Monday, September 17, 2012

It begins...

We've finally started some projects! 

For a while, I was perfectly happy to ignore everything and pretend that it was all just dandy and all those silly plans to change a single thing in this house had never existed.  However, the pond was questionable, what with the blackish brown water and stagnation and wealth of mosquitoes swarming around us and biting our friends on their faces. Womp, womp... sorry, Kaity!

So we bailed it out, scrubbed it, refilled it, re-emptied it and cried on the inside. But then we found the fish! Twelve of those suckers were in there and we had never seen one in the entire month.  The pond lilies look all screwy after the big cleanup, but they are coming back.  We added a waterfall/filter to keep things flowing and keep the skeeters out. And now you can see the happy little fishes a-swimmin. Too bad I think fish are disgusting and I would prefer a hot tub in this location. I have considered getting in to swim, but the fish have convinced me otherwise.  But it is pretty!

 







And THEN, I came home from work to see this:





































Oh, no!  You've killed my baby blues! Anticlimactic story here. He made it to the end of the hallway and now there is nothing but glue residue on plywood and even though I keep sweeping it, crumbs keep sticking to the bottom of my feet every time I walk through the hall and that is where we are. And no, I have no idea why he decided to put the tiles in a cooking pot.  We've started making some plans for replacing the floors and I am incredibly excited about them.  At this point we were inspired to keep moving!


So this weekend we decided to tackle the thing that I hated most - the kitchen wallpaper. Here it is in all it's peachy pink brown glory:


So we started to scrape. And we quickly learned that this could take our entire life. The wallpaper is waterproof and double layered. The blue wallpaper remover spray did nothing.

   
 One trip to Home Depot later, and enter our new best friend, wallpaper steamer:


It was still painstaking, slow going with serious risk of steam burns, but after a few hours we had THIS:


AND THIS:
It's still a hot mess but a lot less peach!  We still have the smaller sections to go, as well as 4 more rooms of wallpaper, glorious wallpaper.  Prepare to die.

The last project was one I was REALLY looking forward to. If you know me, you've probably heard me blab on about my jukebox. It came with this house and it just may be our very favorite part (we actually asked for it in the offer!). But some of the songs were, uh, downright depressing. "Send in the Clowns"? "God Bless the USA"? On a JUKEBOX?!

So we went to the record store to search through their ridiculous, unsorted mess for the best 45s for basement dance parties. And we found AMAZING stuff and it was tough not to spend hundreds of dollars, but it is now AWESOME! And then I replaced the most horrible songs (there are still some that need to go!) and I was incredibly thrilled and we had our first Talking Heads/Cars dance party. And then it started making a horrible popping sound this past weekend and our hearts are broken. But we think we can fix it (or that it will fix itself, right? that happens, RIGHT?). Please, just humor me.

Oh, she's a beaut:










 

Fin.