Weird Lovely

Lillies in the Valley - Jun Miyake



Miss you Remix - Trentemoller & Massive attack

Christmas 3 (2012)

Might get around to putting up the trim in the Christmas tree room before I leave for California on Wednesday. Happy New Year.

The High Road

Broken Bells

add jazz

Santa, pfft, please.

I got some elves helping me at home.

This second hand, country-honey coloured table top got a walnut-flavoured update:

morning sunlight on new finish, my mom did most of the hard work

Our drawers handles were going to be reclaimed wood but turns out they were too fat. Last minute options using copper that was laying about:

took us about 30 minutes to make a few style

settled on the hefty looking "crunched pipe" option

opened this package of silicon rubber

taped off the drawer fronts, let the sugru set

We've been using the sugru-handles for our pots & pan drawers for a week now.

And although I didn't take any pictures of our progress, we got the casings from two more windows stripped over the weekend. We did it while listening to the whole Hobbit audiobook, currently available on youtube and well worth the re-read (movie we saw on Saturday, hee).

Elitism

Check out this nerdy song (turn up the mic)



I have some pictures and things from the house but my replacement laptop just arrived this evening so updates coming shortly.

Jack Frost's seat

Winter has arrived and the wood stove is almost always on. Like moths to a flame, we gravitate towards the room closest to the heat source - the kitchen and back parlour. Our old set-up, where the dining table was the only piece of furniture near the stove, meant we spent all night on rickety caned chairs watching movies or playing games and never ventured to our upholstered furniture in the next (colder room).

Well, by jamming the table against the half wall nearest the kitchen, and hauling over our smaller couch, we've managed to diversify the seating near the stove. It's a tight squeeze but overall much comfier to sit in the couch to watch a movie . We've also created seating where there was none before in the bay window next to the stove:

A few nights ago, without the finished doors

Yesterday with finished door and better light

We go through that much wood in about two days, but it's still nice to have seating for five or six people within reach of the stove. Today was the first frosting of snow - brr!

shabam retro glam

Functional Kitchening

Point 1: We installed the base cabinets but don't have drawer pulls (they got left behind on our roadtrip by accident). I wanted something that wouldn't mar the laminate so I could resell them or reuse them once they've been replaced. So the drawers sit empty.

Point 2: Concrete countertops are time consuming and very labour intensive. The design still very much intrigues, but I also recently searched out images of reclaimed wood countertops. With all the barn demolition lately we've been watching our wood piles climb. So much lovely patina! The link above does suggest we kiln dry reclaimed wood before installing near food (wise!) so I'm on the hunt for a nearby wood kiln.

Point 3: I found this silly putty that dries really strong and has a million uses called sugru. 

                    

If I can add the black sugru to the bottom of some fancy handmade reclaimed wood handles I might have something like this that will not require I drill holes into my cabinet fronts. 

               

                         

Conclusion: I would like to add reclaimed barnboard countertops to my Ikea kitchen cabinets, then add reclaimed wood handles to the currently useless drawers using sugru so that I can remove them in the future and reuse (or sell) the door fronts without the whole thing being an overt advertisement for inexpensive DIYs. Wish me luck (I ordered the sugru already and so should you).

Buy nothing day FAIL

Well, at least we scored on this supra-awesome-been-saving-for-a-year dishwasher from Miele:

I did contemplate purchasing this dishwasher at full price because I'm nuts.

Thanks to some great in-laws, I didn't have to take on some side-work to afford the DW of my dreams.

GuiltFace

We got 17 meat king chicks last week that will be raised through December and slaughtered during the first part of January. I turned the corner on Friday night to find our cat keeping a watchful eye on the flock in the darkened room. I put some cast iron pots on the top of temporary housing just in case.

"wha?"

love them all

Official vevo video for Lucy Rose's single Lines, with advertisement.

Streaming the album here. Coincidence: today is the last date on her latest tour.

this is what we've been doing

in the crisp fall air.

We put together our base cabinets, slapped ugly contact paper on some plywood (small town = one contact paper option available), created a new gravel concrete parking pad, removed the siding on one side of the house, and continued the barn demolition. Pictures:

Splitting wood - thought I had a better photo of demo (on right)

Edible? Looks like I could, but internet proved not useful.

From atop the barn, nasty shingles no match for Wonderbar.

The beams rich people pay money for.

Down to the original boards.

Into the evening - building paper protection.

New parking pad for eventual wood deliveries and guests.

Ugly ass contact paper/temporary countertop.

View over the reclaimed barnboard countertop. Need trim.

Open shelving only until we get handles (this weekend?) + clash.

Hanging dill and garlic on post.

Hanging mint on post + cast iron country seriousness.

tectonic plates

New Bjork Remix. Album of remixes streaming live for a short while at the Guardian.

recovery plans

Boring Adult List:
(things to do before 2012 dies)

- renew prescription, acquire lenses
- lady doctor annual check up
- dentist clickety clack clean teefs
- winterize da house - oil in the tank and storm windows in place
- get a haircut

Last one was the easiest so I tackled it first. Except it WASN'T easy, because I did it wrong.

I went in wanting this cut:

But failed to articulate properly to my hairstylist, so I ended up with this cut instead:

        

It's a bit boring, unfortunately. I very much want to dye the entire thing blue. So far I have resisted, and will have a second shot at the coveted longer cut in six months.

Nope, haven't grown out of this phase yet

Also, look! I made bread! One loaf every few days, which means some of my pants don't fit anymore. Addition to the list:

- pick up spin classes and zumba at the gym if the baking bug continues

Loaf #5, baked in my wee convection oven

Happy Halloween

Song by Emily Wells - Becomes the Color

heard here and there

From the newspaper re: HPX2012

"Now to address the overheards... “Are they going to play that ghost song?” BOOM. You guessed it. Wintersleep. Preceded by Elliot Brood, Rain Over St. Ambrose, and Kestrels. The fact that Elliot Brood was opening speaks to how stacked the show was. And, true to expectation, the crowd became hilariously emotional and blatantly introspective during the performance of 'Weighty Ghost.'"

Wish I was there.

Also: "... my favourite quote of the weekend: 'I’m about to dance really hard for about ten seconds, you should probably back up.'"

Halloween is coming and I'm having a party. You should probably back up.

Also. I was within arms reach of this lady during a birthday celebration where she played some of her songs. I have a massive girlcrush now.

unequivocal

I couldn't wait - I asked him to put together some of the taller cabinets that would give the most storage space.

He said bluntly this morning, after assembling the first: "these are by far the cheapest cabinets I have ever assembled".

Trick or treat.

shit is getting serious

The guts of our kitchen are now sitting in our back room. I wouldn't want to make the journey again very soon, since I was a rollercoaster of uptight nerves the whole time (I may or may not have cried at the table of an Ikea dining room display...) but alas! No looking back now!

We just bought the guts of the cabinets, which are loaded with ergonomically-friendly drawers (you can see them stacked high in the picture). All soft-close, fully extending drawers and hinges *drool*, made for Ikea by Blum somewhere in Austria.

Extra odd-shaped cabinetry, toe plinths, crown molding and other fancy made items will be created by my husband. We tried to source some nice wood for door and drawer fronts, but it looks like purchasing pre-fab will be less expensive than even the raw materials. This shop even ships ground to Canada for a very good price, so I'll see about getting custom fronts done soon.

Halloween first - gotta work on those costumes!

BostonHot

So much geekiness =*swoon*



(I could live without the asshole-ish-ness of rating women. The Social Network movie by David Fincher was very enjoyable IMHO - recommended).

Lighten the Heart

I scored these beauties at a thrift store for $6 last week (retail: $105). Hope I get to wear them to the Tweed Ride this weekend.

Posted in the hallway outside my lab

FOR SERIOUS. This is stereotypical sexist bullshit and I ripped that fucking poster down, wrote a nasty note saying the same and shoved it in the department head's mailbox.


Happy Chemistry Week...

(This was before I read about last night's presidential debate, gah)

UPDATE: My very smart friend suggested I punch holes in the poster, stick it in a binder, and tack the whole thing up to the wall where the poster was.

Kitchen Quest

(aka roadtrip that will save a marriage)

I am dragging my husband against his will to the big box store with flat-pack boxes that will assemble eventually to resemble (hopefully) a make-shift kitchen layout that we will customize and improve and make our own. We've done the numbers and we just can't afford the custom-made cabinets that he wants to build. We are going south of the border and making a two day trip of it. 

Hopefully he doesn't kick me out of the car on the way back for such carpentry blasphemy.

This weekend the back room got sanded and painted:

sexy protective gear

We sourced the shingles pictured below: left second grade (with knots) from a local manufacturer  and the equally priced, clear (no knots) bundle on the right that is usually much more expensive (both $15/bundle). As you can see, the clearer shingles are greyed from exposure to the elements. We thought perhaps we could get a better product (no knots) for the same price but alas, upon drying, the shingles were prone to cupping. And anyway, I like the look of the knots and the wider shingles of the more rustic version on the left.

Left (second clear) versus Right (old & wet, but clear)

Reclaiming a bit of unused space, my better half spent a day building up shelving between the studs in the stairway to our basement to hold my growing preserves collection. This is just what I've made this year - we still have bottles from 2011 hidden away in an upstairs closet.

tomatoes, pickles, apples, beets, dried kale

We also spent a bit of time cleaning out the garden of the last remains of veggies and seed pods. I left the kale to overwinter, to see how it goes. We were also gifted with more squash to increase our collection, and I'll be storing them in an upstairs closet to see how that goes.

our own squash in the top right (smallish ones)

Also a few links for future use (on snowy cold days):
How to make stevia extract for sweetening baked goods, hot drinks and more.
How to make no-knead bread.
How to make apple butter.

Updates on kitchen (and marriage) coming soon.

fickle flooring and fancy facades

A workplace injury has put husband out of work for at least another month. The good thing is the injury will likely heal entirely in due time, the injury was on his non-dominant hand and he can draw unemployment insurance during the convalescence. He can also complete (albeit slowly) the tasks that have been piling up like: putting up light fixtures, replacing door hardware and increasing our shelving storage for all the preserved goodies I keep generating.

The two looming projects that we are chipping away at: exterior finish and kitchen cabinets. 

The house had three layers of siding:

And has had building wrap as the exterior finish for a part of the back of the house for ohhh....two years now :) Originally we had our hearts set on a pre-finished painted product by Cape Cod but as you can imagine, when we heard the hardware contractor's desk guy refer to it as the "mercedes of exterior finishes" more than once, we had to change our minds due to cost. The main draw (other than the custom colour selection option that would have given us our bee pollen yellow house - sigh!) was that the paint finish was guaranteed for 25 years to never need repainting. Alas, at 9K for trim and boards, we opted instead for a locally sourced Eastern White Cedar shingle in clear combined with Cape Cod pre-finished trim pieces (comparative price: 5K). If all goes according to plan, we will not need to address the exterior of the house for decades, because both the (completely unfinished) shingles and pre-painted boards are supposed to have very long lifespans. 

We are not terribly keen on the monochromatic result of a greyed-with-age cedar shingle but it will have to do. I will not be spending my precious time painting the house - I did it one too many times already. And it certainly is historically accurate, as we found out upon removing the asbestos shingle layer carefully:

A bit boring, but not too bad

Our trim will be white

I think this had white paint on it at one time

As for inside, we've hammered out the details of the cabinetry & appliance placements and are now currently arguing (again and again) over pre-fab Ikea drawers sets (faster, cheaper) versus handmade plywood drawers and separate rail systems (custom sizes). I would prefer to go for a joyride to Boston for the weekend (soon) and stock up on drawer slides at the big box store but my (one-handed) husband prefers to build them himself. When we are not arguing, we are working on finishing the floors. 

Remember when I had started the back parlour in a white endless circle design? Ya well the second, unwritten part of that post is that I screwed up so royally in my design (that itself was terribly unforgiving anyway) that it stayed half-finished for a month until I summoned the courage to paint over the first design, choose and cut out from mylar a second design, and begin fresh. This time nothing was stopping me, and I got it completely finished and varnished in about a week.

Retro-cool pattern, white on beige. 

Pattern Attack!

The half-finished floor had, in that intermediate month, morphed into some sort of metaphor for the house as a whole. I hated that it was unfinished but I didn't have the motivation to tackle it again.  Now we are cruising: only the back room to complete (the one with the patio door). Looking up.

boy version versus girl version

Marvin the Martian costume - with a corset.

...the fuck?

guys guys guys

A commenter once laughed at my pencil-and-paper budgeting combo. I think I've just found a 21st century replacement, and I'm excited about it.

(The title of this post from yesterday is taken from a cheesy film called Hackers, in particular one character Joey - scene starts about 2:30 minutes into this clip if you are so inclined - who gets easily excited by computer stuff. The same film was referenced in xkcd giant comic from today - where the new kids in school get locked out on the roof looking for an imaginary pool. The venn diagram of geekiness is closing in.)

Mo on a Monday

Mo Kenney outta Halifax, debut drops next week. (Autoplay vimeo video replaced with ad-contented CBC video. Tough grapes).

Pesto, tomato, apple, huckleberry and gaudiness

Saved some money by preserving our harvest...

...spent some of it on this borderline gaudiness (love it)

Monday Music

Purity Ring - Obedear

Lesulas

New monkey species, described in a PLOS one paper, called Lesula.

No matter how many pictures I look at, it doesn't get any less weird looking.

abundance of dresses

I went looking for this seller on etsy, and freaked out a bit when I couldn't find her. Google saved the day though when another person with great taste linked to the shop on her blog. Phew!

I'm very close to ordering one of these - I just need to figure out which one!

HeartMyCloset makes affordable, custom sized dresses.

I'm leaning toward the very bottom left, but in cream colour fabric.

summer rains have arrived

It rained and rained this past week - all the rain this dry summer was saving poured from the skies. It made our backyard stream (directly behind the house and dry for two months) look like this:

But there was one glorious weekend day that I was able to go to my favourite place in the world, to pick berries for nine hours straight (until my back was sore and fingers purple and my forearms all scratched up):

I picked 15 L of huckleberries - already cleaned up and frozen or dehydrated. The next day, we harvested two winter squash, the last of the peas (hidden under the tomatoes in the photo), pounds of tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini and two types of kale. A bucketful of apples (two varieties). We still need to pick our spaghetti squash, drying beans, more kale, more tomatoes and our onions (sitting in a swamp at the moment).

This means lots of yummy eating lately (in addition to desperate cravings of junk food, unfortunately). 

You see where this is going, right? Awesomesauce.