epic.blogging [two]

well now then, post intermission one...

[spoiler alert::if you havent read part one of this series yet, you may want to find it now and do so...]

hopefully youve all had a restroom break and a leg stretch at least [i know i did...] now lets get back into it all, shall we?

so the next part of this series that i was intending to post about was what other things ive been doing in my newly acquired "time-off." well... for those of you who can remember back that far, you may remember that karen had only just gotten back in town when i last blogged a little over a month ago. well needless to say this getting laid-off thing was a bit of a shock to my beloved, but she has been pretty strong and mostly pretty encouraging throughout the last month. i know shes trying to be patient and i know she wants me to be happy, but she would also like for me to be going to work every day and be bringing home a paycheck...

at any rate, karen had just returned home from her excursion in san francisco and if you dont know what im talking about, well... im not going to repeat it now. and now that she was back from cali she had about a month off before her classes started back up [so for those of you doing the math, ive actually been unemployed roughly 6 weeks and she started back to class about 2 weeks ago...] so we had everyday together at home. for the first couple of weeks i was pretty dedicated to re-doing my portfolio and applying to as many places as i could possibly squeeze in, but after about the first 3 weeks went by i definitely calmed that down a lot and i am now only applying to 5-10 per week id say. well i was dedicated for sure, but i definitely didnt work from sun up to sun down on work stuff, so there was always time in between or breaks or a day off here or there that karen and i spent together working on things. what things you ask? well they fell into two categories, one being house, two being karens art.

so we'll start with karens art because its a much shorter topic and involves no pictures. karen as part of her other mfa [master of fine arts] grad program, has to continually be working on art year round. so as soon as she got back to cincy she hit the ground running. i cant really put it all in a time period, but there have been a myriad of tasks involved with karens art and shes been sweet enough to let me help out some and feel like im contributing. on the list includes things like going to pick up supplies, materials, etc around town - specifically donated furniture from craigslist free-be ads that she needed a little muscle for - and also resulted in our new bed and a little extra cash from selling our old one on craigslist, haha! also, there have been some labor intensive art projects that shes let me help out with when she needed a break and needed some extra labor to step in, or when she needed help with a particularly difficult task that required more hands or more muscle. and then a few times shes even let me help out with the actual construction and design of things like frames for certain pieces or mounting, you know, the fun guy stuff. =] so thats all im going to say about karen's art for now, but for about a solid month she kept me fairly busy in my in-between time acting as her artist's assistant.

now then, for the longer topic, the house. well, now that we had all this "free-time" on our hands, there were certainly a ton of things that we could get done around the house now that we had the time to do them. a lot of our projects were overlapping because frankly, we can never focus on just one thing at a time, but the chronology more or less starts with the second floor bathroom. for those of you that remember the second floor bathroom from pictures a million years ago, it needed a lot of work. it was in pretty bad shape and the people that lived here before us had some pretty terrible decorating tastes, but it had a lot of potential.

as you can see, there wasnt a lot there to begin with, but some really tacky border around the ceiling. what you cant see is that the entire bathroom is floor-to-ceiling wall paper that has been painted over white - and not well at that. theres more pictures of the progression on my pictures website if youre interested, but im just going to show before and where we are now on the actual post. so from this picture, when my dad was here he changed out the light fixture in the bathroom so that theres something a lot nicer there now. and the black shelves you see were covered in this disgusting dust and grime stuff and while the moms collective were here over the summer my wonderful mother-in-law was kind enough to remove all of those from the walls as well. so when we first started in on the bathroom some of the hard stuff had already been done, but there was still much left to do.

well first things first, we had to get rid of all that wall paper... and if we'd known how much of a pain it was going to be... well... we might have decided to just leave it, but we're trying to do things the right way when we do projects here, to the best of our ability anyhow, so the wallpaper was coming down. thus began the arduous process of removing the wall paper. i am not exaggerating at all when i tell you this took days and days in a bathroom thats not even 100sf... the first step to removing wall paper is to decide on the method by which you will attempt [note: attempt...] to do so, and we were in no hurry to mess with toxic chemicals so we opted for the steam and scrape method. in this method you use a little hand-held disk that has two serrated spinning wheels on the bottom and you roll it around the wallpaper in excessive strokes to perforate the wallpaper there-by allowing the next step, the steaming, to get behind the paper and melt the glue.... well thats how its supposed to work anyway, and then easy-peasy the wallpaper comes sliding off the wall like limp noodles... riiight.... well no one told us this, but when the wallpaper has been painted over god knows how many times by the idiot previous owners, this method doesnt exactly go as smoothly as it sounds... we found out the hard way that we essentially had to do the entire bathroom twice over. once to perforate and remove the layers of paint on top of the wallpaper, the second time to remove the wallpaper itself. so for the first couple of days we did this until we'd removed the majority of the wallpaper within reach - and laboriously at that...

then i went through the chore of shutting off all the water valves and removing the various fixtures from their respective homes. well some came off better than others and there were definitely some water issues... not to mention we discovered that the toilet was so old that the screws that held the tank on had completely rusted out and were impossible to unscrew. whereby making it impossible for us to remove the tank without uprooting the entire toilet - not a matter to be taken lightly, nor one i was interested in pursuing for this little project - and in the end we resolved to just remove as much as we could as tight to the tank as we could and then just paint over the rest, haha.

so after getting all of the fixtures mobile, we proceeded to remove all the rest of the wall paper in those hard-to-reach areas and rearranged the bathroom a dozen times as necessary. next [still while karen was working on wall paper] i started to remove and replace the old two prong outlet and the old light switch with newer electrical and then while the sink was out anyway, worked on replacing the old faucet with a new one we'd gotten for that bathroom as well. now i say new... however we're on a strictly no spending budget here, haha, so all of the projects we've been working on have involved us only using any of the supplies we'd already bought long ago to do these projects with and had just never gotten around to. so anyway, eventually we finally got all the wallpaper down and the faucet and electrical changed out and the next part was my favorite of course... patching and prepping...

so we went around the entire bathroom and anywhere we needed to, patch a hole, or a piece of drywall that came up with the wall paper, or caulk around trim, you name it. we patched and sanded and prepped the entire bathroom. then, after letting that dry for a day, we finally were able to get in there and put on not one, but two coats of primer to all the walls, ceiling, and trim before we temporarily finished with that project. at this point its been as we left it - ready for the actual coat of colored paint and then for all of the fixtures to be put back together - for a couple of weeks now, but as you know, we're easily distracted.

it may not look like much, but to us its a vast improvement over what we started with and soon we intend to paint some color in there. and then if we had the money to do it [maybe someday....] we have plans to potentially re-do the tile on the floor and theres a fairly inexpensive wall treatment that i came up with that we'd really like to try out as well. other than that we're going to put up some shelves i have that will really go well with the wall treatment and hopefully we can get a new faucet and some shower accessories for the tub as well and really turn this thing into a functioning bathroom, lol! onto the next project...

well other than the bathroom weve worked on a variety of other little projects, some more minor like putting up some decorative shelves and getting a new sofa for the dining room [pictures on photo site] to finally cleaning up the yard for the fall and attempting to seed grass for the umpteenth time...

to our other really big project - the kitchen. now if youve been keeping up with this blog for long you'll probably know that we've already accomplished quite a drastic transformation in the kitchen from what it originally was and ive got tons of progress pictures up of the transformation so far on the photo site.

[the.before.shot]

however we decided it was finally time to take it to the next level and clean up the clutter. now i dont know how well you could tell from all the old pictures but that island you see in the before shot is a bit of a monster and really ate up a lot of space in the kitchen. well karen and i have been wanting to get rid of it for a long time now but it was really useful for storage purposes because as you can also see... theres not much cabinet space to speak of. well we'd discussed at length many times over the different options we had for the kitchen - from going with all new cabinets and getting exactly what we wanted to making do with what we had and everything in between. well eventually we decided the best option would be to get additional cabinets for a reasonable price to supplement the ones we already had and hopefully gain enough space to eventually rid ourselves of the beast - which karen wanted moved to the basement to use in her art workshop, but thats a whole other story...

so while karen was gone for the summer i decided to try and be sneaky and get started on the cabinets by myself before she got back... well, i didnt get too far. on the one hand i did get a fantastic deal on like 7 cabinets on craigslist that very closely resembled the style of our own for only 50 bucks! however, i was so excited by the deal that i didnt really look them over too closely and just figured id clean them up when i got home, and well... when the time came this summer that i wanted to attempt to re-finish all the cabinets i soon discovered that it was going to be a much larger task than i had anticipated. now originally i had planned to sand down and then either stain or paint all of the cabinets, inside and out, including the original ones in the kitchen. however when i finally got around to inspecting my newly acquired cabinetry i found that it was mostly particle board and in need of a good deal of repair. well... you cant exactly re-finish particle board and if we were thinking of going that route we were going to have to essentially re-build most of these new cabinets of everything but the face trim and doors and well frankly, i was not up to the task... and so when karen arrived back from her summer trip she was delighted to find the new cabinets that shed wanted for so long, however not so much at my evaluation of the re-finishing situation... so after a little mulling it over we decided to just not worry about re-finishing them and to just clean them up and salvage them the best we could and then just put a coat of paint over everything. and so thats what we did.

after cleaning them up we found that they were in better condition than i had first thought, and seemed to be sturdy enough after all. so we started to put up nailers to hang them on and everything seemed to go pretty quickly at first. the first night we worked on them i managed to get all of the nailers in place and 3 cabinets in place before we hit our first snag. well, the guys that installed the cabinets that were existing had to work with the same crappy, uneven, nothing-at-all-square-about-them, walls that ive mentioned all along, and when they installed the corner cabinet they had to do a lot of shimming to get it in there and lined up with the cabinets flanking it on either side. as a result, the cabinets all kind of warp and pitch in a multitude of different directions and needless to say... nothing is square. so now that i was attempting to install new cabinets on top of the existing ones i soon discovered that the corner space was in no way square and in fact was twisted in a few different directions making it all but impossible to "fit" a cabinet in the space - and to add to the fun, the cabinet we were going to put in the corner space wasnt actually a corner cabinet anyway and we were already dreading having to custom cut some pieces to fill the spaces between the cabinets... but in the way that this thing was shifting, it just wasnt worth the effort. so instead, we came to the conclusion that we would just custom cut some open shelves that fit the space in the corner and put more decorative bowls and such on them for display and less for storage. seems reasonable enough anyhow. however, that part of the project will have to wait until we have the money to go buy new materials because we dont have any wood that we can work with for the time being to make those shelves.

so after deciding what to do about that snag we then began the long task of removing all the doors and door hardware and then painting, well, everything. the painting went fairly quickly considering the area we had to cover, however everything we painted needed at least two coats and in some cases three before there was sufficient coverage. so it took a number of days before we finally got finished putting 2-3 coats and dry time between on all the doors and all the frames and were able to reassemble everything and attach hardware and such. additionally... as i said before we were using only the supplies we already had at the house and when we originally bought paint we didnt buy the right kind of paint for this application. so instead of a semi-or high gloss latex or a nice enamel finish paint, what we had was a flat latex paint. so we used what we had for the time being and it looks great! but it scratches or gets scuffed up pretty easily, so at some point we're going to have to come back with a finish coat over everything to really do it right.

so there were a few more snags along the way with shelf supports and re-organizing all the cabinets, but eventually we got finished and we're terribly excited with the result! [oh, and i also took apart that beast of an island and moved it in pieces, make that HEAVY pieces, down to the basement for karen as well. so its totally out of the kitchen now!] and we hope you like it too!

[the.dramatic.after.shot - complete with decorative vase in one of the extra-spaces]

as you can see theres still some work to do on the cabinets, and obviously theres a lot of work to do in the whole kitchen but we're just happy to have made such a huge change and really taken things to the next level. we now feel like were a lot closer to being finished with the kitchen which makes the rest feel so much more manageable!

so, other projects we've done around the house that are worth mentioning [because they happened in the last 6 weeks as well] but we dont have any pictures of yet... we finally moved our bedroom down to the second floor and out of the "penthouse" which was a pretty big deal. basically during the summer when karen got back it was just sooo hot that the window ac unit we had just could not cool down that huge attic space and we decided it was finally time to move down to the intended master bedroom space that was significantly smaller [but still pretty huge, woohoo!] and self contained, so that the window unit might actually have some effect on it. and as it turns out we were totally right, it made a HUGE difference and we slept much cooler for the next 5 weeks.

however, last week the temperature here in cincy started dropping and well, fall is most definitely upon us. the weather has stayed pretty well in the mid to lower 60's for a while now and looks as though itll stay that way for a while yet and then start dropping even more. so we've now retired the ac and after getting the fore-mentioned new bed [for free!] weve since re-arranged the bedroom to less of a makeshift arrangement to more of a permanent situation and we're getting ready to start re-doing it in the near future as well. also, in the bedroom we decided that it was finally time to move the tv upstairs and out of the more "formal" parlor space. so its in a corner in the bedroom now by the fireplace - and looks much more at home there, i must say.

and in stride with the big move to the second floor, we started officially moving our closet down to the intended master closet space as well. not the most exciting project, i know, but for us its a pretty big move. after hanging new rods and shelves and re-arranging the current storage situation so that the space was actually functional as a closet, i think we've discovered that theres less space on the second floor than there was in the penthouse and we're still trying to remedy that obstacle. right now 90% of my clothes have been moved down and most of them are put away, but only about half of karens have made it down and almost none of hers are put away as of yet, lol! but just getting things moving in the right direction is a big step as far as karen and her clothes go, so i'll taken what i can get for the time being. its easy for us to close the door and pretend that mess isnt there, so it might take a while to get it how we want it, but im okay with that for now. =]

oh and lastly, as i mentioned, karen is turning the basement into her artist's studio. so we spent some time down in the basement recently cleaning it up and rearranging it and making it more hospitable for her to play in. it was pretty disgusting but we actually managed to get all of the existing shelves cleaned up and wiped down and the floor cleaned up and then got all of our boxes and junk organized and arranged on them in a much neater and more appropriate fashion. so now theres actually a ton of room down there [or was before she got started, haha] for her to work on stuff and do whatever art experiments shes doing. it still needs some work, but "cleaning the basement" is a chore that no one really wants to tackle and im pretty proud of us for making some serious headway on it.

and well... with that... i think we've about concluded part two of this little saga. and since ive been working on this for the last 4 hours or so, i think i might need to take a little bit of a break before i keep going on the third part. also, i think the wife may be planning to come home from school at some point in the near future and we'll probably eat dinner, so... part three might not get done till tomorrow. hope thats alright, this has been a lot to get down and its taking more time than id anticipated... although i knew it would, haha. and so...

...intermission two...