Time to be big kids.

Hello to our dear, seven-or-so readers!

I've been busy attempting to get this site over to another site, but the new one is full of kinks, like strange, in-post font changes, bad color choices, and really ugly boxes around all of the imported photos. It's totally not living up to its potential.

Kind of like the house.

The rooms in the house are full of strange, in-room trim color changes, bad tile choices, and really ugly boxes that we have yet to unpack. I love it, but it's totally not...living up to...its potential?

Okay, I'm having an epiphany here. I should be showing more photos of our not-so-perfect but still totally lovable home.

I should be using the big kid website already. It's been in existence for six weeks and running for two.

Go on, git! Don't come around here no more!

We've moved (dum dum da-dum!) to www.athomeheroes.com

Old Yeller. Okay, Liz Lemon.

 Got an Old Yeller lamp a few days ago at Goodwill. It felt a lot like striking gold when I found it, but there was no price on it. I saw a litle piece of a white tag on the base, did a happy dance because it was 50% off White Tag Day, and started telling the employee walking by that there was no tag, er, only a piece of a tag, and could he price it for me. He quickly slapped three tags on the lamp and walked away. And they were BLUE. Humph. The tag said $3.99. I silently mourned the loss of $2.00 and cradled my lamp like a baby. My mom ended up buying it for me at the checkout. I mourned the loss of her $2.00. And then I got over it. Promise. Here's a shot of the beauty with the living room mascots, Berta the pig and Wade the fish. They like it. Erik, since he’s been watching ridiculous amounts of 30 Rock, has since renamed it Liz Lemon. I can get on board with that.



It goes perfectly with our plan to bring pops of yellow into our living room. And $3.99 is our kind of price for a lamp, especially one that's the perfect shade of yellow. See: matching the pillows.

The only problem now is finding a lamp shade that really fits. I recently found and bought this $10 drum shade at Home Goods but it's looking a little short.

Erik confirmed that according to the universtal rules of asthetics (or something), a lamp shade should be 2/3 the height of the lamp base. He told me this while I was falling asleep, and proceeded to ask me how tall the lamp was. I held up my arm and told him the lamp was the length from my elbow to the tip of my middle finger, plus a smidge, or roughly 18 inches.

So how did I know how long my arm was? I uh...measure household objects with my body. All the time. I'm sure you know it's not weird to measure distance by walking it out, heel-toe. I just happen to go a step further (ba-zing!) and use my legs and arms to measure other things as well. I'll just write a post about it some other time. You'll start doing it, I promise. Or maybe you won't. It involves occasionally laying on the floor and embarassing your spouse. Suffice it to say, I knew the lamp was 18" without taking a ruler to it.

At the store, I would scope out a similarly-styled lamp, lean my arm on the shelf, and size it up. Then I would pop shades on it.

This was my plan, anyway. I kept finding lamp/shade combos and very few loose shades, and I found shades at IKEA, but they were all for pendant-hangy lights and didn't have the right mechanisms to attach to Old Yeller Liz Lemon.

So by Erik's rule, the shade should be 12" tall. And I knew the current shade was only 10". Sounds about right. So we're on the hunt for a new shade. And it'll be the length of my pinky to my wrist x 2.

Or I'll just read the label.

A River Runs Through It

"I'm rain boots! I'm by the basement door!"

Now why would rain boots be by the basement door? This story begins back on December 26th when we got our first good snow storm of the year. Then it snowed again the next week...and the week after that...and the week after that! No, these weren't little snow storms, they were monstrous things that dumped lots of snow on us.



A borrowed snowblower. Woo!

We thought it was a little inconvenient to have to shovel snowfall after snowfall until the piles were taller than we were, but we can look back now and appreciate that the snow had some manners. You know, it stayed put, sat up straight, and stayed out of the house. Water is more rebellious, finicky, and rude. We need water to live, so water thinks it's boss. I think I'm boss. But I'm mostly water, so don't listen to me.

All that snow, that well-behaved conforming snow...it melted. Water moved into the basement. I worried as I walked down the stairs, because I knew I hadn't been down there in about 2 days. And I don't have pictures of what I saw, because I quickly sprung into action and taking pictures was the last thing on my mind. There was a lot of box-moving. And mopping. And vacuuming. And thanking God that even with all the work it took, we didn't have any "measurable" water. I can't say we had this-many-inches of water in the basement. Nah. We had puddles everywhere. Dry spots too. I wore rain boots because I like rain boots. And I'm a heavy stepper. Splash!



 I worked for seven hours, filling a 1.5 gallon vacuum over and over again.



"Hang On!", cheered the tiny Shopvac.

As Mini-Vac and I were toiling away, I was delighted to see progress- certain areas were totally drying up, and I found that there was only one source of the water. It was a little spot where the wall met the floor.

 I made a hedge of protection with towels. It wasn't that effective, but I felt better.

Great Wall of Towels.

Later that afternoon, Erik came home with a HUGE wet/dry vacuum that made our problem a lot more manageable. Sorry, little guy.



This water was like a newborn baby...in that we woke up every two hours to tend to it. If we waited any longer, it would flow past the towels, under the stairs, over to the other side. Don't cry me a river, water-baby. Mama's here.

The next day at work, several people told Erik that they also got water in their always-dry basements and commiserated over Shopvacs and sump pumps and concrete patches. He got some great advice. One person told him to get this stuff called Hydraulic Cement. Told him it worked in her basement, and that it was "Cheap as Chips". I ran out and bought it.

• Stops flowing water in 3-5 minutes.
• Use above or below grade.
• Sets up under water.

Whoa! Hold the phone. I'm having a memory from the early 90's. Squand.

So Hydraulic Cement is nothing like Squand. Because squand becomes loose sand when removed from water, and Hydraulic Cement can apparently become hard as a rock, even under water. They're both magic, though. And that's what they have in common.

Okay, so here's Erik doing all the work. And clearly looking stylish while doing it.

Chiseling and wire-brushing.



Smooshing with water until it formed a putty.

Then he got to work patching the wall. After it was all done, this is what it looked like.

Not the prettiest solution, and certainly not a permanent solution, but it worked. It totally worked. Even set-up while the water was trying to get in.

Magic. Just like Squand.

Fern Gully

When I was a kid, I watched Fern Gully at Babci's house all the time. "Babci" (Pronounced Bah-chee) is Polish for "Woman who lets you sleep at her house and watch the latest VHS releases, and then gives you waffles and hot chocolate for breakfast". Or was it for "grandmother"? 

If you were old enough to have memories from the early nineties, you'll remember this movie, which, as it turns out, was NOT made by Disney. Stick it to the man!

"Hey Batty! Hey Crysta! Hey Human-Turned-Fairy, Zak!"


If you need a refresher, this movie is Nature vs. Deforestation. Fairies vs. BigBlackGooMonster. And I always used to root for the little guys. But then we bought this house...and it was a little overgrown. I started calling the land around my yard Fern Gully.

Our property is set above the surrounding land by an 8-ft retaining wall. The surrounding land is beautifully overgrown. 

Ah, the quiet peace of God's creation surrounds us

This is what we really loved about this property when we laid eyes on it. Privacy. Nature. Beautifully overgrown. The problem is, it was not-so-beautifully overgrowing into our property, namely, our chain-link fence. The one that keeps small children and curious friends from falling into the green abyss. 


And the vines were all, "What are YOU looking at?"

And then I wandered just a little ways down the fence and found even more offenses. On the fence. Ha! That was accidental.



This tree actually snickered at me. It ate my fence.

I waved the property deed at nature but it didn't budge. Then I tried to have a sensible discussion about property lines, and I think I saw the vines wrap a few extra tendrils around our fence post.

Okay, Fern Gully, you've had your chance. I'm bringing in backup.

My mom and two brothers came over to help Erik and me start taking the yard back. A little snip here, a chop there...we were pruning really. We were doing nature a favor. Boundaries are good. I mean, we bought this property because it was wild...because it didn't look like a manicured golf course. (My brother Brian is not-so-fond of the wildness. He told me moss wasn’t a reasonable substitute for grass. Nonsense!)

I thought that the yard and I were getting along, but no. Fern Gully struck back with an attack on our youngest member. My brother, Kevin, then 13, was throwing the cut vine-pieces back down into the ravine. And of course he was kind of whipping them around in the air before he threw them. Bad idea.  Kev does his little wind-up-and-throw and then we all hear,  “Uh…umm…uh-oh. Where are my glasses?” I walk over to help, he grabs my camera, and snaps this photo of himself in distress.



Okay, Kev. Get to work.

We all search the yard. We crawl, we squint, we rustle the grass. No luck. The grass was short; there were no leaves or piles nearby. It was a sunny day. Our backyard is flat and small. We would have seen them if they were there. I knew where they were. Fern Gully took them. That blasted vine hooked the glasses to send a message to us human-folk. And don’t you know I climbed down into the ravine to look for the glasses. Poison ivy and all.

Poor Kevin. It was no use. His glasses were gone.

See, the whole time, I thought we were being heroes—saving our yard from years of neglect and all. But that day of frantic, excited chopping;  of full-blown deforestation, well, I think it was too much for Fern Gully to handle. I think it made me look a little bit like:

Boo! Hiss! Rawr!

So maybe I can’t blame Fern Gully for striking back. I mean, if five-year-old me watched this glasses-snatching event happen in the actual movie, I would have spit out my hot cocoa and burst into squeals and applause. I mean, come on…Save the Rainforest. And all of that.

A few weeks later, autumn had settled in and we raked our leaves (take that, nature!). Erik and I were making a few small piles into one big pile. I was rake-rake-raking, when Erik tells me to stop. “Look!” he says. “Look down!”

Say what you will about where the glasses actually were that whole time. I still hold that they fell into the ravine (and, I don’t know…a woodchuck brought them up. Work with me here, people). The fact is that they were found totally intact over 30 feet away from where Kevin was standing when he lost them, which is impressive enough. I made amends with my yard that day. Not that I’m going to stop chopping vines or anything. I just won’t laugh as much while I do it.

Let this be a warning to other vines

Not-So-Mellow Yellow

The living room was looking a little blah. We chose neutral gray paint for the room because

1. Erik has always wanted a gray room. It's true!
2. I find it easier to decorate a neutral room.
3. Gray is a nice contrast to our camel-colored sofas.
4. Bold paint colors are great for bedrooms, bathrooms, and bonus rooms (like our "table room"), but the living room and kitchen rack up so many hours of use that painting them a stubborn color (one that doesn't play nicely with all the other colors) seems totally impractical. I like the walls to match everything.

Think about it. It's like you can only own one pair of jeans and you buy them in some color you love, like burnt orange, or barn red, or lavender. They may look great with a few shirts, but you can't really wear them every day and feel good about it. No, you're better off with a classic pair of blue jeans that you can wear with every color of the rainbow. Right? Right.

But I didn't paint my walls dungaree blue. That's not a neutral on a wall, really. I painted one of my rooms that color, actually. Anyway, you get my point. I hope. So I painted them gray. Dolphin Fin. We call it Phinfin. My friend Mandi calls it Fin Squared. She's quite enamored with the color.

But oh, the color. The room is just what I envisioned, but it's so neutral that it looks a little too much like the GAP, or like a European's wardrobe. So I did some research (in that I Googled "Gray Living Rooms") and the ones that really caught my eye were those that incorporated Yellow.

Image found here

Image found at Elle Decor

(The last photo won't load for me, so just click the link for now and check out this pretty living room designed by EKB.

I'm already on my way to this goal with the fabric I used to make new pillow covers for the room.

They're a bit more yellow in real life. Read all about how I made them here.

I have a photo of a daisy in a yellow room that was taken by our wedding photographer. I had it blown up to a 12x18 and plan to use it in a frame arrangement. And I want to pull in more yellow in a few other places too. Maybe a blanket, basket, other art? We'll see. Perhaps a little of the blue as well. It's nice to represent Erik's Swedish side.

A Television Story

We didn’t have curbside recycling at our apartment so, being green-minded 20-somethings, we would trek our bags of cans, bottles, and glass along with old cardboard boxes over to the recycling center on Saturday mornings. One day, on the way, we decided to run some errands and happened to be driving by one of those appliance, mattress, tv stores.

Leading up to this point, Kayla and I, well, probably mostly I had spent quite a number of hours oohing and ahhing at all the beautiful flat panel LCD TVs. I had an old 19” mammoth-of-a-beast thing that I was just sick of. 

It belonged on a Goodwill shelf.

We popped in and within an hour, we walked out with a gorgeous 52” flat panel. The one we picked was a lightly-used floor model (they kicked in a 5 year warranty for free because of this!). The kind clerk loads the TV on the cart and I skip out to the car to pull it up front. About five skips away from the car I remember that it’s full of trash and there wasn’t going to be too much room for the TV. I pull up, open up the back, and the clerk shoots me a look like I just pinched his girlfriend’s butt. I let out a little giggle, timidly look down to the left, shrug my shoulders and say, it’ll be fine! We somehow manage to squeeze a brand new, sexy, expensive piece of technology into the midst of trash.

Since we were renters at our last place, we didn’t get the chance to mount the TV on the wall like I had always dreamed, so it sat on two old bedside tables that actually look pretty good. There is no picture of this because Kayla, while fond of the TV in terms of viewer experience (she may have jumped up and down when we bought it), was not fond of the way it actually looked in our living room. She's in the middle of trying to "disguise" it on our current wall also. I'm going to let her try.

Now that I own the plaster, the first thing I did was hang that sucker on the wall. I bought a trusty wall mount off of the interwebs for $19, found the studs and drilled away. It looked fantastic!...if you were right in front of it. If you took a few steps back you’d realize that it was a foot too high and crooked. Darn it!

I spent the rest of the night convincing myself that it was fine where it was. “It’s good that it’s high, right….right?! Is it warm in here?”

Well, fast-forward four months – I’ve fought off the snickers long enough and now it was time to make some adjustments. Kayla helped me lift the TV off the wall (see: kayla’s guns) and I got my drill, socket wrench and keyhole saw and went to work.



*Kayla's Guns



I had a couple of metal re-work brackets for the wall to line the hole, but I didn’t want to make it too big and then have the bracket be loose, so I followed a motto that runs deep in my family. Measure twice, cut 47 times. A little here, a little there, measure again, cut a little bit more… this goes on for far too long, but soon enough I get a perfect sized hole in the wall for the wires hidden directly behind the TV.





After this was done, I moved the bracket down the wall and this time I didn’t follow the bubble on the built-in bracket for levelness as the ceiling is a little off and went by my handy-dandy tape measure. With Kayla’s help, I fed the wires through and got everything plugged in all nicey-nice and then hung the soundbar on the wall as well so it wasn’t just plopped on top of the bedside, *ahem* entertainment unit.


The TV is now at optimum viewing height with no wires exposed and if I wasn’t me, I’d pat me on the back.



Sock Folding

When we were first married, Erik and I didn't have a washer and dryer in the house. We used a local laundromat. Since Erik was more responsible than I am already familiar with the laundromat, he made the laundry run the first few times. I'm habitually unobservant, so I didn't pay much notice to the drastic change in my sock drawer. Cut to the day of my first stint at laundromatting. Fantastic. I know how to do laundry. I fold everything nicely, pack up the car, and bring the clothes home. After dinner, Erik and I start putting the clothes away. He picks up his socks. Freezes. Unsure smile on his face.

Me: "Yehhhhs?"
E: "Umm, yeah, umm, it's fine, but..."
Me: "Huh?"
E: "These socks" (holds them up like the first piece of evidence at a murder trial)
Me: .....
E: "This is how I fold my dirty socks"
Me: "You fold dirty socks?"
E: "Well, no, I mean, sometimes. I guess it's ridiculous"
Me: "Of course it's ridiculous"
E: "It's not THAT ridiculous. But that's not the point...See, you're supposed to take the socks, then fold them like this, then twist them like this...."

As Erik was making something that resembled a very compact, cotton flick football, I was reveling in our differences. And when I told him that I had never even pre-matched my socks before today, he looked at me wide-eyed, like I had been living without running water before this monumental day. And then he *very excitedly* showed me how to fold my "little socks". And you know what, darn it all, I listened.

Hem and Haw

Our old apartment had 8.5 foot ceilings and big windows. I dressed them in long, flowing, white, floor-length curtains. The walls were dark wood paneling, so these curtains were life savers. I hung them extra wide and kept them extra long to cover as much of my wall as possible.
Even after I painted the walls, I adored them. And I was so happy to bring them to our new home and let em work their curtainy magic on the place. The first place they went was our bedroom, because it was the first room we painted. They looked great. Long, sleek, white...floorlength.

But...wait. What's this? Was there a flood? Is there a reason my curtains are gripping onto the rod for dear life?

This is the work of an enemy. But who would have access to our room? (ahem, everyone, because we haven't put our door up yet). Okay, but who actually goes into our room other than me...except.....Erik!

My husband, he's turned against me.

"Kayla...we have baseboard radiators now. We shouldn't hang curtains over them."

Me: "Give me one good reason why"
Erik: "House fires, heat loss, death"

That was four months ago. I took down my curtains, folded them, and forgot about them. There was no way I would shorten them. I would just...not use curtains at all. I could use them in the summer, right? I could buy shorter curtains for the cold months.

But these were the cold months, and I was doing nothing about our naked windows. As the weather kept getting colder and colder into February (isn't is spring already?), I started looking at "shorter" curtains. And guess what? Any I liked were WAY too expensive for me to consider for "sometimes" curtains, or even for all-the-time curtains. I'd grown so used to buying inexpensive curtain pairs at IKEA that seeing a $39.99 label on a SINGLE CURTAIN made me cringe. And it made Erik furrow his eyebrows like this:

I know, I know, there are sales...and even if I made my own, curtains will always run me at least around $40/pair. I guess maybe price wasn't the biggest factor. It was wasting what I already had; what was waiting for me in the linen closet, patiently. The curtains of way-back-when. The four pairs I'd spent close to $120 on already. If I bought new ones, I'd never hang the old guys back up again. I knew it. They'd die in there. They'd die unless they were amputated. I really don't like war movies, by the way, or surgeries. Or blood. Okay, let's get off of this metaphor before I pass out.....

It was time. I started with my favorites. I call them the shiny zebra curtains. Erik never knows what I'm talking about. But look!

Makes sense, right?


Well, these babies are not for sale anymore. The zebras are extinct! And I love them. So they were the first out of the closet.

I told you I have a lot of white curtains. I should have also told you that I'm bad at folding.

First, I hung them up to determine the length they should be.

Hi. I'm a fire hazard.

I'm not a seamstress. A seamstress would use a lot of pins and make quick work out of this process. But I haven't had my finger pricked since 1994, and I wasn't going to reset the clock today. So, an unecessarily long amount of time later, my curtains looked like this.

 

Eh? It's not that sleek-looking. It looks like when you hold your hair all folded under to see if you want bangs.

Or maybe I'm the only one who does that.

Okay! So I decided I would like the length to be somewhere in between. I measured each with my tape measure and found that one was 65" and the other was 60". Since 63" is a standard length, I started feeling better about the whole process.


Measure, cut, pin (for wayyy too long), hem, and hang. Voila!

I'm going to hem the two pairs I have for the living room, as well as a grommet pair for the room upstairs. I didn't tell you about the room upstairs yet. Maybe next post.....no, maybe after I show you some rooms that aren't terrifying. How's that for suspense?

Oh, Pillow.

I got crafty over the weekend with my sewing machine. I've had a few spats with the ol' Singer in the past, but I was pretty confident that everything would run smoothly this time since my mom set it up for me correctly I'm such a pro now.

Let me show you my creation. Dum-dada-dum!

Ignore the wrinkles. Sometimes I'm too impetuous to dabble in the details. Plus, they'll smooth out when I lay on them. That's love, folks. I owe my success to the creator of a GREAT video tuturial, found here, at a blog called The Crafty Gemini. Thank you to Vanessa for making this, because I literally followed your instructions to the T and everything worked perfectly.

I won't detail the instructions here, because her video is much better than anything I could write up. I'll do a little picture parade though--a photojourney of sorts.

Singer Prelude

Back pieces of fabric pinned, ready to hem.



With pulp.



"Good thing this is a test piece"

Oh, right, the presser foot would help.



Machine working. Check.


 

Both back edges hemmed. Three pieces of fabric lined up to
sew around the perimeter of my pillow, inside-out.

 

Pinned.

Done sewing. About ready to flip to the right side.

Tada!



Envelope opening in back.

There you have it. I made the first pillow in about an hour, which is not bad for my first attempt (and much shorter than the two days it took me to make my first-ever curtain panel). Oh, and I did say "first pillow". That's right. I'm nothing if not utilitarian. I planned to make covers for my triangle-covered, came-with-the-sofa pillows, but I fell in love with the last 39" of this fabric (for $6.99) and it just wasn't going to cover two (they're 21" pillows). I played with the idea of making one pillow, but the thought of wasting 1/3 of my fabric on scraps irked me (read: it's not going to happen).

No fears, math to the rescue! (oh boy) I looked in my closet and found a pair of smaller orange pillows that matched nothing in the new house, and I determined that I could make two covers at this size with very little fabric to spare. Each pillow used  18.5"x22.5" piece, so I used a total of 37"x45 out of a 39"x45" piece of fabric.

That's math, people! Two for the price of one.