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Dishwasher Disaster
Gather around friends, it’s time for another weird house story! The dishwasher was already ‘old’ when we bought this place nine years ago. But other than the fact that not all the buttons lit up properly, it worked just fine. So, we left it alone since there were other and more pressing house matters to attend to first. Until last year, when our old dishwasher started dying a slow death. With falling apart rusted racks, buttons that didn’t activate the first press, and a dish tab holder that wouldn’t always pop open during the wash cycle, requiring us to run it a second time, we decided it was…
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Parkside Twin: 9 Years and Counting
Happy almost May everyone! Between the pandemic and parenting, renovation things here have been paused or put in slow-mo for the past couple of years. But we’re still here and still kicking! We’ve deliberately put on hold anything that would take more than a day or two, as well as the things we felt couldn’t be delayed any further. (I’ll tell you all about our dishwasher experience from H-E-double hockey sticks later.) Here’s a quick rundown of our project list from the last two years We bought a new light for our dining room from Wayfair. Our previous fixture – which I swore I had a picture of but after…
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The Big 6: Reflections on another year of home ownership
Happy Wednesday everyone! Hard to believe it’s May already but I hope you all had a lovely Mother’s Day weekend. I’ve had the privilege to be a stepmom to a fantastic kid for the last 3 years, but this year it was especially sweet since I celebrated with my little one who arrived in February. Enough about me and the baby though. It feels so good to dust off the keyboard and (attempt to) get back into the rhythm of blogging, or at least as much of a rhythm as it can be with a new baby. When I’m not completely sleep-deprived, I’m planning out the laundry list of projects…
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Year 5
Our house is a kindergartener! Okay not really. The house itself is over 100 years old, but it has been five years since we moved into this lovable train wreck that we call home. As we head into the next year, I’d say the past 12 months have been some of the best we’ve spent here. The big highlight, of course, was the recent bedroom remodel. I’m looking forward to not sleeping in a blistering hot room this summer. (So excited!) But more than that, the new bedroom has become a restful haven for me. I’m finding that I enjoy simply being in the space. Now there are…
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Living the spackler’s life
Progress on the house hasn’t been booming. We hit what I’d guess would be a lull or maybe a slump after vacation and now we’re slowly crawling back out. Slump aside, I’m starting to feel like we’ll never get past the spackle and sand phase of the renovation. Ceilings, walls, patch here, more walls. Someone save me from the madness! Our current project – the one we’ve been at for awhile now – is corner bead spackling. The corner beads are pretty much all mounted so now the task of mudding over to make them smooth and even with the wall. It’s not SO terrible really, just a slow process…
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Wall Skimming 2.0: More lessons to learn
So 20 YouTube videos and 2 skimmed walls later, the hubby and I are total pros at this now. If only. At this point, I’d say we’re semi-capable DIY-ers who are having lots of fun with our hands-on learning. Here’s a list of things we’ve learned so far: 1. Consistency matters. There doesn’t seem to be a set formula for determining how much water to mix into the drywall mud i.e. 1/2 c. water to 1 g. of drywall joint compound. YouTube and DIY blogs have recommended the thickness be somewhere between mayonnaise and creamy peanut butter. Real talk here: I love that people are using condiments as a reference for mud thickness. I mean, how…
