by Jonathan
10 June 2008
House and Home
So here I sit getting ready to head to lunch, and I find myself with a few minutes to write something.
Jenny and I have been working lately on things that have been vaguely house-related, but have been covered in other entries. We’ve been hanging curtains to replace some of the nasty old ones that came with the house when I bought it. We’ve been cleaning (and cleaning, and cleaning some more) for various social gatherings. We have been re-organizing the back bedroom so that it could function again as a guest bedroom and not be quite so cluttered. We’ve been working on general yard upkeep. We’ve been hosting social gatherings for various events. I’ve been in the woodshop making gifts and working on a few small shop projects to help me to make those gifts. We’ve also been spending some time resting from work and doing some things that we enjoy, like picnics and a little bit of bike riding and the like. The rest of the time has been spent working or tending to other obligations that have been keeping us both quite busy this spring.
While all of this has been going on, we’ve been thinking, too, about projects in the house. I’m working on getting a few estimates for the work on the porch, which we must absolutely do soon. I also need to meet with our landscaper friends to get an estimate on repairing the retaining wall that borders the alley. The wall might be able to wait a little bit. The porch cannot wait any longer.
I’ve also been thinking about the work in the middle bedroom that we want to do. That was the first project that I ever started in the house. It ended up getting back-burnered for a lot of reasons. My sister and her former boyfriend helped to strip some of the wallpaper in there that I hadn’t finished, so the really hard part of wallpaper stripping is essentially all finished. There’s a lot of the old, thick adhesive left on some parts of the walls, but that dissolves pretty easily with Dif. We also have to think about whether we want to do the woodwork in that room–I would love to do it, but we need to determine if it is feasable. There are some odd electric issues in the room, too. There’s nothing really problematic, but some odd things were done to get outlets into different spots in the room, and I need to have my Dad come down to help me figure out what we’re going to do about the resulting mess. The room will need a light fixture (it didn’t have one when I bought the house–just a crappy ceiling fan that used to have a light fixture below it). The room will also need a throw rug to cover the middle section of the floor. The outside few feet are all hardwood, but the middle section is just unfinished subfloor boards that bring the middle part of the floor level to the hardwood. Odd, yes, but we can deal with it.
Before we can do anything in there, though, we need to clean out all of the stuff. The room has become our storage room. Some stuff needs to be sold or given away. Some stuff needs to be stored for possible future use by other people. Some stuff needs to be stored because it means something to us. Some stuff just needs to be thrown away. That’s going to be a big job. I want to start going through that stuff soon to figure out what is going where.
I’ve also been thinking about some needed stuff for the house, including a linen closet on the second floor to hold all of our towels, sheets, etc. I have plans for some small tables that I’m building for us to use outside on the porch. I also have some more gifts to make for people for various things.
Oh, did I mention that this is my last "free" weekend until probably the middle of July? Argh.
So there it is. Now it is lunchtime.
jonathan
Tagged as:
house,
restoration,
woodworking
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by Jonathan
27 May 2008
House and Home
Jenny and I are finally starting to get over the flu. Jenny has it worse than I did–I’m finally feeling mostly better now, but she’s still working on it. Tonight makes 13 days for me. Ugh. I still haven’t recovered all of my stamina yet, but I’m getting there.
This weekend we hosted my sister-in-law Annie’s bridal shower. It was fun. I smoked chicken in the new smoker, and Mom and Babcia helped with making the salads and baking cookies. Dad helped me with grilling and general logistics. It was a good time. I think Annie had fun, too. 
I built a clock as one of Annie’s wedding presents. Some readers here have known about this for a while, as I was keeping a build diary on here in a separate area. I’ll soon move those or link those here. I need to complete the last entry, though, before I do that.
I ordered bunting and a 45-star flag (historically accurate for the building of our house) last week, and it was supposed to arrive on Friday. Then maybe it was supposed to arrive on Saturday. Now it is Tuesday and it still isn’t here. I’m a little bummed. Oh well. I should have it in time for the Fourth of July, though.
My June is shaping up to be pretty busy. The first weekend in June is my birthday. Yay! Hopefully Jenny and I will get out to do something fun. The following week, I am gone for three days to DC for work. I’ll be back for the weekend, then I’m off on Friday to help Jenny prepare for Annie’s wedding on the 21st. The morning after the wedding, I have a 6AM flight to Vancouver, BC, where I’ll be for a week. I’m taking the train home from there as a bit of a mini-vacation, which should get me home early in the morning on the 3rd of July. Yikes. Busy busy June.
July and August should be a bit more calm, fortunately. Jenny and I are taking our vacation in early August, so that should be fun. In the meantime, I have a bunch of house projects that need my attention, including the front porch, getting the plumbing work coordinated, etc.
The current project in the woodshop (after I spent most of this evening cleaning-up from the clock project) is a custom door threshold for my aunt and uncle’s new house. They have an odd doorway with a 1/2″ height difference between two rooms, and it needs a threshold. I have the initial piece cut for it and the router table set up to make the rabbet, but I was getting a little tired and didn’t want to do anything stupid, so I shut down the shop and came upstairs again.
I’ve been having some trouble making timely updates here for the past week or so partially due to the fact that my main laptop battery is hosed. It will no longer take a charge and the laptop acts as if there is no battery there. I had work order me two batteries today, so hopefully I’ll have them soon. Not having the batteries means that I’m not having the laptop on as much, since it can’t survive power outages and I can’t keep it on while I move among different rooms.
We still have some clean-up to do around the house after the party. We’ve been back-burnering that, though, while we rest and recover a bit.
There’s someone around here who has decided to use one of those stupid motorized mini-bikes as transportation from their house to someone else’s house. This isn’t a scooter or any real form of DOT-approved transportation. This is one of those little two-cycle “mini sportbike” things. They usually are riding it past our house and towards the lower end of Parnassus every weekday at around this time. Someday I’ll stand outside with the hose and accidentally spray them down when they go past. Argh. Come on, folks. They are illegal to have on the streets, so don’t buy them and then wonder why the entire neighborhood wants to see it accidentally crushed into a tiny ball of recyclable metal.
That’s all for me.
jonathan
Tagged as:
family,
house,
neighborhood,
party,
woodworking
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So, this is it–the last blog entry of the year. At the moment, we’re enjoying our tree, our cats, and some of the crazy NYE shows on TV. Our original plans were to go to First Night Pittsburgh tonight, as we have for the past several years. Jenny started to come down with a cold yesterday, though, and this morning woke up and was pretty ill. So we’re at home today, staying warm. Read on for a recap of the past week or so, during which the blog has been quiet, but we’ve been busy!
