I'm Plastered

These photos are a week late. The plasterer was here over a week ago hanging blueboard and doing the skimcoat. These are some in-between photos (in between the hanging and the plastering). Paint is next. Good thing I've been on vacation.

The closet. Unbelievably, this closet is the same size as it was before the renovation. For some reason, this big space existed behind the teeny-tiny door that was here before. Now, it's going to get all tricked out with fancy hanging devices and big amoir-style doors.

The SMOOTH ceiling. I wish someone could explain to me why people choose those bumpy, impossible to paint ceilings that seem to be in all the new houses now. In my opinion, there is no substitute for a smooth-as-a-baby's-bum ceiling.

Slow and steady wins the race. I hope I finish by Thanksgiving, because I need my dining room back. I got quite a bit accomplished while I've been on vacation these last two weeks, but I'm back to work tomorrow, so I expect that the rate of my accomplishments will slow dramatically. I'll do what I can.

I Have a Lot of Plaster Dust in My Nose

I think I have officially gone off the deep end. The last time we did a "project" I silently vowed that it would be my last. All I wanted was to get some new living room furniture and to paint the living room a color that didn't look like last week's moldy supper that I forgot to throw away. Simple right? Not if you live in my house. John took this as an opportunity to remove the wall between the dining room and the living room because it wasn't done "right." Turns out he was correct, but it turned a relatively simple project into a not-so-simple one that took several weeks to finish.

But I digress. Anyone who knows me knows that my dining room has been reluctantly transformed into my "craft room." If it wasn't supposed to be a dining room, this would not be a problem. I am into paper-crafting and I have a lot of supplies. Turns out, the dining room is big enough to hold all my supplies and it is conveniently situated next to the kitchen which has a tv so that I can watch it while I Create, and has ample counter space to spread my supplies on.

However, as I mentioned, this is actually a dining room. It's not supposed to hold crafting supplies. It's supposed to be used for dining. I caught a break last year from temporarily cleaning it out for thanksgiving because my mother decided to host that instead of me, but this year I feared the worst. Where the heck was I going to put all that stuff so that people would have a place to eat on thanksgiving? The answer: the spare bedroom.

This is one view of the room before its amazing transformation into my new, cool stamping studio. Why is there a big whole in the plaster, you may be thinking? This particular bedroom has walls that are in very poor condition. (I found this out the last time I painted it. Yes, that was me that decided on the bizarre random stripe, and no, I don't know what I was thinking). So I decided that it was time to rip out those old, crappy plaster walls and re-do them with nice, new plaster walls. And while I was at it, I thought it would be nice to replace the old, crappy windows with new, fancy, energy efficient ones. Sounds like a good idea, right?

Construction, or should I say destruction, began this morning. It will not end soon. I live in an old house which means lots of lathes (as you can see in the pic) and lots of horse-hair plaster (hence the plaster dust in my nose). Unfortunately, we only have one level B suit and I didn't get to wear it. I mostly stayed out of here while the destruction was going on, but I did enter on occasion to bundle up and bring out all those lathes. What I was doing in the meantime was stripping the paint off of the trim: windows, doors, baseboards. Yahoo.

I know it will eventually be done, but man, I gotta tell you hauling all that ridiculously heavy plaster debris downstairs and out to the bagster is hard work. One thing that I realized is that I'm not "young" anymore and doing all this hard labor is way harder now than it was ten years ago. My back is killing me and I'm tired of trying to get all that plaster dust out of my nose.

By the way, several years ago we hired a local company to blow insulation into the outside walls because we knew there was nothing there and it would help somewhat with the obscenely high heating bills we were paying. Although I can honestly say we did see some benefit from it, as you can see from this picture, trying to blow insulation into an old house is a crap-shoot. This is blown fiberglass insulation, which is not supposed to settle as much as the blown newspaper type of insulation, but settle it has. Something to think about.

Downstairs Bathroom

These are some pictures of my bathroom downstairs. I got the mirror on sale from Pottery Barn. The lights were on the clearance rack at Home Depot. They are not the exact color I would like (I prefer an oil rubbed bronze), but they'll do for now. The shadows from the window obscure the true color of the walls.

This picture shows the wall color a little better. It's Ben Moore "Charlotte Slate" and I love the way it turned out.

This view is out the window to the side yard. The valance is just a brown toile that I picked up at the now defunct Fabric Place. The window trim is painted with Ben Moore "Gray Mist." It really goes great with the rest of the colors. They all have a nice tone.

This wall shows the Ben Moore "Bennington Gray" paint. You can just see the corner of the new toilet, Kohler's "Memoirs" which I love.

HD is IN the building

Without further ado, HD has come to live at my house. We have been contemplating HD TVs for about a year now. John built a cabinet to put it in (he's really the BEST husband) and I feverishly made deposits to the Christmas Club to pay for it. All of our efforts have paid off. Of course, the actual purchase of the TV was not without drama. On Black Friday we, not so happily, got up at 5AM. I went to KMart (to secure a Blu-ray player at a really great price), and John went to Circuit City to score the plasma TV we wanted. After waiting in line outside of KMart in the freezing cold for a half-hour I finally got inside to discover they had none of the Blu-rays in stock (why was I not surprised?!?). But I had a backup plan: the Blu-rays were the same price at Sears. By this time I had spoken to John several times and had revised the game-plan as necessary. At 6:15 he was still waiting in line to speak to a salesman as I was driving to Sears. By the time I arrived at Sears and had discovered where the Blu-rays were, he called to say that Circuit City would match the price so all my efforts were for naught!

But the story does not end there. We purchased the TV, the Blu-ray and the new surround sound receiver (which was not in stock and had to be shipped). I left to go to Wal-Mart to buy Iron Man on Blu-ray (which was out of stock!!), and John loaded the TV on the truck to bring it home. When I finally got home, I went out to the truck to check out the TV, and lo and behold - it's the wrong one! We bought a 1080p Panasonic and they gave us the 720p. This is not to be borne! So off John goes back to Circuit City to get the right one.

This, however, is not the end of our woes. The TV sat in the dining room for a week, since Firedog was not coming until the following Saturday to install everything. So on Friday (a week after we bought it) John takes it out of the box. And what does he find IN the box? A plasma TV with cracks ALL OVER IT! Thank goodness he took it out of the box, because the installation people were supposed to be at the house the next day between 9 and 11. This episode is, of course, followed by frantic calls to Circuit City to correct this very distressing situation. So what happens next? They are, of course, completely OUT OF STOCK of the model we bought. But in all fairness to Circuit City, they substituted the next model UP for the one we bought. All is right in the world. Now I'm off to watch Iron Man in hi-def!! Big thanks to Circuit City!!