working on the house

Last summer (07) I was consumed with worry over the looming demise of my school. I didn't accomplish much other than a whole bunch of sock knitting. This summer (08) we got a lot done on the house, and I still added several new pairs to my sock drawer.

We scraped and painted the side of the house, and worked on the porch spindles:

I also installed a much-needed and long overdue walk around the front garden. I got concrete pavers for this project. It was easier and cheaper than the flagstone I'd planned, and I was pleased with the result:

I really want to get back to my thinking (out loud) about alternative education, but I am so freaking busy actually alternatively educating, I just don't have time. I'm hoping to get back into it after the fall semester ends and my adjunct teaching responsibilities end. Until then, I'll leave you with a link to my new favorite Camp Creek Blog. I agree with almost everything she has to say, and that's really saying something. Thanks to JoVE of Tricotomania for turning me on to a new blog.

free advice, my specialty

Almost twenty years ago, a good friend of Joe's from college told us that his grandfather had given him two pieces of advice. This conversation has really stuck in my head, because even in the inexperience of my early twenties, it seemed like really sound advice, and it still seems so now. Anyway, here's the advice.

1. Always have a project.

2. The most important decision you'll ever make is who you marry.

See? Isn't that brilliant advice? There may have been a third thing, I don't remember. But it doesn't matter, because I'm about to add a third thing of my own:

3. If you have the urge to fix up an old house, purchase it and fix it up before you have children.

This is our wedding anniversary, and as is traditional, my parents have both kids for the weekend. As is not traditional, we are not away at the beach. Rather, we are at home, working on the house. And let me tell you, we have made outrageous progress on several long-standing projects, made possible only by the removal of the two short people who live here.

Here's what Joe did:
That's the corner of our porch, and unfortunately I don't have a before picture, but the length of fancy cut-outs that hasn't been painted yet was missing. The other three railings of the porch have also been secured, so I can relax when kids are climbing around the outside edge of the porch. Yahoo! I might paint this tomorrow, or I might continue working on inside projects.

Here's what I did today:
This is before. The treads have been refinished, and the stringers and risers have been sanded and are ready to paint. They'd been ready to paint for, oh I don't know, months. More than just a few months. Way too many months.
Here's how they look now, after two coats of primer, some spackle in the nail holes, and a finish coat of trim paint. We got all this done even though we took lots of breaks for hanging out, eating, watching the new LOST episode, and going to two garage sales!

We're having a great time together, and it is sheer bliss to be uninterrupted as we go about our day. The house is quiet. Nobody complained when we decided to walk to the garage sales. Nobody fought over the latest Lego magazine. Nobody asked for a snack sixteen thousand times.

Next we're going to go grocery shopping, just the two of us. Isn't that a romantic thing to do on the evening of our 12th wedding anniversary? We can hardly wait.

house projects

Joe and I have made the unbelievably adult decision that we will not go away for our annual anniversary weekend. We've been going to the beach once a year while my parents take care of the kids, but this year we want to do something else with that money, like pay off some of our fabulous trips from the past.

So the kids are still going to my parent's house for the weekend, but we've agreed to get some work done on some of the house projects that have been languishing. There are so many to choose from.

We could work on this, which is our back porch and needs to be jacked up a little more, then secured in place, then the stuff that keeps the wildlife out replaced:
Or we could work on this, the front porch, which has been a long restoration project. We're almost there, but the final details are fiddly and require some small lumber purchases, not to mention paint.
And then there's this. Doesn't this look frightening? I hardly know what to make of it. It's a hole in my foundation along the north side of my house, and it grew bigger all through the winter. I imagine all that needs to be done is chip off the loose stuff, prep the area in some way, and then slop some new kind of goo on there, but I don't know what kind of goo to get. Need some advice on this one.
Doesn't it look like my house is trying to tell me something?

blessed

1. The hole is patched, spackled, and painted. I think we may now call it completely fixed.
2. The walls are painted.
(We decided not to fuss with the woodwork today. It can wait. It is waiting even now. Look, you can just sit right there and watch it wait for me to get paint on it. I have very patient woodwork.)

3. The car is fixed, and we are keeping it.

4. I got the job.

5. I have some very fine friends.
Thanks for your help, Colleen. And thanks to Nicky too, who wanted to come to the painting party, but had to stay home because the highway was closed due to snow.

And now, a quick survey. I know you saw that my couch up there is in need of some serious help. It is dirty. It is also very cute, and quite comfortable. If I had money to burn on home decorating, I'd have it reupholstered in a minute, but I don't. I need some ideas for making that beast look pretty in front of my pretty wall. They need to be cheap ideas.

Here's what I've thought of so far:

a. I could make a slipcover. If you vote for this plan, you have to say what color you think it should be. Colleen and I think burgundy.

b. I could rent one of those upholstery shampooers from the grocery store and shampoo the thing, which might work, but if it did work, I'd be left with a pink couch, which is not my favorite color for a couch or anything else.

c. After I've shampooed it, I could paint it with fabric paint. I don't have any experience with fabric paint, so I don't know if this is a good idea or a potential sticky mess. Fabric dye? Magic marker? Is there anything I could use to change the color of the couch while keeping the fabric?

d. Your idea here.

Please vote for your idea of the best option in the comments. Saying my couch is ugly and should go out on the curb is not one of your choices. Thank you.

the hole is (mostly) fixed

Patching a hole in my sheetrock wall turned out to be not so bad. I got guidance from my friend Dave, who described the method I used. It is probably standard practice, but it was new to me. It is also clever and elegant. I started by making the hole square. This was more challenging than it should have been, because I couldn't find my large utility knife, so I had to use a small x-acto knife.
Then I cut a piece of sheetrock slightly larger than the hole. About an inch all around is what you need, maybe a little more. Then you score it by making shallow cuts on the actual dimensions of the hole.

Bend the sheetrock along the scoring, and then pull the plaster away from the paper.
You're left with a flap of paper, which you use to stick the patch to the wall. At this point, I would have been ready to goop it in there, but as you can see, there's an outlet in my hole. I didn't know what to do about the outlet. I felt that the box should come from behind and then through the patch, but I would have had to disconnect the outlet pretty completely, and because my wiring is antique and I don't know what I'm doing, I decided not to start taking things apart. I did, however, take the precaution of pulling the fuse before I started messing around here.

So I did what any self-respecting novice would do. I called the expert, and Dave very generously came over to help me out. (See Little One just behind and to the left of Dave, gazing up with admiration? Little thinks Dave is very, very cool.)
Dave not only made this elegant little hole in about twenty seconds, he also shimmed and secured the outlet itself to the nearby stud. It had been sort of dangling in its hole, and I was hoping that my new patch would be sturdier so it would cease its dangling. Dave just did it right, with power tools.

Sweet! Now I got to do the fun part. I put spackle in a thick bead around the flap of paper.
Fitted it into the hole...
And then smushed the spackle around the edges to stick the patch to the wall. Next I'll put a few more thin layers of spackle around the edges of the patch, to ease the bumpy transition between the paper and the wall. I'll use a putty knife for that, to make it smoother. After it dries, I'll sand it and it will be ready to paint.
Overall, I'm pretty pleased with this project. It has been really bugging me for a long time, not just because it was a big ugly hole in my wall, but also because for a long time I thought it was something I had to get Joe to do. After I realized that's what I was thinking, I got over it, rationally, but it was still a long way from there to actually getting out the tools and doing it.

I might be just a little disappointed with myself that I called Dave for help. After I called and before he got here, I came up with a solution that would probably have worked, but because I am far less experienced, it would have taken me much longer. Dave did it quickly and well, and I learned a lot just by watching him and asking him about it as he was doing it.

This seems an important balance in education, at home or anywhere. I think I tend to to be very much in the 'work it out yourself, you'll learn more' camp, both with my teaching and my homeschooling. I'm realizing that there is a lot to be learned from experts. It can be satisfying to learn something on your own, of course, but there is much to be gained from talking to and learning from competent people doing complex things well.

Too much of this would be oppressive of course; kids need to try things out too. Kids sure don't need a bunch of super-competent people around all the time, showing them how much better at everything they are. That would be really bad for their willingness to try new things, and we all need to work things out on our own at times; it's good for our brains.

I guess I'm looking for a kind of balance here, both for myself and for my kids. There was a time when I never would have asked for help, but would have just kept working at that hole until I figured it out, even if it took all day. Instead, I gave myself an opportunity to learn a bunch of new tricks by asking for help.

Big One wants his photo credits. He took most, if not all, of the above pictures. He took some crazy wild motion shots too, and I'll put those up another day.

befuddled on four points

1. One of our cars is in the shop. It is very likely that it will cost so much to fix it that it will then be attractive to sell the car in order to pay the repair bill. We are seriously considering this, and if we did, we would not replace it. We may soon have only one car, people. This would mean ditching at least some of our weekly commitments/lessons, and also not going to the grocery store whenever we run out of apples. While it may be the most sensible thing to do, I am completely freaked out about it. Of course, it is not my car that's in the shop and in danger of being sold. No, of course not. Rather, it is Joe's old Subaru that may be laid off, and my beloved Civic would then be promoted to Joe's commuting car.

2. I interviewed for a job. I seemed to have gotten the job, but I expected to hear last week about my first assignment, and I haven't. Did I get the job? Do I want a job? Do I want this job? Do I call and remind them that I exist? Do I sit back and let them get in touch with me? Again, freaked out.

3. Cat Bordhi's book is, as I said, mind-blowing. In just a few days, it has jolted me out of my circular sock stupor, in which I produced many pairs of socks but learned virtually no new knitting techniques for well over a year.

I have learned two new methods of casting on, two new methods of constructing a sock, a new way to manage circular needles, three new methods of increasing, a better way to join the end of a standard bind off, a way to make a column of ssks flow more smoothly, like k2togs, and a better way to deal with wraps on short rows. (See? I told you this book was almost overwhelmingly technical. Cat does all of this in a really friendly way, though. It's almost like having a class with a really experienced knitter who shows you all her tricks.) Consider me de-stupefied.


These first tiny socks I've finished have required me to find a quiet place to knit in order to figure things out. That's how not on auto-pilot I am with these socks.


4. I have run out of excuses for this:

because I now have this:

as well as two fine friends who have decided that we are having a work party at my house on Friday. I now have a deadline, because I don't want to be fixing this hole on Friday. Oh, no! On Friday, I want to be painting this wall:

And these stringers and risers:

And these walls:










Did I mention that I'm freaking out?

Elsie and Joe get things done

Here's a recent project, now almost completed:

We got a bunch of free wool sweaters on our local freecycle, washed them in hot water and dried them (in a friend's dryer) on high. Then cut them apart in rectangles, and put them in a box for almost a year, where they collected dust and irked me. Then, one day, while vacuuming, it came to me, as if from beyond: USE THE EVEN FEED ATTACHMENT. We have old sewing machines, more than a few of them (a subject for another post) and one of our zig zag machines, an early 60s Singer, has a vintage even feed attachment, which serves the same purpose as a modern walking foot.

So I zigzagged them together with the edges butted up against each other. Used many many spools of thread from my stash (yes, I collect thread) so the colors vary over the course of the piece. I started using two different colors of thread, one on top and one on bottom, so the colors would blend.

You know how sometimes you imagine a project, and you have images in your mind about how it's going to turn out? And then sometimes, maybe even often, it turns out not as well as you were hoping? Well, this one came out much better than I was expecting. I love this blanket, just love it. Maybe even enough to finish it all the way sometime soon.

We're starting this blog so we can stop playing show and tell with our friends every time they come over. We want to keep a record of our many projects in various categories. Between the two of us, we knit, cook, sew, restore our old house, and garden, and most of the projects we plan to chronicle here will be from these categories. We also work and raise kids, but we'll try not to bore you with that.

What makes us different? We rarely buy new. We don't use a clothes dryer, and we don't use paper towels. We will spend more time (sometimes a lot more time) on a project if it means we can avoid spending money. A recent example: the tile in our shower needed to be regrouted, so we started pulling the tile off the wall, only to find that the wall behind it was rotten and also needed to be replaced. Got that done, but the old tiles are now caked with hard-to-remove adhesive. Rather than replace the tile, Joe is laboriously removing the gunk, tile by tile. It's been eight months since we took a shower in our bathroom. Good thing we like baths!