Tag Archive | old houses

FO Friday: All the things

The upside to blogging so rarely is that by the time I have the motivation, I have plenty of things to share! I have so many finished things today, which is a relief after months of works in progress. Let’s start with the house: I’m calling it finished, even though we’re still waiting for the new gutter to be installed on the back of the house. It’s supposed to happen today and that’s close enough.

We got the downstairs floors and stairs refinished last week and they’re so gorgeous, better than I ever expected. I even bought new curtains for the music room to jazz up the “boring” gray walls, and new curtains and an area rug for the living room. This is the probably the fanciest we’ve ever been — I feel like we finally have a nice, grown-up house!

Yes, as many people have asked, it does make us think differently about the house. We’ve been saying for ages that we want to sell it and move on ASAP, but now that its potential is finally being realized, we’re starting to ponder. The house still has some issues we want to fix — upstairs bathroom renovation is a big one — and it has some issues we can’t easily/affordably fix — the downstairs bathroom is uncomfortably tiny, the street we’re on is noisy, the husband can’t build a workshop as big as he’d like. So we’re trying to figure things out. I’d like to figure it out soon, but I’m also a little more content staying here while we work on it.

I also have some finished knitting to share! My knitting time has slowly been coming back, thank goodness, though I’m still mostly focused on simple things like socks.

The completed pair used a skein of speckled purple from Mothy & the Squid and I LOVE her yarn. Wish she wasn’t overseas! The shawl is my Peacock’s Tail, a fun one-skein project that might have used a yarn from Blissful Knits. (Keeping track of yarns used is not a high priority at the moment, sorry.) The single sock was started last weekend as the husband and I took off for an anniversary weekend getaway (more on that another day). I got all but the toe done while we were gone, then it took me three more days to get around to the toe! I pulled a languishing skein of sock yarn from Colorful Eclectic Dyeworks from the stash for that one.

I’d really like to get back to my rainbow sweater project so that I have a new sweater to wear when fall arrives. Surely it won’t take too long to knit sleeves, right?

Happy Friday, friends!

What? A new project?

Jul29

Knitting has not been my focus for the last month or so, sadly, but I did cast on a new shawl a couple of weeks ago. This is a one-skein project, not another huge lace project. I’d wound the yarn months ago, picked out a pattern and put it in a project bag along with the required needles. By the time I stumbled upon it recently, I no longer wanted to knit that pattern, so I had to pick a new one. I found Peacock’s Tail on Lovecrafts and it seems like the perfect fit for this yarn.

The lace pattern in the middle is hard to see but it should block out well. This is a fun pattern, with just the center section requiring brainpower, and even then it’s limited brainpower needed. I’m knitting the medium size of this shawl and crossing my fingers that it’s a wearable size.

So if I haven’t been knitting, what have I been doing? Yep, still packing and painting. Everything that can be boxed has been boxed, and many of them have been carried upstairs. Shelves have been removed from bookcases. Every large furniture item has been cleared off except the TV stand, because we’re still using the TV. We’ll move it all out to the portable storage container over the weekend and then Monday the crew arrives to refinish the floors, hooray! We’ll be staying in a nearby house we own — we’ve rented it out the last few years but are getting it ready to sell, so it’s empty and means we don’t have to pay to stay anywhere else, and there are no issues with having three dogs there. We’ll have a bed, a couch, and a kitchen table and chairs. No other furniture, no WiFi. No Wifi means I’ll be going into the office to work for four days, so that’ll be a big switch. I’m purposely not thinking about having to reverse this packing/moving process, except that I know we need to get the storage container empty over two days next weekend. Bah. And the husband wonders why we haven’t refinished the floors before now!

The silver lining is that this has forced me into getting a few more areas painted. I’ve now painted six rooms and a stairwell since we’ve been in this house, with just the craft room and a tiny bathroom left. We’re still thinking we might sell this house and move in the next year or so, so I’m feeling pretty good about my progress. After this house, I’d really like to get out of the “sweat equity” business and let other people do the hard work!

Oh yeah, and the back of the house is done! We’ve got a couple of guys outside doing some touch up and putting storm windows back up, and a couple others inside doing the interior trim on the new windows. With any luck, the paint crew will be done today. After that, we need a tiny bit of tile repaired in the kitchen and some debris cleaned up in the backyard, and then I think the project will be DONE and we can just enjoy the fruits of the labor.

Happy Thursday, friends.

Sock It To Me Monday: Purple Edition

Jul26

I might have only one pair of socks on my needles. I’m not sure, because it’s been a little busy and hectic around here, but this is the only one I’m working on anyway. I’ve got all my knitting stuff up in the craft room in preparation for our floors being refinished next week and apparently it’s out of sight, out of mind.

The purple flecked is from Mothy & the Squid and gosh I just love it. I used a bit of solid Cloudborn for a heel just for fun, and I’m doing my favorite modified Vanilla Latte pattern. This is just the best kind of sock knitting for me. But I still want to cast on more socks!

Since we had to pack up all the books and empty the first floor so the floors can be refinished, I decided that was a great time to paint the sitting room. It was the last room on the first floor to be repainted, since I did the others last summer during my painting spree, and the walls were in terrible shape, with lots of nail holes and cracks and tiny dents and dings. Despite protests from the kids, I painted it the same pale gray as the living room. I had two reasons, both very valid. One: I had plenty of the paint left over. Two: we might still sell this house, if we can find something we like better, so I’m sticking with neutral colors for now.

I’ve got some bold curtains picked out to help jazz up the room, and I’ll definitely share another photo once the floors are done and everything is in place. I feel like we’re finally being grownups, with intentionally chosen curtains and area rugs and stuff!

Happy Monday, friends.

WIP Wednesday

May5

There are a lot of WIPs at my house lately. The house is the biggest work in progress, still. They’ve gotten a lot done but I’m guessing we still have at least a week of work left, if not more. I’m hoping they finish the deck stairs today, and they’ve started putting up the new clapboard siding.

I’m totally in love with my new deck. It’s 12′ deep and there’s going to be plenty of room for the grill and a table and chairs, and maybe even a lounging chair for napping in the sun, plus three dogs. I’m so glad we decided to splurge on a huge deck, since sitting out back with the dogs is my favorite part of this house. Who knows, maybe we’ll decide to stay here after all!

Of course I’ve got my knitting WIPs too. Even though I have probably six things on my needles, I’m still only working on one or two projects at a time. One is a sock and one is a bigger project. I just finished my Walls wrap, which I’ll share Friday, so right now, these are the two.

I’ve got maybe four or five rows left on the sweater before I get to join in the round. I’m still totally in love with this yarn and I think I’m going to love wearing it. And my Twilight sock is growing nicely and look, I even managed to match the stripes! It totally doesn’t bother me when they don’t match, but it does tickle me when they do.

The last bit of news is that we got the boy a car on Monday! He’d had a 1963 Mercury Comet for a couple of years, but they never really got it running, so he wasn’t able to drive it. With us working from home so much, it was no problem for him to just use one of our cars. But things are starting to open up, I might be going back to work at least part-time this summer, and he’s graduating high school this month. It was time to get him some reliable transportation of his own. We found a nice used car with super low mileage, and though it’s not the cutest car, it’s got space in the back for him to lug around his guitars and amps and other music gear.

He seems thrilled with it and I’m glad we’re in a position to be able to help him with this — though it might have been nice if it hadn’t been at the same time as needing to pay for the renovation, haha!

Happy Wednesday, friends!

Weekend Adventure

Apr20

Whew, I’m tired, guys. The husband and I went on a quick weekend road trip to visit the girl in Colorado and watch her perform her junior flute recital. We packed two days full of adventure and good food and vaccinated hugs, and it was all fantastic.

Of course I had to visit a yarn store in Fort Collins! And Longmont! Plus the husband found me the perfect travel mug at a kitchen store. So I came home with yarn goodies and a finished sock.

But there was a day of driving on either end, and we came home to minor renovation-related electrical issues, two dogs coming home from boarding full of craziness, one upset dog stomach, one damaged car bumper from an altercation with a curb, plus the usual unpacking etc. Fortunately, the clever husband blocked the gaps in the fence with some temporary fencing, so we’re able to take the dogs to the backyard when the workmen aren’t here. That helps so much! They’ve made amazing progress on the demolition; now they’ll move on to cleaning up the side of the house. The extra wiring and light fixtures will go away, the two upper doors will become windows, and the wall sections will be replaced with clapboard siding. No idea how long it’ll all take, but I’m hoping no more than a couple of weeks. Three dogs and limited backyard access is not fun!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to take a nap before dinner! Happy Tuesday, friends.

Oh heck I’m tired

May21

The living room is done. I had to push myself to do it, but Tuesday was prep and yesterday was paint and now it’s done and I can stop painting for a while. I still love the results but my body needs a rest and my brain needs some knitting. Plus my book group is having a virtual meeting tomorrow so I need to skim the book (which I read a while back) to refresh my memory. It’s a little one, The Confession Club by Elizabeth Berg, so it’s a fast read. Lots of paint work meant no knitting, so I’ll just share my living room today.

It’s the same pale gray as my bedroom and I like the subtle contrast with the darker gray in the dining room. Now if we could just get the floors refinished!

More painting

May8

Maybe I should wait until my new purple bedding comes but I’m not going to. I’m going to share the progress on my bedroom now because I’m just so tickled with it. Here are a couple of before shots that show the “lovely” paint job from the previous residents.

Note: the spackled cracks are my work. We have not been living with that for five years! But we have been living with the cracks, some of which are pretty bad, so it was very satisfying to fill them all in and sand them down smooth, and then PAINT OVER THEM so they disappear (mostly).

And look at that last photo — see that weird unpainted spot? There was a radiator there. There are radiators throughout the house but the boiler wasn’t even close to being in working condition when we moved in, and I had no interest in dealing with radiators as a heat source, so we’re slowly removing them. I was thrilled to finally get this one out, especially since the last owners had painted the room but not behind the radiator, so you could see the other paint color back there. SO bad. Once it was out, I patched up the huge crack it was hiding, painted over the nasty stained trim, and voila!

Now it’s SO GOOD. I love it. The paint is exactly what I wanted, and I even repainted the trim a glossy white, and seeing this room just makes me smile now.

Now I’m off to do one last bit of trim painting and then I’m taking the rest of the day as a knitting day before starting another paint job. The bedding is supposed to arrive tomorrow so I’ll be sure to share another photo with that!

Happy Friday, friends!

Lifelines

May4

THIS is why we use a lifeline, friends.

C3490BD9-9267-426D-95CC-3126682DD30D I had to frog 30 rows of lace on Saturday. 327 stitches per row. That’s over 9800 stitches, and it was only 15 rows from the end of the shawl. But I’d dropped a stitch a few rows back, thought I’d fixed it, then I dropped another stitch, thought I’d fixed it, my stitch count was off by one so I adjusted, and then the next row my stitch count was off by three. Upon further investigation, the diamond lace pattern was hecked up, to put it in technical terms. I hated to do it but I want this to be a good shawl, thus, the frogging. I got all my stitches back on the needle safely and have done three rows correctly. Now I’m just trying to decide how often to move my lifeline now!

I’m not sure how much knitting I’ll be getting done in the near future, though, because I seem to have found a new project: painting. Alas, no, not pretty pictures but rooms in our old house. We’ve been here five years and never painted a room, mostly because we always had other projects that needed the time/energy/money/focus first. But now I’m not working, the girl is home and will be done with school stuff soon and is eager and willing to help, and paint is relatively inexpensive. It all started with the husband’s office, which was an unattractive salmon-pink color. It’s a small room and he’ll be in there for at least the rest of May, if not longer, so I offered to paint it for him. I filled and sanded all the cracks, taped all the trim, and the girl and I painted it a fresh pale gray. The prep took longer than the painting itself!

I’d forgotten how satisfying it is to paint a room and have it be all fresh and pretty! We’re all jealous of the new room. And honestly, I think it was good for me to have a project that made a difference. I felt a little…lost last week, for lack of a better word, without work to give me a sense of purpose. The last times I wasn’t working, the kids were younger and my purpose was raising them. Well, at this point, that’s pretty much done, and it’s not like the younger one listens to me anyway! So directing my energies toward this sad house is a good plan, I think. It needs to be done before we can sell in a couple of years anyway, and we might as well get to enjoy the fresh paint jobs. Next up, my bedroom!

091869DE-AA0E-437F-A2B0-33DAC2B512B1 I hate this color so much. In person, it’s a touch more yellow. It’s like a pale pea green. It’s hideous. All the many cracks have been patched (hooray for old houses with plaster walls, right?) and today I’ll sand them down and start prepping furniture to be moved out of the room. And then it will be painted the palest gray and the girl said she’ll repaint the glossy white trim, and then! Don’t tell the husband, but then I’m going to order new bedding and it’s going to be PURPLE and I will love my bedroom.

And then I’ll take more ibuprofen and lay down because I’m old, friends, and my back hurts.

This is so cool!

Oct6

Yesterday the husband and I went downtown to a “vintage market” that’s kind of like an antique store only more hipster-ish. They’re only open the first weekend of every month, and we rarely find things we have to have, but yesterday was a good day. The husband found a big metal cabinet thing with drawers that will apparently be perfect for holding screws and nails and some such stuff in his workshop. And me? I found this treasure:

It’s handmade from oak and originally it was going to be for knitting needles but then the more I looked at it, the more I realized it needed to be for my pen stuff.

I think I want to get dark purple felt to line the drawers, and maybe someday the husband can use that workshop of his to make more dividers, and it could hold pens in a better way. But this works for now and I’m just tickled pink with it.

The only other thing I did yesterday was clean out my craft room. I’ve talked about our old house before, and how the old sleeping porch/addition is sagging dangerously and needs renovation desperately. We’ve been working with a contractor and an architect since March to draw up plans and get quotes, and we were going to expand the kitchen and get a laundry room and it was going to be Marvelous! Well. As I feared, our plans were ~~a little~~ a lot beyond our budget, and our dream kitchen is not an option. Knowing that, our goal now is to get the house in shape to sell in a couple of years. For now, we’ll remove the addition, rebuild a nice new deck, update the kitchen a little bit, and refinish the downstairs floors.

Having this be a smaller project means we should be able to redo the upstairs bathroom that’s a mishmash of cheap fixtures, and create something that’s appropriate for the house and aesthetically pleasing. It’s nowhere close to either of those now!

Sorry, getting off track here. Not adding on a laundry room means we need to find a home for the washer/dryer, and our choices are the basement (damp, spidery, rickety stairs, and more problematic, the husband’s current workshop) or the tiny, not-very-functional bedroom that the husband is currently using as an office. (I know, poor husband! He should fare better with our next house.) We agreed the office should become a nice laundry room with some additional storage, and that we could create a shared space from my craft room. It’s not ideal for either of us, but it’ll work for a couple of years.

SO! I needed to create some room for his stuff, and I did a much-needed purge. Gone are the scrapbooking supplies I haven’t used in almost ten years! Gone are scraps of ribbon and other little bits that I hoarded for “some project some day”! Gone are my fabric remnants that I bought to line purses I never made! I condensed my yarn stash and made room for my knitting books and bins of leftover yarn balls. All of that meant I have half a closet and an empty corner, ready to share! And honestly, I’m in love with how it looks.

It’s great progress, but it’s not quite enough space for his stuff. I have a bookcase that holds my knicknacks — my Wonder Woman collection, some family mementos, little gifts from my kids — and I think that stuff will have to be packed up for now to create more space. I do want him to feel like he has a little corner of his own in there, at least. So maybe that will be today’s project. Unless I decide I need to do some knitting!

Oh boy, here we go

Apr1

We live in an old house, 100 years old next year, actually. While I love the look of this house, I’ve written about some of our challenges before. We bought it in a rush, with rose-colored glasses on, and kind of ended up with a lemon. At least it feels that way a lot of the time, as often as things fall apart. The biggest issue has always been the back of the house, where some kind of two-story sleeping porch was added early on but not done properly. It was sagging slightly when we bought the house and has been getting worse over the last three years, and we’ve been putting it off in hopes that we could find someone able to do a relatively simple, affordable fix.

Nope, not gonna happen. The back addition has to come down and be replaced. We decided that late last fall, and then, this week we got the ball rolling. We signed a design contract on Saturday to get work started with the contractor and architect on the plan, and we’re meeting with the architect tonight. If all goes well, we’ll rebuild a one-story addition with a laundry room and an expanded, renovated kitchen, and then paint the entire exterior.

I’m terrified, guys. I know it has to happen, and we’ve been putting plans in place to make it work financially, but logic doesn’t always win over worry in my head. It will help when we get the actual bid, so I know we’ll actually be able to afford it. But guys, heck. A long kitchen renovation? Strange people in/around the house to drive the dogs bonkers? We’re talking about renting a house nearby while the work is done, and that would help my stress level immensely. I don’t know how we could do it otherwise, without one of us working from home to manage the dogs. And even then, leaving our dogs alone in someone else’s house? What if Duncan chews something up? I know, worst case scenario: we pay for the damage. Still, you name it, I’ll worry about it.

Even the contractor said this is a big project, but he also said he’s excited, so I’m pretty sure he’s the right guy for the job. I’m trying to manage the anxiety, especially since the husband is excited. And I think I’ll get there. Eventually. I’m definitely excited to have the work be done and behind us!