have that spot covered up by a rug at the moment, so no pics of that. However, today as I worked to pull up the last bit of flooring, I found something else:

It is wood, and an exact rectangle. At first I thought it was another burned spot (little firebugs!) however now I'm not sure. The linoleum isn't melted like it is in the other spot, and this seems too deliberate.

I'm pretty sure this room was the kitchen at one time--could it have been where a cabinet once sat? There are metal strips tacked to the wood, presumably covering up holes.

This is plywood, I think, put down over top what looks like tar paper overtop who knows what (probably the original floor or subfloor, I guess.) There's a gap where the short baseboard sat that allowed me to see the tarpaper, which I didn't disturb, other than to suck all the gunk out of the gap.

As you can see here, it's obvious that the linoleum was burned. So I really don't think this is another burned spot. (This is the small part that isn't covered by the rug along with the flooring that was glued down on the burned wood, which makes it next to impossible to get off.)

The burned spot spans the entrance to the kitchen almost exactly. I am wondering if they decided to put the door to the kitchen there for that reason alone.

Mabel isn't very happy to stay in the kitchen while I'm working in her room, but she'll just have to live. The burned spot is about sixteen inches wide, maybe more in the middle, and spans the entire entrance of the kitchen and spreads a bit on either side. I'm still not sure what I will do with these two spots eventually--for now they will be covered up, I guess. At least there's no gaping holes in the floor!

More pics

2006-05-20T15:49:00.000-04:00

The pink tile in the picture below (the previous post) was paired with a not-so-lovely poop brown. Why anyone would want a pink and brown streaked floor is beyond me!

I did continue--it actually comes up quite easily about 85% of the time.

The brown stuff is most definitely glue, but it's not sticky. I'm going to try a couple of things to see if I can get it off once I'm done.

This is the opposite side from where I started--that white strip over by the door is cemented on with glue. Ugh! Someone got a little overenthusiastic with the glue right there.

The picture above is the doorway between the dining room and the entry room. I am starting to think that this floor might be original (?) because the hardwood floor is actually slightly higher than the tile/whatever floor. And I would think that if it had been hardwood, there would be too much of a different in heighths there. But I am no expert.

At the moment, though, I am taking a break because my knees hurt, my wrists hurt, and I need to take a shower, get dressed, and drive to my parents' house to take care of their plants and animals. But I'm figuring I might try to get at least halfway done by the time I go to bed. We'll see.

Okay...

2006-05-20T14:26:00.000-04:00

I can forgive my POs for covering up that floor. They didn't cover up the green and tan tiles. Oh, no. What I thought was a layer of peachy plastic that they put down before the adhered that fake wood floor to it was actually the floor they covered up. If that makes sense. So I'm tearing up two layers, essentially.

The pink ick floor looked like this:

I don't think I could have lived with that at all. Especially not in a room with yellow walls!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Question? For anyone who knows...

2006-05-20T13:46:00.000-04:00

Okay, so in my entry room (the room you walk in through the side door and the room we figure was originally the kitchen, since the kitchen was built on much later) there is a butt-ugly plastic floor that is supposed to look like wood.

I have always assumed there was a wood floor underneath--the rest of the house is oak--because if you look in the crawlspace, there is wood there.

Today while cleaning, I am going to say oops, my sweeper snagged on a loose piece of flooring and lie through my teeth, but anyway, this is what I found after some destruction:

Pardon my flash, it's a dark corner. And the tiles are filthy--I even wiped them off before taking a picture. Yuck!

Now. My question is, should I continue? I really don't have any money to replace the floor. The colors are nice enough--and the few tiles I've uncovered aren't in bad shape. Of course I haven't uncovered many tiles at all.

Can anyone take a guess as to how old this floor is? Is it linoleum? Or something else? It is ceramic-y like when I tap on it with my pry bar tool.

My upstairs bathroom has butt-ugly tiles similar to these, but in brown:

Do you think the floors were put on at the same time? This was the original bathroom upstairs--the downstairs bathroom was probably added on the same time as the kitchen.

So what do you think?

Oh boy! Or, Why I need to win the lottery.

2006-05-11T20:46:00.000-04:00

I made the mistake of looking at HistoricProperties.com today. And that is when I decided that I really need to win the lottery.

Or maybe all of us housebloggers can go in together to buy this. There are only 60 bedrooms, so we'd have to share, but I'm sure we could convert something, like a carriage house, or something. We'd also have to share the title of baron, too.

Oh, wait a second, maybe we wouldn't have to share--there are "numerous solid oak libraries" too. I'd take one of those. You all can fight over the rest of it. :)

(Honestly, I can't imagine that it only has 60 bedrooms!)

Hey--there are even bungalows, and apartments, too! I'm sure we'd all fit. So, what do you say? :)

Spare time?

2006-05-01T18:58:00.000-04:00

Here is what I do when I'm not:

a. at work
b. doing housework
c. writing books
d. mowing the lawn or gardening
e. working on the house
f. cleaning up after the crew
g. sleeping
h. eating
i. surfing the internet
j. commuting
k. ummmmm.

More information can be found over at my main blog, DisOrganization, if you're so inclined to wander over!

Yard sales!

2006-04-29T13:01:00.000-04:00

Yard sale season is one of my favorite seasons. Not that you can tell, of course. :)

It goes hand-in-hand with auction season, which is also upon us.

This weekend was the Georgetown Yard Sales. I took Carrotcake cupcakes (baked from scratch, with Orange Cream Cheese Icing--yum) up to the church yard sale this morning and decided to drive around the block or so to go to a couple of yard sales before I went back home. I also had to get gas for the lawn mower too, and I wanted to get all my errands done at once.

Well, the first yard sale I stopped at (I passed a couple with only clothes and stuff I wasn't interested in) filled my car.

For $10.

I now have a new bathroom sink (or will, once we install it.)

I am not usually a fan of doing this to poor, defenseless sewing machines. Especially treadle machines, which are maligned anyway. However, I did also buy the sewing machine itself, for someone who is looking for one to put into a treadle machine he recently refinished and repaired.

I couldn't pass it up. Seriously. If I had been broker than broke, I still couldn't have passed it up. Do you want to know why?

I said I filled up my car for $10. There was a $1.00 price tag on this. :)

And I beat the dealers, who came up right behind me to look at it, too. I beat the dealers! Hahaha!

So the sink built into a sewing machine base (and all the pieces and plumbing thingys are there as far as I can tell) cost me $1.00. I bought the actual sewing machine for $5, two rugs for $1 each, and two tins for $1 each.

This will replace the current setup (don't mind the mess, please), which looks like this:

Don't you agree that it will be an improvement?

Oh, and the nice thing is that it's oak (at least I think it's oak--I'm not very good at this, but my house has all oak floors, so I tend to know oak, at least) so it will match the nice oak cabinet over the toilet.

And then I can work on replacing the fugly medicine cabinet, the toilet, and eventually, the tub/shower. Which are also pink. *shudder*

Other than those things, I bought a very deep bundt pan (I think that's what they are called) for $.50, and eight old bottles for $1/each. Six of the bottles are cobalt blue, so they will go in my windowsills. :)

(This makes me feel better for not buying the $30 antique sink at Burlington last weekend. I drooled over that sink. It had cool, original knobs. It even had one marked 'WASTE'. But it also weighed about 300 lbs, and as Dad said, even for $30, there was no way we'd ever get it into his car.)

Gardening

2006-04-13T19:22:00.000-04:00

I grew up with my family's huge garden. We never bought vegetables from the store. I didn't even know canned lima beans existed until I moved away and saw them on a shelf.

(I can always filch from Mom and Dad, but ya know, I want my own garden too!)

Last year, I removed sod from the middle of two flowerbeds to make a 'garden.' In truth, my 10 tomato plants gave me over 3 gallons of juice, plus enough tomatoes to make me happy for the season. I had zucchini and cucumbers and gourds that went nutso. For a small space, it packed a big punch.

But there is this spot in the front yard between the spruce tree, the forsynthia, and the lilacs, that is nice and flat and just begging to be a garden.

However, it's probably 20' x 40' , so there's no way in hell I'm going to dig up the sod myself, unless I really want to die, because it was hard enough to do that last year.

So tonight, after talking it over with Dad and getting his experienced opinion (I already have rave reviews from a coworker of mine), I ordered a Mantis Tiller/Cultivator. Edible landscaping, here I come!

Decisions, Decisions

2006-04-01T09:44:00.000-05:00

So I snuck out to the store yesterday, got a can of paint, and painted the wall in my hallway this color:

The floor is still dusty, and I had to move all the bookcases again. But I really like this color! Doesn't it look nice?!?!!! :)

Yes, yes, I'm lame. Note the date. :)

Empty Wall!

2006-03-27T13:11:00.000-05:00

This is the same wall in the pictures below. A bit dusty, but done! Yay! The right tool sure does help... (I went to the REAL hardware store this morning.)

Blisters and Blood

2006-03-26T17:43:00.001-05:00

I'm fairly sure I will have blisters on my fingers by the time I go to bed tonight. At the moment, I am using a razor blade to scrape the wallpaper, and while it's going quite well, it's a bit hard on my fingers. (Not to mention that I broke a juice glass this morning and sliced my pinkie quite badly. Ouch!)

But hey, that goes with the territory, no?

I realize there are specific tools for wallpaper removal. I went to our local store (not hardware store--we don't really have one. We have two lumberyards that carry hardware supplies. The one right down the street is never open when I need to go there, and the other one isn't open on Sundays) to see if they had anything, but they only had paint scrapers. I did buy one, just to see if it would work any better than the butter knife, but it didn't work very well at all, even after I tried my best to sharpen the blade.

Ah well.

My house-related goal for the weekend (ends Monday night) is to have the one wall finished so I can put the bookcases back. My office is a mess because of all this rearranging, and I have a coat rack in the middle of my room that I'd rather have somewhere else. After having everything nicely organized for a while now, clutter gets on my nerves fast!

I keep reminding myself that my fingers used to look like this all the time when I did polymer clay regularly and used the very same razor blades to cut the canes of clay. But I still don't remember any blisters.

(However silly it sounds, I think I need to get some of those soft thimbles to wear while I'm working. Hmm. You would think in the piles of sewing stuff I possess that I would already have some of these, but I don't think I do. I will have to check in the Secret Sewing Junk Drawer, though, just in case.)

I only have one thing to say...

2006-03-25T16:18:00.000-05:00

Hmm. I could write my to-do list on the wall and scrape off the wallpaper as I complete the task! Brilliant!! :)

Hey, you strippers!

2006-03-25T12:35:00.000-05:00

Got your attention? Good. :)

I have a question for all the house bloggers out there about paint strippers. I have four sides of four doors and three doorways to strip paint from.

The paint looks like this:
There is actually two layers--a weird-o salmon puke and the yellow. The paint is shiny and I don't know what kind it is. It's almost like lacquer paint instead of paint, if that helps any.

I am not sure why these doors were painted and no other woodwork in the house was touched. It is only in one room, and it's been there for at least 50 years, or whenever they put on the kitchen/bathroom/laundry room addition, because when they put on the addition, they moved the real side door to the back (in the kitchen) and it's painted as well. If that makes any sense.

I don't want to spend a lot of money for the little amount of paint stripping I have to do here, but I'm also not sure what the best product would be to buy. I would like to use something that will not make me ill while working, too. Does that soy stuff really work? Or is it citrus stuff?

As you can see, there aren't really any carvings or whatever to worry about. It's pretty plain.

Underneath, where the paint has flaked off the dining room door (the one on the left in the picture above) over the years, the door is stained or whatever you call that. Is there a way to strip the paint off without harming the stain/whatever underneath?

Thanks to anyone who replies--I am rather clueless about all of this. :)

Playing with colors...

2006-03-20T13:44:00.000-05:00

I decided not to tear down any wallpaper today. However, I've been playing with the Benjamin Moore Personal Color Viewer, and trying out colors for my hallway. What do you think? Here are my two favorites (currently, the first one is my favorite.)

I am thinking about doing an stencil in the band between the colors--period, of course, but I couldn't find anything earlier that I could make look decent.

I am, however, in love with this:

It is an illustration from Decorative Flowers, which is a book full of Art Nouveau designs. Not the right period, I know.

I thought about replicating the original wallpaper that I uncovered last night (or close to it, at least) but I don't have a big enough piece to see the entire rest of the pattern (Here's a picture, though.)

However, I do like the first stencil on the list from this site as well. (The Craftsman Vine.) But it's too big. DE13 from this site is cool. (There doesn't seem to be a way to see individual ones on this website, which is kind of irritating when you're trying to link.) I also like DE22, 24, and 28 from the same site.

Here's a really bad photoshopped border:

Obviously, it wouldn't be done in black. But I don't think it would look too bad, do you? (It's not like it will be very visible, especially in this spot, since the bookcases would cover it. But it would be fun to try.

The Dark Green Wallpaper of Doom

2006-03-19T12:16:00.000-05:00

Aha! So maybe I am getting a little obsessed with the wallpaper, because I ended up tearing more down this morning before church. And look what I found:

I still haven't been able to get a good picture of one of the flowers, but at least you can get the idea. This portion was obviously put up by someone who couldn't see straight, because it's about three pieces all pasted together. Definitely not a good job.

I started on the ceiling, too. The first layer is printed pink and white mottled wallpaper. Ugh!

Progress!

2006-03-18T17:40:00.000-05:00

I am working on uncovering a bigger patch of the Dark Green Wallpaper of Doom--I can actually see half of the huge yellow and cream colored flowers that evidently were all over this wonderful vintage pattern. *coughchoke*

Yeah, right. My mind is still trying to imagine all the hallways (upstairs & downstairs) wallpapered in dark green with large cream colored flowers. I would post a picture, but Blogger (I tend to type Blooger when I'm mad) isn't letting me post pictures at the moment. Argh!

However, I did move two of the three bookcases and start on the wall behind them.

So, progress!

Curses to the Dragon Smaug!

2006-03-18T12:11:00.000-05:00

For some reason, as I remove the wallpaper in my hallway (my wing of the house hallway, that is) that phrase keeps running through my mind. Maybe I've been writing too much lately or something; I don't know.

Today, in between chapters, I decided that I might as well start pulling off more of the wallpaper in my hallway. I started doing this a couple of months ago, since I figured that if I didn't start now I'd be dead before all the wallpaper is gone from my house, but I hadn't made much progress since then.

(You all are going to get pretty tired of me talking about wallpaper, I think.)

This is three layers down. At the moment, the current layer is just peeling off in sheets, which is nice. Under that is light blue where they painted over it at some point, and then there and layers under that as well, including the Dark Green Wallpaper of Doom, which I haven't been able to uncover a big enough piece of to take pictures of yet.

You can see a small strip of the DGWoD in this picture. The grey color is the plaster, the white in the picture is actually the light blue painted wallpaper.

I figured I might as well start in my hallway because it's accessible (I can reach the ceiling without too much trouble and a small stepladder) and if I screw something up with the patching and paint job, the bookcases should cover up my mistakes. This is my practice run. I should be an expert by the time I'm finished, since I have sooooo much wallpaper. (That nice white ceiling is painted wallpaper. Yes. How anyone actually managed to wallpaper ceilings, I will never know.)

Again, the white in the picture (pardon my flash; it's a dark hallway) is the light blue. So I have a lot of work to do.

You can see the lovely pink wallpaper in my studio/office in this picture as well. It's actually not in bad shape, and my bedroom and the office will probably be two of the last rooms I work on.

My supervisor--aka, Mabel--isn't very pleased with my progress yet today. She would rather me be finished so she could reclaim her rug in my hallway and not have to listen to me curse. Considering that my weapon of choice in removing wallpaper is a butter knife (I can't find my paint scraper) I think I'm actually getting a lot done.

If I could only train the cats to scratch the walls...

Crazy Neighbor

2006-03-12T18:17:00.000-05:00

I have a crazy neighbor. Well, two of them really, but one is really crazy and the other is harmless-crazy.

I am also an advocate for garbage picking, if you do it properly. I even wrote a little essay on the subject after Dad and I cleaned out the little building a couple of years ago.

However, the lady crazy neighbor (herein LCN) is a bit much. When Mom and Dad and I cleaned out my basement--old moldy garbage the PO left behind--(and it was garbage, too. Like mildewed and moldy masonite boards and dirt and filth and woodshavings and a pressboard entertainment center that was dripping wet and falling apart, etc., etc.) we ended up with about 6 or 7 contractor bags of garbage to set out to the curb, along with piles of the other debris we couldn't fit in the bags.

LCN took everything. As soon as the sun set, she snuck out of her house and took all the stuff lying in piles, and then she came back for the bags as well.

She claims she intended to recycle them, but I just don't know. Neighborhood gossip says that the house (which is a rather nice Victorian farmhouse (she says my house is older, but I disagree--there's always been a house there on the fire insurance maps, so who knows) is full of crap. Like, hoarding full, if you get my drift.

So anyway, the other day we took some leftover stuff from the basement out to the garbage. The bag stank of mold and mildew. And I mean stank. Not only did she take that (leaving just my garbage can behind) she also took the bag of cereal boxes and stuff we didn't put in the can (milk bottles? Cartons?) and everything else that was sitting out. My across the street neighbors also moved out last weekend, and all she didn't take from their pile (and it was a large pile) was a broken porch swing and a box. I did check out the porch swing myself, but it looked like it was beyond repair.

Yesterday, I cleaned the bathroom. There's a bag full of dirty paper towels, hedgehog litter and droppings, cat litter (used, of course) and nasty gross stuff out at the curb. I told my sister that if she takes that, we know she's got a mental problem.

But seriously. I can see taking useable recyclables. But actual garbage? Please!

(She has offered to pull her van up to my shed when we clean it out this spring and fill it up so we don't have to carry everything out to the curb. I don't mind doing this--as long as I already know what we're tossing (I'm keeping all the copper piping, for example, and useable stuff) but I feel like I'm really just feeding the problem. So who knows what we'll end up doing.)

Guy Crazy Neighbor (GCN) is an alcoholic who suffers from dementia and probably early alzheimer's. He is the one I saw standing naked beside his garage last summer when Mabel and I were on our way home from a walk. I don't walk past their house anymore for that reason. (I did not need to see a naked crazy old guy. Ugh!) He's also really hard to understand, because he's missing a lot of teeth and he tends to stutter. And he kind of scares me a bit, since he's verifiably crazy. But anyway. He hasn't bothered us for a long while. (Knock on wood!)

Cleaning the Bathroom

2006-03-11T12:07:00.000-05:00

My house has two 'full' bathrooms. The downstairs bathroom is pink and green and the upstairs bathroom is pretty old, with a three-legged clawfoot tub, an old but cool sink, and a toilet that tends to overflow if you go #2, according to the PO. (I've never actually put that to a test.)

We don't use the upstairs bathroom. With only three of us in the house, we've never really had any reason to, so it's been the home to the upstairs litterboxes and Hildy-the-hedgehog's cage for a while now. It's also been getting filthier and filthier.

Oh, I should probably add that the hot water is turned off in the upstairs bathroom. Early on, Dad turned it on and it started spraying everywhere. It probably has something to do with the way the plumbing was put together. We will fix it eventually.

The upstairs bathroom is in my 'wing' of the house, so of course I get to clean it.

Here are some during/after pics:

The 'tile' is actually fake--it's wallboard or something and will be *cough* quite fun to take down. As you can see, I had a couple of helpers, although they were more interested in checking out the birds out back and the clean sink.

(Cleome is on the back of the toilet and Chloe is in the sink.)

Before I started, Hildy's cage was straddling the tub. It wasn't the best of setups, but it worked for the most part until I got the idea that I could put the cage overtop the litterboxes--if it fit. As you can see in the next picture, it's a bit tight.

As in, if the toilet was any further over, it wouldnt' have fit. Luckily, I can fit between the tub and the cage just fine.

Don't you just love that wonderful tile on the floor? As far as I can tell, there's hardwood underneath. Probably more oak, like the rest of the house.

That is Cleo's tail, and Misty the kitten.

You can't really see her, but Hildy's in the little pink house.

There are two litterboxes in the bathroom. Since the round one fit quite well in the corner under/beside the sink, guess where the other one went?

Okay, don't kill me. I know it's an antique tub. I know. But I can't take a bath upstairs anyway (at least not at the moment) so...

There's some good points about this--it will virtually eliminate the tracked litter I kept having to clean up on the floor (hence the reason why the floor was so filthy.)

Again, don't you just love that tile?

We will have some old water leakage problems to repair once we take the floor up, because the PO didn't take her own advice to go downstairs to the bathroom.

Instead, she let the toilet overflow many, many times, in fact, badly enough that there's a nice large expanse of water stains on the dropped ceiling in the entry room below.

Luckily, there's nothing sitting below the clawfoot tub, so if the floor is really rotten and it ever falls through, it will just end up in the crawlspace. (I'm kidding, really. There's probably a hole, but I don't believe it's that extensive. *crossing fingers*)
This project, of course, will have to wait until I can save up some money, because I have a feeling it's not going to be easy or pretty.

There is a nice built-in cabinet in the bathroom--someone defaced it with a wooden mirror long ago. But here's a not-too-great picture of it:

It might be original to the house, but I'm not sure. It's hard to tell.

I will, of course, eventually either take off that mirror or make it so it doesn't look so terrible on the cabinet.

The radiator is under the cabinet. It's a small one, but the bathroom heats up really well in winter, so Hildy is happy, since she needs more heat.

That is my elbow in the picture. :)

And since my office is unheated (the radiator in here leaked at one point, so it's unhooked) that helps as well. Although I really don't think my office got much colder than 62 all winter long this year.

It was so hot in the bathroom while I was cleaning it that I opened the window. It's raining outside, but it's not that cold. The fresh was very nice!

Wallpaper!

2006-03-06T17:25:00.000-05:00

I have enough wallpaper removal to do to last me the next ten years. All the rooms in the house except for two bedrooms, the living room, and what we call the Green Room (Yes, it's green, but not a color I'd ever choose) are covered in multiple layers of wallpaper.

One of the POs even nicely painted over the wallpaper in the hallway at one time, which consists of at least six layers. (I peeled six layers apart once, early on, just to see the patterns.) I think the dining room has about eight layers.

My plaster walls have never been painted, so that will definitely be interesting to do. :)

So today after I discovered that I inadvertently damaged part of the damaged dining room floor (the 'conservatory' part of the dining room where all my plants reside for the winter) I peeled the wallpaper away from under the bay window, because I was just disgusted with myself for not realizing that a clay saucer will make a mark on wood and that after sitting on said wood for the last few months, it will bleach and mildew the wood so I have a nice circle of yuck, and I was sick and tired of the sagging wallpaper.

I pulled, and about five feet of wallpaper came free, all the way behind the radiator. (Why they would put a radiator in a bay window, I'll never know.)

I then picked at some on the wall where it was starting to peel off.

The plaster walls don't look to be in bad shape. There are cracks, of course, but not major ones, and they are lily white. Even the wallpaper paste of yore did not stick.

I know I have a lot of work ahead of me--did I mention that the ceilings upstairs (hallway ceiling and two bedrooms) are also wallpapered? And painted?--but I have plenty of time to do it.

Although I will admit that the varying layers of wallpaper showing in the dining room would be a good history lesson, if I could date them.

"And this is how the dining room looked in 1924..."

(I did keep a piece of the old and nasty carpet to show visitors what was covering my beautiful oak floors since before 1978.)

Introduction

2006-03-04T12:45:00.000-05:00

This will be my house project blog, where I can keep things straight and post plenty of pictures without clogging up my main blog, DisOrganization.

My house is:

--located in a small town in Southern Ohio
--frame, with a stone foundation
--over 100 years old--it shows up on the 1904 Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps
--currently home to me, my sister and nephew, five cats, an English Bulldog, a baby ball python, a hibernating box turtle, and a hedgehog

I decided to call the blog "House St. Clair" because that's the title of my website, and it's all connected anyway. (And I've been meaning to make a blog for my house for a while now.

The story:

In December of 2002, I got a divorce, moved back in with my parents and spent the next year and a half paying off credit card debt while also saving to buy a house. My parents own an 1850s Colonial Revival-style brick farmhouse, so I grew up in old houses and could not imagine myself in anything that was in any way, shape, or form, cookie-cutter-ish.

In truth, I envisioned myself in a cottage or a bungalow. Instead, I ended up buying (a year early, too) a four bedroom, eleven room white monster.

In August of 2004, my dream home was put on the market. Since I had always been partial to this particular house (and stone houses in general) I bit the bullet and went to the bank, despite knowing that I would never be qualified for the loan. I wasn't, but my credit looked good enough for me to qualify for something, so thus started the mad race of the next month as I decided to try to get a house a year before I had even planned to start looking.

(I had never really stopped looking, but once my dream house was put on the market, I decided that I might as well try.)

My current house was the third house I looked at. It was billed as just needing the final touches of restoration--it needs a bit more than that--but the house is sound, the woodwork is unpainted except for three doors, and the stained glass window in the dining room was (to me, at least) to die for. And I have a front porch. And a porch swing. Among other things!

There are eight layers of wallpaper in my dining room.

The old lady who lived in my house had lived there since 1978. Her husband had died a few years earlier, and she just couldn't handle such a big place on her own. (Not to mention she kept the thermostat cranked up really high, so she had some major gas bills.) Before that, as far as I've been able to tell, the house was owned and rented by the Shafers (haven't been able to find anything about them yet.) The courthouse burned down in the 70s and most of the property records were lost, so I don't know if I'll be able to go back any further than what I have already.

At the moment, my house is covered by aluminum siding (white and peeling.) As far as I've been able to tell, the original wood siding is underneath. Eventually, finances permitting, I plan to remove all of that, but I will paint the aluminum siding first, because I can't afford it at the moment.

While I like cottages, my high ceilings and huge windows are growing on me. I sure can't complain about the nice oak floors we found under the carpet (that didn't have to be refinished) but I can complain about the state of the house when I moved in (filthy.)

I got the keys to my house on December 11, 2004. Two weeks later, an ice storm raged through town, knocking out the power for 48 hours. That was only the beginning!