House

Homeownership is expensive. -New fence.-Paint fence and repaint deck.-Dirt, plants, equipment rental, blood sweat and tears for landscaping.-Termite treatment.-New alarm system components.-Tree trimming.-Air conditioner maintenance.-Refinancing. People always say that owning your own home is the best investment you can make! But with the way homes leach money out of you, it’s hard to see the advantages sometimes. I guess I have to believe it since I’m WAY too invested right now to change my mind! Honestly, I don’t know how people do it sometimes… afford everything they want or need. Oh wait, yes, I do; it’s called credit cards. In our family, thankfully, we don’t carry credit balances as a rule. Is that un-American?? Probably so. We don’t buy what we can’t pay for. I don’t count the house in that equation, because if I scrimped and saved long enough to buy a house outright, I’d be moving in by the time I reach retirement age. Speaking of houses, I want to live in an Earthship! Or, at the very least, an earth-sheltered home. These beautiful structures have now supplanted my dream of living in an underground house. And wow, how amazing are these places?! So environmentally friendly, built largely of recycled materials like tires and aluminum cans, sturdy, fireproof, bugproof, requires little to no climate control, generates solar energy, recycles used water, catches rainwater… and more. Check out the photos of The Phoenix near Taos. The bathroom leaves me speechless! You can actually stay in some of these Earthships overnight, like a B&B I guess. I’d love to do that next time I’m in New Mexico. I think you need a good bit of land to build one of these, and probably decent soil as well. In otherwords, no matter how much lottery money I win, we can’t really […]

We got a new fence yesterday! Due to the nature of our backyard layout (fences joined to neighbors’ on either side, and a deck that goes all the way to the fence on 2 sides), it was a little on the pricey side, but we needed it badly. Our old fence was falling apart, and I do mean that literally. Doc said that the construction crew didn’t need any tools to remove the old fence; they just pulled it out with their bare hands. We chose not to have latticework across the top again, as it was an added expense. I’m fine with that; I didn’t really care for it in the first place, although Doc liked it quite a bit. You can get an idea of what it looked like here. I plan to take out those stumpy shrubs, put in a gravelled path with sandstone flagstones, and plant monkey grass and caladiums here. It will be much nicer than the mud pit that it now is. The lovely shade tree above it tends to drop huge quantities of leaves here in the fall, so raking it out is an ongoing chore, and one that I have neglected for years, until now. The weird little box shed is gone! It was a real waste of space and hard to use, so I’m glad we had it taken out. I think it was originally the spot for a previous owner’s jacuzzi, and a subsesquent owner had a little covering built over the hole, to use for storage. Click here for a photo of what it used to look like. The new fence is nice and straight. Not only was the old fence wavy in a kind of seasick way as well as rotten all the way through, it had previously been […]

Here is a photo of our newly blue bathroom! Click here to go to Flickr and see the others.

This weekend we finished a mini-remodel of our master bathroom. I absolutely love the way it turned out. I’ll post photos this evening, once I take some halfway decent ones with Doc’s fancy camera… my little snappy-happy doesn’t do so well in low light conditions. I love the color on the walls (“Ocean View”), and although it was initially tough to get the hang of the corner-antiqueing treatment, it looks fantastic. We bought a new mirror to replace the hideous 1980s giant sheet mirror taking up the whole wall, new bath mats and toilet seat covers, and new cabinet pulls and switchplates, again replacing hideous 1980s hardware. We’re having trouble finding a towel rack and TP holder that we like that won’t cost us a week’s pay. The thing about painting that I detest and that makes me swear every time that NEXT time I’m going to hire someone to do it for me, is the taping, masking, and painting of trim. Last time this room was painted, someone really did a half-assed job. Instead of removing the brownish-pink wallpaper with little blue and green hash marks on it, they simply sprayed texturizer on the walls and then a thin coat of paint. Every time we touch the walls with wet hands (which happens fairly frequently, this being a bathroom and all), the paint tends to rub off. Also, nobody bothered to mask off the baseboards, and they were textured the same as the walls. This is bad for baseboards, because they tend to collect a lot of dust and dirt which then gets trapped in the little textury crevices. But we’ve fixed all that. It’s all nice and fresh now. The room feels cool and relaxing. Our next step: framing some art for the walls. And finding a towel […]

We spent about 6 hours last night moving refrigerators across the city and back in a Uhaul truck. And when I say “we,” I mean “mostly Doc.” He really worked hard. Those fuckers are monstrously heavy and kind of scary to manhandle. We acquired a new refrigerator (new to us, anyway) which we had to pick up from South Dallas, and then we transported our old fridge to Rich’s house on the complete other side of town. It took MUCH MUCH longer to move them than I anticipated. Plus, the fun part is that our door is too small to fit a fridge through. So we had to take the handles and doors off the old fridge to get it out of our house, and the new one to get it in. And come to find out, the new one has some problems — a water leak between the bottom of the door and the water dispenser, and the frame in the middle where the side by side doors meet is getting way too hot… too hot to touch. It burned my arm and left a red mark. I spent about 2 hours this morning cleaning out our lovely new fridge. It was pretty clean to begin with but I carefully washed all the shelves and wiped down the entire insides. Then we got the doors back on, plugged it in, and immediately noticed the little hot-frame problem and a little later noticed the water leak problem. I woke up with a killer headache that was not improved by the scent of the cleaning products I was using (natural, but still they give off fumes). And then the fact that after the ordeal of refrigerator moving and the hours I spent meticulously cleaning it, the damn thing wasn’t even working […]