Treasuries

I am obsessed with etsy and have been making treasuries for the better part of the year. Check them all out!

• Neverending Math Equation
• Onomatopoeia
• Free Translator
• Mad for Plaid
• Vintage Beauty
• Looking Bright

Apartment renovation

Over this past summer, Matthew and I spent a lot of time renovating our first floor apartment. We started with fixing up the kitchen. Then our tenant told us she was moving out. After she left, we took to renovating the rest of the apartment. It was a big undertaking, one which we would not have gotten through without the help of a generous group of friends. In late August my grandmother passed away and then Matt’s appendix ruptured, so we lost a week and a half of work. For that reason, there is still some work left to do, but it was definitely good enough for our new tenant to move in this week.

I created a gallery of the goings-on. Here are some of the dramatic before-and-after shots.

The living and dining room had ill-fitted carpet and dark wood-paneled walls.

Painted walls and laminate floors open up this space.

The kitchen before renovation was cluttered and the cabinets were decades old.

The new kitchen has new cabinets against the back wall and a more spacious feel. The blue walls add a cozy touch.

For more photos of the dramatic changes, see my flickr gallery.

The John D. Wood House

One thing we’d like to do in the near future is to order and install a plaque with the “historic” name of our home: The John D. Wood House. The following link is to the official historical record for the house.

Historical Record (Ignore the coffee stain on it.)

We think this would be a fun idea, but I’m now wondering if naming it after the first guy who lived there really makes any sense. How do houses get their names? Or maybe we could make it the John and Sarah Wood house? I guess we’d have to find out if these people were worthy of having a house named after them.

I suppose we can call it anything we want, since we own it.

bright, happy, fab

A couple of weeks ago, I got my crafty on once again. I had taken a long break after more than a year of sewing a lot of beambags, because my hands pretty much gave out on me. But I was inspired by this fabric I picked up at IKEA.

I really could have bought a lot of fabric at IKEA, but I only got a yard of this on sale for $4 a yard.

With half of the yard, I made the bag. With the other half, I made this wall hanging.

Truthfully, the wall hanging was what I made first. The bag was an afterthought. The frame for the wall hanging was also purchased at IKEA and was Matthew’s idea.

I don’t see myself jumping headfirst into craftiness. I think a few projects at a time are all I can handle. My next project is going to be curtains for the dining room.

My week off

People were asking me all week what I was doing during my week off.

On Monday it was about 60 degrees in the shade. I scraped and painted the floor of our front porch. Our doorway is on the right (the one with the cute home plate mat — which was an engagement gift from Jennifer Myszkowski. We also got a cute new floor mat for our wedding from Alyson and Bill. It has monkeys on it. We are saving that one for when this one wears out. But, enough about the doormats). One of our tenants gave me the news that it was going to rain that night, so I only got to put one coat of paint on the floor. When the weather gets warmer again, we plan to do more painting on the porch.

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Summer painting

One of our tenants is painting the side of our house to help pay off some of her rent. For some reason the previous owners decided to paint the house a few years ago using paint that was not meant for brick. Over the course of the summer, the tenants have been chipping away at the paint, filling in holes with cement and reconstructing bad bricks. One day we discovered that an advertisement used to be painted on the side of the house. This must have been from when the storefront was a grocery store many decades ago. We thought it was pretty neat. But I still like the after photo better.

crumbling down update

Remember when I blogged about our neighbor’s wall that crumbled to the ground? Well,  A few days after that someone was reconstructing the wall. The same guy quoted us a price for part of our stone wall and less than a week later we’ve got a nice looking retaining wall (for not a ton of money). We haven’t done the front of our house yet, but the section he did complete was in danger of collapsing. I think our front retaining wall has at least another year left before it starts to look bad. First photo is before, second photo is during, and third photo is after.

and then we returned.

We returned the air purifier. Rather than simply purifying the air, it emitted a foul odor. We thought maybe it was the room – as in something possibly died in the walls – yeah it was really that bad. We even pulled up the mattress and box spring to make sure it wasn’t some sort of present from one of the cats. Nothing.

Seriously, the smell was that bad. At first I thought it was cat fart. But when the smell was still in the room when we came back from a wedding Sunday, we knew that SOMETHING was wrong. It kind of smelled like a cross between faint skunk smell and garbage. And garlic.

Just to make sure we weren’t crazy, we turned on the purified all day today while we were at work, but the smell was there when we got home. So, tonight, while we were having dinner at Matt’s mom’s house, we put it in the den. Sure enough, when we got home tonight, the smell was in the den!

In the meantime, we had stripped the sheets and pillowcases, and there is now a rule that no cats can be in the bedroom, on account of my breathing. So, that room is really a sanctuary now. So although I still get dried out from the A/C, it’s not as bad. And the air purifier probably did some kind of purifying during its short stay in our bedroom

Long story for a boring topic.

Anyone have a good recommendation for air cleaners?

ReStore Home Improvement Center

ReStore Home Improvement Center is located on Albany Street in Springfield, Mass. Next door is a salon called Gasoline Alley, which is owned by Michelle Scibelli and has been in existence for eleven years. It’s named after the stretch of Albany St. known as. . . Gasoline Alley.

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The importance of today

Today was an important day.

I woke up thinking it was going to be one I would just want to get through and be done with. I had an 8:30 appointment at the oral surgeon to look at a spot that has been on my pallette for at least a year. There was the possibility of a biopsy, but I was hopeful that it was nothing and he’d send me on my way. Then there was the memorial service for a friend of Matt’s.

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