Monday, April 14, 2008 | by nathan

Projects: A Garden Paradise

‘Amember this?

This photo embarasses me deeply, as it shows you my tendency toward messiness, packratting and sloth in general. Also, because the most beautiful room in my house became something akin to the tag hanging off Minnie Pearl’s hat: "LOOK AT ME, I’M WHITE TRASH!" I might as well have put that dishwasher on the front lawn.

Well, this weekend, I did: we had a garage sale. Twenty minutes into it, the neighbors were coming over saying, "You guys know that the neighborhood-wide garage sale is on May 3, right?" This transformed our stress - "What do we do with the stuff that doesn’t sell?" - into joy; we took everything that didn’t move and put it into the abandoned garage next door, to be pulled out again on May 3. Yay! Problem solved. We sold most of what we’d hoped to, making a fairly-nice chunk of change in the process.

We spent the rest of the day sweeping out the room, hosing it down, getting rid of the masses of bugs that had nested back there and cleaning the windows. It was ready; it was ripe; it was pregnant with possibility.

Sunday morning we got up early and went looking at patio furniture one last time. We’d made up our minds about a favorite set at Home Depot (available for perusal at the Thomasville website, if anyone wanted to donate us the matching bar set, say), but thought, "Mah, let’s look around some."

And here it’s time for a station break, to shout from the internet rooftops the wonderfulness of my marriage by sharing a story of something that happened during that furniture search.

We stopped at a store in Oklahoma City’s furniture district that was clearly so far out of our price range. I began to get discouraged - we knew what set we liked, and the idea of spending all day looking for a set we might like 10% better for a savings of maybe $100 was frightening to me, especially when I considered the possibility that we might become paralyzed by our options, and do nothing. The time was right.

When I expressed these frustrations to Brian he was so gracious and kind to me about it that I thought perhaps Jesus had tied him up and left him in the closet at home, taken his form and decided to come furniture shopping with me. Then I realized that, no, my guy really is just that awesome.

SO ANYWAY. We went to Home Depot, decided quickly on what we wanted. The set we liked matched a rug we LURVED. Threw it in the car - had to make 2 trips because the boxes were so huge - and came home to put it all together. We made one last trip to Target and hauled an old sofa out of the den, and viola! Check it out!

So, I think you get the idea. We were very tired at the end of this project - I also dug up the plot for my garden this weekend, adding to the exhaustion - but deeply, deeply happy. We lit up some sweet-smelling incense to give the room a nice Sam-hair-free fragrance. My mom came over, bringing along a bottle of wine, and the three of us sat on the back porch, drinking wine, and bashing George W. Bush well into the night. That’s exactly what this room is for, and I have a feeling it’s going to be worth every penny, every drop of sweat, and every sore muscle. So far it already has been, and more.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008 | by nathan

Projects: The Back Porch

When I sat down at the end of 2007 to think about what I would like 2008 to look like, I made a long list of projects that needed to be done around the house. I divided the house up room by room and tried to figure out what each one needed. The bedroom, for example, needed a solution the laundry problem, and a dresser, and a new bed, and while that was a bit expensive, so far it’s proven to be worth every penny.

See, the thing is that when we moved into this house we had *some* furniture. We opted not to borrow on top of the mortgage to finance new furniture, and I’m happy about this. Still, getting our house the way we imagined it when we moved in has taken some time. Two nights ago we hung framed prints of some of our favorite photos in our bedroom and somehow our marriage has survived BUT THOSE PHOTOS ARE NEVER COMING DOWN, NO NOT EVER EVER NEVER.

We’ve tackled our bedroom, as I said, and I painted the office, and now we only have one room to go: the back porch. Here are two photos of what it looked like under the house’s previous owner, who clearly had much stronger moral fiber than we did:

See what a great room that is? When we first walked into that room, the first time we looked at this house, we took deep, excited breaths and grinned widely, knowing all of a sudden that this house was, in fact, made for us, that we were meant to live here. It was if the house was saying, "Come on out in back! Look at the hydrangeas blooming! Have a gin fizz and relax." It was perfect, and we bought the house, just right then.

Today, the room looks, ah, a bit different than that. See, I’m reticent to post the picture I’m about to post, because it frightens and disappoints me so. But hey, I tell myself, you’ve already seen a photo of my bedroom with my underwear strewn about - how much worse could it be?

Deep breath.

Okay, here it is:

We junked it out. This is about as white trash as it gets, people: the old dishwasher is still sitting out here, as is our old dining room furniture, the huge table which held our television in our previous apartment, the awful recliner that Brian had to sleep in when he broke his wrist, that ridiculous papasan chair that Sam slept in all last summer, some gardening utensils and the Shop Vac. Also, Sam’s toys, potting soil and a whole lot of leaves and dead plants that have blown in over the course of a time. And some bugs. Lots of dust. It’s AWFUL.

See, our garage is very small and won’t hold most of this stuff, as it’s already full to the gills with other crap, like, say, our central heat and air unit and water heater and lawnmower. That’s pretty much all we can fit out there. So the rest of it has ended up in here. Also? When we first moved into this house we had these two awful dogs living next door that barked at us constantly, completely nixing the relaxation factor this room had held. So, we put a few things back there as storage - you know, "temporarily." Then we let Sam live out here last summer, a mistake we won’t be repeating. Then we had to replace our dishwasher and pull up the carpet in the den and do all this rotten stupid home repair and where did all that detritus end up? On the back porch.

BUT!

We have a solution at hand. We’re going to have a garage sale soon, which will help us get rid of most of that unwanted furniture. The rest we’re toting out to the curb on our next big trash day, April 16.

Also, we’ve picked out a patio furniture set we like and can afford. Check it out:

and

These are at Home Depot, and they’re a *bit* more than we’d like them to be, but what isn’t? Also, as the patio is covered we won’t be needing the umbrella over the bar. We sort of imagine the room as a place where people want to gather, where we can cook out with our friends and sit and talk and laugh and share a beer or seven. We could have coffee out here in the mornings and it would be a fabulous place to read or get some writing done.

So we’re thinking the process for whole thing is simple, right - get rid of all the crap that’s back there is step one. Brian cleaned out the garage the other night, pulling aside all the stuff that we’ll put out for the garage sale and making a whole bunch more room. What we don’t sell goes in big trash or gets donated. We sweep out all the leaves and dirt and such, hose and scrub the whole thing down. We lay down a rug, bring in the furniture and make sure that door stays good and closed.

I’ll be sure and post photos during the process and as we go along, but friends, we need some major mojo, because this is the last room we need to do much to in our house, and then, so help me God, sometime before the three-year anniversary of our moving-in, we may even have a housewarming party.

Monday, March 24, 2008 | by nathan

Projects: A Clean, Well-Lighted [Bed]Room

Once upon a time, mine & Brian’s bedroom looked like this. (Please, only look for just a second; the embarrassment is killing me.)

That was last year, when I had begun to feel sort of irritated about our house. My Uberlist this year is full of things, plans, specific things to do in our home to make it feel less like we’re just crashing there and more like a place we own, where we live, where we make a home. We’ve lived in this house for over 2 and a half years, after all. It’s time to stop treating it the way we treated our early-twenties apartments and dorm rooms, as basically just storage spaces waiting to be packed up again at the end of a year.

It’s worth noting here that this is the home of two guys - homosexuals, yes, but guys - and guys are messy.

From this photo you can clearly see that the biggest problem is laundry, followed closely by storage. Step One was for us to just make a concerted effort to actually do the laundry more often, which we did. But still, the stuff seemed to spread. When we got the new bedspread, things looked nicer:

But this didn’t entirely solve our problem. We had all this floor space, see, and from where this photo is taken you can’t see it, but the laundry is still out, still there, still lurking and overflowing its hampers. So last weekend we went and had ourselves a nice little IKEA orgy. And for one, we replaced that lumpy old bed and clapboard-looking bedside tables with this sexy beast:

Some of the good things about this bed? Even though it’s using our same old box spring and mattress, it’s about eighty gazillion times more comfortable than the old one. Also, the new lamps are wonderful because no matter how wildly I flail my arms at the sound of my morning alarm, I won’t knock them off and shatter them, which I’ve done to no fewer than three lamps since we’ve lived in this house. Also? Because it sits right on the ground we won’t ever find another horrifying dust bunny under the bed, never, ever again. I mean, hypothetically. You’ll notice the walls are bare; I plan on framing some of my better black and white prints to hang in here. Feel free to let me know if there are any you like.

We also got a new dresser; I didn’t get a photograph of it, but here it is:

It now sits where our laundry had once begun to pile up on our heads. We’ve moved that whole mess into the closet and organized the absolute shit out of it, which means that not only is it not physically able to overflow, but it’s easy to get done once it starts to. The final piece was our upstairs half-bath, which I’m a little ashamed to post photos of in the "before" stage; let’s just say that these West Elm shelves ($20!!) have done wonders in the 24 hours they’ve been up. They’ve redeemed our fragile psyches from the edge of the pit of despair:

Brian will tell you that getting these shelves up on that wall was a feat of engineering akin to building the pyramids at Giza. What he won’t tell you - and I will, because I’m all about keeping it real - is that behind all those toiletries are three centimeter-wide holes in the wall from the first attempt. But oh well; it’s all about presentation. And about not keeping the toothbrushes in a place where they occasionally get knocked into the toilet, only to have to be immediately replaced.

So except for getting some neat decoratey things - photo frames for some of our pictures, etc. - we finally feel like our bedroom is a place we want to spend time. It’s such a strange and welcome change that we’re sort of still figuring out what that means. Also, you’ll be happy to know that there’s a load of laundry running as I write this, and more to be done tonight. Folks, I think the Laundry Monster has been subdued.

Monday, January 21, 2008 | by nathan

Projects: Writing Space

Dude, I’m on FIRE with the house projects lately. There was the organizing of the bedroom, then the new dishwasher, and now, I’ve finally, after two and a half years of living in this house, finally transformed my office into a real space for writing AND a place for Sam to live.

Here’s what the office looked like when we moved in, circa October 2005:

Bad, right? At any rate, not good. That yellow color bothered me from the moment we first saw the house, but I never could decide on a color with which to replace it. Finally, I realized that - oh my GOD - if I painted it, and hated it, I COULD CHANGE IT. I know - this is a revolutionary concept, and I’ll give your mind a moment to catch up.

So, since I had 3 days off this weekend and the dishwasher situation resolved itself by Saturday night, I decided to get started:

I picked out a color called Iris Moon, which is a pale lavender shade. It’ll go perfectly with the dark brown and black furniture I have in here and the black gallery frames I plan on using to hang photographs. I did the lion’s share of the work alone, though I had to have a lot of help from Brian with things near the ceiling, because I’m freaking short and can’t reach the ceiling, even when I stand on a chair. The fact is, I really enjoyed most of this work; I put on a playlist I created titled "Occasionally Terrible Music To Sing Along To" - which is exactly what it sounds like - and went to town, singing at the top of my lungs.

Though I have to say, today was much harder than yesterday, even though there was less painting involved. Today was the day I took down all the books from my shelves, moved them away from the wall, and painted behind where they’d been. Then, I rearranged all the furniture, eliminating some of it, as the room had become ridiculously crowded, and put the books back up and everything back in its place.

It was fun, but I’m okay if I NEVER HAVE TO DO IT AGAIN. Anyway, now if you come visit me there’s room to fold out the couch, and Sam has a little more space to kick around in while I’m gone all day. I’m going to take down the ceiling fan and replace it with this light fixture I ordered from Ikea, chosen in part because it was the only one I could find that they’d ship to me, and I knew if I waited until my next trip to Dallas, the light may never get replaced.

Anyway, enough talk. What do you think of my new office/writing space/library/dog’s room?

Monday, January 21, 2008 | by nathan

Projects: New Dishwasher

Last week my friend Brittany came over for dinner. I tried - and failed - to make Irish potato pancakes, also known as Boxty. Still, we had a nice meal and a nice conversation, and the next day Brian and I went to load the dishwasher, and it made a sound like it had prolapse, like all its internal organs were trying to fall out of its vagina.

But - crap! We had an entire kitchen full of very, very dirty dishes! It looked like this:

We’d been wanting to get a new dishwasher since we moved in, and it was on my list of things to do around the house in 2008. See how it’s all off-white and ugly, and how it doesn’t match our awesome fridge? We figured we could pay to fix the old one, or we could just pull the trigger and get a new one. So my wonderful other half shopped around at almost every dishwasher store in Oklahoma City and finally found a great deal on a new dishwasher. We were ready to pull the trigger; we were moving on up.

Then, Brian had a brilliant idea: "Let’s take pictures of each step in the process and do a blog post about how to install a dishwasher!"

"YES!" I exclaimed. "That’s wonderful! This is knowledge that could help people!"

So we moved the new dishwasher into the house, I got out the camera, and we got started. All went as planned. We got some wonderful photos to show you what we were doing. Photos that looked like this:

Which would’ve showed you where your disposal and dishwasher become good buddies. We hit a snag, however, when we pulled out the old unit to discover it had leaked and warped the floor underneath, and that we were going to have to CUT A MASSIVE HOLE IN OUR KITCHEN FLOOR in order to put in the new dishwasher:

So we did that. Turns out that the water line had leaked and warped the floor, which had bubbled up and got in the way of the old dishwasher’s motor and kinked the water line, which was why the old one never worked all that well.

Anyway, nothing went as planned, and if I’d posted the step-by-step of what we did here, and then you followed it in installing your own dishwasher, well - we just don’t have the money to pay for all those lawsuits. Suffice it to say, we have a beautiful new stainless-steel dishwasher that will save on our energy bills and that looks fabulous in our kitchen - AND WHICH ACTUALLY CLEANS DISHES, unlike its predecessor. Here, check it out:

Sunday, December 30, 2007 | by nathan

Origami Balls (tee-hee. I said balls).

Check out what I did today! I took an ordinary sheet of green origami paper:

And a whole lot of other colors as well, and I made this:

Click the photo to see how I did it! It’s really fun; I recommend trying it.

Friday, December 28, 2007 | by nathan

Projects: The Bedroom, Step 1

I got us this duvet cover and new pillow shams from West Elm for Christmas, and my mom got us new Egyptian cotton sheets to match. One of my major projects for the first part of 2008 is to get our bedroom fully decorated and organized, because for the last two and a half years that we’ve lived in this house, it’s been a major problem area. More pictures will be forthcoming as I continue to get this place decorated.

Now. Here’s the part where I really test you, where I really open my soul to you, because until these wonderful new beddings came into our lives, our bedroom used to look like this. I promise, it never will again:

Friday, December 7, 2007 | by nathan

New Year, New Projects

It’s December already. That means, of course, that 2007 is coming to a close, and I’m looking back over the list of 107 things I made for myself to do this year. I have to say that although I didn’t get to a great number of those things, I did get to a lot of them, and the Uberlist was a helpful tool in planning my year.

That said, I’m going to tweak the list this year. The original idea of the list was to take the year you’re in, and add the last number of it to 100, and make a list of that many things to do. Thus, in 2008 I would give myself 108 things to do. Instead of doing that, I’m going to spend the next 3 weeks taking stock of my life over the past year, and the past 27 and a half years, and make myself a list of projects and goals that are both more realistic and more ambitious.

Also, I’m going to enlist your help in these endeavours, and where applicable, I will be asking for help and posting before pictures and, much later, after pictures. Several of the projects that come readily to mind involve projects around our house, which, sadly, have gone unstarted since we moved in. You know, in OCTOBER 2005. I always told myself that I wasn’t working on the house because I was in grad school, and I didn’t have time, or money, or blah blah blah. Unfortunately, that’s not the case anymore, and I find that I am out of excuses.

To the end of keeping myself accountable to the internet, and to documenting these processes, I am creating a new category, titled Projects, which will serve as my stash-place for all these things. Over the next few weeks - and into 2008 - I’ll post pleas for help, stories of success (I hope), and pointers for how NOT to do the things I will attempt, as I am completely certain I will screw up. The first post, about what I’m affectionately dubbing The Laundry Situation From Hell, will be forthcoming soon, but before it gets here I want comments from all of you with PROMISES - IN WRITING - that you won’t abandon us over the state of our laundry and of our bedroom in general, which, I promise, will be changing very soon. With your help.

Here’s to 2008!