28 October 2011 · 3 Comments
The kitten overlords have decreed that I may not use my desk chair. It has been commandeered for their nefarious purposes. They suggest checking back later to see if they’re done with it, but they make no promises.
Update: Shortly after posting this, the rat fink bastards devious little brats kittens upped the ante in their quest to keep me from being productive. They swarmed me, all three at once, on the tile floor. It was a choice between dropping what I had in my hands and grabbing the sink or going ass over teakettle and landing in the middle of them. In the fraction of a second one has to make those sorts of decisions, I choose to protect the kittens (and my knees). Alas, the thing I had in my hand was my ipad. The glass is now cracked beyond salvage. This is not an auspicious start to the day.
25 September 2011 · 2 Comments
We had always intended to use carpet tiles, or something like them, for that entrance. It seemed easier than taking up the linoleum.
The house and I have a slightly wary relationship. I like it. Love it even. And I admire it for sticking around for 91 years and counting. But I don’t trust it not to do something like spring a leak or develop holes or do something else equally dire. I’ve adopted a sort of respectful distance. I will fix problems. I will make considered cosmetic improvements. I will not go mucking about with perfectly good (read functional) things that don’t need to be changed.
Given this philosophy, tearing up the linoleum seemed unwise. It could be full of asbestos. It could be all that was holding the floor together. The tearing up could just piss the house off and drive it to do something dramatic four months from now (it will be snowy four months from now, the scope for drama is increased).
FLOR seemed a good choice. It didn’t require any holes in the house (one of the central tenets of my respectful distance philosophy). It doesn’t even stick to the floor…it just sort of holds on with gravity and friction. It seemed to fall on the side of reasonable cosmetic change. Even better, the website made it look easy and quick.
And it likely was a good choice. It was affordable, I was able to get it fitted to the space, and it looks good. It was not, however, quick or easy. Now to be fair, a big part of that was me and the space I was working in. The landing has lots of corners, lots of edges, and lots of fiddly spots. Even better, it has limited space to maneuver and poor lighting. Each and every tile required at least one cut, most more than that. Add in a few kitten supervisors and a very sharp knife, and I’m a bit scuffed around the edges. It took about three hours and my pajama pants may never be the same. But the floor looks good, and the house doesn’t seem to be pissed off enough to be plotting revenge.
And of course it’s nearly impossible to photograph. If you’re standing on it, you’re too close to see it through the camera. If you stand upstairs, you can only see part of it. If you stand downstairs, you don’t get any sense of perspective (but do get an excellent view of the dirt on my shoes). I know this isn’t great, but it will have to do.
I’m standing in the kitchen peering down the stairs. That’s the side door there and the milk door beside it (I love my milk door, the only thing cooler would be a dumbwaiter). All the way at the right you can just see the edge of a coat hanging from the row of hooks over there. We’ve got a little shoe rack (each of us keeps two pairs of shoes by the door, any more than that and it gets unruly). Levon is staring down into the basement waiting for someone to do something about the laundry pile down there.
Now as soon as my fingers heal, I promise I’ll come back with some actual knitting content.
23 September 2011 · 1 Comment
So you know how you get one project done, and then you find yourself inspired to do something else…and something else…and something else? Yeah. Me too. Now sometimes that’s cool and leads to scads of productivity. But sometimes it leaves you sweaty bleeding and swearing on the floor.
I know I mentioned that we had the house painted (all done, looks good). Part of painting was getting as much stuff as possible out of the way so the painters had easy access to the house (why hello garage, you’re looking rather full). This meant coming to grips with one of our more shameful bouts of homeowner failure. You see, we have a side door. About two years ago, the side door’s screen door’s pneumatic canister thingy committed suicide. A few months later, the screen door handle joined his canister friend in death.
We, being responsible homeowners and competent adults, did the only reasonable thing. We held the screen door shut with industrial strength twist ties and just pretended that door didn’t exist. For two years. We are so awesome.
The door was so banged up that the painters couldn’t really work around it. So we took it down (a process which took all of 20 minutes…I have no idea why it took us two years. Of course we’ve not yet put a new one up, but we’re pretending that’s because the painters just finished up this week and we have to wait for the paint to cure.) But, we are now using the side door (by far the most convenient door given where we park).
And since we’re now using it, we wanted to make the side entrance nifty. It’s a tiny space (you come in on a little landing that’s about 7 by 3…there’s a half flight of stairs up to the kitchen on one side and another down to the basement on the other). We’d already painted it and lined it with hooks (about three months before the door offed itself and we stopped coming in that way). But the floor still needed some attention. For you see, it was ancient crumbly linoleum. Ancient crumbly brown linoleum. Ancient crumbly brown linoleum with mystery stains. It was not attractive.
So I ordered some FLOR carpet tiles…which I will tell you all about…as soon my fingers finish healing.
15 September 2011 · 1 Comment
Today was the first really crisp day of fall. It was absolutely lovely. I even put on some wooly socks.
The timing is excellent…since yesterday the air conditioner decided to go on strike. I’m sure this will be convenient and inexpensive to fix, because home repairs always are. Sigh.
8 September 2011 · 3 Comments
Having brawny lads scampering all over your house (banging and scraping and banging and climbing and banging and thumping) is rather more distracting than I had expected. And I had expected it to be distracting. I just hadn’t expected it to drive me stark raving mad. And I hadn’t expected it to go on for days.
What I did expect (it’s an old house, it has trained me well), was to find some sort of lurking problem. Don’t get me wrong. I love my old house. It’s pretty, and it’s well made, and it looks and feels like a house should. But it is 91 years old, and sometimes it has little incidents. So it wasn’t a huge surprise when we discovered that some of our windowsills were a bit rotted. This had happened before, and we knew it would likely happen again. The last time it happened we hired someone to come fix it. This time, we decided to tackle it ourselves (on the advice of the guy who came and did it last time actually…he assured us it was totally a do it yourself sort of project…shortly after we paid him lots of money to do it).
So we scraped out the biggest chunks of rotted wood and then went to the lumber yard. We bought some fancy goo that soaks into smooshy wood and restores it to its former splendor and some fancy play-doh that fills in the holes and turns into something that acts much like wood and set to work. It wasn’t exactly hard, but it did take longer than expected. It also required a fair amount of time on ladders. In the end, we had sore arms, proof that someone out there got more from their chemistry classes than we did from ours, and something that looked suspiciously like a windowsill.
Given that what we had had was a panic-inducing hole, I’m going to call it a net gain.
And please don’t freak out about the way it looks now. This picture was taken in the middle of the scraping stage of the painting process. It’s apparently quite natural for it to look like six shades of hell at this point. I’ve been (repeatedly) assured that it will look awesome once we get through the scraping and priming stages and into the painting part of the process.
But until the banging part is over, I’m not sure I’ll be able to muster the mental clarity necessary to knit. Unless one of you wants to have me over for an hour of peace and quiet. Because here? Here is kind of noisy.
4 September 2011 · 3 Comments
The town I live in has a rather…um…zealous housing authority. They inspect all houses every few years and send out letters informing the residents how they get to spend their summer vacations. This year, they decided that Chez Violence was due for a new paint job. Now honestly, we needed it. And we’re lazy, so the letter from the housing office was likely a good kick in the pants. But it meant we were in for a rather expensive and intrusive project. We’ve had folks climbing all over the house for days (and many more days of it to come), and we’ve written a lot of fairly horrifying checks.
But, it also meant that we got to pick a color. Our current house is white with dark green trim. Changing the color of the trim is hard and expensive (taking down all the storm windows and painting all the window parts is apparently every bit as much of a pain as it sounds). So we’re keeping the green. But we weren’t crazy about the white. It never quite looks clean. But we also didn’t want to stray too far into bright colors, as that makes the painting more complicated. We decided on very light gray. I realize this isn’t a huge departure from white…we’re scaredy-cats.
At the paint store, I realized just exactly how many nearly-identical versions of light gray there were. So, with nothing else to go on, I more or less had to pick the one called Knitting Needles. It seemed only fitting. Of course the only question is, which needles?
1 September 2011 · 6 Comments
Having decided to dye the blanket, I thought I should do a bit of research. Armed with a bit of reading, I first washed the blanket (it hadn’t been washed for years…because it had been in the blanket chest, not because I’m filthy). Then I dug out my old jug of synthrapol from a previous tie dyeing phase and ran it through with a shot of that out of some vague notion that it would be helpful. Then, while the blanket was still wringing wet, I trundled off to mix up the dye.
I used all three packets, and I followed the directions to the letter. Yes, even the part about the cup of salt (farewell fancy Penzeys salt, it was nice to have known you). I ran enough water in the washer to allow the blanket to move freely, tipped in the dye, and swirled it all around. Then, in an unexpected move, I left it alone for a full hour. I’m bad at waiting. This was a challenge.
Once the allotted time had passed, I came back and drained the washer and ran it again with just water. I did that a few more times until the water ran clear.
I picked up my blanket and…and…it was exactly the same. Exactly. No difference in color what so ever. It’s a bit softer and a bit fluffier now, which actually makes it even nicer, but the color is identical.
The next plan, fiber reactive dyes. That involves finding a vessel in which I can simmer my blanket on the stovetop. Should be entertaining. But it will have to wait until the post office brings me a package. Though now that I think of it, you can also simmer the RIT dyes, and I can get more of those locally. Maybe if I’m going to be simmering one way or the other, I should just use those since they’re on hand. Does anyone have some super secret dyeing knowledge that would be of use in this decision? Plan A failed, so I’m totally up for taking suggestions.
Oh, and don’t forget to leave a comment on the giveaway post (look down the page a bit) today for a chance to win Laura Nelkin’s Adorn collection. I’ll be picking a winner tomorrow, so you’ve still got time!
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