Nice Hardware

So after I painstakingly (we are talking at least three coats) painted the doors from their original wood color. I'm not normally against wood, but this was not the same shade as either the hardwood floors or the molding. It also make the house feel a bit dated. I know you can't tell it from the photos, but the doors also had a little bit of an old person smell to them (like the carpets we removed and the walls we repainted). One last look at them:

We had thought about replacing the doors as I was shocked at how little doors costed (<25 dollars each) compared to what I thought they would cost (at least 100). But we thought it was worth trying to paint them first because this is even cheaper and easier. And now the white color:

I think painting them turned out just fine. But now that they are all spiffy and new looking, we noticed that the old brass hardware was in need of an upgrade. Brass has its time and place (lion door knockers), but that time and place was not the interior doors. Chris picked out some really nice brushed silver ones and has since replaced all of the finished interior doors:

This has certainly helped to make the place look more modern and it is a pretty cheap fix. Beyond the clean look, the new door knobs also work much better than the old ones and were definitely worth it. 

Tree Root Sadness

Now, I have always been a lover of trees. This love affair has ended with the maples lining the back fence. I was willing to put up with them destroying the unused sidewalk back there:

But we are through, now that I have realized they are invading the bottom of the pool:

Initially, we though these lines were just wrinkles in the liner, but it has become clear that they are tree roots coming from the incriminating maples on the other side of the fence. We aren't quite sure what to do with them, as they are close to the road and likely on the town's property, but there isn't much we can do until we replace the liner (hopefully, sometime before next season). Boo.

Baseboard Finishing Touches

Yay for finishing a project (again). So I thought I had finished painting the baseboards in the Living Room, but that was before Chris pulled up the carpet. So a job that was 'finished,' sadly wasn't:

And here is a shot of the one corner that shows it in a larger scale:

Yea, I know when I do things they won't be perfect, but this wasn't even close the clean, polished, and finished look I was going for. So, using a putty knife I scraped off all the remaining carpet (both the red, and a green shag that must have come before that) and tried to make the baseboards as smooth as possible. Next came the paint:

Let the oohs and ahhs commence. Okay...so it isn't that impressive, but it is done. You can still see a bit of the unevenness of having multiple layers of paint but in some zoomed out after shots it isn't that noticeable:

And for completeness:

That is much closer to the polished and finished look that I was going for. So *knock on wood* this is one project that is done. 

Floored!

As I mentioned last week, I am extremely happy with the wood floors, but there were some problems. One of the most scary for me was the gap in the wooden slats at the bottom of the stairs:

I was concerned on how we could possibly fix this. Most of our other floor problems would be fixed by refinishing, but you can't just refinish an inch gap in the flooring.


While carefully cleaning all of the wood floors last week, I noticed a small scratch near the steps that didn't line up for this piece of wood. I thought hopefully that maybe, just maybe, this would be as simple as getting under the stairs and simply sliding that bit of wood over. Luckily, Chris agreed and gave it a try and tah-dah:

That little piece just slid right over, back into place. Phew! I am glad that is one problem around here that was easy to fix. 

Updated: The Before Page

As more than one of you has voiced their concerns over the lameness of the post of the hydrangea (who by the way is crying over the lack of love), I have decided to redeem myself just a bit, and update the Before tab of this blog.


It still isn't quite finished, but I have added half a dozen new pictures. You can access it by clicking the Before link in this tab or by clicking the Before tab located just below the title on this blog. I hope you enjoy. 

Flowers of a Different Color

So I previously posted about how excited I was about the hydrangea in the front yard. My mother mentioned that she didn't really see the blue in the last picture. They slowly turned more blue and I wanted to share an updated shot that really shows off the blue flowers:

Another reason for this post is that I noticed that there are actually two hydrangea plants growing very closely to each other. Additionally, the second one must have slightly different soil conditions or is a different variety because it has molted purple blooms:

They are rather striking next to the blue blooms, but they were quite a surprise. More on stuff going on inside the house later this week, but we had a busy weekend because Shelly came to visit! As those of us on the East Coast know, it was super hot this weekend and it was great to have her over to enjoy the pool and beat the heat.  

Here Birdie, Birde

So one of the things that I love about having made the move to the suburbs is the wealth of small animal life. As Lucy has already discovered we have bunnies, squirrels, and lil chipmunks (also shrew-like mammals that the hawks keep dropping in the pool....not so cute). There is also a wealth of flying life that makes for nice, peaceful background noise around the pool. There are robins, sparrows, owls, woodpeckers, and love birds (along with some others I haven't yet identified). I also found the blue jay hangout at the local park...so they don't just steal tater tots from the sonics. As much as I enjoy the bird, it seems also that the last owner did too. He incorporated them into some of the exterior design elements. Here is an example from the back of the house:

Not to be outdone, there is one for the front hose too:

As adorable as both of these guys are, they have nothing on the painting on the back fence:

The ivy has done a number on the painting over the last couple of years. I keep trimming it back, but it is a tenacious plant. Regardless, I think these little touches are really charming and they make me appreciate the little critters even more. 

Couches!

So although the Living Room isn't quite finished, we decided we desperately needed somewhere to watch TV. We had picked out a couch and loveseat set that was a dark chocolate brown before we had even moved into this house. The plan was for it to match Chris' beloved recliner. 


Well, we went back to that furniture store to make sure we still loved the set we had picked out and happened upon a nicer set in a lighter color. Although Chris really wanted recliners, they are really ugly and I was happy that he though these couches were more comfortable than the one we had picked out before:

They are this soft suede like material. They feel wonderful, but aren't the the most photogenic...sorry. Before we went back to look at the couches we did some measuring. I really wanted the loveseat to be centered under the window. Chris insisted that regardless it wasn't going to be. Well guess what?

No surprise, but I was right again. We basically just walked into the store and saw these couches. They were a calculated impulse buy (they were discounted because we had to move them ourselves :-/). They are really well sized for that side of the room given that we didn't really measure them:

I think they go really well in the space and for 600 dollars for the set (plus the cost of renting the truck and taxes), I don't think we could have done much better. The pillows came with the couches and seem to play nicely with the blues and yellows in the room. Maybe not something I want to keep permanently, but in the meantime, the pillows certainly add a polished touched to the otherwise empty room. Overall, I am really happy with them and even happier that we have somewhere to sit. We are practically grown-ups at this point. Now just for a coffee table, and a rug, and some endtables, and wall art, and...well, I guess practically might be a stretch. 

TV Install

As I mentioned before, we were planning to place the television on the blue accent wall in the Living Room:

As you notice in that picture, the plugs for both the power and the cable are located at the bottom of the wall. When placing the TV in the middle of that wall this would leave several wires exposed and would generally look pretty messy. Chris planned to run the wires further up the wall and create new outlets. He is pretty handy and this isn't that big of a job for him, but I was impressed. 


This started a debate on the proper height of the TV. After some debate and an internet consult, the TV is placed a eye level while standing (for those who are super serious TV watchers, the 'correct' height is sitting eye level, but we thought that was too low). And the boy went to work:

Look Ma, no wires! He did a pretty awesome job and the only lose thread is that the switch that you see in the picture did control that electrical outlet...now it doesn't control anything....oh well. When you have TV, you care much less about the orphan outlet. 


And since Jenna asked, here is another picture of this wall with the flooring (we are still working out the placement of the cable box, so it is hanging out below right now):

More Wooden Floors!

So yesterday was all about the love for the wooden floors. Let me remind you how wonderful they look with yet another picture:

So fantastic! But this picture does bring up two of the small issues that pulling up the floors did bring. First of which are some small dark patches, which we guess are a result of the last dog that lived here. These don't really bother us and will just hang around. I figure they will become less noticeable when the room is full of stuff. The second issues is that the baseboards that I thought I completed last week, are not, in fact, completed:

I will need to go back and sand off the old carpet still stuck to them and repaint the bottom of the baseboards. It also appears that the molding was added after the carpet was installed as there is a small gap between the molding and the carpet. This is another problem that doesn't really bother us and would require a lot of work to fix, so we are keeping the gap. I figure that once everything is painted up, I will just keep visitors away from laying on the floor and all will be well. We also haven't quite finished pulling up the carpet:

It still remains (along with my painter's tape....whoops!) on the upper part of the steps and the second floor hallway. It is likely that we will be taking this out soon, but we haven't decided for sure. This photo also shows off one of the floors trouble spots, the steps. I am not quite sure why, but there is a small gap in the flooring on the landing:

Not a huge deal, but it is now on the project list for the future. There was also some water damage on the steps that is more noticeable now the the carpet is gone:

Luckily, most of this damage is underneath the railings which were moved to take out the carpet. Not to mention that they floors still need to be cleaned and waxed (we have the stuff...I just haven't quite got around to it yet...this week, I swear). Either way, these are small issues that really won't stand out once everything is painted, polished, and the railings are put back in. We got very lucky with the condition of the floors and I am sooooo pleased that there is less red carpet in the home.

Pleasant Surprises!

So I was away this past week and Chris was left to his own devices. So while he did survive the week, he wasn't able to resist making some drastic changes while I was away: Pulling up the red carpet in the Living Room. Here was my first glimpse when I walked into the house:

I must say this makes the Muffin color on the walls look way better. Here is a shot of the room facing the front of the house:

And now a shot facing the back of the house:

And now the floor is ready for its close up:

I love the thin oak panels and I am extremely pleased with the work done so far.  


Chris did a really good job and has earned his right to be left unattended in the future. I was pretty surprised given his speeches on how it isn't a good idea to pull the carpet up at this time in case the floor underneath needed to be replaced. I asked him what made him change his mind. He said he didn't, but that he was curious about the condition of the floor, so he started to pull the carpet up. Then apparently at a point, he thought he had gone too far and would just pull it all up. Regardless of why he did it, I'm glad he did. The living room looks much better now. This post is just about the love for the wood floors...more about the work still involved later. 

A Re-potting Tip that Rocks!

So I have been doing a lot of re-potting lately. One of the plants that recently got a new home was the desert rose, Rosie, who is posing in the pot she will be re-potted in:

So for the tip. Many plants, including this desert rose, require really good drainage and recommend that you let the soil dry out before re-watering. If these plants were in the ground their natural soil would drain this excess water to underground sinks. For the most part the small hole in most pots is not sufficient to provide even drainage. So here is my nearly free tip for correcting this problem: Rocks. 

If you layer the bottom of the pot with rocks this will allow excess water to drain more evenly. Luckily, our backyard did not miss the handful of rocks that I swiped for my project. After the rocks are placed on the bottom, simply cover it with potting soil:

Then I simply re-potted Rosie as you normally would. This year we are trying out moisture control soil to help compensate for our erratic watering and I will be sure to let you know if we are really disappointed or really happy with it. Speaking of happy, here is Rosie in her new home:

This is definitely a tip that I will be using as I go about replacing all of the fake flowers around the house with real ones:

Yes, those are fake tulips on the outside of the kitchen window. File that in the rather large folder of questionable decisions. 

Have You Seen this Tree?

So when I posted those pictures of Chris putting up the flags, I noticed just how over-grown the front yard was. Just as a reminder, here is the 'before' picture:

And here is the 'after' picture:

It is looking a little shaggy. These pictures don't show it but there are also several medium sized trees that are growing under the large trees. Here is a picture of some small Japanese Maples growing near the front bushes:

There was no question. These little guys needed to come out. They were not really viable where they were growing anyway, and I needed to start somewhere with the jungle in the front yard. So I dug them up:

I felt bad just chucking them, so I planned to treenap them over state lines to deliver them to my mother. I had visions of extracting a 'root ball' with lots of soil, but I learned that our soil is a bit too sandy to do so. So I sadly got less roots than expected and next to no dirt.  In that picture above, they just seem like little trees, but there was some much larger trees:

I carefully wrapped the roots in potting soil and plastic bags:

Now for the hard part. I needed to put all these trees into my small red chevy:

Chris has no idea the level of crazy that he lives with. Luckily, 1 part engineer + 1 part crazy = Mission Accomplished:

This is the last known photo of the trees. They are thought to have been treenapped to western Pennsylvania by a small build Caucasian woman and a sausage shaped brown dog and are suspected to be hiding in my mother's backyard. 

Herb Garden: Part 1

So before we found the house, I had big plans for a veggie garden. I had even printed out plans for a 6x6 "All-American" Garden from BHG. But, as we all know, it is now June. We moved in early May and then I have been really busy. Too busy, in fact, to start this garden and now it really is too late. But I have simply shelved those plans for next spring and I am now focused on my kitchen herb garden. I have picked out the six types of herbs I want:

The live plant is sweet mint. The home depot was out of mint from seed and the seeds I had from last year did not start, so I decided it was worth the 3 extra dollars to buy the started plant from that one. The ones that I am going to try from seed are basil, cilantro, rosemary, oregano, and parsley. I also picked up containers from Ikea during that epic trip:

I was pleasantly surprised to find that these containers already had drainage. I bought one large container for the basil and five smaller ones for the other herbs. So then I planted them:

Now I wait. I am going to left them start in the sunroom before I move them to their final growing place, but that is a surprise and as I have to wait for herbs to grow so do you. 

Summer Reading

So now that I have more free time, I finally got around to getting my library card. 

Sorry, the glare made it a bit blurry, but it has a nice picture of the Middlesex Blue Jay. They love their blue jays down here. They are the team names and on all of the signs. That being said the only blue jay I have seen yet was stealing tater tots at the Sonic's the next town over. 


So I have been looking for books to get me excited about medical school. After reading House of God and some other ones, I got the summer reading list from RWJMS. I thought I would share it because I spend some time looking for a list like this and now everyone will know what they want the doctors of tomorrow (okay, so really doctors of a decade from now, but close enough) to read. 

• The Soul of a Doctor, Harvard Medical Students Face Life and Death, edited by Susan Pories, Sachin Jain and Gordon Harper
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebeccal Skloot
• Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese
• Body of Work, by Christine Montross
• Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life by Karen Armstrong
• Better A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance by Atul Gawande
• Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Naomi Remen
• Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Tracy Kidder
• The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Ann Fadiman
• Complications, by Atul Gawande
• The Lonely Patient How We Experience Illness by Michael Stein
• Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis
• Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande
• Seeing Patients: Unconscious Bias in Health Care by Augustus White
• Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
• The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee
• The Great Influenza by John Barry
• Crashing Through by Robert Kurson

We aren't required to read all of them (only the first one and another one on the list), but I thought it was worth sharing the whole list. I've read a few of these already and would recommend for those so inclined to indulge in the nerdfest, either The Emperor of all Maladies or Cutting for Stone. I thought that both were good and interesting. 

So here is to a summer of reading books from the library! Feel free to comment with any book recommendations either medically related or just enjoyable. 

Ikea Upgrade: Bookcases

A couple of weekends ago, Chris and I went to Ikea to buy bookshelves, because as it turns out 99.9% of my material possessions are books (the other 0.1% is dog toys). This is just a small taste of the number of boxes of books that we moved:

Needless to say, I couldn't get away with not having bookshelves. I picked up two 50$ BILLY bookcases from Ikea in white:

These bookshelves are perfect in that they are large, cheap, and have clean lines. That being said, they are a little boring and do scream IKEA!! Since I am trying to trick my friends and family into thinking I am an adult, I wanted to make these look like more than 50 dollar bookcases. I found a beautiful idea on Pinterest, where a woman stenciled the back of her bookcases to add color and pattern. It looked amazing, but then I remembered that stenciling is  a lot of work and I'm not yet trained in the art of not-making-a-huge-mess-with-paint. So I decided on my own little twist: Fabric!

Isn't it perfect? I was smitten. A special thanks to the lady at Jo-ann's who was nice enough to explain that each baton doesn't have the same width and then wait while I worked out the math. So after I got my fabric home and started to build my bookcases I needed to line the back of the bookcases, which without fabric look something like this:

So i laid out the fabric to make sure it would fit. All that extra time thinking at Jo-ann's paid off, because it fit:

Then I flipped it over and taped it into position:

I used Chris' fancy Gorilla Tape and to be honest, I don't think I could get that fabric off even if I tried. After I doctored up the back of the bookcase, I built it as per the instructions to get this:

I'm in love! Here is a close up:

I rinsed, washed, and repeated to have two matching bookcases. I think they look much better than the cheap bookcases they were before. All in all, this project wasn't that intense or expensive and I would totally do it again. Now I just have to get around to putting all those books away...