Sweet Mod Kitchen Yo!

Dan wanted a red kitchen. Not a pale sweet pink or a Casablanca meets Studio 54 maroon, but red. Bright red. Now personally, I'm more of a "seriously?! well what about just a red accent wall?" kinda gal, but I thought about it. I got my icy blue bedroom, so Dan can have his red kitchen, if it sucks we change it. He decided on red walls all around, and cream colored cabinets. So off we went to Home Depot for some paint. The older gentleman in the paint department gave me a lecture on red paint. Apparently it is a feat almost impossible to pull off if one does not first prepare their walls with a grey primer. Sold! Load up the primer, load up the red! "Oh, and what is this high gloss cream for?" he asks, and upon hearing we were repainting cabinets, "Cabinets?! Primer is a must!" Now these weren't his exact words, and under any other circumstances I would never consider buying a primer, but neither of us had much experience in dealing with red paint or with cabinetry, so we figured better to spend some extra money and time with the primer than to botch these things up and have to rebuy and redo everything after it all looks like crap. So, we headed home with a trunkful of paint.

The kitchen walls were white, cabinets a dark brown, and the counter a gross kind of yellow.

The walls were bare with the exception of some art that Dan drew (I helped).


So one day we said "bye bye boat!" and primered the kitchen. It wasn't a very difficult task seeing as it was just going to be painted over anyhow thereby cancling out any notion of needing to be precise with the details. A few days later we started in with the real paint, and holy begonias, what a pain. It took three coats of this red to completely cover the white, and it seems to be impossible to get it to cover solidly around the edges, something I've personally come to terms with with the reasoning that it will one day be covered by moulding. It doesn't look bad though. Because the paint is semi-gloss it shows all of the imperfections with the walls (and there are a lot). But I must say, it looks far better than I thought that it would, and the cream cabinets contrast it quite nicely. It all looks very modern, due in part to our new black stove and the fact that we have only hung black and white artwork. The cabinets are still being painted (I hope to finish them today in fact) and after that the kitchen will be finished except for some few minor details and a new counter which is planned for a very distant future.

*Dan painting over the primer. Notice the jar of money on top of the refrigerator? That's our swear jar.

*The kitchen wall leading to the hallway, there is a nook in the wall directly in the center of the picture where there will one day be shelves for our awesome cookbooks.

*Red walls- cream cabinets coming soon.

Building the wall, continued.

Dan and I threw a housewarming party. Partly because he wanted to throw a party, and partly because we needed something to really motivate us to get stuff done around the house. Our main focuses were the kitchen and finishing up the entry way between the living room and dining room.

We were almost finished with the entry way, it was down to needing one more small coat of spackle, some sanding and then it would be ready to paint. If only that is how things really work. One day shortly before the party Dan was standing back and admiring his handy work when he realized something just wasn't right. Now I don't want to put any words in his mouth, I wasn't there for his realization or his reaction so keep that in mind. But the top wall that we built wasn't straight. In fact, it was horribly unstraight. It was hard to miss, it looked great compared to how it had looked for so long with the horrible jagged edges of plaster and metal mesh, but that didn't change the fact that our entry was lopsided and terribly noticeable once you actually looked.

So we had to rebuild our doorway. Dan tore down all of the corners and we had to go Home Depot for some thin wood to put in some shims and get more drywall. It didnt take that long to fix but it set our schedule for being finished for the party back by about two days. We didnt have as much time to layer the spackle and so the corners and the places where we spackled onto the drywall were noticeable But alas, with a day left before our grand party, we decided to hell with it and just let the spackle dry. Dan painted it the next day, leaving mere hours for it to dry before our party.

Dan and Tara Build A Wall

There used to be a small hold in our wall. It was in the doorway between the living room and dining room. We had to patch it in order for the house to pass the inspection appraisal, it really wasn't a big deal. But, then we had an idea. You see, when you looked into the hole, you could see the glossy reflection of paint on the wall behind it, meaning the previous owners had simply built the doorway out and around the old wall. How easy it would be to tear this wall down and widen the doorway between the two walls! And how much better it would look! So we got to work.

The project did not turn out to be as easy as we had hoped. As we took the corner down we did not find drywall as we had originally assumed we would. Instead, there were layers of plaster and metal lath, so instead of simply being able to cut the walls back to the previous existing walls, we had to rip off all of the plaster. So we ended up taking the wall down to the studs and a bit further back than we had originally anticipated, as you can see here.

Dan also decided to leave the next people who decide to rip these walls down a surprise, and since we didn't have any old playboys, he left the next best thing.

And so the room sat like this for some time, doors closed to avoid the spreading of dust and any disturbance of the dogs. Then some weeks later my parents came out to help us rebuild another wall that we had ripped out upstairs. Long story short, we learned how to build walls. So, a few weeks later after a visit to my parents where I obtained a grinder, we took to finishing the demolition and reconstruction of the entryway.

So it went from this...















..to this...
(pictures from dining room side where wall was not ripped down to studs)

The grinder worked miracles. It was like holding a hot spinning blade up to a huge uneven chunk of frozen butter- not quite as smooth as you would think, debris flying every which way, even up my skirt at one point. But in the end, we got smooth straight edges around the doorway and were set up to build. We had to build the studs out an extra inch to put up the drywall so that it would be even with the rest of the wall. So we did. We then put up the drywall, covering up Dan's profession of love. He looked really stunning with a drill in his hand, if I may say so.

Once the drywall was all up, we put up some spackle and attached some corners and put up some more spackle. It looked great. But it wasn't over yet.

Planted a Garden

Recently, I planted my garden! Or replanted I suppose I should say.

The story started about two months back when I went through the labor intensive task of clearing out the entire garden, pulling out dead bushes, piles of weeds, and digging up a series of roots that had taken over the entire underground of the garden. This task was made more difficult by the fact that the dogs wanted to help me with this process, running in and out of the dirt and making a mess of everything that I had already removed from the ground. So when all was said and done, I was quite proud of what I accomplished and soon went to the North Hills to some orchards to buy an array of very pretty, and somewhat expensive flowers.

A week later my flowers were dead. I had no idea why, I watered them, kept the dogs off of them, but they still died despite my efforts. Weeks later I realized why. As Dan and I were driving through Wexford, I noticed several houses in which all of the flowers were wilted, dying, or dead. All of these houses were within a mile of Soergels, so what my assumption is is that Soergels loads their plants and flowers with steroids, leaving them no possible way to survive once they are out of the plant steroid miracle grow infested atmosphere and are planted in real soil. That is assuming those other people had also bought their plants from Soergels, which I am.

Which leads us to the day of replanting. Ever since my plants died I have been yearning to go to the Home Depot to purchase new flowers, though I was conflicted. You see, I do not approve of people who go out and spend hundreds of dollars in the spring on flowers and mulch who then repeat this every year because these flowers die at the end of the season. This is an absurd waste of money in my opinion. I had already spent over fifty dollars on flowers and the only way I was justifying buying more was because of the fact that I had won three ten dollar gift cards from work, so essentially these flowers were free, so that was fine. Also, because we were recently gifted a grill and patio set, we were spending more and more time outside and I was tired of looking at the pathetic excuse of a garden that was dying more and more each day.

So I started replanting the garden. We stopped at Home Depot on the way home from Wexford one day and I got flowers and potting soil and top soil and some miracle grow plant food. I was taking no chances in having these flowers die as well. Upon arriving home I donned my gardening gloves and got to work. I decided to clear out some of the lillies that had overtaken the other half of the garden and that the dogs had trampled to a pulp. So I started to dig. Dan watched for a few minutes before he got bored and decided to go upstairs to hook up the television to our awesome and free cable. Within minutes of his departure my shovel hit something hard in the ground. Figuring it was just a rock I moved my shovel back a few inches and dug back in. Upon bringing the shovel back out it caught on the buried object and lifted it out of the ground. Seeing that it was not a rock I got excited. Jackpot! I had stumbled upon buried treasure and since Dan was out of sight it was all mine! I slowly opened the tin and peeked inside... and screamed and dropped it on the ground. "Dan! Dan! Get down here!" Clomp clomp clomp comes Dan down the stairs and out the back door. "What's wrong?" "Just get rid of that tin!" What was in the tin you ask?

I may have discovered that our flowers were not dying because Soergels kept them hopped up on flower steroids, but because our garden was cursed by the vengeful spirit of a dead pet hampster/gerbil/rat/flying squirrel. The flowers are doing much better now, though it is still unconfirmed if it was in fact Soergels' fault, or that of the dead animal.


It's not too impressive, but you should have seen it before. Of course, the grass also used to be green, but with the amount of urine spread on it every day by the dogs it hasn't stood a chance.

First Post = First Post About Poop

One of the many reasons for buying a house was to finally have a yard where the dogs could run and play and, most importantly, do their business without us needing to put on pants and go with them. And the new house serves these purposes well, although the dogs have developed a habit of barking at any noise that strikes their sensitive ears, as well as any stray figure that happens to enter their fields of vision. We do our best to be good neighbors, though, cleaning up after them and trying to keep them quiet, pulling them inside when they start to bark.

Tara left yesterday after work to spend the weekend with her parents, so last night I was alone, staying up late, playing video games, and listening to all the music that she dislikes. I slept in this morning, and when I finally took the dogs out, I was greeted in the yard by a series of four or five small piles of what turned out to be kitty litter, each serving as a sort of burial mound for a pile of poop. I quickly ran through a mental list of suspects, and quickly ruled out everyone but our neighbors. I tried to think of a proper response to this action. I didn't want to just go and clean it right up. I thought about grabbing Tara's guns and cleaning them on the patio table, but we don't have any cleaner and I don't have any idea how to clean a gun. I thought about standing next to their house and yelling "Cowards!"*. In the end, I just sat in my chair waiting for them to come out. Quickly, my neighbor came over and semi-apologized, saying he had thought we were out of town and that the smell was too much. I politely acknowledged his reasons, reminding him that we clean it up daily, but that it accumulates at a disturbing rate (seriously, these dogs each dump a good pile about 3 times a day). After that he left. I waited a bit, then cleaned it up.

It was after all of this, as I looked at my yard with the now-flattened piles of kitty litter, that I realized how aggressive my neighbor's actions were. I wasn't lying when I said we clean it up daily, so this was really just a day's worth of poop. If that is bothering him, then it seems like our yard must bother him constantly, which serves to explain why he thought it was necessary for such an action. But while he thought we were out of town, he still chose to pour litter on the piles rather than just clean them up. Now, even after picking up all of the poop, I'm left with kitty litter in my yard. If we were really out of town, that would mean the number of piles wouldn't be increasing, so why not just pick it all up and be down with it? That would have made me feel guilty, whereas now I just think it was kind of a dick move because I'm stuck trying to figure out a way of separating litter from grass, or having to deal with having a spotted lawn. I have half a mind to go over and say "I cleaned up the poop, you guys can come over whenever to get your kitty litter back."





*But getting the proper effect would involve rigging a hose simulate a torrential downpour, and all that preparation would go against the spontaneous nature I was aiming for.