I don’t remember this but it was in my saved drafts of posts and it’s labeled “Terrible House” which probably refers more to my sketch than it does the house. We finished another few square feel of the kitchen floor, which involves tearing up two layers of linoleum, pouring hot water to soak, then scraping paper backing before finally scrubbing away gunky brown glue that was troweled on in circles. After all that you have some pretty but soaked wood floors! Unfortunately it takes forever. And you get coated in forty year old glue and water and paper and you bend your nails backward and smell like plastic and a dentist’s office.

We also sanded more liquid nails off the walls and cleaned the ceiling from where the cabinets had extended upwards. Did I mention we cut off the top of the cabinets and realized the stove hood just vented onto the ceiling and attic? It rotted away a good chunk of drywall and looks gross to boot.

So if you’ve ever been curious about what I do all day, this is pretty much it:

Sometimes I’ll get onsite and be excited for a five second fan or hard drive replacement, and then DUN DUN DUN they hide it under the board and you have to take every last damn component out. The person who designs these is an asshole. I’m going to go out on a limb and say a Mac is probably going to be exactly the same though.

ALSO PLEASE NEVER BLOW OUT THE FAN WITH COMPRESSED AIR YOU WILL PROBABLY BREAK THE FAN AND THEN YOU WILL CRY

I’m rewatching Gilmore Girls and I find my reactions to the plotlines much different than they were when I originally saw the show. Rory’s relationships with Dean and Jess are filled with mistakes that I can identify with now. I cringe watching the show a lot more now that I’m not  twenty. Lorelai’s relationship with her mother is also a lot more interesting to watch now and I find myself wanting to rewrite their dialogue to fix fights sometimes, something I couldn’t have done in the past.

We haven’t been doing much around the house lately. We had issues with the breaker box frying a breaker repeatedly and have been living without power in the bedroom, office, kitchen, or bathroom for about two weeks. A few days ago Groupon popped up on my phone with a  deal for Angieslist and I signed up! I found an electrician (Bill Watts) I was interested in and emailed and called him. He showed up yesterday and popped in a breaker into a different spot and wired it in the breaker. He also gave us an estimate for replacing our box and upgrading to a 200 amp box as well as removing our second breaker box (so we could break open space between kitchen and laundry if we so desire). A previous “electrician” came by last week and told us we couldn’t upgrade to 200 amps without rewiring our entire house. We’re still waiting on their estimate to show up. Mr. Watts gave us an estimate under $1500 and assured us that we don’t have to rewire the entire house to upgrade the panel. WHEW!

We’re at about a month and a half waiting for our handyman Scott to get done with a job and come back to install a gas tankless water heater and remove our two late 70s water heaters. His estimate was something like $1400. We got tired of waiting and I scheduled a plumber to come out this morning to give me an estimate. He came in at $3800! DUN DUN DUN WTF

I’d rather wait another month than pay an extra $2-3K. How horrifying.

Short news, I turned another year older and I’m now either 27 or 28, I’m not sure which. And David gave me an ipad, best present ever. My parents gave me some awesome gift cards (and sundries), which are close to my shopping heart. Kten sent me a prickly pear cactus in the mail, which promptly attacked me.

We’ve been living half in the dark for about a week now, no power in the kitchen, bathroom, office, or bedroom. Thankfully David inexplicably has a ton of extension cords so we can still use the television and computers.
I’m running out to Tuscumbia and will just leave you with some House interiors:

Wilson’s pretty awesome kitchen (hate the light fixtures),

A soothingly weird egg tub in what is a great bathroom,

And a Rory blerg-face since I’m systematically rewatching Gilmore Girls (except for that stupid Donna Reed episode).

I’ve been MIA lately, but it’s just because I’ve been busy and tired. I also didn’t want to spoil my luck, but I see now from Brittney’s blog that she beat me to the punch: we bought a Clawfoot tub!

Unfortunately there’s no plumbing home for it inside our bathrooms yet, so it has to live in the laundry room for the foreseeable future until we’re ready to start a bathroom renovation. In the meantime, I’ve got some major lust for these inspiration bathrooms!

Other items on my mind, I painted a portion of the top cabinets and they’re almost perfect except that once we put them back on, the hinges didn’t want to close. I selectively sanded and chipped away at one of the doors in an attempt to correct the issue, thinking that maybe the centimeter layer of paint prevented the hinges from rotating fully, but I can’t make it work. I keep thinking maybe the hinges are just old and out of whack and I REALLY should have labelled the damn doors and hinges when I took them down.

The knob on the door instead of handles is also disconcerting but I’m hoping I’ll just get used to it since I bought enough for every door at a super cheap price.

Also, you shouldn’t use 50 grit sandpaper on your cabinets, word to the wise!

I’m also researching ideas for a kitchen island, but I think I’d have to build it from materials and a dresser or bookcase skeleton frame.

Future ideas, loving this bench solution for the mudroom.

As far as television news, I’m starting Continuum season one and it’s pretty good so far, at least the first ten minutes. Man, I got so much more crap to talk about. We just finished up the guest bedroom because David’s sister and crew are in town and we wanted to provide some space to crash if it came up. See you on the flip.

Work has been super busy lately and it’s made me exhausted. I sanded half of the top cabinet doors and primed a quarter of those, so not much got done. We finally finished trimming out our “hallway” and are on the third or fourth coat of paint for the baseboards and door trim. I still have no clue what wall color for the kitchen. But I am pretty sick of painting.
Also, Google Reader is shutting down soon and so I’m trying out Feedly. There’s no real update in that except that it’s depressing.
I finished reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and I think you should read it now too.

About three or four days ago it was raining and freezing and this sad soaked kitten was howling outside our gate. So of course I picked her up and cuddled her. And now she lives on our front porch.  I have named her Baby Wolf.

In other news, I have started sanding the cabinet doors in prep for painting them. I’m thinking the top cabinets in white and the bottom in a gray? Possibly Behr’s White Truffle and Granite Boulder.

At this rate, I’ll be done sanding in like two weeks.
In the meantime I’ve been watching House back to back, and David rewatched Battlestar Gallactica in its entirety in about three days. Still need to catch up on Walking Dead, Mindy Project, Justified, Supernatural, and Once Upon A Time. I’m much better about television than blogging or house stuff.

I’m very easily consumed by new project ideas, so the house is a great distraction. There’s always something that needs to be done, and usually something that needs to be finished. We spent last weekend sanding and spackling the hallway. Considering the hallway is only about 20 sq ft, I had thought it would take an hour, but somehow it consumed forever. We need to start painting the hallway, computer room, and eventually the living room. Eventually it’d be lovely to actually hang some artwork, right now we’ve filled one of our five strangely shaped closets just with paintings and picture frames.

Of course there’s also the “curtains” I started a month ago and finished one and a half panels, and the picture frames I disassembled and painted and never reassembled and hung.

So of course instead of ever finishing a single project, I’m obsessively researching building a custom desk to replace my current wobbly dining table situation. I’m all for clean lines and modern designs, but I’m discovering I really hate visual clutter that it makes when there’s nowhere to hide your knick-knackery.

Aubrey & Lindsay's Little House Blog

I’ve really loved this desk built from Ikea Besta Cabinets and the finished project came in at around $300, but unfortunately the closest Ikea is four hours away and just shipping on something close to these materials would ring in around $200.  But I love the options to hide some of my belongings and store the printer and my desktop. I have a nook in the computer room that looks a lot like this, minus a window.

I love this desk and would just make the cabinets underneath a little further out so I’d have more leg room. I also love the Ikea rail above and the beautiful pulls!

Can I bring up the fact that Lucchese makes Alabama cowboy boots?

Very Teddy Westside of me.

Let’s just take a moment to ponder the prettiness of Mindy Kaling’s apartment on The Mindy Project.



Also, David and I are officially grown ups with our own Costco membership. This is mostly due to my obsession with tiny objects and massive packages of things. Seriously, you can buy a triple stack of Solo cups that’s taller than me for less than $10. And also, I’ve hit up their wine department twice this week. To be fair, you can buy alcohol without a membership.

Try it, it’s $8.50. I also got a bottle of our favorite Coppola.