This past autumn, my city decided they weren’t going to pick up the leaves that fall into the street in my neighbourhood. Normally they come by once each year after most of the leaves have fallen and enormous street-sweeping-leaf-picking-upping machines haul away the detritus. But not this year. Instead, as a cost-cutting measure the leaves […]
Category: House stuff
Poe Pillow
I finished this project in December but just managed to deliver it to its intended recipients — it was a wedding gift for Ruby Nite and her now-husband — last week. In the interim between finishing it and delivering it, the pillow lived in my office, so all my colleagues who saw me working on […]
Ah, destruction
We started to bash up the hideous, much-hated cabinets from our ex-kitchen (well, more of a “kitchen” really) in the back bedroom. YAY. I haven’t flung any chunks out the window yet, but it will definitely happen. I really loathed trying to cook in there — it was a zero-bum kitchen, the kind in which […]
Of record collections and cabinetry
Quotation of the Day for June 30, 2008 “It’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.” – Nick Hornby Back a million years ago when my record collection kept to […]
Larval kitchen
Kitchens, at least, ours, have a larval form, in which they appear in vast numbers (159, to be exact) of bags and boxes:
An overexcited post about drywall.
Once upon a time a long long time ago there was a downstairs kitchen in our house. It looked something like this: …and despite its extreme ugliness when we bought the house we fully intended to use it for a time, then switch to the upstairs kitchen temporarily while we renovated. But no. Once we […]
Numbers
55: Approximate weight of a sheet of 1/2″ x 4′ x 8′ drywall, in pounds. 9: Height in feet of our kitchen ceiling 639: Approximate number of muscles in the human body 600: Approximate number of those muscles that will hurt the next day if you spend a lot of time lifting 1/2″ x 4′ […]
Very sensible advice.
Quotation of the Day for October 7, 2007 “Fix what you can. Call the rest authentic.” – Sarah Graves, offering home renovation hints in her novel Trap Door.
Grubby, but not crabby
The water heater is busted. Happily, though, it’s busted in a way that has not (has not yet, let’s not tempt fate) leaked water anywhere. Also happily, it’s a rental so it’s Somebody Else’s Problem. Unhappily, there are five people in the house at the moment — three large and two small — and we’d […]
Penance
Quotation of the Day for January 5, 2007: “I’ve been waist-deep in a dead hippopotamus, and I’d rather do that than change diapers.” – Eric Humphries, production manager at Skulls Unlimited International, on getting used to his line of work. The company claims to be the world’s leading supplier of bones, both human and animal, […]
Why I’m always so tired after vacations
Errands. I spend my vacations doing errands, cleaning the house, and — inevitably — painting things. Today we (minus Maddy, who spent the day happily playing at daycare since she would’ve been bored to tears by all of this) pursued a missing bit of a plumbing fixture, took many boxes of books downtown to the […]
Drywall!
Drywall! Originally uploaded by morecoffeeplease. Much progress in the bathroom: real, modern wiring (now mostly hidden); insulation (also now mostly hidden); plywood on the bits that will have wainscotting and greenboard on the bits that will show. And the window is new too. Not visible in the photo is the cementboard around the shower area. […]
What passes for New Year’s fun at our house
We raised, if not the roof, the second floor of our house by a centimetre or so. (Not by partying, sadly.) Safety-Averse Former Owner (SAFO) decided that cutting great huge chunks out of the joists was a good idea — hey, why not, just because they’re structural doesn’t mean you really need them, right? — […]
Kitchen destruction
Thanks to the tool of power, courtesy Lee Valley …our downstairs Once and Future Kitchen is about as empty as it can ever get. Now we can rebuild it with modern conveniences, such as wiring and insulation and intact plumbing.