December Update

I have no idea how it is December already!

We finally found the solution to our light hanging headache. I ended up buying each of the available picture rail hooks from House of Antique Hardware and this was the winner. It's wide enough on top that it stays on the rail when you're jiggling around the string of lights and the top hook part perfectly fits our picture rail. It's pretty unusual for us to spend money right after Thanksgiving, but we did this year. We bought 60 of these things during their Cyber Monday sale.

Portland had an absolute TON of rain in November and our basement is still dry! (Happy dance.) I'm so glad the guys installed the French Drain last spring. It's working!

We have not finished the bathroom shelf. Oh well. Whenever it's sunny out, the fur children remind us it's time to go to the dog park, not go work in the garage. We'll eventually be tired of having nowhere to hang towels and get it done. I did dig out a board from our pile of fir, but we need to unbury the table saw to rip it to size.

We also spent many hours this month writing our first book. We're almost done with the rough draft and it's over 200 pages. I expect we'll be done with it in the next week or two then we're actually going to set it aside for six weeks or so before we edit it again.

Oh, and since we're disappointed about everything we've been reading in the news lately, we decided to escape to another land. We started playing Elder Scrolls Online (cringe). Only, after three years of behaving like teenagers, this time we're acting like adults (so far). We're doing our task list BEFORE we allow ourselves to sign on and escape to Tamriel.

Door Nearly Stripped

After many days of rain, our weather was finally decent again, though a bit humid, so I spent another quiet day with my heat gun and iPod. I am nearly done with both sides of the door. I haven't done the edges yet. A couple more hours will finish off the paint stripping with the heat gun then I'll have to turn my attention back to the chemicals.

In the category of simple pleasures, the fans on my gaming computer started rattling. Probably I could have just removed them and cleaned them well and reinstalled them, but I discovered I could change them out for $8 and have glowy purple fans.

Yeah, the photos are awful because I tried to take the pictures without the light on or camera flash and I didn't want to go dig around and look for a tripod. You guys get the idea; my computer glows purple now, instead of red. LOL

Sorting out Details

I've been obsessing the last week or so about getting our soapstone slab from Sacramento, California to Portland, Oregon. When we remodeled the kitchen in 2012, we bought a "remnant" from Teresina Soapstone that was enough for our proposed bathroom project.. At the time, we planned to get to the project sooner, but we all know how that went..... LOL

Anyway, fast forward two years and Teresina has been bought out by Sierra Soapstone and they don't ship soapstone. They did tell us they have a job next week in Gold Beach, Oregon and offered to bring our soapstone up there. So, now we are trying to work out how to transport it from Gold Beach to Portland.

We are getting quite the education. Apparently you cannot transport soapstone horizontally, but are supposed to transport it on an A-frame or on its edge. I researched the cost to rent a full size pickup and we're going to drive down to Gold Beach. We're hoping to borrow an A-frame from our local fabricator, but we'll build one if we have to. Once that slab is safely tucked in at Portland Marble Works, we'll start demo.

And I guess I better figure out the dumpster soon.

For kicks, Jeff and I have been goofing off with the idea of building a gaming lair in our basement that is inspired by this. It would be a fun way to use a bunch of the salvaged parts we have kicking around in our basement.

Fiddly Details

Paint stripping seems to be one of those activities where you are never really done. You can spend a staggering amount of time trying to clean up paint out of all the crevices, but eventually you have to just declare it "good enough" and move on. I spent a few more hours the last couple of days cleaning paint out of crevices on the crown mouldings and door jambs with dental tools, despite my declaration last time that we were done. Seems like I do this every time.

I also finished stripping paint off the window in the closet. Now we really are at the point where we can fill holes and start sanding. Really, for sure this time. LOL

Jeff has been working with his friend, Eric, everyday this week. He usually is the one who does projects like filling holes in the woodwork, so I guess I need to go dig around and find the wood filler. I really want to keep this project moving along. Sanding, here we come!!

Over the weekend, alas, we got a distracted with our video game again. I never seem to be able to do real life house projects on the weekends anymore. Instead, Jeff and I basically "cleaned house" in ArcheAge and dealt with getting rid of "stuff". We had land and a house and lots of chests that were full. We were sort of pack rats and we're now trying to clean house, so to speak, so we can close out this chapter of our lives. It is possible we will go back and play some more ArcheAge in the fall, once our summer projects are finished, so we're trying to get our character's affairs in order for a long, possibly permanent, break in the game.

Family House in ArcheAge

Sewing Room Progress Finally

I have finally mostly escaped the self-destructive habit of playing the ArcheAge game all day and I'm working on my sewing room again. I've packed up all of the hanging and stacked fabrics and most of the stuff in the bookshelf. I didn't really want to declare any progress on the blog again until I had made a lot of progress packing, lest it get derailed like it did last time. :)

I'm hoping to get the room packed up entirely in the next week and get started right away on paint stripping before our weather gets too hot. I'd really like to finish staining the wood and repainting the walls by the end of summer. I'll also plan on having the floors refinished before I move back into the room.

Right now all the packed boxes are being stuffed into the other bedrooms on the second floor, so it's going to be pretty cluttered and unphotogenic for the near future. It's probably going to be pretty crazy when we have to move all the furniture out of the room for the floor refinishing. (I predict the bed in the guest bedroom will get unassembled.)

It was a little painful to start packing up the stacked fabric as I spent so long making those piles just as I liked them. Ultimately, I ended up buying boxes that were just the right size to fit two piles side-by-side without having to reshift the piles. It should be fairly straightforward to put the fabric right back on the shelves mostly the way they were before.

(P.S. about ArcheAge. Don't even think about playing it. The game is being managed extremely poorly by its North American publisher, Trion. I regret some of the money I put into the game, though I must admit I did enjoy it for many months. We hung out with some really nice players and I do not regret the time I spent with them. The game itself is really beautiful, but it unfortunately does not reward hard work, but luck and swiping your credit card. Additionally, many players in the game are really toxic and ridicule players who don't view PvP as their primary desire in the game. Save your time and money. Don't bother.)

Stupid computer games . . .

Jeff and I must have been channeling our inner teenager for the last couple of weeks because we managed to get totally distracted by an online computer game. The time just sort of slipped by and we barely noticed. But last Friday I looked up the date we started and was shocked to realize how much time we had wasted!

Partly, I think we were feeling really overwhelmed by it all and it was easy to go tuck our heads into our computers and ignore all the other stuff. So, I decided it was time for some project rescheduling. I still want to get many of the same projects done this year, but I'm trying to be more realistic about our abilities to actually finish them before summer.

I think we have finally gotten our act together and progress on our lists should resume. Right now we're focusing on small projects.

Jeff went to storage and brought home a car-full of boxes of art (which wasn't all of them). Geez, we have a lot of art. We obviously had a lot of wall space in our big house and we probably have about 3 times as much as will fit in this house; we'll probably have to get rid of a lot of it. We're still trying to sift through it all to figure out which pictures will get to stay and where they go. (I hate this part of downsizing.)

Today I finally made curtains for our master bathroom. This is one of those "why didn't I do this sooner" projects. It really only took me a few hours and most of the time was sitting around sewing on rings.

I didn't like the old curtains because they were faded polka dot and didn't really seem like they were designed for these windows since they were about 4 inches too long. And they didn't open and close very well because the casing was very bulky on the rod.

This is pretty much the only before picture I can find but it's not very good because it is backlit.

This is what the new curtains look like. The fabric I used is a William Morris design done in bright colors. I've sewn on rings so the curtains will actually open and close, unlike the old ones. They're cheery and bright and I like them.