Upgrading the house a dollar at a time

My kitchen is fairly run-of-the-mill but I don't have money for one of those 8 thousand dollar makeovers (or more) we hear about on TV. Who does? I have decent cabinets and could use new countertops and a new sink, but the floor screams "80s" with it's cute country lines and flowers. Once upon a time I would have loved the stuff. Now I just try not to look down. It also has indentations that dirt loves to get stuck in, so to get a really clean floor you have to get down on your hand and knees and dry it with paper towels.

Needless to say, it is therefore never "really clean."

I was wandering through Home Depot, I swear looking for JUST a can of spray paint to spiff up a $3 magazine stand I found at the Thrifty Shopper, when I wandered by those stick-down tiles. The premium ones (the ones I can never afford) were on sale at the same price as the cheap ones. I was drawn to a type called "beige slate" and they were ust $30 a box.

Guess what?

Old floor:

New floor:

It looks much better in person.

Since the refrigerator had to be pulled out, you can guess what I found there:

Unfortunately it took up almost all of the weekend to get the floor mostly done. I still have to do the pantry, but that must be painted first. That means there are countless chores still to go.

Summer is almost gone and I haven't done a single summer thing...

Until now.

The weather has been gorgeous. Warm during the day (but not really hot!) and very cool at night. The days are getting shorter at an alarming rate, and I've done nothing fun that I couldn't do at any other time of year. So when the Spencer Picnic calls to action started coming across Facebook, I figured I had to go.

I've been here 13 years and haven't once gone.

The search for an adult who would go on rides was on. Gretchen and Brian decided they would be up for it, so we met there and had a great time on the Tilt-A-Whirl and the Scrambler. They went on the Gravitron, and I opted for the Ferris Wheel.

I haven't been on a ride in at least 20 years (maybe more) and I was pleasantly surprised that the old "tingle in the gut" that I'd long forgotten about, was still there. It was like running into someone who was once a good friend in your childhood, whose memory you'd long since dropped in favor of other important but far less pleasant events and people. $15 got enough tickets for four rides, and that was more than enough. What a blast.

On Friday a quick text from Gretchen brought us both up to the rooftop bar in Owego. Again I have not been there since spring. Time goes too fast.

I'm so mired down in work that I forget to do just these small things that make me feel like there is some sort of life off of a computer.

If you have forgotten as well, it's time to get out there and enjoy the summer and fall, before the snow flies again.

Getting things done. The back door

I'm desperately tired of being two steps behind on everything. I've finally decided if I look at it, and it needs doing, and it touches my brain cells, I will do it right then, even if it may not be the most logical priority. You can get sucked up in "prioritizing" sometimes.

Thus I am finally tackling my extremely embarrassing back door, which leads to an unused mudroom. Let me qualify. It is not used as a mudroom. It is used as a highly convenient cat box room. I have two back doors, so I don't need to use this one.

It was a bit neglected when we purchased the place 13 years ago. Somehow I've managed to look away for over a decade and allow it to get worse. Finally I realized that "looking away" was just adding to my overall stress and I decided it had to happen. I did not post a "before" shot because it was just too awful. Seriously, it was awful. But I do have a "halfway home" shot.

The whole area had to be painted, some worn boards torn off (to be replaced), the brush cut down (yes, there was BRUSH!), landscaping fabric and stone laid down (after making sure no critters were living in the hole under the foundation), the door painted, etc. I still have to build a landing (I have tons of wood in the barn), replace a rotted board on the overhang, and replace the siding boards. I'll also need to add topsoil to level off the area around the stone. Once the wood landing is in, I also plan to sink some flagstones from the creek into the gravel.

I did have to relocate this little red eft. I'm glad I found him (under rotted cardboard packaging from the treadmill I bought three years ago) before I put down the stone.

And then that will be one less thing preying on my soul, and one less thing for visitors to look at and think "Oh, that poor cat lady...things are getting out of hand, aren't they?"

Ivan is diabetic

More to come. Right now I'm just posting this for my veterinarian. My poor wobbly boy.



For some reason YouTube is progressing from one video to another. If you need to view Ivan's video again just click the blog post title, and it should re-load.

I'm amazed he was able to navigate all the half-finished projects on the porch, not to mention the curious Molly and Rose. He laid on Molly's bed in the sun for awhile before going back inside to sleep in the den.

Roadside find

I went to Ithaca to trap cats early Sunday and I noticed a door with glass panes sitting in a front yard with a washed out sign taped to it, well back from the highway so the panes wouldn't get broken by stones from passing traffic. Curious, I expected it was junk but I made a mental note to return home in the same direction to check it out.

With a car full of cats in traps on the way back, I remembered the door and pulled over. I trotted across the highway to look and the closer I got, the more certain I was that the washed out sign would say something like "$20" and not "Free" like I hoped. None of the glass panes were broken, there were no dog chews, it had the original hardware, and the doorknob was glass.

Once I got up to it, I made out the blurred word. "Free. Solid wood." Holy crap. Why hadn't anyone picked this up? Probably because it was so far from the road, everyone else, like myself, assumed it was for sale.

I went to pick it up and realized I was about to look very silly. It was extremely heavy, and I somehow had to get it in a compact car full of cats. I made it across the road, trying to look like I wasn't about to tip over, took the headrest off the front passenger seat, and was able to rest one end on the road and gently slide it in over the cats, braced at an angle on the passenger seat back.

I continue to be shocked at what the Kitty Kia (Soul) will hold.

On the way home I tried to think where I needed a door. It was an exterior door, but I certainly wasn't going to put a glass door on the exterior of my house. My home is old but doesn't look old inside. It looks rather like a 60's makeover, and I've worked hard to try and restore some charm to it. The door would help. I decided it would look nice on the bedroom. A curtain on the door would be privacy enough, here. The bolt lock works from the side of the door, although the key to work it from the outside is missing. I might be able to get a key fashioned, which would be great if anyone ever moved in up there. It would look great if I ever did sell the house, and the extra door could live in the barn so if a new person objected to having a see-through bedroom door, they could just put the original door back and use the antique door elsewhere.





Last night I measured the existing bedroom door, and wonder of wonders, the width is exactly the same! The antique door is taller, but I can cut it down with some careful measuring.

I took a minute to look online and found a chewed-up similar antique door, 36", $795 plus $125 freight. Thank you, unknown Rt 34/96 homeowner, for the beautiful door.

Amazing. Some day I may actually have a nice looking house from end to end.

The stand-up desk

It was getting a little hard to ignore all of those on-line articles about how sitting down all day will ultimately kill you.

A former colleague at work had a wonderful bar at her house that was stand-up height. It is in her very-sunny kitchen in the heart of her house. While my house isn't set up for the same sort of design, I do have a wall next to a window in my den, where my desk is (was), so I took the plunge, rummaged through the barn for a countertop, and set up my own stand-up desk.




I thought it would be harder to stand up all day, so I bought a cheap Big Lots upholstered stool, but I haven't used it much. I've discovered that with good music playing, I can boogie around a bit and keep moving as well. There is no longer the "oh hell, I have to work, I guess I'll go sit at the desk" attitude now. Working and living is more integrated. It can be a bit hard on the legs at the end of a long day (like right now) but in the morning and afternoon, it has been fine. I also brought my hand weights in so that periodically I can take a break and do a little exercise to the music I normally have playing.

I'm beginning to see some immediate health benefits that I'm not going to blog on for awhile until I note that they really are improvements and not just wishful thinking.

So far the only real drawback has been the lack of storage space, and the fact that I now have a big desk kicking around in the middle of my den until I find a new home for it. There are shelves in the entertainment center nearby that I can use for the time being, and I picked up an old wicker file box at the Re-Use Center in Ithaca to replace the file drawers I had.

At least I'm no longer sitting on my butt all day!

The stand-up desk is next to the window cat-seat, which has suddenly become quite popular now that I'm standing here all day.

The fallen trees are going away

After mowing around them for two years, and adding a few more to mow around after high winds hit last summer again, the trees across the farm road up to my cabin are finally going away. With a week or two of seriously cold weather, the ground is fairly well frozen, and the farm road is can be navigated by something other than a tractor or ATV. This is good, as "seriously cold" also means "high heating costs" and I need more wood.

I previously got my wood (excellent stuff!) from a friend who used to be able to back right up to my door with his truck and dump it near my woodpile. He recently invested in a trailer and prefers to bring multiple cords. This means A) I have to pay for 2-3 cords when I might not have the money, and 2) I have to haul the wood up from the driveway myself. I did that just once, and never again. Now that I have the dumpster in the driveway, the garbage truck needs to back in as well, so there can't be a pile of wood in the way.

So this fall has been the dance of the Craigslist Wood Guys. Luckily, as the winter rolls on, there are more guys who are willing to stack the wood for just a mere $20 extra. When I was younger, and also had more time, I would have saved that $20 and stacked it myself. But nowadays, with so few hours in the day left to me, I'm happy to have two guys toss it off the back of the truck and have it all done in a half hour.

The first guy who brought me wood delivered it after three days of pouring rain and stated that it should dry outside in 5 days, and inside in 2. Well, it still isn't really dry five weeks later, and I had to purchase WoodBlockFuel to get things going and keep things going, in my small stove. I asked him for an estimate on my roof, which I still haven't received, so I assumed he was too busy and had moved onto other things.

The second guy came this weekend and delivered a 3/4 load of excellent wood, and stacked it nicely. He's supposed to bring the rest of the cord this long weekend (his truck doesn't hold a whole cord). Let hope he shows up as planned. If he does, I'll be happy to have myself another good wood guy.

The morning after Wood Guy #2 delivered wood, the phone rang. He had asked me if "early" was OK to deliver the rest of the wood, so I wasn't surprised at the message asking for permission to come cut downed wood on my property--an offer I had made to both guys (plus a neighbor) as long as the trees across the farm road disappeared. Well, the message was actually from Wood Guy #1 (hey, don't rely on me for good voice recognition on the phone--I can barely remember people by face!) and he showed up yesterday afternoon and started making good progress on the downed trees. Of course today the temperatures have warmed up, so it will be too wet to make it up the hill again this weekend (sigh). But at least half of it is gone.

I'm thinking about investing in a small chain saw to take care of the little stuff that these guys will likely leave behind. They want to load up short sections of logs to take back to their woodsplitter, not fill up their truck with brush and tops, I'm sure. Whereas my little stove would be quite happy with the three-inch branches they are leaving behind. Chances are I won't cut off a foot cutting up such small stuff (she says).

Molly and I went for a walk up on the hill to check their progress after they drove off with the first load of logs, and I was surprised to see them get that much wood out of just a few medium sized trees. There are still some left to cut up and move, but things look much better than they did before.

There are still some left to go.

I haven't been up the hill in awhile because seeing all those impassible trees just made me depressed at my own inabilities. When I got to the top of the fields I discovered Mother Nature had been playing ball with my old lawn furniture I have perched up there as a resting spot on my summer walks.

I dug them out and set them up again.

The old bonfire wood also needs to go away, because it depresses me as well. Friends used to come over faithfully on a mid-September weekend for a birthday bonfire for myself and another woman in the group, but that no longer happens since my husband walked. The wood has been sitting so long, there have to be huge families of mice living under there now, and I don't want to send them up in a blaze of glory, so I'll likely just pull it apart and toss it off to the side, then dig a fire pit like I have at the house to burn it up piece-meal.

I'd be happier with a fire pit anyway, since the bonfire always made me nervous when things were dry. It's not like fire trucks can get up here easily. I'll probably also dig one up at the cabin, with wire grates for all of them to keep big chunks of sparks from wafting off into the trees. Up at the cabin there is dead stuff all around and very dry and dead standing trees.

Just for the fun of it, I took photographs of the designs on the backs of the wood chairs a friend made, down by the house. It's time to take them indoors to dry out and sand and refinish again, before they fall apart any more than they have.

It was such a good day that I actually finally got out my drawing things and began to work on a promised cat portrait.

And that was Saturday! Let's hope the rest of the long weekend continues to be as productive.

Poor neglected blog and home improvements

Yikes, almost a whole month since my last post?

Work has been busy. Busy in a good way. I'm headed into a three day weekend and I'm thrilled.

I've been doing some work on the house...ripping up old carpet, etc. and once the sun is shining the right way again, I'll take some more photos, but my bedroom upstairs (which I seldom sleep in, since I like to crash downstairs in the winter) now looks like this:

I ripped up the old carpet after peeking under a corner and seeing unpainted hemlock boards. Perhaps I could sand and finish them? Well, after I began ripping up the carpet I discovered they had been partially painted, and...oopsie....the "floorboards" were actually the ceiling boards of the den below.

...and you could see right downstairs. So I went at the floorboards with pale green paint and caulk....

It's still a major improvement over 20 year old brown industrial carpet, which looked good when we moved in, but had experienced some serious wear and tear both before and after our arrival.

Here is the other half of the room:

The table and chairs I picked up alongside the road from a "free" pile at a neighbors.

This entire room was redone to accommodate the rug I purchased off of Amazon.com. The ferny one. I might have had too much wine when I purchased it, but I'm glad I did. I received a gift card via work. I could not spend it on bills, so I targeted the house. While surfing around, I found the ferny rug, and somehow ended up buying it, expecting it not to arrive for weeks. In two days, it was on my doorstep. Well, I assumed, it would take weeks for the wrinkles to fall out. Nope, it laid flat as soon as I unrolled it, and I had a friend due to come and stay two days later. That meant making the room accommodate the new rug, which meant ripping up the old one.

Then the friend couldn't make it. Oh well...it was great incentive to rip up old stinky carpet and paint and caulk floors!

The cat in the photo is Tommy, with his permanently runny eyes, and thick fur that makes him look tubby (he's only seven pounds although he looks about fifteen).

One nice thing about the gap in the floor is that the heat from the woodstove make the bedroom the second warmest room in the house. Also, when I play music downstairs, I can hear it upstairs. If new owners in the future don't like those options, they can just lay down a hardwood floor, or put down a pad and carpet again.

I'm not sure my taste matches the rest of the world, but personally, I love it. :)